Musings

Reflections on life lived by a coast

  • Home
  • Travel
  • Yoga
  • Contact
You are here: Home / Archives for Bookshelf

How to Survive a Summer Cold

July 31, 2011 •

A few days ago a new Vita­Mix 5200 arrived on our doorstep, fol­lowed within hours by the onset of a bad sum­mer cold. Per­fect tim­ing.

The quest for well­ness

Since then I’ve been liv­ing on fruit smooth­ies and roasted gar­lic soup. The Vita­Mix has offered a refresh­ing way to deal with the unpleas­ant side-effects of a nasty cold. I’ve also tried other uncon­ven­tional reme­dies.

My friend Jenny brought a box of Well­ness Fizz tablets, Vit­a­min-C plus herbal sup­ple­ments to dis­solve in warm water. Con­sumed 3 or 4 times a day, Well­ness Fizz claims to boost the immune system’s abil­ity to fight back. Even so I’ve had to resort to Zicam, decon­ges­tants, restora­tive yoga and lots of sleep…

No mir­a­cle cures, only mod­est relief — but I’ve found some pleas­ant dis­trac­tions.

With the Help of a Few Good Books

When too ill to social­ize, exer­cise or work, lis­ten­ing to jazz and clas­si­cal music can be won­der­fully dis­tract­ing. Like­wise a good book or a riv­et­ing movie. Forced to slow down while recov­er­ing, I’ve found time for some fine books.

I loved Camilla Gibb’s The Beauty of Human­ity Move­ment: A Novel.  Set in Viet­nam, the story intro­duces an aging cook — an itin­er­ant street ven­dor — famous through­out Hanoi for his phở. You learn about Old Man Hung, his his­tory, the proper way to make a bowl of phở — and the expe­ri­ences and peo­ple who’ve touched his life over the years. The story is richly embell­ished with the details of every­day life in Hanoi, thanks to the author’s back­ground as a social anthro­pol­o­gist. You can almost smell the lemon­grass and cilantro on every page…

From Viet­nam to Paris, in just a few hun­dred pages.

“It’s so lovely here it hurts.” — Ernest Hem­ing­way, 1922

This week­end I immersed myself in 1920s Paris with the Lost Gen­er­a­tion, thanks to Paula McLain’s The Paris Wife. Her novel deals with Ernest Hemingway’s early strug­gles to become an author, and his years in Paris with his first wife, Hadley, “who loved him before he was famous,” as an Ama­zon reviewer wrote.

Although told from Hadley’s point of view, the story sheds some light on the expe­ri­ences, adven­tures and trou­bled rela­tion­ships that inspired Hem­ing­way to write his first two nov­els, includ­ing the ground-break­ing Amer­i­can novel, The Sun Also Rises. You’ll meet some of the lumi­nar­ies of 20th cen­tury lit­er­a­ture such as F. Scott Fitzger­ald, Ezra Pound, James Joyce, John Dos Pas­sos, Sher­wood Ander­son, Gertrude Stein, Ford Madox Ford, among oth­ers.

After a vic­ar­i­ous week­end in Paris with artists and famous writ­ers, I’m anx­ious to re-read Hemingway’s mem­oir of this period, The Move­able Feast — and learn the story through his eyes.

And as for this cold — Enough, already.

Is It Time for Reading to Be Reinvented?

May 15, 2011 •

Why do peo­ple read books? For plea­sure or dis­trac­tion? For self-improve­ment or to learn some­thing new? For class assign­ments: text­books, lit­er­a­ture?

Are eBooks best suited for use cases that are fun­da­men­tally util­i­tar­ian, rather than plea­sure seek­ing?

Why do peo­ple read eBooks?

I’ve been pon­der­ing these ques­tions for a few days, sparked by an entrepreneur’s pitch. He dreams of rein­vent­ing how peo­ple read and expe­ri­ence books, at least among young peo­ple. He wants to host the con­ver­sa­tions that take place around books, via a new “social eBook app” for the iPad and other tablet devices.

A New App for eBooks

His eBook app will be enhanced by “a social wrap­per” — in order to encour­age online con­ver­sa­tions among read­ers of a book, or exchanges between book fans and the author. In brief, here’s the con­cept.

Read­ing as a social expe­ri­ence

Imag­ine a book opened in front of you. Each page of the book is dis­played on the right — pretty much what you’d see if you were using Apple’s iBook app on an iPad. On the left, where you’d nor­mally see the fac­ing page, his app’s UI dis­plays short mes­sages exchanged among read­ers of that par­tic­u­lar book — sim­i­lar to a Twit­ter mes­sage stream or a chat win­dow.

His notion of read­ing plus online con­ver­sa­tion may offer real ben­e­fits to stu­dents who must read the same book for a class assign­ment. As long as his plat­form allows peo­ple to express their ideas or ques­tions with­out the arti­fi­cial con­straint of the 140-char­ac­ter tweet, this tech­nol­ogy may lead to enhanced learn­ing and stu­dent engage­ment. Assum­ing, that is, that the books they need to read are made avail­able for his eBook app.

But I’d like to share my impres­sion about the impli­ca­tions of this approach for peo­ple who read for plea­sure.

First Impression — Not for Me

My reac­tion to the new con­cept was tepid, even though I own an iPad 2 and have been col­lect­ing apps for it. I’m a vora­cious reader: con­sum­ing between 100–200 books a year, for plea­sure, plus sev­eral dozen busi­ness books. You’d think I’d be the ideal cus­tomer for this enhanced eBook app given the value I place on read­ing.

But here’s why the propo­si­tion doesn’t appeal to me:

  • At my level of “addic­tion to read­ing,” the pub­lic library is the most cost-effec­tive source of books for me.
  • I love the look and feel of a well-designed book. So far, the eBooks that I’ve seen (iBook and Kin­dle for­mats) lack any real typo­graphic ele­gance — each page looks pretty much the same. Books become bor­ing as a result.
  • When con­verted to EPUB® for­mat, the book’s orig­i­nal page lay­out is dras­ti­cally scaled back when ren­dered by the dig­i­tal book reader. This sim­pli­fi­ca­tion can reduce mean­ing or com­pre­hen­sion — what­ever was intended by the way the designer laid out text, head­lines and images on the page to be printed.

For exam­ple, the sam­ple shown here con­denses a lot of infor­ma­tion to a sin­gle page, thanks to the design choices that are expressed through this lay­out.

sample-book-page-layout

But my most impor­tant rea­son for pre­fer­ring today’s book for­mat to a “social eBook Reader” is the desire to pre­serve the holy grail of read­ing: the state of flow, a won­der­ful emo­tional state that is the hall­mark of the world’s best books.

Reading & The Joys of “Flow”

When read­ing a well-told story, I’m immersed in the expe­ri­ence — caught up in the state of “flow.” My per­sonal bound­aries dis­solve when I enter the storyteller’s world: I feel the heat and dust of the North African souk, or the pen­e­trat­ing cold and damp of the Scot­tish high­lands.

Psy­chol­o­gists describe flow as a very desir­able state of mind (source: WikiPedia):

Accord­ing to Csík­szent­mi­há­lyi, flow is com­pletely focused moti­va­tion. It is a sin­gle-minded immer­sion and rep­re­sents per­haps the ulti­mate in har­ness­ing the emo­tions in the ser­vice of per­form­ing and learn­ing. In flow, the emo­tions are not just con­tained and chan­neled, but pos­i­tive, ener­gized, and aligned with the task at hand…. The hall­mark of flow is a feel­ing of spon­ta­neous joy, even rap­ture, while per­form­ing a task although flow is also described as a deep focus on noth­ing but the activ­ity — not even one­self or one’s emo­tions.

While it’s pos­si­ble to achieve flow while read­ing an eBook, the expe­ri­ence of flow is so reward­ing that choos­ing to inter­rupt it for chat mes­sages is the last thing I can imag­ine doing when read­ing for plea­sure.

But this may be a gen­er­a­tional pref­er­ence… Per­haps teenagers and young adults are will­ing to sac­ri­fice the expe­ri­ence of flow in order to check in with each other. Or maybe their hyper-active, multi-task­ing world is not one that’s amenable to flow; not hav­ing expe­ri­enced it, they have no rea­son to want it. For them, is con­nec­tion prefer­able to flow?

Per­haps my real issue with this con­cept is that I pre­fer asyn­chro­nous to syn­chro­nous social­iz­ing, when it comes to the expe­ri­ence of read­ing a book.

Yes, We Engage Socially around Books

My friends and I are highly likely to talk with each other when it comes to books or mag­a­zines we’ve enjoyed. Books are com­mon top­ics of con­ver­sa­tion among us. We bring bags of books to social events, for shar­ing with each other — our own lend­ing library, if you will.

We always talk about books (or movies) when we go for hikes or long walks, and often over a glass of wine or a shared meal.

Some are avid book club mem­bers, and love talk­ing about a book with oth­ers dur­ing semi-struc­tured club meet­ings.

After fin­ish­ing a book that’s made a huge impres­sion, we’re quite likely to email a rec­om­men­da­tion.

Most of us already own an iPad or a Kin­dle; all of us have com­put­ers. So it’s not the device that’s the issue.

It’s just hard to imag­ine that we’d want to chat in real-time while read­ing for plea­sure, when we so enjoy talk­ing about books face to face…

The entre­pre­neur is actively seek­ing financ­ing, so I chose not to iden­tify his com­pany nor his prod­uct. I wish him the best of luck, as long as there are enough peo­ple who will value dig­i­tal books enhanced by a social expe­ri­ence.

Kindle: Reasons for Not Falling in Love

August 15, 2010 •

As a new owner of a Kin­dle DX, I was really hop­ing to fall in love. But it didn’t hap­pen. Here’s why. [Read more…]

Where Are the Books in French for Kindle?

August 9, 2010 •

A fran­cophile friend is eagerly try­ing to buy French books and peri­od­i­cals for her new Kin­dle DX. She splits her time between Seat­tle and France, and would love to con­sol­i­date her read­ing mate­ri­als elec­tron­i­cally for prac­ti­cal rea­sons. Fueled by opti­mism, she bought a third gen­er­a­tion Kin­dle last Fri­day.

She loves Kindle’s promise, but dis­en­chant­ment is already set­ting in… For rea­sons that aren’t clear, the usage sce­nario she has in mind is not well sup­ported by the cur­rent mar­ket envi­ron­ment. She has spent hours search­ing www​.ama​zon​.fr, to no avail. No French books to speak of, and hardly any peri­od­i­cals.

Her trial sub­scrip­tion to Le Monde has revealed a num­ber of usabil­ity issues. There’s no teaser for­mat that enables her to skip to the arti­cles that most inter­est her. No images, text only.

Update: March 14, 2012 — Ama­zon has launched the French Kin­dle Store (at last!), and now offers over 4000 French clas­sics at no charge. You can visit Ama­zon for more infor­ma­tion on what’s avail­able for French speak­ers. It will be inter­est­ing to see how long it takes the French pub­lish­ing indus­try to agree to release cur­rent titles for enjoy­ment on a Kin­dle…

And now, back to my friend’s wish list — for the expe­ri­ence she wants on a Kin­dle…

En Français, S’il Vous Plait

Her dream: read French nov­els, news­pa­pers and mag­a­zines on a con­ve­niently portable device like the Kin­dle. Cur­rent releases, not just 19th cen­tury pub­lic domain books. Because she’s pas­sion­ate about per­fect­ing her French com­pre­hen­sion and pro­nun­ci­a­tion skills, she’d love to read while lis­ten­ing to a simul­ta­ne­ous play­back via MP3 (or equiv­a­lent).

French is not her native lan­guage, so she wants to be able to select unfa­mil­iar words on the Kin­dle, thereby launch­ing a built-in dic­tio­nary whose entries explain their mean­ing. She’d also wel­come the option of view­ing French-to-Eng­lish trans­la­tions of unknown words and slang (a must-have for peo­ple whose French is less flu­ent than hers.)

She’s very inter­ested in Kindle’s text-to-speech option, espe­cially if it doesn’t sound like a robot. Need­less to say, she expects the text-to-speech option for French con­tent to pro­duce words pro­nounced cor­rectly in French, rather than lis­ten to a techno-voice try­ing to pro­nounce French words as if they had been writ­ten in Eng­lish.

Before order­ing the Kin­dle, my friend did some research which revealed that Ama­zon had released a dig­i­tal pub­lish­ing plat­form for French lan­guage authors in Jan­u­ary. That sparked her pur­chase of a Kin­dle. Surely, she thought, there’d be French ebooks in the mar­ket­place by now, 6+ months since Ama­zon released its multi-lan­guage pub­lish­ing plat­form.

Hélas! She’s learned there are few con­tem­po­rary books in French for Kin­dle. And no linked dic­tio­nary for French con­tent as there is for Eng­lish lan­guage con­tent.

Too Early, Or Too Unusual?

Her big ques­tion: is she just suf­fer­ing early adopter pains, and if she waits patiently, will some­day have the oppor­tu­nity to read French books and mag­a­zines on a Kin­dle? Or is she an out­lier, a mem­ber of a niche mar­ket of French read­ers who would wel­come elec­tronic books, but who are too few in num­ber to moti­vate the French pub­lish­ing indus­try to embrace the new dig­i­tal for­mats?

And what about the French government’s con­tin­u­ing quest to pro­mul­gate the French lan­guage around the world? Will France suc­ceed in ensur­ing a steady demand for French lan­guage pub­li­ca­tions beyond French bor­ders? And if so, surely dig­i­tal for­mats would make French pub­li­ca­tions more eas­ily acces­si­ble to a broader global audi­ence if book­sellers could avoid the brick-and-mor­tar chal­lenges of inven­tory fore­cast­ing, ship­ping costs and other import-related chal­lenges.

Update

The Wall Street Jour­nal describes the role of the French gov­ern­ment in pro­tect­ing the rights of small inde­pen­dent book­sellers, and spec­u­lates on what’s in store for elec­tronic books (Sep­tem­ber 24, 2010 arti­cle). Will the same law that pro­tects small book­sellers against heavy dis­count­ing also apply to elec­tronic books?

Know Your Audience

January 12, 2010 •

Seat­tle is well known for lots of things. Besides the rainy cli­mate, dead rock stars, envi­ron­men­tal activists, micro-brews and mediocre sports teams, we’re home to more than our share of global brands — Ama­zon, Star­bucks, Microsoft and Boe­ing among oth­ers. Inno­va­tion and cre­ativ­ity thrive here. Per­haps fueled by all those lattes we drink. Not to men­tion [Read more…]

What Matters Now

January 6, 2010 •

Every now and then you come across a gem to share broadly with oth­ers: What Mat­ters Now, a com­pi­la­tion of great ideas by bril­liant thinkers and change agents. Agent provo­ca­teur Seth Godin has pro­duced this com­pi­la­tion and offers it as a free down­load­able ebook from his blog. He encour­ages like-minded folk who are sick and tired of the sta­tus quo to do like­wise.

Each of these big thinkers has offered up pearls of wis­dom from their life’s expe­ri­ence or their pro­fes­sional adven­tures — and some of their notions will res­onate for days after in your mind. It’s easy to con­sume: one big idea per page.

big-thinkers

For exam­ple, con­sider this gem [Read more…]

A Wonderful Mother-Daughter Story

October 1, 2009 •

I’ve just devoured Trav­el­ing with Pome­gran­ates, a lov­ing duet co-authored by Sue Monk Kidd and her daugh­ter, Ann Kidd Tay­lor; a story told in “braided voices.” I highly rec­om­mend it if you’re inter­ested in travel mem­oirs, life’s major pas­sages, an exam­i­na­tion of cre­ativ­ity, or the rela­tion­ship between moth­ers and daugh­ters. (And it helps if you remem­ber your Greek myths or were ever exposed to the con­cept of arche­types…)

On Becoming a Novelist

Sue Monk Kidd wrote the wildly pop­u­lar The Secret Life of Bees, her first novel.  Traveling-with-PomegranatesAs we learn in Pome­gran­ates, Kidd ago­nized over the deci­sion to write a novel given her long career as a non­fic­tion author. She reveals how and where she made the deci­sion to write a novel, The Secret Life of Bees, as well as what inspired many of Bees’ themes and imagery (such as the Black Madonna and bees). Trav­el­ing with Pome­gran­ates and The Secret Life of Bees are con­nected on many lev­els, both lit­er­ary and spir­i­tual.

For aspir­ing nov­el­ists her descrip­tions of emo­tional upheavals, cre­ative fer­ment, sources of inspi­ra­tion, spir­i­tual “moments of truth” and an ongo­ing bat­tle with self-esteem offer a pre­cious peek into the cre­ative process.

The … surge of cre­ativ­ity I’ve felt…. Where does the impro­vi­sa­tion, the free­dom, the hint of new author­ity and potency come from? Images well up in me more spon­ta­neously, trail­ing along a stream of ideas, mem­o­ries, feel­ings, and sym­bols, and I feel con­nected to a source­like place in myself.

Pome­gran­ates is a yummy book — I should have savored it instead of rac­ing through so I could return it to the library. It’s def­i­nitely a book to rec­om­mend to friends and re-read some­day at a more leisurely pace.

Life Passages

On the sur­face this is a travel mem­oir, a story told in alter­nat­ing voices, as mother and daugh­ter con­trast their expe­ri­ences of travel togetblack-madonnaher in Greece and France. They visit key des­ti­na­tions for early Chris­t­ian pil­grims, as well as ancient God­dess sites – a sort of fem­i­nists’ jour­ney. I’ve vis­ited some of those places, and enjoyed the oppor­tu­nity to relive them through the authors’ expe­ri­ences. And even more, to learn the inspi­ra­tional sources of imagery in The Secret Life of Bees, such as the Black Madonna of Roca­madour, shown here.

But the book’s most pro­found moments occur when each author describes her feel­ings as they work through life pas­sages, and rede­fine their rela­tion­ship as they both tran­si­tion into new life stages:

  • On the thresh­old of turn­ing 50, the mother is fac­ing menopause, mor­tal­ity (her own and her mother’s), and is think­ing about unre­solved rela­tion­ship issues with her mother and her daugh­ter.
  • The daugh­ter has just grad­u­ated from col­lege, is still ago­niz­ing over her rejec­tion from grad school, suf­fers from low self-esteem, and does not yet know who or what she wants to be.

For her fel­low Baby Boomers, the most poignant moments occur when Sue Monk Kidd writes about the pain of leav­ing youth behind while not yet ready to embrace what she calls “The Old Woman.” And then she describes the joy and release of accep­tance. Here’s a sam­ple, writ­ten toward the end of the book when she begins to embrace “the final third of my life”:

By Christ­mas, the need to exam­ine my face for lines and sags left me. I rec­og­nized the grow­ing per­mu­ta­tions as more than the effects of time. They became a poignant his­tory – trac­ings of my expe­ri­ence and char­ac­ter, the pas­sion­ate indi­vid­u­al­ity of my soul, the story of lived life writ­ten in the ten­der­ness of skin. I began to find a worn beauty in all of that. I could never cut it away.

Need­less to say the title’s ref­er­ence to pome­gran­ates is laden with sym­bol­ism and ref­er­ences to Greek myths, fer­til­ity, and other imagery.

Happy read­ing!

PR 2.0 Book by Solis & Breakenridge

May 5, 2009 •

The pub­lic­ity team for Putting the Pub­lic Back in Pub­lic Rela­tions asked me for a review in this blog. This is the lat­est book by Brian Solis and Deirdre Break­en­ridge, two emi­nent thought lead­ers in the world of pub­lic rela­tions and social media. Photo of book jacket by Solis & Breakenridge

Their book is an in-depth dis­cus­sion of their man­i­festo for “a New PR” — to rein­vent the prac­tice of PR given the onslaught of social media, new forms of peer-to-peer engage­ment, and the emer­gence of con­ver­sa­tional mar­ket­ing. There’s a lot to like in what they’re advo­cat­ing, even though it threat­ens to turn the tra­di­tional prac­tice of mar­ket­ing inside out.

But — I’ve strug­gled for a week now to get my thoughts in order before writ­ing the review, as requested by their pub­lisher. (For my cre­ative pro­cras­ti­na­tion, see this post.) [Read more…]

Is Now the Time for E-Books?

April 20, 2009 •

Today’s Wall Street Jour­nal fea­tured an in-depth arti­cle about the poten­tial dis­rup­tive impact of dig­i­tal books and e-book devices. (The author touched on impli­ca­tions for new pric­ing schemes and busi­ness mod­els for the pub­lish­ing indus­try, but that’s not the sub­ject of this post.) The ques­tion is, should book lovers like me switch over to e-book read­ers like Kin­dle 2, or should we wait for the next gen­er­a­tion of devices?

The jury’s out. [Read more…]

Marketing 2.0: How To

April 2, 2009 •

Finally there’s a prac­ti­cal resource for peo­ple who want the best of both worlds: what’s worth keep­ing from tra­di­tional mar­ket­ing, com­bined with the ben­e­fits of the emerg­ing Mar­ket­ing 2.0 toolkit. Thanks to IBM’s Sandy Carter, there’s now a great resource for B2B mar­ket­ing strate­gists and prac­ti­tion­ers, The New Lan­guage of Mar­ket­ing 2.0. I def­i­nitely rec­om­mend it.

[Read more…]

« Previous Page
Next Page »

About This Blog

Reflec­tions on life, travel, books, and yoga. Think­ing out loud about the pur­suit of mind­ful­ness and well-being.

Learn­ing how to care for a beloved can­cer patient.

About Me

Caregiver. Hiker, yoga practitioner, foodie. Avid reader. Former Apple marketing exec and computer industry pioneer. Adapting to life on Cape Cod after 30+ years on the West Coast.

Recent Posts

  • Wet Sand, Wet Boots, Birds
  • Living with Vintage Items
  • Slowing Down
  • Reflections on My Camino
  • Going Off the Beaten Track in France

© 2019 by Christine Thompson. All rights reserved. • Log in