NWR: Side argument - Jonathan Franzen, great or shit?

originally posted by BJ:
Yo peeps:

I just bought my copy of Purity! At Powell's. Yay for me!
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So, I just read Purity. (My neighbors are loud, "and damn that music" /Kinbote.)

So, finally purchased it—on a cloud device. I blazed through it; it kept me, hooked me and I read hungrily.

But afterward, I sat and digested.

A couple of molten thoughts I'll write tomorrow.

BJ, what'd you think?

My quickest thought is that I'm not ready to read a novel on a device. I've done OK to date with non-fiction; maybe it matches better with caught glimpses of reading, or shorter form. Despite the fact that I wanted to read all of this and did, I was somewhat persistently disconcerted by its presentation: not to be holding a book in my hands.

Sheesh, what a Luddite. But that's how I felt.

Anyone have any opinions on paper vs. virtual books? I'm srs.
 
Riding the subway last month Jen and I both noted, happily, that at least half the people reading were reading actual, paper books. And most of those looking at phones/devices were playing games.

I like to think real books are here to stay and for good reason.
 
Fuck those pieces of retrograde shit. Soon, they'll just plug directly into our brains (believe me, coming super soon) and then it's game over.
 
By the way, I had forgotten all about Purity, and so I'd better get started. Just finishing 1493 and then it's on.
 
I still find the heft and physicality of a book to be integral to the reading experience. I say this as someone who readily embraces new technology and who has embraced screw caps as wine closures. My blushing bride, however, is all for ebooks, but her arms get tired.

Mark Lioton
 
I am hooked on e-books, particularly in foreign language. I travel a fair amount and appreciate carrying one small thing rather than leaving books I have finished here and there. My aging eyes appreciate the backlit screens of the more recent Kindles as I often have difficulty finding great lighting in trains/planes/hotel rooms.
 
An ebook has some problems relative to a physical book. I particularly miss being able to flip back multiple pages easily. However for me they are far outweighed by the convenience of being able to carry many books at once, by the weight, and by the ability to make print bigger. The print in my physical books seems to have been shrinking over the years.

I'll also say that I greatly prefer reading on a Kindle Paperwhite to a color screen.

Another problem is that they are easier to lose as they're so thin and light. Which reminds me that I need to order a new one.
 
E-readers are a virtual necessity for lengthy trips if you are a compulsive reader as I am. The cheapness and availability of all literature out of copyright has been an incredible boon. Both Cole and I are working our way through Zola's Rougon-Macquart series, a project that would have been far more expensive and difficult to do prior to kindle. I have now read all of Hardy and Trollope, am most of the way through Wilkie Collins and about halfway through Henry James. I just couldn't have found half those books before. Lots of stuff that used to be unavailable outside of university libraries are now instantly accessible. All of this makes me happy to have these things. They have drawbacks. I can't mark them up in the same way when I'm reading a book with the view of writing something. Non-commercial etexts tend not to have x-rays and so Jay is right that the absence of easy flipping back can be a problem. Also, Pete's appreciation for touch dictionaries is a double-edged sword as those dictionaries are frequently quite lousy, even though they are nice to have.

On balance, I love them
 
I'm surprised to see so many in favor of electrobooks. I get the notion of ease of transport and also of ease of access, but not being able to flip through pages, not to have a sense of one's place in the book, offsets all that for me.

But then, I'm not a huge traveler.
 
originally posted by Jonathan Loesberg: Pete's appreciation for touch dictionaries is a double-edged sword as those dictionaries are frequently quite lousy, even though they are nice to have.
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Jonathan, These days on the rare occasion when I read a paper book I find myself motivated to touch a word on the page to call up the dictionary definition -- my hand actually instinctively moves toward the word before I catch myself. Definitely a creature of habit.

But, yes, while handy, the ebook dictionary is often quite rudimentary.

My Sony PRS 950 shows everything that I need, including page number and total pages. Referring back is also easy.

. . . . . Pete
 
originally posted by Sharon Bowman:
I'm surprised to see so many in favor of electrobooks. I get the notion of ease of transport and also of ease of access, but not being able to flip through pages, not to have a sense of one's place in the book, offsets all that for me.

But then, I'm not a huge traveler.
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You can see where you are in percentage terms and chapters (and sometimes physical page numbers); also, when you have forgotten who a character is, you can search the name and see where else he appears.
 
originally posted by Sharon Bowman:
As for Franzen himself, this piece perfectly pinpoints what irks me about him as a writer:

The Franzen of It All
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Interesting read, winegrrrl. I haven't yet taken on Franzen. I was initially dissuaded when I read an interview with him shortly after the publication of The Corrections, and he sounded positively awful. I don't need to like the authors of books to like the books, but I wasn't at all sure that I wanted to read the insights of someone who sounded so unpleasant. That link hasn't done much to change my mind...

Mark Lipton
 
I am of course biased since I sell used books for a living. But ebooks rock. I love my Kobo in all other ways except that customer service can be slow in answering if there are any problems. But even on relatively short trips like commuting to work and back it's nice to have so many books in an easy format - how can I know in the morning if I want to read the same book on the metro back from work? Of course books on entomology, archaeology and such topics that usually have lots of illustrations, I prefer to read on ex-trees since viewing pictures on a Kobo isn't terribly nice.

Just as escalators and lifts didn't make stairs obsolete, I don't think ebooks will make ex-tree books obsolete either. On the contrary, those customers of mine who are most enthusiastic about ebooks also buy the most ex-tree books from me. I guess book-hallucinogens are like any other drug: there's a small group of hard-core users that will spend all they have on books and the format doesn't matter. In addition to this addict population, it seems that there are so many luddite readers who simply cannot stand the idea of an ebook that I don't think there's any worry about hallucinogenic ex-trees becoming obsolete any time soon.
 
originally posted by Cole Kendall:
originally posted by Sharon Bowman:
I'm surprised to see so many in favor of electrobooks. I get the notion of ease of transport and also of ease of access, but not being able to flip through pages, not to have a sense of one's place in the book, offsets all that for me.

But then, I'm not a huge traveler.
Click to expand...

You can see where you are in percentage terms and chapters (and sometimes physical page numbers); also, when you have forgotten who a character is, you can search the name and see where else he appears.
Click to expand...

Oh, I know, but the progress bar is all theoretical.... I "knew," but I didn't know. And not being able to flip back to a place easily was surprisingly unpleasant.

In the end, I felt like (to compare to our wheelhouse) I was drinking out of crappy stemware. The content was the same, but it was hitting my palate in the wrong place and tasted flat.
 
originally posted by Sharon Bowman:
originally posted by Cole Kendall:
originally posted by Sharon Bowman:
I'm surprised to see so many in favor of electrobooks. I get the notion of ease of transport and also of ease of access, but not being able to flip through pages, not to have a sense of one's place in the book, offsets all that for me.

But then, I'm not a huge traveler.
Click to expand...

You can see where you are in percentage terms and chapters (and sometimes physical page numbers); also, when you have forgotten who a character is, you can search the name and see where else he appears.
Click to expand...

Oh, I know, but the progress bar is all theoretical.... I "knew," but I didn't know. And not being able to flip back to a place easily was surprisingly unpleasant.

In the end, I felt like (to compare to our wheelhouse) I was drinking out of crappy stemware. The content was the same, but it was hitting my palate in the wrong place and tasted flat.
Click to expand...

I've always felt like Georges Poulet about literature: it occurs when I experience someone else's thoughts in their language in my head. The way the language gets there is ultimately secondary. When I started with a kindle, I expected all that stuff about feeling the book to matter. It almost immediately didn't, because the novel was still getting from the author's head into mine.

I know all the objections against Poulet. It doesn't change the experience.
 
Just finished On Chesil Beach, a small tragedy of British manners by the sometimes over-masterful Ian McKewan, a disturbingly touching read.
 
I had forgotten this wonderful thread.

Anyone read Solar? It is weird how much he gets the climate change community mojo.
 
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