Highly recommended.

National Public Radio’s Morning Edition today ran a piece on the detective fiction of Qiu Xiaolong. What makes Qiu Xiaolong’s fiction interesting beyond its genre is that it deals deeply with the changes in Chinese society from the Cultural Revolution to the present. Qiu Xiaolong’s latest book is A Loyal Character Dancer.

The American Library Association has an informative page on Banned Books Week on its site, and Google has a page inviting readers to explore banned or challenged books.

The Guardian is running a short profile of Richard Ford, who certainly needs the attention.

It appears that Sony’s next e-book reader will soon be available. The PRS-500 features an “electronic ink” display with higher resolution and contrast than the typical liquid crystal display. There has been a lot of noise on the Web about this device–those who are eager to see digital distribution of books succeed have been excited. Unfortunately, the PRS-500 is another entry on the long list of e-book failures. No, I have not used one. How do I know, then? Here are my top five reasons:

1. Price–the PRS-500 costs $350. I usually borrow books from public and academic libraries. When I do buy books, I buy hardbacks that have been out for a few months from Amazon. With the breaks involved, such as no tax, free shipping, and a large discount, I spend about $12 per book. I can spend $350 and have twenty-nine nice hardback books, or I can spend $350 and have a Sony Reader and zero books. Don’t mention Project Gutenberg’s e-texts. As much as I love Project Gutenberg as a resource, I find that many of the texts are quite sloppily converted. All of the files are also plain text, which can be read by virtually any computing device, which brings me to the next point.
2. Digital Restrictions Management–Sony’s software tells one what one can do with one’s books. One cannot lend them to friends or give them away. One cannot (at least easily) sell them. The files become worthless, in strictly monetary terms, the moment one acquires them. One has no guarantee that one will even be able to access one’s books five years from now. What is the use of going to great expense to build a library that might one day disappear in a puff of bits at someone else’s whim?
3. Display–the display still is not good enough. It is getting close on the contrast front, but it still only manages half the resolution of the cruddiest page. It has no backlight. One of the few things that I enjoy about reading on my Palm is that I can do it late at night in bed without involving other gadgets and without disturbing my wife. The Sony Reader’s display is also apparently marred by artifacts; one can often see the faint remains of the previous page.
4. Tether–I hate being tied down. When I have to take my laptop somewhere, I do. Otherwise I want nothing to do with wires and outlets when I am on the move. The Sony Reader requires a Windows PC (rather expensive dongle, that) to run its iTunes-like e-book store software. It also requires wires and adapters for charging the battery, a task that takes from four to six hours. That’s just too fussy for a book.
5. Selection–there just are not enough books available in Sony’s format. There is no standard e-book format, with e-Reader, Microsoft, Adobe, and Sony, at the very least, all selling incompatible formats. Many publishers opt out of the digital distribution game, and many more ink deals with a single company. The result is a frustrating patchwork of availability, restrictions, and interfaces.

The Washington Post has a review of Ian Buruma’s Murder in Amsterdam: The Death of Theo van Gogh and the Limits of Tolerance.

An article by Jonathan Yardley at The Washington Post on Robert Hughes’s memoir Things I Didn’t Know bears this refreshing conclusion:

Hughes is, by his own rather defiant declaration, “completely an elitist, in the cultural but emphatically not the social sense.” He is, “after all, a cultural critic, and my main job is to distinguish the good from the second-rate, pretentious, sentimental, and boring stuff that saturates culture today.” He quite properly refuses to apologize for this: “I am no democrat in the field of the arts, the only area–other than sports–in which human inequality can be displayed and celebrated without doing social harm.”

An interesting article at The New York Times exposes graft in the Department of Education.

Department of Education officials violated conflict of interest rules when awarding grants to states under President Bush’s billion-dollar reading initiative, and steered contracts to favored textbook publishers, the department’s inspector general said yesterday.

“Some Kind of Wonderful is the prolier-than-thou retelling of Pretty in Pink” begins an unexpected article at Slate. Why should anyone care about such pop culture twaddle? The thrust of the article may surprise–it is the political conservatism of John Hughes.

It is with great relief that I link to a Guardian article reporting Elif Shafak’s acquittal.

Not recommended.

Noam Chomsky spoke about his book Hegemony or Survival: America’s Quest for Global Dominance on The Tavis Smiley Show. The starkly differing timbre of the two voices proved to be an interesting juxtaposition.

The Guardian reports on the recently narrowed field for the 2006 Man Booker prize.

The finalists are:

1. The Night Watch by Sarah Waters
2. Mother’s Milk by Edward St. Aubyn
3. The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai
4. The Secret River by Kate Grenville
5. Carry Me Down by M. J. Hyland
6. In The Country of Men by Hisham Matar

The Washington Post is running a review by Alan Wolfe of Ray Suarez’s The Holy Vote: The Politics of Faith in America. After some initial misgivings, Wolfe finds that the book handles its subject well.

Suarez, who identifies himself as a deeply religious person without giving specifics about his own faith, is offended by the Christian right’s efforts to identify their country with their faith, and he has no problem saying so. The result is a powerful reaffirmation of America’s greatest contribution to human liberty: the separation of church and state.

British-born Moazzam Begg was secretly abducted by U.S. forces and taken to Guantanamo Bay, where he spent nearly two years imprisoned as an enemy combatant of the United States. He was released in March 2005, and has now written a book about his time inside Guantanamo.

The book, Enemy Combatant: My Imprisonment at Guantanamo, Bagram, and Kandahar, details his experiences. Listen to the interview at National Public Radio.

Novelist Elif Shafak is to stand trial for “insulting Turkishness.” How did she do so? She did so by having one of the characters in The Bastard of Istanbul refer to the 1915 deaths of Armenians as genocide.

Powell’s Books blog has (by way of The Atlantic Monthly) a review of Chris Wickham’s Framing the Early Middle Ages: Europe and the Mediterranean, 400-800. This is the sort of nonfiction to which I am naturally drawn, so I surely would have discovered it on my own at some point. Here the numbers alone are impressive–nearly four pounds, over a thousand pages, almost two hundred dollars.

While performing searches on various topics relating to America’s dwindling readership, I came upon a post dealing with the decline of literary fiction. It is nothing revolutionary, but it does bring up a few points that I tend to forget, such as that many people do not even know what literary fiction is.

Not recommended.

John Ezard, writing in The Guardian, reports that novelist Susan Hill has accused public library managers of “abandoning their commitment to books and manoeuvring to turn library buildings into social centres.”

“They have been actively trying for years to get rid of books and introduce almost anything else,” she continued.

The attitude of which Ms. Hill speaks is what drove me from an MLS program in the late 1990s (I ended up with an MA in English instead). There I was pursuing librarianship because of my deep love of literature, many examples of which I had discovered in the stacks of public and academic libraries, and no one wanted to talk about books! The situation in the United States reversed sharply following the bursting of the Internet stock bubble. Apparently the United Kingdom has not seen a similar brake.

Jerome Karabel, a professor of sociology at Berkeley, reviews The Price of Admission: How America’s Ruling Class Buys Its Way into Elite Colleges–and Who Gets Left Outside the Gates at The Washington Post.

The Third Rome: Holy Russia, Tsarism and Orthodoxy (excerpted at The American Journal of Russian and Slavic Studies) by Matthew Raphael Johnson contains the following sentence as part of a rather confrontational paragraph: “In post-modern times, what mass semi-literacy has done is provide the state, as well as far more powerful private concentrations of capital, the ability and media to control far greater masses of people, all the while they believe themselves to be free.”

National Public Radio has a piece on George Eliot’s Middlemarch as part of its “must read books” series.

Motoko Rich’s article in The New York Times on Claire Messud’s experiences with the publishing industry and her new book, The Emperor’s Children, provides an interesting inside look at the dilemma of writers who garner praise but not sales.

I find myself agreeing with Andrew Brown’s assessment at The Guardian that Google’s massive digitization project “looks like one of those uses of technology from which no one benefits.”

Today’s Fresh Air featured an interview with Jonathan Franzen about his memoir The Discomfort Zone: A Personal History.

David Barboza writes in today’s New York Times about Yu Hua’s novel Brothers.

The Washington Post has a positive review of T. Christian Miller’s Blood Money: Wasted Billions, Lost Lives, and Corporate Greed in Iraq.

Recommended.

A post at ALG explains the author’s reluctance as a reader to discover anything about the lives of the writers whose work she enjoys.