I sometimes wonder about this.
I will admit to only reading the first three or four paragraphs before re-tweeting, but some people don’t seem to read any of an article before recommending it.
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Tag Archives | reading
Worst. Dystopia. Ever.
I find this quite horrifying.
Alltop likes to unleash its inner Marlow.
Venn Diagrams of Publishing, Hypocrisy and Despair
Okay, this one isn’t entirely original, but I have tarted it up a bit. Made me laugh because of its truthiness, and lest you think I am judging, I fall into the “bloggers” category too!
I found the original at The Atlantic here.
You may also want to check out another older one, Economies of Despair:
The commentary is a hoot.
Now, please help me prove this second one wrong by going to my publisher’s website, and buying a copy of Marvellous Hairy. (Only $16.80 Canadian.) Let me know you did so in the comments, and I’ll send you a bookplate (with my signature if you want it, just say so!)
Then you will prove the diagram actually looks more like this, and I think we all want that:
Alltop and humor-blogs.com form a Venn Diagram of Funny.
Ask General Kang: Apparently, only one in four people read a book last year — how can we improve that figure?
I’d start by disabling the publishing industry in some way — perhaps an elite cadre of pulp-loving squirrels armed with plasma-shredders and capable of firing book worms out of their mouths? Or perhaps you could change the tax laws so that drinks, food and visits to literary conferences can no longer be deducted.
Then I’d start a massive PR campaign that showed (with whatever scientific research we can drum up — we’ll need to set up a think tank to provide some too) how reading books was actually harmful to your health. We should also start some kind of fake grassroots organization that can politicize the issue for us, appealing to our need to “save the children.”
Then, I’d —
No, no, I want more people to read books
Why would you want that? It makes the population much easier to control if they’re illiterate, you know.
I don’t want the population to be easier to control!
What are you, some kind of anarchist?
Okay. So a campaign to get more people to read. Hmmm. What if you tied lotteries to book reading? Instead of picking numbers at random, you would only pick winning numbers from a pool of those who purchased tickets and correctly answered the skill-testing question, based on the book they have claimed to have read?
Either that or have some kind of compulsory reading comprehension test every year: they get three chances to answer the questions right, and if they don’t, you implant some kind of mind-control device (the X-trablian Zombie Beetle is an excellent choice) that prevents them from using the TV, Internet and radio.
Or you could force them to spend their days, reading through the slush piles of romance publishers.
Next time: I seem to be molting, and I’m not a bird — so what’s the best way of recycling skin?
Neither Alltop nor humor-blogs.com can read while watching TV.
I See Dead People[‘s Books]
You’ll find an impressive list of the libraries of such ex-humans as Hemingway, Samuel Johnson, Marie Antoinette, and of course, Mozart, at LibraryThing.
This link comes via the Very Short List, which says of the social bookworm site: “While browsing, you may discover some excellent books you hadn’t heard of (like Aboard the Flying Swan, by Stanley A. Wolper, found in Ernest Hemingway’s library). Also, by peeking at the titles in a dead person’s library, you’ll get fresh insight into his or her intellectual nooks and crannies — sure, we more or less get why Aspects of Chinese Painting, by Alan Priest, was found in e. e. cummings’s library, but Machiavelli’s The Prince in Tupac’s library? Who knew?”
The other day I had a neighbor over looking at my library (which is pretty modest compared to Hemmingway’s, but kick-ass if you compare it to that of James Joyce — I’m not necessarily making any writing comparisons here, by the way, it’s just the facts). So, the neighbor says, “do you mind if you look at your books?”
Mind? I practically insist. I addition to housing some of the books I have read (I don’t keep everything I buy, and I also — ahem, — will occasionally do something really antiquated like visit a library and borrow a book) there is a nice little catalog of stuff that I’m in the process of reading. The aforementioned James Joyce, for example. I’ve been working on Ulysses for several years. I seem to get stuck somewhere around page thirty. I’ve also not read the copy of Cicero’s “On the Good Life”, though I have actually read Marcus Aurelius’s “Meditations” and Plato’s “Republic”, which come in the same nice set. Plato was a proto-Fascist, by the way. I get the feeling that I could have a beer with Marcus Aurelius, you know, if he wasn’t an ex-human.
I’ve yet to even crack the cover on Gibbon’s “The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire” yet, and to my great shame, I’ve yet to read Primo Levi’s “If This Is Man.” (Not that I’m making any connection between the two.)
I guess my library is a work in progress. Much like me really. It represents some of the books I’ve read and absorbed, yet it also represents the book nerd that I yearn to be. Perhaps it is just intellectual posturing.
What does your library say about you? Does it say anything at all? Why am I asking all these questions?
Does a link to humor-blogs.com and alltop at the end of every post mean something too I wonder? Oh my God I can’t stop asking questions! You should definitely check out the site where I got the cartoon for more savage chicken goodness.