my mind on books

Browsing in some new books today, I came upon this:

Living has no meaning (except by way of projection or fabulation), nor is it absurd (despite the spiteful reaction of disbelief); it is beyond meaning.

François Jullien, Vital Nourishment: Departing from Happiness (tr. Arthur Goldhammer), p. 8

I’ve been reading a couple of novels set in India, in which occasionally I come across some Indian cultural references or terms I’m not familiar with. I could sorta get an idea from the context but I thought I’d look them up online. For example, “golgappa” – finding this post about the food (“one of the top 5 most sexy things you can put in your mouth”!) really made the scene in the book come alive.

That’s just one small example of how the web can enhance reading (for those of us who still read books – see recent NEA report) – along with author & book websites, ebooks, online discussions and reviews, the ability to search inside books, watch videos of the authors, find obscure used books, etc.

This blog post “What does it mean to read?” from Out of the Jungle also touches on some of the ways reading is changing [Kirschenbaum is the author of an article in the ‘Chronicle of Higher Education’]:

The digitization of literacy changes many things. Kirschenbaum comments on how reading and writing are becoming commingled in surprising ways. For instance, I was just looking at the Nature Alert, a form of table of contents/alert publication. Once upon a time, it was just a list of abstracts to alert the reader of full-length articles in the journal Nature. Now, besides the abstracts with links, one can access videos where authors discuss their research. Once, they had a sound file of a musician experimentally playing a very ancient bone flute. They have podcasts which expand the brief notes, covering a variety of the headlines each week with different stories. The articles include hyperlinks to references, encouraging the inquiring reader to follow multiple paths of related thought. And readers can post comments, and react to the comments of others.

Nature Alert has become a blog, a current awareness journal, links to complete science studies and literature, and multi-media extravaganza, all at once.

See also:
“Twilight of the Books” article at the New Yorker
“A Good Mystery: Why We Read” from the New York Times

The Dec 2007 issue of Scientific American highlights a selection of books “especially appropriate for holiday gifts,” including Talking Hands: What Sign Language Reveals About the Mind.

Link to the book’s website

I haven’t succumbed to the temptation of the Kindle: Amazon’s New Wireless Reading Device, partly because I’m afraid those quick book downloads at $9.99 or more could develop into an expensive habit (“crackberry” for bibliophiles?) – or else I’d be reading lots of free first-chapter samples. I have come across a couple of posts recently that delve into the Kindle in depth:

“Why Amazon’s Kindle is revolutionary” – looks at some of the Kindle’s lesser known features

“Getting serious about the Kindle” – Geoff Arnold reports on three weeks of using the device and a decision he recently faced over whether to buy a hardback or Kindle edition of a book.

Santa did stop by early to drop off an ASUS Eee (4G Surf model), which I’m using right now to type up this post! It’s a small but pretty full-featured “sub-notebook,” weighing under 2 lbs and costing less than $400. Though lacking a CD or DVD player it does have slots for an SD card and two USB 2.0 ports. I’ll be able to slip it into my purse and carry it with me to read e-books, listen to music, watch movies, surf the web, play games and more. Our pet name for it is “Tripeee.”