Plagiarism, copyright, borrowing, and texts: these are all topics that have fascinated me since college.  I was particularly moved by an essay Kathy Acker wrote for the MMLA about copyright nearly fifteen years ago, in which she reiterates the importance of friendship and community in the work of creation.  Based in part on my work on Acker (and my appreciation for her methods) I planned to write my dissertation on plagiarism/borrowing across a broad and surprising swath of American authors. Instead, a decade after I left grad school,  I find myself an author as well as a reader, grappling with these issues and their intersection with technology. Needless to say, I have taken a great interest in Doctorow’s creative and business models.

Of course, you can always purchase Doctorow’s books, and he hopes that you will!  If you’re content with the electronic version, but would like to still generate a sale for him, you can put the book into the hands of teachers and librarians who would like to provide the book for their kids.  Donate a copy of For the Win here.

Besides all this high falutin’ copyright talk, I’m excited for this book because I simply adore good YA sci-fi.  I inhaled this stuff as a kid.  It opened up my brain to all kinds of creative possibilities, and it opened up my heart to books.  These books turned me into a reader.  And while I’ve definitely read my share of Very Important Books in my life, and I’m glad to be part of challenging book clubs as an adult, nothing can replace the singular, joyful escape of curling up with an action-packed sci-fi story.  (So, yes, I am counting the days until Mockingjay, the final book of Suzanne Collins’s Hunger Games series is released…)

Without a doubt, the best new(ish) book I read this year was Atmospheric Disturbances by Rivka Galchen.  It’s rather an understatement to say that I was impressed and moved by this novel, which is a meditation on time, identity and love, all wrapped up in meteorology, and written by a woman of about my age.  (And that summary doesn’t really do justice to the novel.  Please just read it.)  I experienced a similar intellectual reaction to I am Not Sidney Poitier by Percival Everett.  These two books practically had me hopping around my apartment with hooray to talk about them.

I added a bunch of novels to my “I Can’t Believe It’s Taken Me So Long To Read This Incredible Thing” list: The Yiddish Policemen’s Union by Michael Chabon; Watership Down by Richard Adams (okay, so it doesn’t quite qualify as “incredible,” but it did make me think big thoughts about rabbits,  John Hurt, and Bunnies & Burrows all Spring); and A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith.  I was especially taken with A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, not just because it’s one of the best coming-of-age stories I’ve ever read, but also because I live in Williamsburg and it was delightful to re-imagine my familiar blocks in Smith’s turn-of-the-century story.

In the  sci-fi universe, I finally got around to reading Robert Heinlein’s The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, which made me give a cosmic, jovial punch in the arm to hard science fiction.  I normally steer clear of you, classic hard sci-fi, but this novel was a surprisingly charming and humane representative.  It was a year of re-reading in sci-fi, too.  I took a second look at Cory Doctorow’s Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, appreciating all the more how it anticipated so much of our modern social media world, and I spent a few good days re-visiting The Female Man by Joanna Russ.  I read and wrote about The Female Man in my teens, and finishing the book for the first time was the moment when I decided (even though I’d been deciding all along) that I was a feminist (in fact, that I had to be a feminist).  Reading it twenty years later, it’s not quite as revolutionary, but it has become more revelatory for me.  In the new weird universe, Brian Francis Slattery’s Liberation killed me with awesome both times I read it this year.

I spent a fair bit of time with short stories this year, too.  Belle Boggs’ “Homecoming“ was a stand-out among contemporary selections.  Shirley Jackson’s “The Summer People” is a rad, economical little story that reminded me 1.) of why I should never stay on in a vacation town after Labor Day, and 2.) why Shirley Jackson does creepyawesome like no other author.  And I think that E. M. Forster’s 1909 story “The Machine Stops“ actually flabbergasted me with its vision about the role of technology in the future (despite its dystopian-as-all-heck outlook, it’s fairly spot-on in a lot of ways about the way we are living our lives right now).

And (of course, of course) there are more!  But I’m really interested in what you’ve read this past year, and what you think I should be reading in the next.

Please comment or drop me a line with some suggestions, dear readers!

Oh, and I’ve included a bonus book club PowerPoint presentation after the jump, too, if you’re interested…

Behold: a bonus year-end analysis I created for one of my book clubs.  Please enjoy or disregard.  Whatever you like.  (And don’t forget to leave suggestions, readers!)

The Book

The Goods: Generally credited as the origin of the true crime genre, In Cold Blood is a Truman Capote’s non-fiction novel detailing the grisly 1959 murders of the Clutter family in Holcomb, Kansas, as well as Capote’s study of the two killers.

The Report: Despite the face that we’re living in an age awash with all things true crime, book club was impressed with In Cold Blood, and found the experience of reading it chilling and a little creepy.  Nonetheless, many of us found it impossible to discuss this novel without discussing how it was written: Capote’s methods, his interpretation of the events, and his relationship to the real-life killers.

Thoughts about the book from our collective book club brain…

Whose story is this? By and large, we found Capote’s pacing and nearly insufferable attention to the details of the Clutters’ lives in early part of the novel to be super effective in evoking dread.  We also found the back stories he related about the killers, Dick Hickok and Perry Smith, to be very compelling.  But many of us were less-than-comfortable with the narrative at the end of the novel, which seemed preoccupied with Capote’s psychological interpretation about why the killers did what they did as well as the shortcomings of the justice system.  At the end of the novel, we wondered: whose story is this, anyway?

Well, it’s Capote’s story, in many ways. Despite the fact that he doesn’t appear in the novel, Capote is all over the place, making choices and controlling the narrative.  We all found places in the novel where we sort of had ‘gotcha’ moments, realizing that Capote was making a dramatic choice, or investing a character with a certain motivation, etc.  In particularly, we pointed to the expectation that Capote created about which of the killers pulled the trigger/made the decision to start killing (I won’t disclose this here in case any of gentle readers haven’t read the novel yet), only to disclose a long way into the novel the truth – a strong narrative choice that points to just how strongly controlled the novel is.

Shocking.  We wondered, at length, about how shocking this novel would have been to read when it was first published (or even when it was serialized in The New Yorker).  It seems as if In Cold Blood was published at a crossroads in American culture: a cold-blooded murder in the heartland of the country six years before it was published, and the Helter Skelter of the late sixties just a few years away.  In our world of Dateline NBC, everything is shocking, and so not much seems shocking in the way that In Cold Blood must have felt (although, certainly, plenty of crimes seem disconcerting and tragic).

Capote Vs. Infamous.  Nearly everyone had seen Capote (2005), starring Philip Seymour Hoffman as Capote and Catherine Keener as Harper Lee (and all agreed: it’s a great movie).  But a few of us made a strong case that nobody should pass over  Infamous (2006), with Toby Jones as the writer (appropriately short for the role, especially as compared to Hoffman), Sandra Bullock as Harper Lee and a knockout, charged performance from Daniel Craig as Perry Smith.  I was truly not alone in thinking that Bullock made an absolutely fetching Harper Lee.

Fine Linkage of George and Truman:  Our host sent along this very insightful George Plimpton interview with Truman Capote from 1996.

Hey, It’s a Bonus H.P. Lovecraft Story!

As were were meeting in Red Hook for book cub this month (and just a few days after Halloween), we decided to throw in a bonus: the 1925 short story, “The Horror at Red Hook” by H.P. Lovecraft.  It’s kind of a terrible story, but I include it here because it was hilariously terrible: full of overblown descriptions of the evil underbelly of the Red Hook neighborhood and rampant racist and xenophobic descriptions of the cultish evil-worshipping inhabitants of said neighborhood.  Yet, for those of familiar with that area of Brooklyn, it was kind of a hoot to read Lovecraft’s descriptions of streets and alleys that were never as dirty as he imagined (and certainly not evil) and are rapidly gentrifying now.

It was also fun to introduce book club to the tentacled phenomenon of Lovecraft’s Cthulhu.  As a super bonus for this post, I’d like to share a photo I snapped at a convention a few years ago of a homemade Pokethulhu model.  Cute!  Tentacled! Demonic!  (I admit that I didn’t write down who actually made this model, but if you’re reading this and the model below is your Pokethulhu, let me know!)

Next up: A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith!  I’m sure there will be less killing and demons...

The Goods: Half the Sky is both an investigation into women’s oppression worldwide and a moving call to action to economically and socially empower women in developing countries – not just because it’s the morally correct thing to do, but also because the authors believe that it’s the most effective way to fight poverty and extremism.  To make their case, Pulitzer-Prize winning authors Kristof and WuDunn focus on three major issues facing women around the world — forced prostitution and sex trafficking, gender violence, and maternal mortality — blending grim reportage and ample statistics with individual stories of women who are triumphing over their circumstances and making real change for their families and communities.  The authors also observe and report on the pros and cons of varied international development/aid strategies and argue that grassroots, ground-up activism and support is the most effective way to fuel change.

The Report: Thanks to the smart thinking of one of our readers, we decided to take a break from our normal fictions to read Half the Sky, and use the occasion as a fundraiser for Mercy Corps.  (Hooray for reading!)  Like most non-fiction, Half the Sky presents a bit of a challenge for book club discussion.  We wondered: should we talk about how the book is written?  Should we talk about the issues and stories covered in the book?  Should we talk about our reactions to those issues and stories?  In the end, our discussion was pretty far-reaching, touching a lot on comments about the methods and approach used by the authors.  Many of us found ourselves invoking old, college-aged questions about cultural relativity, as well as questions about rights vs. rescue,  international context, and the nearly-absent investigation into mens’ accountability, only to set aside our potential critiques in the face of the many stunning achievements of Half the Sky.  Because, in the end, we all agreed: this is one powerful, moving book, and it’s all the more impressive because it’s an engaging read – at times uplifting – and it motivates the heck out of you to do something (and gives you concrete ideas about what to do).  So, yes, we all had our own questions for the book, but mostly we had questions for ourselves: what shall we do and when shall we do it?  That, to me, is a great measure of success for Kristof and WuDunn’s book.  And so I’ll keep my recap of Half the Sky here brief, as I’d simply encourage you all to pick up a copy of it and consider donating to one of the many worthwhile aid organizations doing the critical work described in its pages.

I’ve taken my Kindle to book clubs, answered questions about it on the subway, and found myself in countless conversations about the aesthetic and economic implications of the growing e-reader market. I’ve stopped being surprised at how passionate people are about their reading preferences, their fears about the digital future, and their suspicions about the pleasures of reading electronic ink. I think these are exciting conversations to have, and in the course of talking so much about e-books, I  realized that even though I’ve always been a book lover, I stopped being a book buyer a long time ago.  What’s more, I’ve realized that I have a much more enjoyable relationship with e-books now than I’ve had with real books for years.

When I transitioned out of my PhD program in English literature about ten years ago, I had approximately a gadzillion books. I loved them all, and dutifully schlepped them from apartment to apartment, California to Colorado, on my quest to find a job I loved in a place I liked. I also just kept buying, reading, and collecting. My shelves were so stuffed that one of the main reasons I loved a weird little duplex apartment I rented was a set of floor-to-ceiling bookshelves set into the walls of its weird little office. I bought, I read, and I collected.

A few years into being a non-academic, I started to wonder about what was at the heart of my incessant booklust. I thought a lot about those growing (and dusty) stacks of books. When I got really honest with myself, I realized that the heart of my book buying ways was vanity. Really. It was. I wanted to be acknowledged as a reader, and thinker, and owner of fine and funky books. Regardless of how anyone might feel about my taste, I wanted to be recognized as a voracious reader. I also wanted the validation of being surrounded by the objects that I had studied so intensively for so long. Books were comfortable. And they made me feel better about myself. (Mind you, I am not suggesting that either vanity or validation is at the heart of your booklust, should you possess it. It wasn’t even the reason I started loving books, but it became the reason I relentlessly hung on to them.)

So I decided to let them go. I gave almost all of them away. I allowed myself to keep one small bookcase of my very favorites, and boxed up some classics, anthologies and academic texts for deep storage. After that, nearly everything I read was borrowed – either from the library or friends. I was lucky enough to be living in Denver at the time, because the Denver Public Library is one of the finest libraries in the country, and I had virtually no problem reading anything I wanted whenever I wanted (or after a very short wait).

Becoming a book borrower instead of a book buyer was super significant for me. It re-aligned my relationship to words and stories, and moved me beyond my attachment to books as both physical objects and symbols of my intellect or capabilities. It helped inform my anti-clutter sensibilities, and bolstered my desire to own less stuff, in general.

When I moved to Brooklyn, I continued to borrow – from the library and from friends. I ended up buying a few more books after joining book clubs (and also feeling the knee-jerk compulsion that most people in new cities often have to fill up their new space with something comfortable and known) but not very many. And then (as some of you know) I started having a lot of problems with my back. So Ehren gave me a Kindle as a holiday gift this last year, mostly because he didn’t want me to have to ouch around the subway, lugging books. And it’s pretty much one of the most thoughtful and loving gifts anyone has every given me.

There some downsides to the Kindle (all e-readers are evolving and all of them have problems), but the upsides have been tremendous. Chief among them is, of course, that I can carry around a bunch of books without having to carry them at all. It’s great to be able to share books with Ehren, too. But I’ve also found my reading experience greatly enriched: I’m highlighting passages, taking notes, and looking up words in books these days, which is something I haven’t done for years. Yes, instead of decreasing the aesthetic pleasure of reading, my Kindle has actually activated a more engaged relationship with books than I’ve had since I left academia. And you know what? I buy more books now that I own a Kindle than I have in the past seven years as a library fangirl. Let me say that again, differently: I make more purchases from the publishing companies that are currently freaking out about e-readers than I did before e-readers were even invented – even despite the fact that I continue to get a lot of my e-books for free. I love the convenience of being able to buy an e-book (typically cheaper than print versions) and download it immediately. I love being able to read many of them at the same time, too.  I realize that I might not represent the majority here, but my experience suggests that not all e-book readers have the same desires or the same habits. The truth of the matter is that I’m still not a book buyer, but I am an e-book buyer.

(Let me say here that I’m also a tech savvy gal who knows about the difference between buying a book from Amazon and buying a license for a book from the company, and I’ll look forward to discussing that issue in a future post.)

I recently showed my Kindle to my mother and my grandmother. Both are tech adverse, and yet both women were compelled by a single, important feature: the ability to increase the text size to gigantic proportions. I’ve also had conversations with older folks on the subway about this. After seeing the large font in action, one man declared to me, “Well, that settles that. I’m getting one.” Have you seen how unbelievably big and heavy large print books are? I write about this because we assume, somehow, that the physical objectness of the book is at the core of the pleasure of reading – but it seems, in fact, to be an obstacle for many. So I’m excited about how e-readers will enhance my experience as I become an older reader, too.

So there you have it… Girl meets Kindle.  Girl names it Kindle McMurtry. Girl reads more, reads more deeply, and reads more books that she actually purchased than before she met Kindle.  It’s a love story.