Thanks to Jamie at The Broke and the Bookish, today I discovered another book blog: A Striped Armchair, by Eva. I really like her writing style and I think our taste in books is quite similar, so this is another one I'll be trying to follow regularly.
On this blog, Eva has created a page entirely devoted to her yearly reading lists. They are insanely ambitious, for reasons she describes in her 'About' section. I doubt that I will ever be in a position to compete with that prolific list -- not that it's a competition or anything... But I really like the idea of using a blog page to post past and current reads.
I once estimated that I read around 30 books per semester as an undergraduate majoring in English literature and Anthropology, with other courses spanning Sociology, Political Science, Women's Studies, Linguistics, and more. A lot of those were textbooks or non-fiction books related to course work, but from second through fourth years, I took three English courses each semester and many of the texts I read were fiction. So I did manage to plow through a lot of novels and story collections during my university years -- and that doesn't include books I read for "fun" during summers or holidays.
Since then, my progress through reading lists has slowed down radically. In journalism school, I barely read anything that wasn't a newspaper, an online news source, or a textbook about Marshall McLuhan. (How much do I wish that Douglas Coupland's biography of McLuhan had been out in 2007? A lot.) As a post-grad, I was too busy looking for jobs and having pre-quarter-life crises to be able to wrap my head around serious lit-rah-chah. But when I am not reading, I miss it in a very tangible way. So despite having a full-time job and being an adult-type-person with real-life responsibilities, I am trying these days to spend more time reading and less time watching TV. I actually canceled my cable last month -- this is serious business.
Given everything I mentioned in my post yesterday about online book communities, I'm not sure posting a reading list on a blog page is any more interactive than the Excel list I keep on my laptop. (I wasn't kidding about the Excel list. My mother is a statistician -- lists are also serious business in our family.) But at least it allows me to share my picks with others, if not generating automatic recommendations from Indigo or publishers.
A friend of mine sent me a comment on Facebook after reading yesterday's post, saying she uses Wereads (formerly ireads) and had a good experience. If you use any of the book communities and have good or bad things to say, please let me know in the comments section.
Wednesday, November 17, 2010
Tuesday, November 16, 2010
The Question of Online Book Communities
A year or two ago, I signed up for an application called Visual Bookshelf on Facebook. I rarely use third-party applications on Facebook, since it's become clear that these applications collect personal data from user profiles. However, as someone with a reading list that spans as many pages as a Masters' thesis summary, and who treated her undergraduate degree in English literature as a four-year series of book club meetings, I was enthusiastic about an app that would let me brag to my friends about the many extremely tasteful books I was reading at any given time. After all, if there is any public space that embraces narcissism, it is Facebook.
The beauty of the Visual Bookshelf application was that it published a note in your friends' news feeds whenever you made a change in your "shelf": Meghan is now reading War and Peace. Meghan has just finished reading Great Expectations. Meghan would like to read a Faulkner trilogy, but doesn't want to end up suicidally depressed. (Okay, I made that last one up -- the status notices did not allow for ironic editorializing.) News feeds would also display reviews that any of your friends made after reading books, recommendations, and encouraged sharing -- ie, Rachel owns a book that you just indicated you'd like to read.
Then everything changed: Facebook went through one of its maligned format changes, and suddenly the Visual Bookshelf application no longer functioned in the same way. Maybe it had been designed to work best with the older version of Facebook, and no longer shows up properly. I'm not sure. But either way, something got messed up: now, when I click on my Visual Bookshelf tab, it brings me to a page called LivingSocial. What is LivingSocial? Some other kind of book-related community, sure, but how did I end up with a profile here? The publishing features have changed, too: instead of publishing an item in my friends' news feeds about what I'm reading, people would have to actually click on the "Books" tab in my Facebook profile to see my latest "activities". Nobody cares that much about what I'm reading, not even my fellow book nerds. It's simply too much effort -- too hidden.
More recently, I discovered Chapters-Indigo's online Community. From what I could tell, it was essentially Facebook for booklovers: you can add books to various "shelves", like "plan to read", "already read", etc, but you could also add people as friends, join discussion groups, participate in chats. In principle, it was a great idea; in practice, not so much. I don't know of anyone else among my friends who have Community accounts with Indigo, and I wasn't interested enough in the discussion groups to seek out strangers as "friends". I did continue to use my account, mainly for the shelf application. Whenever I get personalized emails from Chapters-Indigo suggesting books I might like (to purchase), there's an option right in the email to add books to my shelf. I use it as a way to track books I come across that I want to check out at some point.
But to complicate matters, Indigo also has Wishlists and Shopping Cart lists inside user accounts on its website. Wishlists are clearly geared toward gift-giving, so that friends and family can find out what books you'd actually like to receive ("Oh, thanks Uncle Marvin, this biography of Winston Churchill looks just fascinating..."). Shopping Cart lists are books you've decided you actually want to purchase online. At some point during the Indigo online experience, I completely forget where I've listed what, and end up feeling like I have no overall list that is reflective of what I hope to read anytime soon.
Recently I've begun following several book bloggers on Twitter and Google Reader to get a better sense of what other people are reading. Not everyone's taste is the same as my own, but I'm convinced that I will stumble upon far more great books this way than if I were left to my own devices. And a few of these bloggers are members of Amazon book clubs, or a community called Goodreads. Goodreads seems to combine all of the aspects that I'd like to see in a book-related community, but frankly I'm a bit tired of going to the trouble of creating new profiles, loading up my latest lists, and then letting it fall to the wayside. I've got Social Book Networking Fatigue. By the time I discovered BookLounge.ca, a site dedicated to promoting books from Canadian publishers McClelland & Stewart, Random House, Doubleday and others, I was totally confused about which sites to participate in.
To me, it seems pointless to maintain a Facebook account, a Myspace page, a Twitter page, a personal blog, a Tumblr account, Google Reader feeds including the sharing-with-friends feature, and so on through the less mainstream sites like Digg and Delicious. I stick to the basics: Facebook for people I actually know in real life, Google Reader for real-world news and for following traditional blogs, and Twitter for witticisms and general lurking purposes to keep up with trends.
The same holds true for bookish sites: I can't possibly keep up with three or four different communities and accounts. I might get a better representation of all the great new books that are out there, but I'd never get any work done if I had to devote that much time to even reading the updates, let alone participating. So which one to pick?
Anything's better than an Excel spreadsheet list.
The beauty of the Visual Bookshelf application was that it published a note in your friends' news feeds whenever you made a change in your "shelf": Meghan is now reading War and Peace. Meghan has just finished reading Great Expectations. Meghan would like to read a Faulkner trilogy, but doesn't want to end up suicidally depressed. (Okay, I made that last one up -- the status notices did not allow for ironic editorializing.) News feeds would also display reviews that any of your friends made after reading books, recommendations, and encouraged sharing -- ie, Rachel owns a book that you just indicated you'd like to read.
Then everything changed: Facebook went through one of its maligned format changes, and suddenly the Visual Bookshelf application no longer functioned in the same way. Maybe it had been designed to work best with the older version of Facebook, and no longer shows up properly. I'm not sure. But either way, something got messed up: now, when I click on my Visual Bookshelf tab, it brings me to a page called LivingSocial. What is LivingSocial? Some other kind of book-related community, sure, but how did I end up with a profile here? The publishing features have changed, too: instead of publishing an item in my friends' news feeds about what I'm reading, people would have to actually click on the "Books" tab in my Facebook profile to see my latest "activities". Nobody cares that much about what I'm reading, not even my fellow book nerds. It's simply too much effort -- too hidden.
More recently, I discovered Chapters-Indigo's online Community. From what I could tell, it was essentially Facebook for booklovers: you can add books to various "shelves", like "plan to read", "already read", etc, but you could also add people as friends, join discussion groups, participate in chats. In principle, it was a great idea; in practice, not so much. I don't know of anyone else among my friends who have Community accounts with Indigo, and I wasn't interested enough in the discussion groups to seek out strangers as "friends". I did continue to use my account, mainly for the shelf application. Whenever I get personalized emails from Chapters-Indigo suggesting books I might like (to purchase), there's an option right in the email to add books to my shelf. I use it as a way to track books I come across that I want to check out at some point.
But to complicate matters, Indigo also has Wishlists and Shopping Cart lists inside user accounts on its website. Wishlists are clearly geared toward gift-giving, so that friends and family can find out what books you'd actually like to receive ("Oh, thanks Uncle Marvin, this biography of Winston Churchill looks just fascinating..."). Shopping Cart lists are books you've decided you actually want to purchase online. At some point during the Indigo online experience, I completely forget where I've listed what, and end up feeling like I have no overall list that is reflective of what I hope to read anytime soon.
Recently I've begun following several book bloggers on Twitter and Google Reader to get a better sense of what other people are reading. Not everyone's taste is the same as my own, but I'm convinced that I will stumble upon far more great books this way than if I were left to my own devices. And a few of these bloggers are members of Amazon book clubs, or a community called Goodreads. Goodreads seems to combine all of the aspects that I'd like to see in a book-related community, but frankly I'm a bit tired of going to the trouble of creating new profiles, loading up my latest lists, and then letting it fall to the wayside. I've got Social Book Networking Fatigue. By the time I discovered BookLounge.ca, a site dedicated to promoting books from Canadian publishers McClelland & Stewart, Random House, Doubleday and others, I was totally confused about which sites to participate in.
To me, it seems pointless to maintain a Facebook account, a Myspace page, a Twitter page, a personal blog, a Tumblr account, Google Reader feeds including the sharing-with-friends feature, and so on through the less mainstream sites like Digg and Delicious. I stick to the basics: Facebook for people I actually know in real life, Google Reader for real-world news and for following traditional blogs, and Twitter for witticisms and general lurking purposes to keep up with trends.
The same holds true for bookish sites: I can't possibly keep up with three or four different communities and accounts. I might get a better representation of all the great new books that are out there, but I'd never get any work done if I had to devote that much time to even reading the updates, let alone participating. So which one to pick?
Anything's better than an Excel spreadsheet list.
Thursday, November 4, 2010
The James Clare Tribute Band
Greetings! For those of you who actually follow this blog in any kind of regular fashion, I apologize for my recent (total) lack of posting. Work and real life took over for awhile, precluding much of my internet activity. And then I got back into Twitter in a big way, especially during such exciting events as the Toronto mayoral race (don't get me started), so I've been paying a lot more attention to that form of expression lately. Sometimes Twitter is just a better medium when you have one specific thing to say, and feel that it's not expansive enough or intelligent enough for a full blog post.
The last few months have been intense for me. I've spent a lot of time pondering my decisions about where to live, how to spend my time outside of work, and what my priorities should be. As I said to a friend recently, in a lot of ways I am lucky that I have options to choose from and the freedom to make my own decisions about these things. But I tend to see the wide-open space as a scary abyss and a lack of direction, instead of as an opportunity.
I've also dealt with sadness recently, when we lost my grandfather. I was lucky enough to go through my entire childhood and adolescence with three grandparents, without ever losing a family member or close friend. Now I have lost two of those grandparents in the last year and a half. Both times, I had the surreal feeling that I was living out a role I'd only read about or seen in movies, and wasn't sure how I should actually be feeling. There were many moments when I showed grief on the outside and felt panicked on the inside, but most of the time I felt numb, or kept myself busy trying to be supportive and helpful to my relatives who had just lost a parent.
My papa had been dealing with dementia and alzheimer's-type symptoms for three or four years. It crept up on us; at 80, he was a remarkably healthy and ever-cheerful man who loved to participate in intelligent conversations and was active in community volunteering, hospital boards, et cetera. Within a few years, he was losing his short-term memory and had trouble finding the correct word while speaking or locating an object that was mentioned to him. At 84, he no longer recognized many of his family members and friends. Yet he remained an incredibly patient and kind person, never complaining about his situation though it must have been so frustrating, and still lighting up and giving us a welcoming smile when we came over.
For most of us, it took a long time to accept that he wasn't entirely himself anymore, and we tried as much as possible to treat him the same way we always did. But it hurt to see him that way, needing so much more care from my grandmother and not being able to participate in conversations or games the way he used to.
One Sunday in September, the whole family (about 20 of us) gathered to celebrate my grandmother's 80th birthday. We had planned a whole special evening: a limo to pick up my grandparents at their house, stops along the way to pick up various other aunts and uncles, a surprise stop for champagne and toasts at another house with all of the grandchildren (and great-grandson) waiting, then on to a dinner, complete with slide-shows. It was a wonderful night to celebrate my grandma and the family she created with her husband.
On the morning of the following Thursday, I got a message from my cousin saying that Papa had had a stroke and was in the hospital. Those of us who live out of town stopped what we were doing -- in my case, checking my morning emails; in my dad's case, driving to the office for an early meeting -- and did the only conceivable thing: get to the hospital. There was a Greyhound bus leaving from downtown in an hour and a half; I showered, packed a bag, and took a subway to the station in record time, my heart pounding and inner monologue yelling the entire time. After a bus ride that seemed to last forever, I arrived at the hospital to be with my family, many of whom were already there. Papa was not conscious at this point, and did not wake up fully while we were there. He was in the intensive care unit for about two days, all of us there with him, until he passed away.
Throughout the four days that followed, through the phone calls and writing the newspaper obituary and the wake and the funeral, the recurring sentiment among our family and from friends was that we were all incredibly lucky to have each other to lean on and to create a loving atmosphere for such a sad happening. I don't know that having all of us there made it any easier to say goodbye to our grandfather; I hope that it was in some way helpful to my grandmother to know that she wouldn't be alone. But the whole experience reminded me, once again, what family means and why it's so important to me. We've spent so many evenings together at parties, laughing and dancing and enjoying each other's company, not just because we're family but because we genuinely have a good time together. And when we're able to come together during the difficult times as well, it makes me feel even closer to those friends I happen to be related to. It also makes me miss my other cousins, aunts and uncles who live farther away, miss them more than I usually do, but still feel happiness that I share those bonds with them too and remember the times when we've been together through sadness.
One of the things I found difficult to grasp while going through my Papa's passing was the idea of heaven or afterlife. This side of my family is Catholic, many of them practising, and so it was comforting to all of us to be told by priests and friends that he would be with us after he passed, and would know that we were all expressing our love for him. But as someone who stepped away from regular churchgoing 10 years ago, I struggled to think about this in an intellectual way. And so it was even more emotionally meaningful to me when I heard about my dad's conversation with his uncle, the morning that Papa had passed.
My dad had called to tell my great-uncle that his brother, my grandfather, had passed away. His uncle said, "I knew he had passed when I saw a rainbow in the sky early this morning." After hearing this, my dad came into the kitchen to share the story, with tears in his eyes. He told us that on Thursday morning, while driving to make it to the hospital in time to see his father, he'd said a silent prayer, asking God to send us a rainbow if his dad passed away.
It's been a month and a half since my grandfather's passing, and this story still makes my heart pound and my fingers shake. My belief system is irrelevant in the context of what my dad experienced. To my family, the rainbow was just one of several signs that our grandfather is still with us and will remain a part of our daily lives.
The last few months have been intense for me. I've spent a lot of time pondering my decisions about where to live, how to spend my time outside of work, and what my priorities should be. As I said to a friend recently, in a lot of ways I am lucky that I have options to choose from and the freedom to make my own decisions about these things. But I tend to see the wide-open space as a scary abyss and a lack of direction, instead of as an opportunity.
I've also dealt with sadness recently, when we lost my grandfather. I was lucky enough to go through my entire childhood and adolescence with three grandparents, without ever losing a family member or close friend. Now I have lost two of those grandparents in the last year and a half. Both times, I had the surreal feeling that I was living out a role I'd only read about or seen in movies, and wasn't sure how I should actually be feeling. There were many moments when I showed grief on the outside and felt panicked on the inside, but most of the time I felt numb, or kept myself busy trying to be supportive and helpful to my relatives who had just lost a parent.
My papa had been dealing with dementia and alzheimer's-type symptoms for three or four years. It crept up on us; at 80, he was a remarkably healthy and ever-cheerful man who loved to participate in intelligent conversations and was active in community volunteering, hospital boards, et cetera. Within a few years, he was losing his short-term memory and had trouble finding the correct word while speaking or locating an object that was mentioned to him. At 84, he no longer recognized many of his family members and friends. Yet he remained an incredibly patient and kind person, never complaining about his situation though it must have been so frustrating, and still lighting up and giving us a welcoming smile when we came over.
For most of us, it took a long time to accept that he wasn't entirely himself anymore, and we tried as much as possible to treat him the same way we always did. But it hurt to see him that way, needing so much more care from my grandmother and not being able to participate in conversations or games the way he used to.
One Sunday in September, the whole family (about 20 of us) gathered to celebrate my grandmother's 80th birthday. We had planned a whole special evening: a limo to pick up my grandparents at their house, stops along the way to pick up various other aunts and uncles, a surprise stop for champagne and toasts at another house with all of the grandchildren (and great-grandson) waiting, then on to a dinner, complete with slide-shows. It was a wonderful night to celebrate my grandma and the family she created with her husband.
On the morning of the following Thursday, I got a message from my cousin saying that Papa had had a stroke and was in the hospital. Those of us who live out of town stopped what we were doing -- in my case, checking my morning emails; in my dad's case, driving to the office for an early meeting -- and did the only conceivable thing: get to the hospital. There was a Greyhound bus leaving from downtown in an hour and a half; I showered, packed a bag, and took a subway to the station in record time, my heart pounding and inner monologue yelling the entire time. After a bus ride that seemed to last forever, I arrived at the hospital to be with my family, many of whom were already there. Papa was not conscious at this point, and did not wake up fully while we were there. He was in the intensive care unit for about two days, all of us there with him, until he passed away.
Throughout the four days that followed, through the phone calls and writing the newspaper obituary and the wake and the funeral, the recurring sentiment among our family and from friends was that we were all incredibly lucky to have each other to lean on and to create a loving atmosphere for such a sad happening. I don't know that having all of us there made it any easier to say goodbye to our grandfather; I hope that it was in some way helpful to my grandmother to know that she wouldn't be alone. But the whole experience reminded me, once again, what family means and why it's so important to me. We've spent so many evenings together at parties, laughing and dancing and enjoying each other's company, not just because we're family but because we genuinely have a good time together. And when we're able to come together during the difficult times as well, it makes me feel even closer to those friends I happen to be related to. It also makes me miss my other cousins, aunts and uncles who live farther away, miss them more than I usually do, but still feel happiness that I share those bonds with them too and remember the times when we've been together through sadness.
One of the things I found difficult to grasp while going through my Papa's passing was the idea of heaven or afterlife. This side of my family is Catholic, many of them practising, and so it was comforting to all of us to be told by priests and friends that he would be with us after he passed, and would know that we were all expressing our love for him. But as someone who stepped away from regular churchgoing 10 years ago, I struggled to think about this in an intellectual way. And so it was even more emotionally meaningful to me when I heard about my dad's conversation with his uncle, the morning that Papa had passed.
My dad had called to tell my great-uncle that his brother, my grandfather, had passed away. His uncle said, "I knew he had passed when I saw a rainbow in the sky early this morning." After hearing this, my dad came into the kitchen to share the story, with tears in his eyes. He told us that on Thursday morning, while driving to make it to the hospital in time to see his father, he'd said a silent prayer, asking God to send us a rainbow if his dad passed away.
It's been a month and a half since my grandfather's passing, and this story still makes my heart pound and my fingers shake. My belief system is irrelevant in the context of what my dad experienced. To my family, the rainbow was just one of several signs that our grandfather is still with us and will remain a part of our daily lives.
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