Lists and books
austenheroin had this on her journal and I am shamelessly jumping in and doing it as well. So, here’s my top ten desert island book list:
1. The Odyssey - Homer
2. The Rainbow - D. H. Lawrence
3. Candide - Voltaire
4. The Good Soldier Svejk - Jaroslav Hasek
5. Hyperion - Dan Simmons
6. Steel Beach - John Varley
7. The Book of Laughter and Forgetting - Milan Kundera
8. War Music - Christopher Logue
9. Robinson Crusoe - Daniel Defoe
10. Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
But that is just the appetizer for some additional thinking I have been doing about books in general. I am trying to write and offended by the publishing industry and pondering the idea that writing in a traditional sense is basically a dying industry. I got to thinking about this after three things happened:
1. a colleague waved their shiny new Kindle at me a declared it the future of books (yuck),
2. I have been living up to the old faculty joke: Professor 1 asks professor 2, “what are you working on?” Professor 2 responds, “I am deep in preparing my second book.” Professor 1 responds “Yeah I am not writing either.” Progress has not been spectacular.
3. I listened to this episode of the Kojo Nnamdi show on The Future of Books in which they predicted that the value of content would fall to essentially zero, while the value of the social experience of sharing the knowledge will rise exponentially. Basically, the value of creating a space for people to write marginal notes about your work will exceed that of the work itself. The analog being that the trading of music files and proliferation of listening options has caused the value of produced music to plummet and placed the value in venues, live performance and fan base.
I am thinking of starting either a blog or livejournal community which will provide a space for me to work on two projects (plus one more):
1. Writing this dammed second book. I plan to post weekly updates on the process I am going through and use the pressure of the process to help keep it moving forward. In addition, I hope it might attract some of the kind of feedback that will both test the ideas and prepare the groundwork for publication.
2. Explore the possibility of developing an open source set of anthropology text books. I continue to be horrified by the cost of textbooks used in my courses, when I don’t actually believe there is any point to them anymore. There have been some discussions around the web, and I would like to see if we might get something going, possibly around the open source model used in software development.
3. See if anyone else wants to do similar sorts of projects and use the space to develop them.
I am going to poke around for existing venues on these subjects but I suspect the fairly specific nature of these projects may limit my options.
1. The Odyssey - Homer
2. The Rainbow - D. H. Lawrence
3. Candide - Voltaire
4. The Good Soldier Svejk - Jaroslav Hasek
5. Hyperion - Dan Simmons
6. Steel Beach - John Varley
7. The Book of Laughter and Forgetting - Milan Kundera
8. War Music - Christopher Logue
9. Robinson Crusoe - Daniel Defoe
10. Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
But that is just the appetizer for some additional thinking I have been doing about books in general. I am trying to write and offended by the publishing industry and pondering the idea that writing in a traditional sense is basically a dying industry. I got to thinking about this after three things happened:
1. a colleague waved their shiny new Kindle at me a declared it the future of books (yuck),
2. I have been living up to the old faculty joke: Professor 1 asks professor 2, “what are you working on?” Professor 2 responds, “I am deep in preparing my second book.” Professor 1 responds “Yeah I am not writing either.” Progress has not been spectacular.
3. I listened to this episode of the Kojo Nnamdi show on The Future of Books in which they predicted that the value of content would fall to essentially zero, while the value of the social experience of sharing the knowledge will rise exponentially. Basically, the value of creating a space for people to write marginal notes about your work will exceed that of the work itself. The analog being that the trading of music files and proliferation of listening options has caused the value of produced music to plummet and placed the value in venues, live performance and fan base.
I am thinking of starting either a blog or livejournal community which will provide a space for me to work on two projects (plus one more):
1. Writing this dammed second book. I plan to post weekly updates on the process I am going through and use the pressure of the process to help keep it moving forward. In addition, I hope it might attract some of the kind of feedback that will both test the ideas and prepare the groundwork for publication.
2. Explore the possibility of developing an open source set of anthropology text books. I continue to be horrified by the cost of textbooks used in my courses, when I don’t actually believe there is any point to them anymore. There have been some discussions around the web, and I would like to see if we might get something going, possibly around the open source model used in software development.
3. See if anyone else wants to do similar sorts of projects and use the space to develop them.
I am going to poke around for existing venues on these subjects but I suspect the fairly specific nature of these projects may limit my options.