From Merchants of Culture, by John Thompson, pg 238. In the United States: The number of new books published in the US each year prior to 1980 was probably under 50,000. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, the number of new books published greatly increased, reaching nearly 200,000 by 1998. By […]
Blogging – Jill Rettberg The Internet Is Not The Answer – Andrew Keen [astonishingly he had a whole team of research assistants for this yet used few, if any, sources which weren’t from the internet] Homeland – Cory Doctorow Status Update – Alice Marwick [brilliant!] Graphic Novels: Ex Machina [best thing […]
After five of these posts I’m getting slightly bored with the exercise of describing each book. But I’ll continue with the posts as a whole because blogging a list of the books that I’ve finished does seem to be helping with my prior tendency to so rarely finish a book […]
Shutting Out The Sun is a journalistic exploration of Japan’s ‘lost generation’ that gives much social scientific work a run for its money in terms of breadth and insight. I read it because of a long-standing interest in the hikikomori: Japanese youth who isolate themselves, often refusing to leave the […]
At the end of 2014 I tried to choose the favourite books I’d read during the year. I discovered two things. Firstly, it was a real struggle to remember what I had actually read. Secondly, I had started and failed to finish far more books than I had completed. So this […]
How We Are – Vincent Deary The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P – Adelie Waldman The Circle – Dave Eggers Locke & Key (vol 1 to vol 5) – Joe Hill The Importance of Disappointment – Ian Craib The Massive (vol 1 to vol 4) – Brian Wood Days of Destruction, […]
Earlier this week I read Solo by William Boyd. The idea of a new James Bond novel wouldn’t have appealed to me if it had been written by anyone other than Boyd and it lived up to my expectations. One curious aspect of it which I wasn’t expecting was the […]
I got briefly obsessed last year by the observation that at a rate of one book a week between the ages of 5 and 80, it will only be possible to read 3,900 books in a lifetime. This is a little over one tenth of one percent of all the books […]
I love the Kindle app on the iPad. Or at least I want to love it. I’ve been using it intermittently for well over a year now and I’ve gradually realised how difficult I find it to read attentively when using it. I’m a compulsive underliner, margin scribbler and corner folder of books. […]
I read a book a decade ago and struggle with it. I read it again now and find it astonishingly thought-provoking. How do you explain this? It seems I bring something different to the book on the second reading: concepts, experiences and knowledge which I lacked at the time of […]
It occurred to me recently how much I like the ‘books received’ feature on Stuart Elden’s blog and that I might like to do something similar. Unfortunately he seems to get lots of books sent to him, whereas I get comparatively few. In retrospect I really didn’t take advantage of […]
To me a book is not just a particular file. It’s connected with personhood. Books are really, really hard to write. They represent a kind of a summit of grappling with what one really has to say. And what I’m concerned with is when Silicon Valley looks at books, they […]
