What Kind of Reader Are You?

Image from article. Flickr/Simon Cocks

There are many different types of readers out there, but thanks to The Atlantic Wire's "What Kind of Book Reader Are You? A Diagnostics Guide," you can now pinpoint exactly which category you fall under. 

From the article:

The New Yorker's Page-Turner blog includes a book-reader coinage that got us thinking about our own reading styles. There, Mark O'Connell confesses his dirty little reading secret: He doesn't finish books; he's a "promiscuous reader," a book abandoner. He writes, "I’ll start a book, get about halfway through it, and then, even if I’m enjoying it, put it down in favor of something else." But it's not the books, it's him. "I like reading too much. I can’t say no," he writes. "I’ll be reading a novel and thoroughly enjoying it. Then I’ll be in a bookshop and I’ll see something I’ve been anticipating, and I’ll buy it. I’ll start reading the new book on the bus home that evening, and that will be the end of the original affair. I’m certainly invested in the relationship with the book that I’m currently reading, but I can’t help myself from pursuing whatever new interest happens to turn my head. Perhaps that’s just a tortuous way of admitting to being a pathetic serial book-adulterer who’ll chase after anything in a dust jacket." He justifies his behavior in the end, as you'd expect of a "book cheater," by saying that maybe occasionally this is a good thing. When he finally meets the book whose fickleness meets his own, well, perhaps he's met his match. 

We understand. We, too, have occasionally set one good book down and picked up another, and forgotten the first nearly entirely, even though we'd been quite smitten with it before. Sometimes we engage in threeways, fourways, or even orgies of reading, in which there are so many books involved, well, we might not even be keeping track. It's horrible, isn't it? But, for as many books as exist, there are also any number of different reading types a book lover (or even a book hater) might demonstrate. What kind are you?

So, friends, where do you fall? I'm a Chronological Reader, with a little bit of Delayed Onset Reader #1 thrown in, myself.

Superior Person's Tuesday!

Formicate v. To swarm like ants. "Principal, I thought you ought to know - the Seventh Grade is formicating all over the quadrangle."

Children always formicate around the ice cream truck.

Each Tuesday, we’ll offer up a Superior Word for the edification of our Superior Readers, via the volumes of the inimitable Peter Bowler. You can purchase all or any of the four Superior Person’s Books of Words from the Godine website. Formicate appears in the First.

Godine's End-of-Summer Sale Continues!

Looking for a good book to read? We've always got you covered, but now is an especially great time to browse our website, thanks to our end-of-summer sale. Most markdowns are 50% or more, and some discounts are even deeper! They won't last long, so act fast.

Monday Blues?

Monday got you down? We have just the video to put a smile on your face. If only everyone were as friendly as this little girl at the Copley Place Mall.

Bye!

Superior Person's...Wednesday! (Oops)

We may be a day late (please forgive us!), but never fear - here is your Superior Person's word of the week!

Ozostomia n. Evil-smelling breath. Or so my source defines it. Not bad, you will note, not sour; but evil. How does breath smell evil? Is this the origin of the famous royal motto “Evil be to him who evil stinks”? Or have I got that wrong?

The Tasmanian Devil’s ozostomia is worse than his bite.

 

Each Tuesday (or the occasional Wednesday), we’ll offer up a Superior Word for the edification of our Superior Readers, via the volumes of the inimitable Peter Bowler. You can purchase all or any of the four Superior Person’s Books of Words from the Godine website. Ozostomia appears in the Second.

Fauna and Family

We are pleased to re-announce Gerald Durrell’s Fauna and Family, the final installment in his beloved Corfu trilogy. Set on a Greek isle between the world wars, this autobiography concludes the wacky and often hilarious adventures of the Durrell family. Durrell, now a world-class naturalist, here recounts the origins of his passion for wildlife. Young Gerry’s wide-eyed enthusiasm for fauna of all types – snakes, lizards, birds, fish, and everything in between – sets the tone for a charming tale populated by a colorful and eclectic cast of characters, both human and animal.

An excerpt from Fauna and Family:

The Bootle Bumtrinket, being Leslie’s first effort in boat building, was almost circular and flat-bottomed, so that, with her attractive color scheme of orange and white stripes, she looked not unlike an ornate celluloid duck. She was friendly, stalwart craft, but owing to her shape and her lack of keel she became very flustered in anything like a heavy sea and would threaten to turn upside down and proceed that way. Owing to her shape, she could not wear a tall mast without turning over and so her pocket-handkerchief-sized sail could only garner and harvest the tiniest cupfuls of wind; thus, for the most part, she was propelled from point to point with oars, and when we had a full crew on board – three dogs, an owl, and sometimes a pigeon – and were carrying a full cargo – some two dozen containers full of seawater and specimens – she was a back-aching load to push through the water.

One Times Square in The New York Times!

Our new title One Times Square: A Century of Change at the Crossroads of the World, written and illustrated by Joe McKendry, has been garnering some well-deserved buzz in the book world recently. According to the Regional Plan Association, "McKendry's book elegantly fuses watercolors and words to tell the story of one of America's most iconic addresses." Another review for One Times Square was featured in a small newspaper you may have heard of - The New York Times!

Review:

Several miles down the grid lies another of Manhattan’s towering majesties, the chaos known as Times Square, the subject of Joe McKendry’s exquisite illustrated history, “One Times Square.” McKendry, who described a similar slice of urban architecture in “Beneath the Streets of Boston: Building America’s First Subway,” traces the famed intersection’s roots back to early 1800s farmland, where a former brewer named Medcef Eden owned 70 acres that included a dirt path known as Bloomingdale Road, now Broadway. 

As the grid moved northward up the island, McKendry tells us, the intersection between Broadway and Seventh Avenue became known as Long Acre Square, commonly referred to as “the Thieves’ Lair.” (Some things don’t change.) Of course, its new name, which came along with the city’s first subway line, the completion of the Astor Hotel and – ahem – the new headquarters for The New York Times, was a lot more enduring. “Covering the event in its own pages, The Times crowed, ‘It is a name … not likely to be forgotten in this community.’ ”

McKendry’s meticulous attention to detail in his illustrations and text enriches both without weighing down the book in the slightest. Who knew the history behind the Motograph News Bulletin, or “Zipper,” installed in 1928 and a marvel of its time, even if it ultimately led to those annoying tickers on cable news television?  One of the Zipper’s operators, McKendry tells us, spent 33 years assembling the bulletins. Readers also learn just how an ambitious billboard designer made a Camel billboard that blew “smoke” rings across the square for a quarter of a century.

The book doesn’t skip over the less than jolly aspects of Times Square. McKendry dutifully describes the area’s descent into an alternately condemned and celebrated state of seediness and disrepair. A full page shows the Times Tower’s transformation from its Florentine campanile glory into the gray humdrum of the Allied Chemical Company headquarters. “By the mid-1970s,” McKendry writes, “Times Square had a well-earned reputation as one of the most dangerous neighborhoods in New York City.”

As an artist, McKendry is as versatile as Times Square itself, rendering sepia-toned watercolors just as adeptly as black-and-white line drawings, clarifying diagrams, streetscapes and full-spectrum painting. Much of the artwork feels deeply nostalgic, entirely appropriate to the subject matter – like leafing through an old issue of The Saturday Evening Post, with none of the pages falling out. Yet the layout, varied and lively but still with plenty of white space, feels entirely modern. This is both a handsome and highly readable book, one that will be pored over cover to cover by young New Yorkers, real and aspiring.

Superior Person's Tuesday!

Vulpicide n. The killing of a fox other than by hunting with hounds; or one who does that. The italics are mine. A puzzling one indeed. This is the meaning of the term as given by both Webster and Oxford. Yet why should hunting with hounds be excluded from the definition? The implication would seem to be that there is a moral bonus, so to speak, in hunting with hounds; that this is an ethical way to despatch the wily Reynard, and that other methods are unethical. Yet what other methods are there? In what circumstances could the word vulpicide actually be used? "I say, old chap - passed a fox on the way across the meadow this morning - got him on the head with a four iron!" "You absolute rotter! You could have got out a few hounds and had them tear his throat out; but oh no, you just had to commit vulpicide!"

Each Tuesday, we’ll offer up a Superior Word for the edification of our Superior Readers, via the volumes of the inimitable Peter Bowler. You can purchase all or any of the four Superior Person’s Books of Words from the Godine website. Vulpicide appears in the Third.

Superior Person's Tuesday!

Velocipede n. A light vehicle propelled by the rider - strictly speaking, by the rider's feet. A genuinely useful word, since it covers not only bicycles but tricycles, dinkies, toy cars, scooters, and the author's VW.

A velociraptor on a velocipede.

 

Each Tuesday, we’ll offer up a Superior Word for the edification of our Superior Readers, via the volumes of the inimitable Peter Bowler. You can purchase all or any of the four Superior Person’s Books of Words from the Godine website. Velocipede appears in the First.

Don't Miss Nan Parson Rossiter on Cape Cod!

Summer is in full swing on the Cape, and Godine author Nan Parson Rossiter is set to read from her new book The Fo'c'sle: Henry Beston's "Outermost House" next week. Bring the kids, hear Nan talk about writing and illustrating this beautiful book, and pick up a copy to take home!

Here's where she'll be:

• Tuesday, August 7, 10-12: Brewster Bookstore in Brewster, MA
• Wednesday, August 8, 4-5: Titcomb's Bookshop, East Sandwich, MA
• Thursday August 9, 3-4:30: Cape Cod National Seashore Salt Pond Visitor Center, Eastham, MA
• Friday August 10, 9:30-11:30: Books by the Sea, Osterville, MA
• Friday August 10, 2-4: Where The Sidewalk Ends, Chatham, MA

Don't miss her!

The Fo'c'sle in the Wall Street Journal!

Our new title The Fo'c'sle: Henry Beston's "Outermost House" written and illustrated by Nan Parson Rossiter is the lead children's review in the Wall Street Journal this weekend!

Review:

In 1926, the naturalist Henry Beston lived for a year in Thoreau-like solitude on a Cape Cod dune overlooking the Atlantic. He spent his days observing the rhythms of his environment and recording his impressions in a journal that would be published in 1928 as "The Outermost House." That was the name local people had given to Beston's snug dwelling, a tiny house with 10 windows that made it, he wrote, "something rather like an indoors out of doors."

In a serene picture-book account of Beston's sojourn, Nan Parson Rossiter has captured in oil paintings the lonesome, windswept beauty that drew Beston to the ocean. "The Fo'c'sle: Henry Beston's 'Outermost House' " (Godine, 32 pages, $17.95) takes children ages 7 and older through the naturalist's quietly consequential year.

In autumn, he marked the southward passage of migratory birds. In winter, he opened a welcoming door to surfmen who patrolled the shoreline. We see him beside a campfire, a human speck against a great tableau of foaming sea and starry sky: "Beyond the crackling, salt-yellow, driftwood flame," Beston wrote, in one of several excerpts from his journal here, "over the pyramid of barrel staves, broken boards, and old sticks all atwist with climbing fire, the unseen ocean thunders and booms, the breaker sounding hollow as it falls." Some picture books seek to educate, some to excite; this one feels like a restful pause.

Crime and Puzzlement Giveaway!

It wasn’t us—promise. But see how sharp your detective skills are with Lawrence Treat’s puzzle, then get ready for more: Crime and Puzzlement ships free on all orders over $25! For orders over $50, you'll receive Crime and Puzzlement and Crime And Puzzlement 2! And with any order of $75 or more, receive all three Crime and Puzzlement books!

Superior Person's Tuesday!

Caballine n Horselike. "Just turn your head to the right a little, Miss Montmorency, while I set the focus and shutter speed. I want to have the light falling on you in half-profile, to bring out that . . . how shall I describe it? . . . caballine quality in your facial structure . . ."

Each Tuesday, we’ll offer up a Superior Word for the edification of our Superior Readers, via the volumes of the inimitable Peter Bowler. You can purchase all or any of the four Superior Person’s Books of Words from the Godine website. Caballine appears in the Second.

A Morning with Emerson

We never met much in college—very surprising, I know, for an English major. I do remember running into you briefly, that one time in junior year AP English. Ms. Williams was it? I think I hated you. We were preparing for the AP exam and you were getting in the way.

Was it because we ran in different circles, Emerson? You with your philosophy majors, me, taking classes on the American Novel and aestheticism. I read Pater, Ruskin, and Henry James; you met with Hawthorne, Alcott, and Thoreau.

But I think we would have gotten along quite well, Emerson. As our recent reprint of A Year With Emerson: A Daybook tells me in the title, we need a full year to get acquainted. I’ve got until lunch.

So diving in, I had to see what Emerson said on my birthday:

While on his trip to the Southern states in an attempt to improve his health (he was showing signs of the weak lungs that were common in the family), Emerson writes from St. Augustine on February 23, 1827, to his brother Charles. 

Dear Charles,

            You are in the heyday of youth when time is marked not by numbering days but by the intervals of mentality the flux & reflux of the soul. One day has a solemn complexion, the next is cheerful, the south wind makes a third poetic, and another is “sicklied o’er with a pale cast of thought,” but all are redolent of knowledge & joy. The river of life with you is yet in its mountains and sources bounding & shouting on its way & has not settled down into the monotony of the deep & silent stream. Vouchsafe then to give to your poor patriarchal exhorting brother some of the sweet waters. Write, write. I have heard men say (heaven help their poor wits,) they had rather have ten words viva voce from a man than volumes of letters for getting at his opinion. – I had rather converse with them by the interpreter. Politeness ruins conversation.

Feeling a bit homesick, Emerson expresses feelings about the letter itself. In writing, man “divests himself of his manner & all physical imperfects” and speaks “pure intellect.” This is more interesting when we consider Emerson not just as a writer, but as a famous orator who dominated the lecture circuit, a feat highlighted most recently in The New Yorker. “Instead of the old verse, "Speak that I may know thee," I write 'Speak, that I may suspect thee; write, that I may know thee.'”

Perhaps the authenticity of the written word explains why we at Godine still use typewriters. Something about it just feels nice. It’s thoughtful; it’s cool. This book gives a bit of that authenticity in short, daily glimpses that are easily digested and remembered. If you and Emerson haven’t spoken since high school, or if, like me, you should have met but never did, this is what you need.

Superior Person's Tuesday!

Crime Passionel phrase (From the French.) A crime motivated by the passions – such as the murder of a treacherous lover. As with other foreign or classical terms (see pinus radiata), the Superior Person always uses the original pronunciation – in this case, for example, "crime" is pronounced as "cream". At the average dinner party, there is always at last one guest who is not familiar with the phrase and can be persuaded, while the hostess is out of the room, that crime passionel is in fact the name of the passionfruit cream dessert that has just been served. This can lead to some entertaining after-dinner conversation.

Colonel Mustard, Miss Scarlett, and Mr. Green at dessert.

Each Tuesday, we’ll offer up a Superior Word for the edification of our Superior Readers, via the volumes of the inimitable Peter Bowler. You can purchase all or any of the four Superior Person’s Books of Words from the Godine website. Crime Passionel appears in the Second.

Don Share - Interview with Chapter 16

Black Sparrow Books is thrilled to publish Wishbone, the latest collection from Don Share, senior editor of Poetry magazine in Chicago. Share recently spoke with Chapter 16 ("a community of Tennessee writers, readers & passersby") about his new book, the centennial year of Poetry magazine, and his Memphis roots.

From the interview:

Chapter 16: The title poem, “Wishbone,” begins with a clear, assertive voice: “I have a bone to pick / with whoever runs this joint.” The “joint” is our world, and the god here comes across as an inept manager who has some communication problems with his staff. Many poets find it quite difficult to approach religion in poems. What are some of your strategies for doing so? 

Share: Yes, the joint is the whole big world: there are times when we ask, “Hey, who’s running all this?” “Looking Over My Shoulder” talks similarly about the “man upstairs.” It’s not that God is inept, but it’s more about that feeling we have sometimes: “Who do we complain to?” I’m playing around with that desperation—and whininess. As it happens, “Wishbone” is in the voice of a dying cat, and from his perspective, human beings are in charge, making godlike decisions in the face of which he feels powerless, though this is a tough cat and he suffers no loss of nobility or character even at the very end of it all. Needless to say, a cat can’t talk; I wanted to give one language for a short spell so he could speak his piece. A bit of tragicomic relief, you might say.

 

Chapter 16: In your blog, you quote Jeanette Winterson, who recently rebuked the notion that poetry is a luxury, something to do when one has leisure time: “A tough life needs tough language—and that is what poetry is,” she wrote. “That is what literature offers—a language powerful enough to say how it is. It isn't a hiding place. It is a finding place.” Can you talk a bit about how your own poems in Wishbone serve as a finding place? 

Share: That quote is in Winterson’s latest book, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? and it means a lot to me. A writer’s job is to say how it is. Well, I suddenly find myself at the age when real loss sets in. I was used to being so young! So I’m finding out what we all find out, if we stick around long enough. But it’s not easy, and we certainly don’t have much choice. The poems in Wishbone describe what it’s like to have obstacles thrown in your way, but there really is something both funny and sad about it. That’s what we find out, if we stick around long enough: what can be said.

. . . 

Chapter 16: Are there any ways in which you see yourself as a specifically Southern writer? Any ways growing up in Memphis particularly has affected your poems or the way you think about the nature of your writing?

Don Share: I do see myself as a Southern writer. My first book, Union, was very explicitly about Memphis and about the South in general. I don’t live there now, but its whole way of life has warmly permeated everything I think and do; it never leaves me. The music, the food, the weather, the way people talk—these things are not clichés; they nourished me every step of the way. You are where you come from.

Superior Person's Tuesday!

Procerity, n Tallness, height. "I think you showed great procerity out there, darling," you say proudly to your gangling teenager after she has just done her bit in the ballet class's end-of-term performance.

Robert Wadlow shows more procerity than any other person in recorded history.

Each Tuesday, we’ll offer up a Superior Word for the edification of our Superior Readers, via the volumes of the inimitable Peter Bowler. You can purchase all or any of the four Superior Person’s Books of Words from the Godine website. Procerity appears in the First.

Ulysses, illustrated by Matisse

In a recent post, Brain Pickings showed us a stunning version of James Joyce’s Ulysses with illustrations by Henri Matisse. Unable to own the book ourselves, we default to the words of the author: “a glorious leather-bound tome with 22-karat gold accents, gilt edges, moire fabric endsheets, and a satin page marker.” Despite its outward beauty, the etchings are the real collectors’ items:

Last year we were thrilled to immerse ourselves in the richly colored paintings included in our title Miss Etta and Dr. Claribel: Bringing Matisse to America, written and illustrated by Susan Fillion. The book tells the true story of two unmarried sisters from a German-Jewish family in Baltimore amassing one of the major collections of modern art in America. Before long, they had one of the foremost collections of Matisse’s work in the world.

Fillion, an artist and museum educator in Baltimore, carefully mixes works by Matisse, Picasso, and others alongside originals of her own in the book. The result is a detailed, intimate commentary on the two women and the art they shared.

Superior Person's Tuesday!

Photophobia n The morbid dread of light. You know – that thing of Dracula's. And of the computer generation.

Each Tuesday, we’ll offer up a Superior Word for the edification of our Superior Readers, via the volumes of the inimitable Peter Bowler. You can purchase all or any of the four Superior Person’s Books of Words from the Godine website. Photophobia appears in the Third.

David's Publisher's Note

Each Godine trade catalog features a Publisher's Note from David. The one from our Fall 2012 catalog is certainly worth sharing with you today:

Godine and the Brave New World

Hardly a week goes by when I am not asked what Godine is doing about e-books and Amazon and what effect these new media will have on our business. Good questions with some cloudy answers. If you look through this catalogue, you can see for yourself how few of our titles will or – given the present technology – can make an easy or satisfactory transition to a handheld electronic device. There is a reason why books such as The Hand of the Small-Town Builder and Waterfront New York offer two-page spreads that are carefully designed, and not easily disassembled, visual units. The design and the production of such titles are as much a part of their value as “intellectual property” as the words and images. Broken apart and parsed, outside their considered context, they lose meaning and impact.

The printed book has survived for five hundred years because it is, like a violin, a machine perfectly suited to its use. We take books for granted and can instinctively find the title page, the index, or the table of contents. They “open” without turning on a switch. We’ve never issued a user’s manual (apart from Georges Perec’s Life a User’s Manual). There is a comfort level with a book that needs little explanation – or justification.

If there is a revolution it involves a) how text, relatively pure text, is now stored and transmitted and b) the physical distribution of information. Consider our lead book, Le Clézio’s memoir of growing up in Africa. Here it doesn’t matter in what type size or style you read the text. The files needed to read this text can be manufactured and sold cheaply, on a “per read” basis, far more cheaply than a physical book. The real issue is the price the reader is willing to pay, and the publisher is willing to ask, for the content. Companies like Amazon don’t develop (or even recognize) a talent like Le Clézio, but they have the technology to distribute – both the physical book and the electronic counterpart. They are delivering the milk, but they are hardly attending to the cow. If books (the milk) are sold for $9.99 through Amazon, who is going to step forward to take care of the cow at $26.95? And if it makes so little difference to the reader through which “device” the text is accessed – a book or a Kindle – I would argue it’s clear who in time will win this battle.

But, of course, content does have a price: the price of selecting and developing it, of editing and organizing it. These are the costs that are not reflected in a “distribution model” where one pays only for the end results. This is a battle between content creators and content distributors that will be played out over the next decade, complicated by an electronic revolution that has made content creation open to virtually anyone. If you own and can operate a computer, you can write, design, and distribute a book. The numbers are astonishing; in 2009 “non-traditional” (meaning self-published or on-demand titles) accounted for 267,000 new titles. In 2010, that number had spiked tenfold, to more than 2,775,000. It’s a new world, more confused than brave, and we’re doing our best to cope with it. But speaking personally, I was just as happy in the old one, and the books you’ll encounter in this catalogue probably reflect a bias toward quality book making better than any justification you’ll read in a Publisher’s Note.  

D·R·G