Commentary on technologies of reading, writing, research, and, generally, knowledge. As these technologies change and develop, what do we lose, what do we gain, what is (fundamentally or trivially) altered? And, not least, what’s fun?
By: Alan Jacobs
May 18, 2010
This is not surprising: The Kindle isn’t doing as well in academic environments as Amazon—and educators—had originally hoped. The Darden Business School at the University of Virginia is near the end of its Kindle “experiment,” already concluding that students are not into the Kindle when it comes to classroom...
May 17, 2010
Gracious readers, I need some help. I have a vast compendium of stories and quotes about reading that I’m drawing on for my book, but there is one story I can’t find — I may not have saved it. And though I have mad Googling skillz they have let me down this time. Here’s what I remember: it was a newspaper article that...
May 17, 2010
Brandon Sanderson’s novel Mistborn: the Final Empire begins with a brief italicized passage, spoken by the protagonist, which contains this sentence: “They say I will hold the future of the entire world on my arms.” Wait — shouldn’t that be either “in my arms” or “on my shoulders”? In...
May 14, 2010
Thanks to one of my wise and learned commenters, I discovered the pretty-much-wholly-unadvertised Your Reading page on Amazon’s Kindle site. This has made me think, for the first time, that the Kindle really could be used for serious and scholarly reading: I can see all of my highlighted passages and all of my notes on a single...
May 14, 2010
My critical edition of W. H. Auden’s long poem The Age of Anxiety will be out later this year, I hope, though it hasn’t shown up on Amazon yet . . . but hey, while I’m handing out excerpts, how about one more? This is from my Introduction to the poem: The Age of Anxiety begins in fear and doubt, but the four protagonists find...
May 13, 2010
Following the lead of Old Man Stewart here, I’m going to take a moment shake my fist at Bill Simmons.I needed something nearly mindless to read at the end of a long, hard, illness-infested semester, so I thought I would try Simmons’s The Book of Basketball: The NBA According to The Sports Guy. I got about a third of the way through...
May 13, 2010
Victor Keegan: My second book, Big Bang, was published as a real book but launched in the virtual world Second Life amid an animated conversation by avatars. Since those early days Second Life has developed an innovative culture of creating three dimensional virtual books including poems which is taking literature in a new direction,...
May 12, 2010
For me, ‘tis the season of proofs. Recently I got proofs for my contribution to the forthcoming Cambridge Companion to C. S. Lewis, which is an essay on the Narnia books. Here’s an excerpt: Lewis once suggested that literary critics are, and have always been, neglectful of ‘Story considered in itself’. They have been so focused...
May 11, 2010
Recently a meme flitted around the internet for a few days — a meme about books: “What,” whispered the meme, “are the Ten Books That Have Most Influenced You?” Or something like that; sometimes I have trouble hearing memes, because of the whispering and all. Also because they tend to bore me.I don’t know how to answer the...
May 10, 2010
Here’s a meditation on children’s books that can still make adults cry. The list is largely what you would expect: The Velveteen Rabbit, The Giving Tree, Charlotte’s Web, etc. Oscar Wilde’s “The Happy Prince”, which Lynne Sharon Schwartz has called “the saddest story ever written,” which may well be true, is mentioned...