Real Book | All things literature, from bibliophile discussion to the latest bestseller news

Tom Paine

Writer Of Revolution

I've just started reading the collected works of Tom Paine, firebrand writer of both the American and French Revolutions, and ultimately betrayed by both. Paine wrote these stirring words to help motivate Washington's troops at Valley Forge:

“These are the times that try men's souls: The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: it is dearness only that gives every thing its value. Heaven knows how to put a proper price upon its goods; and it would be strange indeed if so celestial an article as freedom should not be highly rated.”

It has been said that Paine's writings did so much to motivate ordinary Americans to take up arms for the rebel cause that the Revolution would probably not have happened without him. After the American victory he went to France, and served in the Revolutionary government until he fell afoul of Robespierre and the other Jacobin fanatics for his opposition to the Reign of Terror. They threw him in prison and put his name on a list of people destined for the guillotine, but he somehow got overlooked. After he was released he returned to America, but instead of receiving him as a hero of the Revolution, the American public turned on him as a supposed atheist.

Paine was actually not an atheist, but something in between a Deist and a Quaker. He was a deeply religious individual, but he was strongly opposed to all forms of organized religion or narrow-minded doctrines. That was enough for most Americans to consider him an atheist, and he was rejected completely by those who owed a portion of their liberty to his inspiring rhetoric. He died in obscurity.

I'm not sure whether or not it's actually a comfort in the afterlife to know that you're remembered and honored more by future generations than you ever were by your own, but if so then Paine must be happy with how posterity has judged him.

Foucault's Pendulum

Umberto Eco

“Foucault's Pendulum” by Umberto Eco is a fun and rather erudite novel about much of the same material as Dan Brown's “DaVinci Code,” but with a much less credulous approach to it. In fact, one line in this novel gave me a rule of life that has stood me in good stead on a number of occasions: “if a man mentions the Knights Templar, you can assume him to be a madman.” Of course, I had to just mention the Knights Templar in order to give you the warning, so I suppose it technically applies to me as well.

The book is about three people who work for a company that publishes trashy and/or demented occult conspiracy books for a hefty fee. After being exposed to too many fevered speculations on everything from the Knights Templar to the Druids to Atlantis, they create their own conspiracy theory as a private joke. Their theory is called The Plan, and it links up all the other crazy conspiracy theories in a kind of Grand Unified Field Theory of insanity.

Unfortunately for them, the sheer scope and elegance of the Plan turns out to be very appealing to all the crazy conspiracy theorists out there, and before long they're being hunted by so many underground secret societies and pseudo-Knight-Templars that The Plan might as well actually be true. Pretty soon they're no longer sure it isn't...

Every fan of “The DaVinci Code” should read “Foucault's Pendulum” as an antidote immediately!

Why Do Old Books Smell?

Ever wondered why old books have that distinctive smell?

Used bookseller marketplace AbeBooks has produced a fascinating video about the origins of the smells of old books.

Long story short, when you sniff an old book, what you are smelling is the book's destruction. As it slowly (ever so slowly) decomposes in contact with the corrosive elements of light and air, the paper in a book releases "hundreds of volatile organic compounds into the air."

Even more poignantly, a major factor in the decomposition of a paper book is the chemicals which were used in its production. Both the ink and the paper both contain within them the seeds of their own destruction.

EBooks have no smell, of course. Because eBooks do not decompose. It's a good news/bad news type situation.

A side note: many VOCs are toxic. It's strange to think of a smell as being itself poisonous, but this is the case with many VOCs including those that off-gas from plastic and rubber, as well as chemicals found in solvents, gasoline, paint, and other solutions. In other words, the smell of paint, gas, new carpet, or a fax machine is bad for you. But there are a lot of VOCs in the world, and it seems that the VOCs released from books are non-toxic.

Of course, in my world, there is another big factor in the smell of books: molds and mildew. I live in the Pacific Northwest, where the musty smell of Grandma's cement-floored basement permeates hundreds of thousands of books. This smell is permanent, nothing you do can erase the smell of mildew. And don't think I haven't tried. People will advise you to bake the book slowly, leave it out in the sun, spritz it with white vinegar, put it in a Ziploc bag with a big pile of baking soda… all of these treatments are temporary at best. (Ruinous at worst.)

The allergy-ridden Pacific Northwest book lover learns to sniff every used book suspiciously before buying it. Cheap mass market paperbacks seem to be most likely to suffer from Book Must. I don't know why. Either their owners take less care of them, or their papers are more likely to be colonized by mildew, or both.

EBooks do not get mildewed. That's the trade-off: they don't have that great book smell, but on the other hand, I have lost entire shelves of books to a creeping powdery white mold that always strikes the side of the book that faces away from you.

Reading Bestsellers: You Say That Like It's A Bad Thing

It's high time we stopped judging other people's reading choices, and celebrating the fact that in this day and age, anyone at all reads a book

Book Riot editor Jeff O'Neal points out a curious fact (tongue-in-cheek): if you ask people to list their favorite books, they will throw out a handful of literary classics. But at the same time, the bestseller list is full of (horrified gasp!) crime and romance novels. He then proceeds to excoriate readers for consuming these mass market novels.

So many problems with this tired old argument. First of all, there is no single "reader." I know many people who would never stoop to reading a mass market book. These are the people who cheered Jonathan Franzen for rejecting Oprah's imprint, then abandoned him when he made peace. (Darn that Oprah's Book Club! Encouraging Americans to read cheap, mindless trash like, um, Eli Wiesel's Night and Tolstoy's Anna Karenina! Um, wait…)

I also know a lot of people who churn through mass market fiction at a staggering rate. I can think of many coworkers off the top of my head who go through a genre novel - including, yes, crime and romance - a week. A week! And most of them might tackle one or two "difficult" books a year, at most.

O'Neal, and everyone else who turns up their nose at the bestseller's list, need to get with the times. No longer is it "fancy books versus mass market paperbacks." The battle lines are clear. It's a fight between "any book at all versus television/movies/internet/video games."

In other words, it's not the bestseller statistics that are surprising. It's the fact that there IS a bestseller list at all. The fact that the publishing industry continues to exist is a marvel. Anyone who supports any part of the publishing industry is to be commended. Each literary darling (Jennifer Egan; Colson Whitehead) rides on the backs of dozens of mass market blockbusters (Suzanne Collins; James Patterson). Without the earning power of a Patterson, there would be no money to risk on an Egan.

The bestseller statistics aren't even that surprising. Bestseller lists grade on a curve, remember. Specific numbers are hard to come by, but here's a pretty reliable one: 5,000 copies sold in a week will put you on the NYT bestseller list. Only 5,000!

By comparison, over 500 million people have downloaded Angry Birds, and 5.61 million people watched Family Guy last week.

Seriously, folks. It's high time we stopped judging other people's reading choices, and celebrating the fact that in this day and age, anyone at all reads a book - regardless of which section of the book store it came from.

Perdido Street Station

China Mieville

Most fantasy fiction is still set in pseudo-medieval worlds with swords and knights and that sort of thing. This type of fantasy landscape got old a long time ago, yet authors keep churning out massive novels set in various fictional versions of medieval Europe.

China Mieville's “Perdido Street Station” is very different. It's set in a world reminiscent of the Victorian era, where magic operates side by side with technology of the steampunk type. The novel is set in a massive, filthy and politically oppressive city-state called New Crobuzon, and every bit of grime and speck of urban filth is described in loving detail by Mieville.

Revolutionary politics are in the background of the whole book, but are not the primary focus. I would say that the primary focus is the city itself. Mieville is obviously very comfortable with the city as a mythic landscape; he actually seems to revel in how repulsive and dirty New Crobuzon is.

He's also very good at inventing monsters. Underneath New Crobuzon, for instance, there is a monstrous spider called the Weaver, which is extraordinarily powerful and extraordinarily dangerous because its only conception of morality is based purely on aesthetics. Do something it finds conceptually interesting and you're okay, but do something it thinks is boring or passe and things get very horrifying very quickly. That's just one of the interesting monsters in this unusual, creative and fascinating fantasy. Mieville has also written two other novels set in the same fantastic world, “The Scar” and “Iron Council.”

Merkabah Rider

The "High Planes" Drifter

If you're a fan of old pulp fiction, Clint Eastwood, the Weird Western genre, adventure stories or Jewish mysticism, you should pick up the “Merkabah Rider” series by Edward M. Erdelac. This series seems to be built around the amusing coincidence that Clint Eastwood's “Man With No Name” character sometimes wears a flat-brimmed black hat and a long black coat, and so do the members of most Orthodox Jewish sects, and most people can't seem to tell the difference.

I should know, because for many years I wore an outfit like that- partly out of admiration for those old Spaghetti Westerns- and I can't even tell you how many people have come up to me over the years to ask me where a good Kosher deli might be found. Now, if you really know anything about Orthodox Jewish people, you would know that they don't generally have long ponytails, nor do they often wear Jack Daniels T-shirts under their long black coats. But those little details were never enough to clue most people in, and they went right on assuming I was Jewish when what I was actually going for was something in between Clint Eastwood and Humphrey Bogart.

But I digress. The Merkabah Rider is a wandering mysterious drifter in a skewed version of the Old West, but he's also the last surviving member of an ancient order of Jewish mystics. His enemies tend to be demonic in nature, but he can quick draw on the high street at high noon if he really needs to. The premise is fun, the stories are fun, and the author captures the elusive quality of pure adventure that made the pulps so fun. And if you ask him where a good Kosher deli is, he can probably tell you. Better than I can, anyway!

Kindles Boost Reading Confidence in Middle Schoolers

E-readers improved student self-esteem in remedial reading classes

Encouraging middle school students to think of reading as an enjoyable activity rather than just a mandated one has been a mounting challenge for teachers as digital distractions grow all the more plentiful. How do you convince a 12-year-old that an entire world waits for him between the covers of a novel when an endlessly growing and infinitely interactive universe lies behind his computer screen? The dynamic interface of the Web and the constant innovation in the devices used to access it make for stiff competition with the old-fashioned written word. But a new study indicates that it's possible to make old words cool again--by putting them on the screen of a digital device.

The study examined the preferences of 199 middle school students in a reading improvement class. Study authors asked students to rate their own reading skill before and after using a Kindle e-reader to complete their reading assignments. While all students generally felt better about their reading ability after finishing several e-books on the Kindle, boys reported an especially marked spike in academic self-esteem. Girls enjoyed the e-reader, but stated that on the whole they preferred reading paper books. And the younger the student, the more likely he or she was to be impressed by the digital books; sixth- and seventh-grade students expressed more enthusiasm for the Kindles than eight-graders.

The difference in response between genders might be explained by the manner in which new devices, such as Kindles, are advertised to consumers. Marketing campaigns for all products generally depict men as more active and in control of their own activity. Gadgets are generally marketed to men first, the "doers" of society who measure their own worth by how up-to-date their consumer choices are. It's not surprising, then, that middle school-age boys would report a greater level of self-esteem after being granted a state-of-the-art gadget. Even though reading a book and reading a Kindle require the exact same skill, the Kindle carries with it an implied endowment of competency. The boys were actively using a device, not passively absorbing a novel. Because the action of using technology falls in line with how society measures ability in men, the boys felt better about themselves with the Kindle. Girls were perfectly comfortable with the passive action of reading an actual book because women aren't judged by their technological skills in the same way.

So is the e-reader the way to bring students up to grade level in reading? It seems it might help, especially with boys, but don't expect it to make a widespread appearance in America's underfunded classrooms anytime soon.

A Princess of Mars

Edgar Rice Burroughs

The recent failure of Disney's “John Carter” movie may have convinced you not to give the books by Edgar Rice Burroughs a chance. I haven't seen the movie yet, but even if it's the worst movie ever made, nothing should stop you from reading the Martian novels if you have any interest in adventure fiction at all.

“A Princess of Mars” is the first book in the series, and the one Disney chose to base its movie on. It features a Confederate veteran who is fleeing from hostile Indians when he stumbles on the cave of an ancient and long-dead shaman or sorcerer and is somehow magically transported to Mars. On Mars (or Barsoom, as the locals would have it), his earthly muscles make him ridiculously strong in the lighter Martian gravity, so he is even able to hold his own in single combat with the giant, green, four-armed warriors of the extraordinarily mean Thark hordes. This enables him to rescue Princess Dejah Thoris of the city-state of Helium, although he ends up having to rescue her quite a few times in the course of this series, because manly men rescuing princesses is the only plot Edgar Rice Burroughs had ever heard of.

If none of this makes a lick of sense to you, you're not alone- but it doesn't matter. Burroughs had one gift as a writer, and one only, but he had that one gift in spades. That was the gift of writing a thrilling adventure story. No one does it better, and even if you don't want to read twelve books about human warriors rescuing Martian princesses, you should at least read the first three. Actually you can just go ahead and read the first one, I'm confident that if you do you'll read the next two as soon as you can get your hands on them. Logical or not, these books are exciting!

A Dance With Dragons- At Long Last

George RR Martin

After a long, long wait, “A Dance With Dragons” is finally out. The latest volume in George R.R. Martin's excessively epic fantasy series “A Song of Ice and Fire” has been delayed for five or six years now, so it's only to be expected that some frustrated fans would be disappointed with it when it finally arrived. If you look at the reviews on Amazon, they're pretty mixed, and a fair number of readers outright hated it.

But I don't. It's not as compelling as the first few books in the series, but that's only to be expected. When you sit down and decide to write a seven-volume series of increasingly massive novels with hundreds of characters major and minor, you have to expect that the quality will start to slip a little as you get past that initial burst of crazy inspiration that made you think any of this was a good idea in the first place. Personally, I don't think the quality has actually slipped all that much. It's still an absorbing story, it's still a good read, and it's still not really fantasy fiction.

Why do I say that? Read the essay “From Elfland to Poughkeepsie” by Ursula K. LeGuin if you really want to know, but the gist of it is this. “A Song of Ice and Fire” is about war and politics on a massive scale, in a world that just happens to be at a medieval level of technology. It's not about magic and wonder, thus it isn't really fantasy. It does have an element of magic and wonder in it, but only an element, so I suppose you could say it's a war epic with a fantasy aspect. Either way, it's a good book, and I don't usually like these mega-epic pseudo-fantasies, so from me that's high praise. I'll be eagerly awaiting the next one- however long it takes!

Encyclopedia Brittanica is Dead - Hooray!

Here's hoping from now on, families can invest their $1,400 in something more useful

It took a long time, but the world finally killed the print edition of the Encyclopedia Brittanica. And I for one couldn't be happier. The tyranny of this multi-volume sales scheme was as crushing as the books were useless. I'm glad they will no longer be around to burden aspirational families with their trademarks: cost, clutter, and awfulness.

The EB will continue to exist online. Hooray. As Farhad Manjoo points out, have you seen their web pages lately? Each entry's page is clogged with disreputable ads, of the "Dermatologists hate this local mom" type. That alone should set your warning bells off.

The Encyclopedia Brittanica always cost far more than it ought to. Just before it was axed, it cost a whopping $1,400 for the entire set. $1,400! For about a dozen textbooks, with no updates included. That is madness! No amount of faux gold tooling on faux leather binding could account for that cost, although it was clearly meant to look impressive and make you think it was worth far more than it really was.

The cost of the Encyclopedia Brittanica also served as a regressive tax. Who bought them? Poor and middle class families desperate to give their kids an edge over the competition. In other words, the families who could least afford them. Meanwhile, affluent families used that money to take their kids to the library and hire tutors.

Worst of all, the books didn't work. For one thing, they were only current for a year or two. Have you ever paged through an old Encyclopedia Brittanica, looking for lulz? Then you know the truth of this: the world is constantly evolving. Borders blur; women get the vote.

For another thing, they were only one source. What kind of paper are you going to write with only one source? A lousy one, that's what kind. You need at least two or three sources on your topic to get a decent handle on it. Turn in a paper with the EB as your lone citation and watch your grade sink sadly into the muck.

And philosophically, the EB is heavily weighted towards white male Western culture. It's the last bastion of the worst, stuffiest sort of academia. Nothing like the vibrant panoply of information you can find at your local library.

Here's hoping from now on, families can invest their $1,400 in something more useful. Tutoring, for example, or groceries!

Pages