QUESTIONS for the AVID READER Part V

New month, new season



QUESTION 34: Working

Today is Labour Day in Canada, prompting this question:

Studs Terkel and E P Thompson wrote two of the best known classics on work. What are the best titles on working, fiction or nonfiction in your mind, no matter how you define work? Why do they stand out for you?

the one that started it all the jungle read it in HS, should be read by all people who think we have too many regulations and that workers dont need a living wage

the one that started it all the jungle read it in HS, should be read by all people who think we have too many regulations and for those who have forgotten why we have them

>1 SassyLassy: Oh, a good one! I have a real weakness for workplace literature. There’s a huge amount of good stuff out there, and a lot of it is underappreciated, so it’s difficult to know where to start stop…

— Obvious classic (other than those already mentioned above): The ragged-trousered philanthropists, a socialist epic about house-painters in late-Victorian England and the struggle to survive.
— Germinal: Zola doesn’t just show us the terrible conditions miners had to work in, but extends the picture to the way that impacts their families, and the way the system clamps down on any effort to improve things. (See also Sons and lovers for a slightly less political British take on the same industry.)
— Het bureau: a massive seven-volume novel by J J Voskuil (I’m currently up to volume 5) that takes us, paperclip by paperclip, through the working life of someone in a government social science research institute, analysing the way office life creates strangely limited relationships between people who spend many hours of their lives together but never quite get to know each other. Sadly still only available in Dutch and German.
— Independent people: by contrast, this is a novel about a one-person workplace, where the main struggle is between the worker and his environment.
— Spur der Steine Erik Neutsch’s massive novel set on a big industrial building site in East Germany in the 1950s, picking up a lot of interesting themes about work and the way it is organised. Also a very interesting film. There are lots of other good East German workplace novels, the system obviously encouraged them. Christa Wolf’s Divided heaven is one that’s available in English. Rummelplatz by Werner Bräunig isn’t (as far as I know), but it’s a very interesting novel set in the uranium mines of the Wismut organisation.
— Railwaywomen, a fascinating (non-fiction) study of the “invisible” history of women’s work in a traditionally male-dominated industry. This was originally self-published, because Wojttczak had trouble getting anyone to take her project seriously, but it had a big impact once people actually got to read the book.
— The new housekeeping by Christine Frederick. Dating from 1913, this was one of the first attempts to treat the work of women in the home seriously as a form of industrial labour, and to analyse what they did and look at ways to make it less wasteful of time and effort. Obviously early 20th century “time and motion” is no longer the preferred way to analyse work, and a lot of the solutions Frederick comes up with might look bizarre from our perspective, but the point is that she did it at all.

OK, I’ll stop, for now…

How to win Friends and Influence People Dale Carnegie

This book changed my life - I was given this book to read as part of a training course. I thought it was so wretched that I promptly resigned and got another job.

>1 SassyLassy: The first books that I can bring to mind on this topic have to do with farming life and work. The two examples I can think of offhand are Väinö Linna's brilliant Under the North Star trilogy following several generations of a Finnish farming family, and Growth of the Soil by Knut Hamsun.

I've gone back over my reading lists since the beginning of my LT membership (2008) and I don't come up with many books specifically about the sort of work that I think we generally think of in conversations like this. That is, working in offices or factories or mines or hospitals or schools. I did come up with the following list of works which strike me as books either wholly or significantly about work, mostly in other ways:

Janesville: An American Story by Amy Goldstein. This excellent non-fiction book is about work, as it chronicles what happened to the workers of Janesville, Wisconsin, and to the town as a whole, when their GM plant closed.

The Boys of Summer by Roger Kahn. This is a very well-known and excellent memoir about the Brooklyn Dodgers team that finally won a World Series. Kahn provides portraits of many of the best-known players of that team, and also offers a personal memoir about his own experiences during that summer and beforehand. Through it all, Kahn offers a perspective of the job of being a professional athlete, including the pressure, the working conditions and the interactions with both employer and customer (i.e., the fans), and, as well, the job of being a sportswriter.

Ar'n't I a Woman? Female Slaves in the Plantation South by Deborah Gray White.

A Promised Land by Barack Obama. Among many other elements to this memoir, Obama provides a look at the hard work of being president, a very tough job that I wouldn't want.

Elderhood: Redefining Aging, Transforming Medicine, Reimagining Life by Louise Aronson. Along the way in her memoir/study of the American medical establishment's attitudes about medical care for older people, Aronson gives us a close look into the everyday life and struggles of the geriatrician.

I'm sure that I've read books about mine work that I'm not remembering offhand, but as I recall it, Orwell's The Road to Wigan Pier has some in-depth descriptions thereof.

Here are some books that provide insight into the idea of soldiering as work:
Grunt: the Curious Science of Humans at War by Mary Roach. Roach's usual humorous yet thorough and thought-provoking writing gives us an idea of the issues that modern day soldiers have to deal with, above and beyond actual combat.

Three Soldiers by John Dos Passos. There is very little actual fighting in this novel about military life in the U.S. Army during World War One. Just the day to day life, the boredom and the oppressive nature of the military command.

One Very Hot Day by David Halberstam. Halberstram, a famed historian of course, offered us this short novel, again relatively light in actual combat scenes, that provides a look into the conditions of the employees of the U.S. Army, i.e., the soldiers and officers.

>5 baswood: Hahaha! sounds like the time the new principal decided to make us read who moved my cheese* at our first meeting of the year. I didn't resign, just ignored it, and by the end of the year it was him who had to leave!

* didn't realize there was a spoof on it called who stole my cheese which I will now have to read

>4 thorold: You've certainly hit on some of my all time favourites here: The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists (my review started with "Every once in a while you come upon a book that makes you wonder "where has this been all my life?"), Germinal of course, and Independent People which left images which haunted me for months. I like the sound of the others you mention too.

>5 baswood: Too funny, but I can definitely see how that could happen!

>7 rocketjk: Any kind of work counts here. When I went looking for an image, it was interesting that they seemed to divide into either traditional manual labour work, or sitting in front of a computer work.

Thinking of books not already mentioned, one I came up with José Saramango's All the Names. The protagonist worked in a paper based system, but it still is a wonderful view of any mind numbing clerical function, and how it can go wrong.

Not how many people think of it, but Moby Dick is an excellent look at whaling and whalers, with a bit of obsession thrown in to keep the story going.

>7 rocketjk: mentioned Väinö Linna and that made me think of Unknown Soldiers, men for whom war was a job to be endured and survived if at all possible, rather than an ideological struggle.

A lesser known book, but well worth the read for its descriptions of the actual work and the class system behind it, is Toby Musgrave's The Head Gardeners: Forgotten Heroes of Horticulture. These men had knowledge and experience that far exceeded anything most of their employers could imagine, yet they had to walk a narrow line between using that knowledge and "knowing their place" when it came to dealing with those same employers. Many of the advances in plant science up to the late nineteenth century came from them.

The condition of the working class in England, 1845, Friedrich Engels -- possibly the most important inspiration for Marx and a still valid description of how capitalism treats workers.

Bullshit jobs, 2013, David Graeber -- bullshit society breeds bullshit everything. But can the comfy people be shamed out of their complacency?

Also, of course, there's Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America by Barbara Ehrenreich.

I seem to remember some controversey over that book, that she didnt work a long time at any of the jobs to know much.. But I found the book matches my images of what the work entails esp as the daughter of a deli manager. not fun

for a book about the work of teachers, one of the best is up the down stair case about a new teacher in a inner city HS. She describes lots of rules, requirments, general bs get in the way of teaching students as individuls. alot of the garbage admins dish out is pretty much the same: usually involving not supporting the teach . Remembering some of the scenes, it has only gotten worse. She had to wear severl hats back then: teacher counselor nurse , but now the amount of hats we wear is untenable, the load heavier, we barely have time to teach.And since COVID the disrespect that people have for teachers is high which of course kids can feel the same way. Am glad I am not teaching now tho I miss the kids. Its just scary out there

Two Years Before the Mast was _fascinating_ about sailing and trading in the age of wooden ships - and about California history too, though that's outside this subject.

>14 jjmcgaffey: I’ve been curious about this for years. Hmm.

>13 cindydavid4: It's certainly true that Ehrenreich didn't work for long at any of the jobs she used to research Nickel and Dimed. While I don't remember if she addressed that issue, she did mention that she "cheated" in that she kept a working car (and I believe at one point had to have it repaired), and that she sought out medical care immediately when she had a major dental emergency. And she pointed out that either of these situations would have been catastrophic for the barely-getting-by workers she was writing about.

The same "small sample" charge can (and probably will) be brought against Emily Guendelsberger for On the Clock.

But the point, for me, is that investigative journalists shouldn't have to devote years to "undercover" research in order to get a general overview of the topic. Would WalMart have started scheduling most of its workers 40-hour weeks if Ehrenreich had worked there longer? Would the chances of getting and keeping secure housing change for a person who works for Merry Maids have improved if Ehrenreich had spent years working for that agency? How long should Guendelsberger have stayed at the call center before she was satisfied that their wage-theft practices weren't going to change?

>11 LolaWalser: I was hoping someone would mention that, and my money was on you. Slightly off topic, but not much, the Engels also makes me think of Henry Mayhew and Jacob Riis.

>12 rocketjk: That's had good reviews, should look for it. >16 LyndaInOregon: Interesting points on the research.

>14 jjmcgaffey: That was a great book, and there was a lot of work involved.

QUESTION 35: Backing up Backups

LT has had a rough time this past fortnight with cyber attacks.

Is LT your backup for titles, reviews, dates etc, or do you have multiple ways and places to document your reading/music/film life?

If so, what are they? How do you keep them all in synch?

Well, before LT i had a piece of paper, which I eventually converted to a much more sterile word document. Later i added an excel sheet, which i still maintain. Then i found LT. I’m on other sites, but these are the only places I’m thorough and each has different info. So i need them all. 🙂

Is LT your backup for titles, reviews, dates etc, or do you have multiple ways and places to document your reading/music/film life?

Excellent question.

I started using the Access database as a reading journal in 2000. I had just begun a job that required database skills, and my employer paid for a basic course, then suggested that if we really wanted to get good at the program, we should get a personal copy and install it on our private computer, and then "play" with it, using information and data that would be useful to us, personally. I started cataloguing my reading on one database and my music library on another. It was an ... educational ... experience! At least, when I had a catastrophic data loss, it was not something that would cost my company thousands of staff-hours to reproduce! (And I did have a couple of such losses!) I quickly learned what not to do when working with live data.

By the time I found LT, I already had 20+ years of reading journal information on my PC. Access has some advantages (ways to manipulate the data), and LT has others (more flexibility in the way information is entered), so for the present, I'm maintaining both sources.

Keeping them synchronized can be a problem. If there's a way to mate the two systems and enter information simultaneously, I haven't found it yet. So I enter them separately, sometimes cutting & pasting when working with a lot of text, other times just keying in the information. It only takes me two or three minutes to enter a title and relevant info into Access. LT takes a little longer, because that's where the longer, more detailed reviews go.

>18 SassyLassy: For the last few years - reading dates and reviews are posted on both LT and GR - most of my non-LT friends prefer GR so I do not mind the copying that much. If both die at the same time, there are probably more important things than my reviews out there that had been lost...

For the years before that - I have a few reviews here and a lot of dates and I had been thinking on copying them over to GR but... never seem to be getting to it.

I've played with the idea of keeping a third catalog, just for the books I own (when I get around to getting them cataloged anyway), probably with Collectorz (they have both an online and offline catalog) or even going old style with pen and paper or Google Sheets or something but... we shall see.

Q35: LT is the only social media location that I regularly use these days. It was always the only online site I used for talking about and cataloguing books.

I used to be relatively active on a Facebook group called Jazz Vinyl Lovers, whereon members talk about the jazz LPs they're listening to and provide photos of the album covers. The group often then gets good discussions going about this LP or that one.

I've also been intermittently active on Discogs, a site where members can catalog their LP and CD collections. It's also a major portal for people to buy and sell LPs and CDs, but I've never used it for that. During the darkest days of the Covid lockdown I spent a lot of time on the site gradually cataloging my LPs and getting lost in the weeds of the minutia like pressing plants and mastering labs per the information listed on the album covers but also in the letters, numbers and symbols etched or stamped into the dead wax (that otherwise blank section found on each side between the label and the record grooves). Eventually I grew tired of the all the detail work and also how unfriendly a minority of the members there can be. Anyway, I have about 5,000 LPs, I think, and I got about 20 percent of them catalogued.

But I've had to suspend activity on both the Facebook group and on Discogs due to the simple logistical consideration that I am now in New York City and my records are still in California.

>16 LyndaInOregon: I totally agree

i keep my book list in a reading journal. this includes dates titles authors comments ratings. Reviews are on my word office. thats about all the book data I keep.on day ill catch up and pur more stuff on my profil so if LT crashes id be sad, but I have a back up (and hopefully we stay healthy and bug free!)

that being said Id be lost at sea without my viral book buddies here., it would be fun to share info but not sure how many wiukd want to (Id think twice)so dont go anywhere!

>17 SassyLassy:

😄

>18 SassyLassy:

Q#35

I keep a paper record of books I finish and movies I see but if LT disappeared so would my catalogue and whatever changes to it were captured on
LT... I did export it several times in the past, and even printed out a version once or twice, but since I tinker with it all the time, to say nothing of the never-ending additions, it feels pointless...

Given how "weird" my collection is (lots of not-English books, lots of old books) I don't bother thinking about backups on other sites as it seems this would at a minimum demand a replication of effort I put into LT... if not be even more of a hassle.

Incidentally, speaking of other sites, someone told me about this new kid on the block:

https://www.thestorygraph.com/

Anyone has some experience with it?

>18 SassyLassy: Q35: Backing up Backups

I have exported my catalog once or twice over the last 15 years, but that's it. It is my one and only record of my books and reading, so if it were to go, well... there would be no joy in Mudville. After reading your question, I went to my review page and saved the 511 reviews as a PDF, but the formatting was horrid, so I copy and pasted it into an LibreOffice doc. So thanks for the prompt. But it started me thinking that even more important to me than my reviews (which as I forget more are becoming more important) are the conversations I've had with all of you. I guess I should think about saving my threads in order to capture some of that. As for the catalog itself, it's nice to have, but I could recreate it, whereas the conversations are irreplaceable.

I don’t think LT is about to lose any of our data, despite all the malicious attacks. They seem to follow pretty rigorous protocols for backups of user data. But still, it’s a commercial enterprise and won’t necessarily be here for ever. I try to export my data every three months or so and archive it for myself.
I’ve used various other tools for keeping track of my reading, so there has always been a certain amount of redundancy, but my reviews are probably more important to me long-term than the stats, which are just for fun really. I’m moving towards keeping them in Obsidian, the note taking app I use for my personal diary and other stuff like that. It stores data locally and in a plain text format, so I’m not tied in to the survival of the app.
I used to use other catalogueing tools for my LP and CD collection, but I don’t bother much about that anymore. The subtle temptations of music streaming…
My diary is the place for thoughts about the films, exhibitions and concerts I go to. No need for stats and complications, and text search is usually enough to answer questions about when and where I last heard a particular conductor or soloist. And the web has an astonishing ability to tell you who was in an opera production you saw forty years ago. No need to store every detail myself.

>25 labfs39: with as much as we post, I think saving all those conversations would be impossible. On another long ago online site,one of our members passed away and we wanted to make a memorial for the family; Much smaller than here, we were able to get a good amount but it did take a while.I think I remember who I coversed with on a daily basis, and that will be enough for me (maybe)

>26 thorold: The subtle temptations of music streaming…

Warning: Subject Derail Ahead!
I look at our CD collection, which includes lots of discs burned from old vinyl and cassettes, and represents about 70 years of collecting (because some of those LPs were from the 1950s...) and am filled with anticipatory grief due to the certainty that the CD medium is going to go the way of the wind-up Victrola.

Streaming is a lovely idea, but is there a streaming service out there that specializes in 1950s Afro-Cuban jazz? Novelty songs of the 1960s? Sound tracks of obscure Broadway musicals? And how, if I digitize our collection and dump it onto a thumb drive, do I find (for instance) Buddy Fites' recording of Evil Ways, or even remember that I have it if I don't happen to see the CD when I'm looking through the collection?

We now return you to the original thread...

>28 LyndaInOregon: Yeah, I'm always surprised when a streaming service has _any_ filk (SF folk music) - I have more than any service I've found yet, and my collection isn't all that big (compared to other filkers). I have digitized it, though, because I have the opposite problem - if the music is only on CDs, I won't remember to go look through them so I won't listen to anything but the most basic. I rip and listen through Mediamonkey which has very good search and decent tagging (actually it has excellent tagging but that requires me to actually tag the music...). The two smart playlists I listen to most often are Highly Rated songs (4 stars and above), and Unrated (I haven't given it a rating yet). Between the two of those, I get favorite songs and new songs (I just have to remember to rate the new ones...which is hard to do when I'm listening in the car, my most frequent method).

Re: the actual question...
I do have my Book Stats spreadsheets, one for each year since I started tracking that way. They have the books I've read, with some (not all) of the info on them, my rating, and my review. That doesn't cover all the books I've read since I joined LT, let alone the ones before that; nor does it cover any of the books I have but haven't read yet. I have tried exporting from time to time but it's so limited...actually, I don't think I've tried the JSON export since shortly after it was added, I should see what that contains.

While I love the conversations I've had on LT, I don't think I'd be interested in archiving them. Too much...stuff.

But I had tried a dozen forms of cataloging before I found LT, none of which worked for me at all (generally, I'd be about 2/3rds done with one section (genre) of my library, and I'd already have made changes (discarded books, added books, moved them around...)). LT was fast enough at cataloging that I actually got everything in, and I've almost kept up (there's small piles of not-cataloged-yet that build up and then get knocked down and into LT). So my LT catalog is rather important to me.

Q35:

I go through phases of updating LT and GR, or updating only one, or trying to go back and fill in the gaps. So they're not perfect mirrors of each other, but I do have info on GR as well.

Beyond that, I have a spreadsheet that I've been keeping since 2017, and I've gone back and filled in data to 2013.

And finally, I use a reading app that tracks my sessions, time etc. called Bookly. I haven't put in any data from before I started using it, so it only covers the past couple of years. But on the other hand, in some ways it has the most detailed info about the actual reading since it includes quotes and notes and actual reading sessions.

I do not, however, write book comments anywhere but here on my threads, so those would be lost to eternity if LT disappeared.

LT is my main place. I used to update my books on GR and Babelio (the French answer to GR) fairly regularly, but I don't anymore. It's too much faff for not enough return. LT handles books in different languages much better than all the other tools I tried. Once or twice a year, I simply export all my entries since my last export, and use the file to update GR and Babelio. They're not going to have all my titles, but I'm not too bothered: LT is where I have accurate data.

I have started using Storygraph in 2023. I'll do it until December, just to see what my graphs and data look like for a full year, and then I'll stop, unless the criteria it uses are updated to make them more granular and comprehensive, or I discover some new use that makes it worthwhile. My impression is that the site is geared towards genre readers. If you're into non-fiction and literary fiction, your graphs are going to be very monochromatic. As it is, the "mood" of 2/3 of my books is "reflective" and "emotional", the "pace" is nearly always "slow" (46%) or medium (51%), page number is 78% under 300" (why do they only have 3 ranges: under 300, 303-499 and 500+?) LT's Charts and Graphs section is better, in my opinion. Obviously, YMMV. I haven't really tried the social media side of Storygraph. I know they do group reads, for example. The only thing I do that is not self-contained is enter the book I read for the Food and Lit Challenge in the relevant page, but I haven't seen that it leads to any kind of interaction.

I’ve been using storygraph since sometime after i stopped updating Goodreads (it just got to be too much work). I like that i can update my status on storygraph, and that it keeps some stats, and that no one seems to read reviews there, so i can post initial thoughts without feeling guilty about errors, misleading comments, or changing my mind. But its non-social.

I also use bookly, but only for paper and ebooks, not audio. I use it to track my reading time. It’s an odd obsession.

Side note - LT is the only place i have my unread books catalogued.

>27 cindydavid4: >28 LyndaInOregon:
I agree completely about the extra visual and tactile clues you get from physical media (and the smell of old record sleeves…), and in principle I’m sure you are right about the way streaming services don’t cover the fringes. But, disappointingly for my self-image, it turns out that my musical tastes are never quite obscure enough for that to be an issue. My CD collection seems to be covered about 99%, with only a couple of sampler discs and some things recorded privately by friends falling outside the boat. Even the LPs are mostly covered, and where they are not, there are plenty of equivalent or better recordings of the same repertoire available. Obviously the thing about “classical” music is that however small the audience is, enough of it has money to make it worth distributing recordings. And it takes forever for back catalogue stuff to go out of fashion.

>28 LyndaInOregon: same. I still have my folk dancing CDs from decades ago,all of my parents soundtrack albums, lots of casseste of folk music, and fav international music that I dont want to part with but hard to impossible to find streaming. Have a cd/cassettte player that I hope stays in good condition so I can still play them. Im really want a new stereo for my car, but the no longer make them with cassette players, so.....

>18 SassyLassy: Backups

My LT library is a mess, so not worth protecting. But I just read >25 labfs39: above and discovered that I need to back up my threads, like, right now! And I started doing that. Notability on my iPad does a decent job of converting the thread to pdf, in case anybody is interested. And I found out that I started having threads on CR in 2014, and started rereading them and feeling guilty about all the book recommendations that I never followed through on. Or the books that I meant to read almost 10 years ago and are still on the TBR...

I am very unreliable about logging my readings. LT was where I did that for a time, but as mentioned I no longer use the LT library, except when I need to create a milestone for a book that isn't in the database yet, or occasionally to wishlist a book. My current routine is to create a text note when I finish a book. I currently use the Notebooks app on my iPad (that's Notebooks with an s, Notebook is a different app). I title the note with the date and the keyword "livre" (2023-09-12 Livre) and write down the title, author, series name and number. I also copy any comment I wrote on my CR thread.

The reason for the text format and the naming convention is that the notes can then be imported in any app or read directly from the folder, and I can use the title as a sort criteria to keep them organized chronologically. iPad apps come and go, so this is important to me. I don't want to be stuck with unreadable files in a proprietary format. Many apps will export to pdf, but I feel that the .txt option is the safest and simplest. I've already migrated my notes from a previous app to Notebooks (the previous app used Evernote for backup/sync, so that wasn't as easy as text files, but I managed to import them into Notebooks after a while).

>31 Dilara86:, >32 dchaikin:

Thanks for the Storygraph feedback.

>28 LyndaInOregon:

I'm with you on the importance of "real" media, Lynda (at least to the individual...) I have cca 4000 CDs, LPs and even tapes, most of which I've catalogued on LT, and I'm still adding to it. I too regret and fear the total passing of such things (I have nightmares about even books!), BUT, that said, consider the resurrection of the gramophone disc, or "vinyl" in hip parlance. OK, yes, the downside is that they are ridiculously priced... still, it may be that a small minority of collectors will always be interested in hard copy. There are also CD collectors around, I've noticed young people priced out of the "vinyl" craze turning to CDs that can be had used very cheaply.

I don't like streaming for many reasons, but the worst, in terms of uploading a collection in the "clouds" somewhere, is the lack of reliably good formatting that respects the integrity of classical pieces. I know there are specialised software programs that address this but it's all a big faff and a hassle.

So, yeah. I'll be sticking to my "real" media as long as possible.

>28 LyndaInOregon: It is even worse that simply not having a lot of the non-standard content on streaming - they can pull any record out whenever they lose their permissions to use it (or something else like that) -- and that may even apply to records you had bought - not just the ones you get in a "All you can listen to" kind of services. Which is why I keep buying disks of the things I really really really like - an hope that they will still work when I get around to them in the future.

It's very interesting to read how other people log/catalogue their books and music. I use LT to log all the books that I read and the reviews that I share. I copy the reviews onto my computer. Of course I would not like to lose LT for its easy access to my library and reviews, but it would not be the 'end of the world' for me if they all suddenly disappeared. I feel the same way about the stuff on my computer because I only put it there for my own amusement. In my opinion life is too short to worry about backing everything up.

I use the app cdpedia for my music collection.

>28 LyndaInOregon: Mark me down as another who loves his physical music media, and LPs in particular. (And, yes, I find it annoying when the hipsters refer to LPs as "vinyls.") What you mention about the ability to browse your own physical collection as opposed to scrolling through file lists resonates with me very much. For me personally, there's also an emotional attachment to my LPs that comes from the fact that I've been assembling my collection since 8th grade (first LP purchased: Time Peace, the Rascals' Greatest Hits). I had to be dragged into CD world, and I have a few hundred, I guess, many of which I received as review copies from record labels and PR people, but I have been toying with downloading them all onto some sort of device and doing away with the physical CDs as a space saver.

Ted Goia, the excellent jazz historian, has a fine Substack column I subscribe to. He writes about music and the music/recording industry. He recently had a column about streaming services like Spotify who make more money promoting bland, generic listening channels and discouraging people from following individual artists. Hence, they make their search engines very difficult to use and refuse to provide information about individual albums (liner notes and musician credits). Those "channels" are less labor intensive to create and can be curated by AI. I use Apple Tunes, which seems to be marginally better.

>18 SassyLassy: Q35 - backups

I joined LT originally when I was thinking about creating a database or spreadsheet for my books and happened upon mention of LT in a blog. It's helpful to read my reviews or comments to refresh my memory, but if they disappeared I don't think I'd miss them terribly. I would miss Talk, but more for the interactivity, not for posterity. I keep track of reading because it's the social arrangement here; otherwise I don't much care, plenty of books I read pre-LT that I never recorded. If I saved threads, I doubt that I would ever read them. (I also have email going back to the 1990s, and handwritten letters going back to the 1970s. Not sure how much I need these either.) I wasn't alarmed when LT was inaccessible, assumed they'd figure it out. I have exported my books occasionally and did so just now, but I still have the actual books organized on shelves, so that'd be more of a nuisance loss than an emotional loss.

Q34 - Work
I'm in the middle of (my library hold ran out, so I'm waiting to get it back again) Sarah Jaffe's Work Won't Love You Back: How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone. The first half was a very solid labor history with a feminist slant, which I enjoyed. I've heard varying things about where she goes with the second half, so I'll let you know.

Q35 - Backup
I duplicate all my reviews on Goodreads, for that exact reason. Of course, if the entire internet goes down that won't help me, but if we're looking at a web-wide denial of service, I probably. have bigger problems than where my book reviews went. No backup for the friends, though, other than having a few of your emails and home addresses. So I guess I could just show up on your doorsteps and we could commiserate.

>41 lisapeet: I guess I could just show up on your doorsteps and we could commiserate.

Bring wine.

>42 LyndaInOregon: Will do.

Denial of service sort of leads into where I have been recently and why the next question is late.

Hurricane Lee, by this stage a post tropical storm (interesting fact - post tropical storms can still have hurricane force winds, which this one did, they just have different inputs, like cooler ocean temperatures, not tropical) blew through here this past weekend. That meant 53.5 hours without power. Being without power in my case also means being without water, phone, computer and other such services. Bottom line - no access to LT - no question. Power was restored here on Monday afternoon, and the intervening time has been spent cleaning up. Some people less than 30 km away still do not have power after five days.

All this means the mind was otherwise occupied, and no question popped up. I just went back to a question from September ten years ago, and found this one from rebeccanyc:


image from University of Manitoba

QUESTION 36: Course Reading Lists

It's back to school time, and Questions for the Avid Reader is going back to school with a twist: YOU create the course/reading list. Some of you have been reading extensively in certain areas, or may have professional or academic experience with a certain area, or maybe you have a more eclectic idea for your "course." Please think of a topic that you can recommend at least a few books for, and give your fellow Avid Readers a reading list.

Just to get you started, some imaginary courses created were:
- A Fictional Voyage to Medieval Times (rebeccanyc)
- behavioural ecology (C4RO)
- American Civil War (wildbill)
- the political novel (SassyLassy)
- film adaptations of classic works of literature (baswood)
- a request for books on the French Revolution (avidmom)

>44 SassyLassy: oh no! thats terrible! yes you were otherwise occupied; Hope at least you were able to read....and hope all gets settled soonest

A small throwback to the previous question as this article popped up this morning--and yes it's about DVDs/movies not books, but I think the same principles apply:

Farewell forever to Netflix DVDs

And link to Steven Soderbergh's annual list of things seen and read in the previous 365 days (mentioned in the article):

SEEN, READ 2022

(1. I'm mildly cheered that Soderbergh doesn't seem to have much more of a life than I do. 2. His system is messy.)

Question 36: Course reading lists

This is essentially a repost. As many of you may recall, from around 2020 through last year, I gradually read my way through a list of books about the history of slavery and racism in America. The list was supplied by my friend Kim Nalley, who is both a well-known jazz and blues singer and a PhD/professor at Cal-Berkeley on African American History. As I read, I also added some of my own selections to the list. By the time I was finished with the project, the list had rounded out to 30 books. But for the purposes of a course syllabus, I will try to get the list down to an even dozen. This syllabus is somewhat fanciful to the extent that the two Litwack books are extremely long, so no professor would include them both. In fact, Kim only included one of them on her original list. (ETA: Well, I got it down to a baker's dozen, anyway!) Finally, books followed by an asterisk were added to the project by me.

13-Book Course list:
Capitalism and Slavery by Eric Williams
Been in the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery by Leon F. Litwack
Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow by Leon F. Litwack *
The Slave Ship: A Human History by Marcus Rediker
Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet A. Jacobs
Black Sexual Politics: African Americans, Gender, and the New Racism by Patricia Hill Colliins
Walk With Me: A Biography of Fannie Lou Hamer by Kate Clifford Larson
In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960s by Clayborne Carson
Black Against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party by Joshua Bloom and Waldo E. Martin
Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision by Barbara Ransby
The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander
The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together by Heather McGhee *
The Color of Law: The Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America by Richard Rothstein

Additional books read for this project. Of course others will wish to shuffle books on and off the "active list." It hurt my heart to leave Their Eyes Were Watching God off the course list, for example, but I couldn't make it fit.
Women, Race & Class by Angela Y. Davis
They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South by Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers
Up from Slavery by Booker T. Washington
Black Jacobins by C.L.R. James
The Souls of Black Folk by W.E.B. Du Bois
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave by Frederick Douglass
Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson
Death of a King: The Real Story of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s Final Year by Tavis Smiley *
In the Shadow of Statues: A White Southerner Confronts History by Mitch Landrieu *
An Easy Burden: The Civil Rights Movement and the Transformation of America by Andrew Young *

Fiction:
Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
The Sellout by Paul Beatty *
Conjure Women by Afia Atakora *
Going to Meet the Man by James Baldwin *
Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison *

Just for fun, here's another for Question 36. Here is my imaginary and too long reading list for the course on Baseball History that you've all been clamoring for. Note that, with one exception, I have limited myself to books I have read, thereby leaving out many worthy books and, possibly, your favorites.

Memoirs and Oral Histories:
We Played the Game: 65 Players Remember Baseball's Greatest Era, 1947-1964 by Danny Peary
A series of fascinating short oral histories arranged by season. A primer on what it was like to be a major league ballplayer from the late 1940s through the mid-60s.

The Boys of Summer by Roger Kahn
A masterful memoir about writing about and learning about the 1955 Brooklyn Dodgers. Really the first book of its kind and still the standard.

Pennant Race by Jim Brosnan
The baseball notes of a relief pitcher (and fine writer) who was a member of the bullpen of the pennant winning 1961 Cincinnati Reds

Ball Four by Jim Bouton
The first and most famous tell-all baseball diary. Extremely well done and a hoot besides.

Essays:
The Summer Game by Roger Angell
The Heart of the Order by Tom Boswell
A pair of essay/column collections from two absolute masters

Histories:
The Old Ball Game: How John McGraw, Christy Mathewson, and the New York Giants Created Modern Baseball by Frank Deford
A fascinating history of baseball in the early 20th Century

Summer of '49 by David Halberstam
Halberstram, a Pulitzer Prize winning historian, gives us this terrific history of the great post-war Yankees/Red Sox pennant race of that year.

Turkey Stearnes and the Detroit Stars: The Negro Leagues in Detroit, 1919-1933 by Richard Bak
The one book on this list I haven't read. I wanted an in-depth look at the Negro Leagues. I hope this is well written! If I was really teaching this course I would certainly read the book first.

British Baseball And the West Ham Club: History of a 1930s Professional Team in East London by Josh Chetwynd and Brian A. Belton
A sentimental pick. The story of an obscure chapter of baseball history, the period when some courageous soles were trying to establish a professional baseball league in England, an attempt that was abruptly abandoned when the bombs started falling over London.

Biographies & Autobiographies:
Diz: The Story of Dizzy Dean and Baseball During the Great Depression by Robert Gregory
One of baseball's great characters, though not always an appealing fellow.

Frank Frisch: the Fordham Flash by Frank Frisch, as told to J. Roy Stockton
As a player and later a manager, Frisch was extremely highly regarded. Like Dean, Frisch was a member of the famous St. Louis Cardinals "Gas House Gang" of the 20s and 30s.

Casey: The Life and Legend of Charles Dillon Stengel by Joseph Durso
An admiral portrayal of a true baseball original. Stengel's playing career stretched from 1912 to 1925, and he managed from the early 30s through 1965, including famous stints leading one of baseball's best teams, the Yankees of the late 1950s, and of the the worst, the expansion New York Mets.

Hank Greenberg: the Story of My Life by Hank Greenberg
An insightful, well-written autobiography by baseball's first Jewish superstar.

Satchel: the Life and Times of an American Legend by Larry Tye
A compelling, entertaining biography of a unique baseball great and iconic character, truly a fascinating man. This is also, among many other things, an enlightening picture of Negro League baseball.

>47 rocketjk: >48 rocketjk: Great lists, real and imaginary. A person could really learn a lot there.

Now hoping for someone to come up with any kind of a list for the movies.

QUESTION 37: Dabble or Devour?

When you find an author or topic of particular interest, do you read everything that author has written before moving on, or as much on that topic as you can find, or are you happy to just say "I'll come back to that person/subject later."

If you get wrapped up in a topic, what is it that finally prompts you to move on to something else?

What is the longest streak you've ever had?

When you find an author or topic of particular interest, do you read everything that author has written before moving on, or as much on that topic as you can find, or are you happy to just say "I'll come back to that person/subject later."

if its an author ill check through their work and pick what looks interesting. Longest streak with one author probably was Ursula Helgi and Terry Pratchett I tend to have to read other books along with that authorso i mix it up a bit and if I get interested in a different book I go ahead and read it then come back for more

If you get wrapped up in a topic, what is it that finally prompts you to move on to something else?

OMG Not sure what my longest streak is but Ive had several topics that led to other similar topics that led, well you get the idea. Topics usually involve history, travel, biographies, its usually a book that prompts me to move on. I may go back to the earlier topic another time

An example for the RTT Revolution theme I decided to go for the neolithic agricultural revolutions. Started with mixed harvest: and as I read i realized I needed more information on all of the different refernces of archaeolgy digs that let to lots of googling and artical reading. I stopped when we started anther theme but the topic still fascinattes me and am keeping my eyes open for new info or book

this habit got me into trouble with my masters professor, I was her research assisstant and she'd give me articles she wanted from the library. Well one article led to another etc so something that should take 15 minute takes at least 30 Needless to say she was not happy so I was careful not to get too carried away

I do tend to binge on an author, particularly the ones where I start reading and don't look up until I finish the book (ie Nathan Lowell, who currently has me entrapped). A lot of authors, though, start sounding too similar after a few books, so I'll put them down and go read something else for a while (days, weeks, months...sometimes years). Less often on a topic, mostly because I read one good book and then have to go find other ones on topic and equally well written (if they're less well written, I get annoyed and apt to drop the book entirely - after all, I've already gotten one good exposure to the subject...).

I have no idea what my longest streak was. The annoying thing is that when I binge, I don't stop between books to review...and afterward I can't remember what happened in which book (assuming it's a series with a continuing story, as many of my binges are).

There was the time I read Mercedes Lackey's Hunter, Elite, and Apex - finished the series (all three), thought about it for half a day, and started Hunter again. I've reread that series half a dozen times, and find new neat little bits every time - and enjoy the story, too. I didn't reread it that many times in one go, though, I only read through it twice that time.

What usually stops me, or makes me say "I'll come back to this", is simply not having the next book. I try not to buy too many books, so when the next one is on a library hold for a couple weeks, I have to go find something else to read. Or it's an obscure paper book, that I could buy for mucho bucks on Abebooks or Amazon or whatever...or put it on a Want list and wait until I come across it in a yard sale, or Amazon has a sale, or something.

If I may just duck back to Question 36 one more time, I'd like to offer an actual course syllabus I was recently sent. But first, a story! As I've mentioned elsewhere, I am now auditing a course at Columbia University, about a half-hour walk from my apartment. It is a lecture class on Latin American History from the time of the Spanish invasion forward that takes place twice weekly. After class last week I was strolling along upper Broadway near the Columbia campus when I came upon a bookstall which, naturally, I stopped at. The bookseller was chatting with a young African American man (late 20s or, more likely, early 30s) and it took me only a second to realize they were talking about Toni Morrison. So, again naturally, I butted in to relate the fact that my favorite Morrison is Song of Solomon. The bookseller looked at me and smiled. "That's just what we're talking about," she said. "I'm reading it now and not really getting into it." I recalled that, indeed, the beginning of that novel can be off-putting, as the characters take some time to round into shape.

Then the man turned to me and said, "Can you tell me what you like about Song of Solomon?" To be clear, he wasn't saying this in any challenging way, as if I had to prove to him that I wasn't wrong, but rather in a tone making it clear that he was just interested in what I thought. Luckily, I had reread the book and discussed it with my reading group recently enough that the themes I'd enjoyed came back relatively easily to mind, and I was able to articulate that I'd enjoyed the evocation of working through family issues, the fact that all of the characters turned out to have back-stories that, as you learned them, added dimension to who you thought they were at first, and the idea of being an alien within one's own culture. The young man nodded thoughtfully (I felt like I'd passed a test!) and asked me if I'd read Morrison's novel, Paradise. When I said I hadn't, he strongly recommended it, saying that in it Morrison dealt with the same themes, but handled them much more smoothly and effectively. So I promised a read in the near future. Then he mentioned Morrison's Jazz, which he said was one of the best fictional representations of Harlem he'd ever read. I said I had read it, yes, but somewhere around 35 or 40 years ago, so my memory of particulars was dim. He said, "I'm using Jazz now for a course I'm teaching here at Columbia. It's called 'Jazz Fiction.'" I asked him, "What is the definition of 'Jazz Fiction?'" He said, "Well, that's part of what we talk about in the class. I don't really have a specific definition." I asked him whether, if I gave him my email address, he'd be willing to send me the syllabus for that class and he agreed. A couple of days later, he did so, and here it is:

The course is called "Jazz Fiction" and it's being taught in the English and Comparative Literature Department at Columbia University.

Course Materials for Purchase
Julio Cortázar, Hopscotch
Toni Morrison, Jazz

Course Materials Available Online
Alan Munton, “Misreading Morrison, Mishearing Jazz: A Response to Toni Morrison’s Jazz Critics”
Bruce Robert Nugent, “Smoke, Lillies, and Jade”
Chad Jewett, “The Modality of Toni Morrison’s ‘Jazz’”
Henry Louis Gates, The Signifying Monkey
Hugh L. Smith, Jr., “Jazz in the American Novel”
Langston Hughes, “Danse Africaine,” “Young Singer,” “Harlem Night Club,” “Negro Dancers”
Maya Angelou, “Reunion”
Ryan Jerving, “Early Jazz Literature (And Why You Didn’t Know)”
Sherrie Tucker, “’Where the Blues and the Truth Lay Hiding’: Rememory of Jazz in
Black Women’s Fiction”

QUESTION 37: Dabble or Devour?

When you find an author or topic of particular interest, do you read everything that author has written before moving on, or as much on that topic as you can find, or are you happy to just say "I'll come back to that person/subject later."

I generally go to Paperback Swap and see what's on offer by that author or on that topic. I'll order one or two if they're available, or put a couple on the Wish List if they're not in the swap pool yet. At that point, I just let nature take its course, unless it's something that has just knocked me out. So I guess I'm an "I'll come back to that later" reader!

Not sure if you could even call my streaks by that name, as I prefer not to read multiple books within the same genre without sandwiching some other genre in between. They are more chains than streaks. A historical novel may lead me to the biography of one of the background characters, which leads me to a nonfiction history of the region, which prompts an interest in the technological development that made that region influential in a certain product, which leads me to the history of that product..... You get the picture!

If you get wrapped up in a topic, what is it that finally prompts you to move on to something else?

As hinted above, I prefer not to read the kind of series that have some immense arc (George R.R. Martin, I'm lookin' at you), but will read the loosely-organized series that don't really need to be read in chronological order (hello, Stephanie Plum!). So, I may be "prompted" to move on to another author or genre just for variety, yet maintain an interest that will bring me back to it when a new title rises to the top of the TBR stack or a popular author releases a new book.

What is the longest streak you've ever had?

And because of that rather peripatetic reading style, I'd have to say my longest streak goes back almost 60 years, when I fell into the Arthurian Legend and keep going back for more. Likewise, I've been fascinated with the Tudors for 50 years.

>53 rocketjk: What a wonderful story, Jerry! Talk about serendipity. Thanks for sharing it and the course list. I have Paradise on the shelves unread, as well as A Mercy. Must make time for them...

Question 37

I'm forever saying "ooh that was really good, I definitely want to read more of that author" ... and then coming back to them 10 years or so later. Reading more than one book by an author in a single year seems like a lot to me. (I am actually experimenting with this this year - I have 2 authors I've read 2 books from this year, which is extremely unusual!)

Same with topics - I love reading about arctic exploration, mountaineering, things like that, but I tend to read one book every year or two (or three or four) so it's not really like being wrapped up, I suppose.

Q37:

If I get reading a series, I sometimes read several in a row (the Wayward Children series sucked me in this year), but in general I don't follow up in reading my favorite authors when I really should. I mean, if they are favorites, why hold off?

As for topics, I sometimes "read down rabbit holes" with one book leading to another, but it hasn't happened lately, mainly because I have spent a considerable amount of my reading time on the African Novel Challenge (which is, I suppose, a nonorganic topic focus) and book club selections.

Q37:

I occasionally take up topic-based reading projects that can last quite a while. See >47 rocketjk: for an example. What I generally do in a case like this, though, is alternate that project reading with other books. So maybe I'll read something from the "project" every third book.

There have been writers whose work I always read as soon as their books came out. Philip Roth was one such, and also Jasper Fforde for a good while. Although I'm not as quick to Fforde's new books as I used to be, I still check in once in a while to see if there's anything I've missed.

For the past several years I've had individual writer's whose work I've gone through two books per year, the first book I start each January and the first book I start each July. I read through all of Joseph Conrad's novels in this fashion and now I'm on to Isaac B. Singer. But I don't generally just peel off 5 or 6 books of a particular author's in a row.

Q36: …I may come back to this one, I’ve got a couple of ideas, but it’s hard to do when I’m just using a phone for LT.

Q37: As everyone knows, I do tend to go down rabbit holes when they present themselves, whether it’s a chance discovery of an interesting author or a topic suggested by some theme on LT or in what I’m doing in the “real world”. But I’m quite fickle, it’s not unusual for me to be distracted from a topic with two or three books still on their way to me or sitting on the TBR.

On the rare occasions when I do a complete read-through of an author’s work to date, or of a series of books, then it’s usually a mix of re-reads and first times. I’ve done that in fairly recent times for Tales of the city, Adrian Mole, and A.S. Byatt, amongst others.

My longest “project” to read an author’s works was probably P G Wodehouse, who kept me busy (on and off) for the best part of fifty years, which is an average of about two new books a year, about the same rate as he wrote them.

Q37

Hmm. When I find an author i like, I definitely want to read more, even everything by them. And i do sometimes read all a single author’s work. But the two lists oddly don’t really overlap.

Because my theme reads are largely about authors I have never read and want to discover. Whereas an author I discover randomly gets tossed in my unstructured want to read list somewhere hovering loosely in that brain network, and gets read again haphazardly.

My TBR and "wanna read someday" lists are long enough that I rarely go on a long binge of a single author. There are active authors whose work I keep up with as new books are published, but when I discover an older author, I just add their name to the list of authors who I know I can turn to in the unlikely event that I run out of stuff to read.

Sure, I would love to get around to reading more of Donald Westlake and Octavia Butler and Chris Bohjalian, but I've got to keep up with John Scalzi and J. Ryan Stradal and Julia Spencer-Fleming, and I still haven't even gotten around to reading anything by Kelly Link or Tony Hillerman or N. K. Jemisin. I don't have time to binge!

I don't really binge. There are certain subjects and authors I'll tend to pick up, or return to, but I almost never do that consecutively.

>53 rocketjk: What a great course, and I love the syllabus. Also, glad to hear at least some of those booksellers in the blocks around Columbia are still around. When I worked there from 2006-10, there were a good number of them, and I spent many lunch hours browsing and talking with the sellers and, often, coming away with some unexpected (and usually really good) title for a few bucks.

Q37 If my author starts writing books that are so similar to her others that I could just switch charactrs and it wold be the same book, Im ready to move on. Anne Tyler, John Irving, and Guy Gabriel Kay are three that come to mind

Well I disappeared for two weeks but I'm back home again, so here is the overdue next question:


image Redzinga from Getty Images

QUESTION 38: Readings and Signings by Authors

Your favourite living author is miraculously speaking in a location close to you. Will you attend? What are your expectations? Is getting an autograph important to you?

Would you travel to see a favourite author?

Have you ever been to such an event featuring an author you admired, only to be completely disillusioned? Conversely, have you ever heard an author you didn't particularly admire speak, only to be convinced otherwise?

Playing the dead authors game, who is the author you would most like to hear speaking and reading?

Tell us about the good and bad of author performances, especially if you've been behind the scenes.

No, I'm not going. I've never been one who cares much about the person behind the work; I'm happy to enjoy the book (the movie, the music, the TV show...) for itself without needing to know anything about the creator beyond "when's their next thing coming out?"

It’s probably been 15 or more years since I attended a reading. I’m not really a person drawn to crowd events in general, and that’s probably my strongest excuse.

It’s an interesting question as to who I would like to see speak. James Baldwin, certainly. But he was quite a personality. Authors tend to be at their best when on their own.

Your favourite living author is miraculously speaking in a location close to you. Will you attend? What are your expectations? Is getting an autograph important to you?

this has happened many times. I will attend and buy the book. my expectations are to enjoy the reading and learning the background of the book and writing. I have asked for autographs before from a few special authors

Would you travel to see a favourite author?

I have often driven a couple of hours in my state, esp when an author is at a book festival

Have you ever been to such an event featuring an author you admired, only to be completely disillusioned? Conversely, have you ever heard an author you didn't particularly admire speak, only to be convinced otherwise?

I don't get disllusioned at the reading; I do when I find that I dont like the book

Playing the dead authors game, who is the author you would most like to hear speaking and reading?

I have to give that more thought, Ill come back to this

Tell us about the good and bad of author performances, especially if you've been behind the scenes.

non that I can remember

>64 SassyLassy:

Q#38

My favourite living authors are thin on the ground... In general, yes, I would make an effort to attend such events. I'm not firing on all cylinders lately so I won't try to list everyone, but I was very happy to listen to (and in some instances meet, even multiple times) people like Elaine Pagels, Jeanette Winterson, Edmund White, Quentin Crisp. I often did get autographs because usually there'd be books to buy and that is one way to show appreciation, but collecting signatures in itself isn't a crucial thing for me.

I've never been disappointed in hearing or meeting an author I like, but then, I haven't had the opportunity (nor the desire) to develop real deep contacts with any of them. I'm friends with a couple of writers I also like to read (nobody really famous, certainly not in North America) and it's impossible to separate their personalities from their work. Not sure I could be friends with someone while detesting their work, or vice versa.

Dead author I'd most want to meet: Virginia Woolf, a million times over. But I'd best be invisible, so I could stare and listen without annoying her.

Your favourite living author is miraculously speaking in a location close to you. Will you attend? What are your expectations? Is getting an autograph important to you?

Realistically, no, because experience tells me I would only hear about it the day after, from an acquaintance who had got tickets six months ago and didn’t realise I was also a fan of that author…

I don’t really identify with the idea of author as performer, I suppose, so I don’t make much effort to keep track of that kind of event. If I knew an author I admire was coming to town I probably would make the effort to go. I don’t tend to attend literary festivals and the like, although when I have done so, usually at someone else’s prompting, I’ve often enjoyed it.

The autograph-line isn’t really my sort of thing: I tend to get very shy in crowds, and I go along imagining that the author probably hates it as much as I do. If I do end up in the line, I make it as quick and efficient as I can. I’d love to be in a situation where I could chat at leisure with favourite authors — at a dinner-party, say, or coincidentally sharing a railway carriage — but I’m useless at coming up with intelligent questions in the typical after-lecture situation.

Most of my (few) signed copies are from authors I’ve met in other situations, e.g. as teachers, colleagues, or social acquaintances, without knowing their work. Some I’ve later come to appreciate as writers, others not. Similarly, the writers I follow as bloggers or on social media tend to be people I’ve come across in other contexts, not through their literary work.

Would you travel to see a favourite author?

Well, I once went as far as Brussels (about 3 hours away) with a group of friends to hear Ali Smith and Jonathan Coe reading, and enjoyed it, so probably yes. But it’s not something I often do.

Have you ever been to such an event featuring an author you admired, only to be completely disillusioned? Conversely, have you ever heard an author you didn't particularly admire speak, only to be convinced otherwise?

Not really, although I did once go to hear Dawkins and found him as lecturer so exactly like himself as author that there seemed to be no point going to all that effort…

Playing the dead authors game, who is the author you would most like to hear speaking and reading?

Well, Dickens, obviously, because contemporaries all said how much they loved his performances. But I wouldn’t miss a chance to see James Baldwin (>66 dchaikin:) or Virginia Woolf (>68 LolaWalser:), should it arise. I saw Terence Dixon’s fabulous 1970 Baldwin-in-Paris film Meeting the man a little while ago: I’d have loved to be one of those students who get to sit down with him at the end, even though it might have been a bit scary. Thomas Bernhard is also high on my list of writers I would have liked to know in person; he seems to have been slightly less crotchety in life than on the page, by all accounts. The one filmed interview I’ve seen makes him look almost human…

Q38:

Your favourite living author is miraculously speaking in a location close to you. Will you attend? What are your expectations? Is getting an autograph important to you?

I might, and have, but I'm generally more interested in seeing an author being interviewed by someone competent than in seeing the author read from his/her/their works. I'm interested in the creative process, and a good interviewer is likely to lead the author to that topic. The readings I've most enjoyed (or at least those I can remember) have been by Philip Roth (in a large auditorium, so not a very intimate event), Jasper Fforde (in a bookstore; he was charming and delightful), Mary Roach (same bookstore, same charm and delight) and the poet Kim Addonizio (a good friend from grad school days). Autographs are fun, mostly for the reason that LolaWalser provided: buying the book and saying "Thanks" while getting the autograph.*

Would you travel to see a favourite author?

I wouldn't be likely to travel a significant distance to see a favorite author speak. I can't think of a time I've done so.

Have you ever been to such an event featuring an author you admired, only to be completely disillusioned? Conversely, have you ever heard an author you didn't particularly admire speak, only to be convinced otherwise?

No, I've never experienced either.

Playing the dead authors game, who is the author you would most like to hear speaking and reading?

Assuming I get a babel fish so I can understand all languages, I would love to hear Homer reciting from the Odyssey. (And James Joyce reading from Ulysses, come to think of it.) Also Anton Chekhov reading one or two of his short stories. And who wouldn't want to sit in Emily Dickenson's parlor (oops, I mean "parlour") and hear her read her poetry? I doubt that Joseph Conrad ever read from his work in public, but that's something I would like to experience. Also, I wish Philip Roth were still alive so I could see/hear him read in a smaller, more intimate setting and have a chat with him, to swap Weequahic stories. Also, as others have said, Jame Baldwin. And Toni Morrison. OK, I'll stop now.

Tell us about the good and bad of author performances, especially if you've been behind the scenes.

I've never been behind the scenes of a reading. Generally speaking, other than the material you hear read itself, the "good" is the sense of comradery among the fans of the author and, as noted above, the insight into the author's creative process you might get somewhere along the line. The potential "bad" elements are:

++poor, rambling questions from the audience, if there is an audience Q&A period,

++bad sound

++people in front of you in the autograph line who want to get into long conversations with the author in total disregard of all the people waiting behind them

_____________________________

* Re: autographs. Although it's fun in the moment to get an autograph and say hello and thanks to the author, in the end the book goes on the shelves with all the other books and it doesn't take long to forget that one or the other book is autographed. Although I will say that I have a few times made a point of buying signed copies of books either online or at bookstores if I am planning to give the book as a gift, especially to my wife, to add an extra element of specialness to the book.

But my favorite book autographs are the ones in books that I've found in used bookstores, thrift shops or even sidewalk sales. How fun to open a book you're interested in at such a venue and find that the book's author, famous or not, has handled the same copy you're holding and even signed it.

>70 rocketjk: I doubt that Joseph Conrad ever read from his work in public, but that's something I would like to experience.

It would have to be on a sailing boat waiting for the tide in the Thames estuary... :-)

>69 thorold: *It's unlikely I would travel to see an author these days. Well, maybe.

*I'd like to sit with Marian Evans/George Elliot (in my time rather than hers...not sure that one of those dresses would be comfortable)

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It's been my experience that adult readers are often disappointed meeting favorite authors because, well, authors are just people like us. There are nice authors and sh**y authors and everything between.

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During my years at the bookstore I made it part of my job to create in-store book clubs and other events. The largest of these groups was the SF&F group which came together each week to discuss what they were individually reading. Off the top of my head, we also had a Classics group, two consecutive Jane Austen groups, children groups...and more. And with the success of these groups we had a ready-made base audiences for authors events.

This store was in a plaza in a smallish middle class suburb here in New Hampshire. The manager let me at it and we discovered we did very well with SF&F authors. Our big fish was Orson Scott Card, but Robert Jordan was a close 2nd - their lines were at least 300 fans long. We also had Terry Goodkind), China Mieville and many more...

*I actually met Michael at a SF&F convention in the Boston area (aptly named Readercon)\while chasing authors for the store.
** I also went after authors through the bookseller association conventions.
***Had a volunteer come and teach some regency dancing to one of the Jane Austen groups....

>72 avaland: The SF&F group is still meeting twice a month, though there are only about 6 regulars these days.

>71 thorold: Ha! Love it.

Your favourite living author is miraculously speaking in a location close to you. Will you attend? What are your expectations? Is getting an autograph important to you?
I absolutely would attend, and would re-arrange my schedule if at all possible for Barbara Kingsolver, Margaret Atwood, Rick Bragg, Louise Erdrich, or Neil Gaiman. Autographs for the sake of autographs are not high on my list of priorities, though I wouldn’t turn down a photo op!

Would you travel to see a favourite author?
I have traveled to events where a favorite author was part of the programming; i.e., to knitting conventions where Stephanie Pearl-McPhee or Franklin Habit were teaching, and have chosen science fiction conventions based on their Author Guest of Honor.

Have you ever been to such an event featuring an author you admired, only to be completely disillusioned?
I remember a particular science-fiction writer (whose name I will not share) giving a seminar to wannabe writers on how to carve out writing time when you also held down a full-time job. The short answer, after all the egotism was removed, was that you turned over all domestic chores and adult responsibilities to your spouse. Disgusted would be a better response than disillusioned. What a jerk!

Playing the dead authors game, who is the author you would most like to hear speaking and reading?
John Steinbeck, though Kent Haruf is right up there in close competition.

Tell us about the good and bad of author performances, especially if you've been behind the scenes.
Others have posted (and I’m sure more will do so) about interactions with authors at science fiction conventions. When I was active in the hobby, in the 80s and 90s, it was quite common for writer guests to not only present participatory seminars with lots of Q&A, but to hang around the Hospitality Room for general BS sessions with fans. There were a number of mentor-mentee relationships that grew out of these interactions.

I will share a story that has become funny in the rear-view mirror. I once went to an sf convention that was out of my normal orbit and budget, because Harlan Ellison was the writer GoH, and there was an opportunity to have breakfast with him (along with any other attendee who could pony up the extra bucks). Unfortunately, the night before was ... well, some of the details are a bit fuzzy, but I know there was a great deal more drinking than I am accustomed to, and various varieties of alcohol were sampled. Long story short, I woke up with the World's Worst Hangover (probably only the second time in my life that I was really ill). By the time I could actually walk upright, the breakfast was over. Talk about adding insult to injury! Until I found out that Mr. Ellison was also hors de combat and had himself skipped the event. So do I get to be mad at him for disappointing fans, or mad at myself for pulling a dumb stunt the night before? Or do I just laugh about it and remember The Time I Didn't Have Breakfast With Harlan Ellison?

>75 LyndaInOregon: Ha! love that

thinking more about dead authors Id like to chat with
John Stienbeck (thanks for the tip)
Ray Bradbury
Arthur C Clark
Norah Loft
Elizabeth Von Armin
Edna Farber

>63 cindydavid4: Totally with you on Anne Tyler. I really enjoyed her early books but she became so annoying. There are others whose names I have repressed. One is an Indian-American woman who always writes about a wife adapting to American life, and an Afghan male who wrote two almost identical books about two young boys running kites. Kate Atkinson seems heading in the same i direction.

I agree with your first one I think you mean Chita Banerjee DIVAKARUNI Loved her for years, they, yeah, im done The Afgan wrote kite runner I didn;t think his next one was the same, esp because the protagonist was a women.

I have attended a lot of readings and lectures over the years and it is my practice, if the speaker brings copies of his/her book, to buy a copy and ask him or her to autograph it. I have 111 books in my collection tagged “signed by author” and about 90 were acquired in this way. Another 20 were picked up in used book stores or acquired from ABE. Of course, a signature from back in the day before authors sat in the bookstore and signed them by the score can add a lot of value to a book by a famous author.

>78 cindydavid4: re The Kite Runner. I looked up a very short review of Khaled Hosseni’s A Thousand Splendid Suns and you are right. There’s a difference. being girl friendships rather than boy friendships, but the plot seemed so similar I discarded it. Here is what I wrote on discarding it.

“This novel appears to be a mirror of the writer’s first novel, The Kite Runner, which I enjoyed. However it’s the same old same old. The main difference is that the main characters are two girls growing up on different sides of the track. The style of writing is the same. It reads like a fable, which was novel in Kite Runner, but I’d had enough.

Just couldn’t stick with this as there are so many good books waiting out there, and life is short.”

oh i agree, and sorry it didnt work for you. when I read it i saw the same themes of the first but otherwise found it different enough tp like it. but as always. YMMV

>76 cindydavid4: And if they autographed your books, you’d learn how to spell their names! Currently you seem to be 0 for 6, or am I missing the joke?

my apologies, its been a very stressful week and I read malice when there was none. that wont happen again. I will still probably make typos and spelling mistakes I type fast and am not good at checking. thank you for understanding. now back to your regularly scheduled post already in progress

Q38:
I went to some readings when I lived in the Bay Area. When I was taking a class at a local community college, we were assigned attending a reading - I went to see Douglas Adams, which was phenomenal.

Later, I saw Nick Hornby (fun), and Tobias Wolff - super engaging.

I helped put on a couple of readings, I remember doing the one for Dave Barry the best. He drew a huge crowd and we had some difficulties with our space (finding a way that everyone could see him), and he gamely stood on top of a table to read and field questions.

Q38:

I've been to a few author talks/readings, and enjoyed them all. If the line's not too long I buy a book and have it signed, but I don't collect signatures per se. It's more a thank you. And I'm too conscious of people behind me to do more than smile and say I love your writing. The first author I remember hearing was Art Spiegelman right after Maus II came out. Super cute inscription. Others that stand out are Mary Doria Russell, Mary Norris, Madeline Miller, Bill Bryson, and most recently a Maine author, Kevin St. Jarre.

>84 ursula: oh love that! And I am very jealous - Douglas Adams! I did see Sir Terry Pratchett, actually called in sick to work so I could go, Neil Gaimin completely filled a HS auditorium.

thinking about other good ones: Madeliene Albright, Rebecca Solnit, local author Luis Alberto Urrea, Mark Vonnegut Jr. And this week we are going to see Rachel Maddow who i suspect will be a treat

An advantage of growing old is going to a concert in a little coffee house or a reading in a small bookstore and getting something autographed, then living long enough to wow people with your signed copy of The Edible Woman or James Taylor and the Original Flying Machine.

I'm more inclined to go to friends' readings than those of authors I don't know. All things considered, I'd rather see an author I don't know personally on a panel or one-on-one discussion than just reading their work. I live in NYC, which is ostensibly great for access to author events, but I'm up at the northernmost end and getting to anything that happens in Manhattan is a good hour one way, and Brooklyn is 1-1/2 to 2 hours. So I need to be picky about what I take the time to go see, how late I want to be out on a work night, etc. That was one thing I loved about the remote events during the height of the pandemic—they didn't have the same energy as live events, to be sure, but at least I got to go to whatever I wanted (within reason).

I do love a signed book... one of those things that feels like it shouldn't really matter, but it does. Back when I was moderating in-person author panels I always asked them to sign print galleys, when I had them, and some of those have real sentimental value for me now. (Probably the top of the list: a warm and personal message from Karine Jean Pierre, now White House press secretary, signed "with much love & respect"—she's a lovely person and I'm a big fan.)

>88 lisapeet: I’ve been to a few book readings in Manhattan but only had one book signed - The Masque of Africa by V S Naipaul and I was so disappointed though I’d so looked forward to actually seeing him. It was like going through a checkout at a supermarket. He was known for his taciturn character. I felt sorry for his wife.

>89 kjuliff: A House for Mr Biswas is one of the most mean-spirited books I’ve ever read, in every sense of the word. And that was an early work! I crossed him off the list after that.

>90 booksaplenty1949: A House for Mr Biswas was my favorite book for many years. As V S Naipaul was putting his signature to The Masque of Africa I had the apparent audacity to remark that I came to his work through Mr Biwas. V.S. didn’t even look up. As he put his flourish on the last letter of his signature, in one singular movement he brushed he aside, ready for next in line.

V.S. Cash-register. Still his middle career books were good. A writer, not a charmer.

I've heard that Naipaul was not the nicest guy in private, either. But hey, gossip is gossip.

Paul Theroux often mentioned his fued with Naipaul in many of his travel narratives. Never knew what the problem was but considering Theroux judgemental tendency, its a little of the pot calling the kettle black

>93 cindydavid4: “ Naipaul’s disdain for women, his not considering them as equals is proudly displayed in his life. In Patrick French’s authorised biography, it’s revealed how he mistreated his first wife, Patricia Naipaul, with whom he was married for 41 years ”
The World Is What It Is: The Authorized Biography of V. S. Naipaul by. Patrick French
I certainly got that vibe,