Books
George Saunders: The brain-dead megaphone
“…the nightly news may soon consist entirely of tirades by men so angry that all they can do is sputter while punching themselves in the face, punctuated by videos of dogs blowing up after eating firecrackers, and dog-explosion experts rating the funniness of the videos…”
I think I’m going to enjoy this book.
New Sony Reader e-book: better, still not perfect
According to Mobile Tech Review, the new PRS-700 is better than the previous Reader:
Sony has worked a near miracle with their touch screen and touch-centric user interface. The Reader is simply a joy to use in terms of ergonomics, control and navigation. This is by far the most natural way to manage, navigate and read books we’ve seen so far. Alas, its lesser contrast doesn’t warm our bookish hearts, and for those in love with e-ink’s paper-like look, that’s a tough one to swallow. For those new to eBook readers or those who don’t mind reading from matte notebook displays, the PRS-700 has greater appeal. As always, the Reader is a great way to carry around a huge library of books and avoid the storage issues of traditional books.
I was actually playing with the current model yesterday, and while it’s a lovely wee gadget it’s still not the right reader for me. What I want is the Reader’s form factor with the iPhone’s wireless and two apps: NetNewsWire and Instapaper. That’d work.
As Engadget says:
with no wireless of any sort you’re stuck filling this one via USB, SD, or MS Duo. In other words there’s still no perfect choice in the world of the e-ink reader — but it is awfully hard to ignore the Reader’s sleek exterior when compared to the Kindle’s distinctively sci-fi doorstop look.
The lost years and last days of David Foster Wallace
A superb (and very sad) bit of journalism from Rolling Stone.
His life was a map that ends at the wrong destination. Wallace was an A student through high school, he played football, he played tennis, he wrote a philosophy thesis and a novel before he graduated from Amherst, he went to writing school, published the novel, made a city of squalling, bruising, kneecapping editors and writers fall moony-eyed in love with him. He published a thousand-page novel, received the only award you get in the nation for being a genius, wrote essays providing the best feel anywhere of what it means to be alive in the contemporary world, accepted a special chair at California’s Pomona College to teach writing, married, published another book and, last month, hanged himself at age 46.
Three good things and one bad one
Good: The new Christopher Brookmyre, James Lee Burke and Ian Rankin novels.
Bad: The new Girls Aloud single.
Better e-book readers are coming
Excellent news. We’re not quite at the point where I’d want to dump my daily paper for a digital Daily Me, but we’re getting closer.
The iRex Reader 1000 offers a 10.2-inch diagonal E-Inkscreen, far larger than Kindle’s 6-inch screen or even iRex’s own 8.1-inch diagonal iLiad, its last e-book model. That stretched display is designed to work with any file format, be it an e-book, a full-sized PDF, a Word document or HTML. Like earlier iRex devices, it sports a stylus and touch screen for taking notes and marking documents.
…Business-targeted readers also come with business-sized price tags. Though Plastic Logic won’t yet reveal the price for its device, iRex says its basic reader will start at $650. (By contrast, Kindle sells for $360.) Adding a writable screen to the iRex reader will cost another $100, and equipping it with wi-fi, Bluetooth and a 3G cell connection for downloading documents will raise the price to $850.
But nonbusiness consumers, take heart: Cheaper, book-focused e-readers are also likely to be revamped soon.
Why let an author’s death put an end to a series?
Following on from the news that Eoin Colfer, best known for the Artemis Fowl books, will be writing the next book in the Hitch-Hiker’s Guide To The Galaxy, I have my own announcement: I’ve been commissioned to write the sequel to James Joyce’s Ulysses. Obviously I can’t say too much about it, but I can promise that it’ll feature more car chases than the original.
Babies don’t come with instruction manuals. But you can buy one
You get a lot of advice when you’re about to become a parent, or when you’ve just become a parent. Most of it is well-intentioned, but it’s largely useless. Sometimes it’s contradictory - so one person says “you MUST do this!” while someone else says “you MUST NOT do this!”; sometimes it’s based on half-remembered newspaper scare stories or long-discredited parenting theories; sometimes it’s based on rose-tinted nostalgia; and sometimes it’s from someone who’s just really, really thick and passionately believes in whatever New Age shite is kicking around.
Even when the advice is good, it’s still pointless. If you’re about to become a parent, you just know that everything’s going to be great and that you’ll automatically become The Best Parent The World Has Ever Seen - so you ignore it. And if you’ve just become a parent, it’s a bloody miracle you can remember your own name. You’re barely capable of making a sandwich, let alone absorbing parenting advice.
There is the odd exception, though. Shortly before Baby Bigmouth turned up, a colleague of Mrs Bigmouth told her that The Baby Whisperer book had changed his life. And he seemed to be telling the truth. While parenthood isn’t easy, he’d changed from an absolute wreck of a man into something approaching a human being. The difference, he said, was The Baby Whisperer.
We bought the book. In fact, we bought two - Secrets of The Baby Whisperer, and The Baby Whisperer Solves All Your Problems. Unfortunately we bought them just before becoming parents, so while we did read them the advice went into our brains and immediately fell out of our ears. We were going to be the best parents ever! We didn’t need no parenting books! And then, when we were parents on pretty much sod-all sleep, we read them again. But we were too tired to follow a sentence, let alone a chapter.
Eventually, though, we did manage to read the books and to put some of the advice into practice.
And it changed our lives.
You know me. I’m a cynical sod. But my tongue isn’t in my cheek here. By following the ideas in the books we went from utterly clueless, desperately tired parents to utterly clueless, desperately tired parents who know how best to deal with an extremely spirited baby. We get a reasonable night’s sleep. We know how to avoid over-stimulation and interrupted sleep. We know how to ensure Baby Bigmouth gets enough food during the day to ensure she doesn’t wake up hungry in the wee small hours. And most importantly of all, we’re enjoying being parents.
Babies, we’re all told, don’t come with instruction manuals. But the Baby Whisperer books are the next best thing.
Make Amazon like a real bookshop
This is great: an interface for Amazon that attempts to recreate the bookshop browsing experience.
[Via MetaFilter]
Kill Your Friends: good on music, sub-American Psycho story
John Niven’s book, Kill Your Friends, is set in the music business at the height of Britpop. Niven knows what he’s talking about - he was an A&R man at the height of Britpop - and his protagonist’s rants about the music business, consumers and the general bovine stupidity of artists clearly come from experience. Pity the opening quote, Hunter S Thompson’s “cruel and shallow money trench” is a misquote (HST was talking about the TV business).
Here’s the book blurb:
It’s not dog-eat-dog around here…it’s dog-gang-rapes-dog-then-tortures-him-for-five-days-before-burying-him-alive-and-taking-out-every-motherfucker-the-dog-has-ever-known. Meet Steven Stelfox. London 1997: New Labour is sweeping into power and Britpop is at its zenith. Twenty-seven-year-old A&R man Stelfox is slashing and burning his way through the music industry, a world where ‘no one knows anything’ and where careers are made and broken by chance and the fickle tastes of the general public - ‘Yeah, those animals’. Fuelled by greed and inhuman quantities of cocaine Stelfox, blithely criss-crosses the globe (’New York, Cologne, Texas, Miami, Cannes: you shout at waiters and sign credit card slips and all that really changes is the quality of the porn’) searching for the next hit record amid a relentless orgy of self-gratification.
But as the hits dry up and the industry begins to change, Stelfox must take the notion of cutthroat business practices to murderous new levels in a desperate attempt to salvage his career.”Kill Your Friends” is a dark, satirical and hysterically funny evisceration of the record business, a place populated by frauds, charlatans and bluffers, where ambition is a higher currency than talent, and where it seems anything can be achieved - as long as you want it badly enough.
As a satire on the music industry, Kill Your Friends is pretty much peerless. (Real) A&R stupidity is mercilessly skewered, artists of all stripes get it in the neck and one particular rant, a Trainspotting-esque monologue about bands who want record deals, should be printed in 72-point type and nailed to the wall of every rehearsal room in the world. Some of the fictional artists are clearly drawn from real ones, like the self-indulgent drum’n'bass superstar and the band producing sub-Radiohead whiney nonsense, and many of the music business characters appear to be thinly disguised versions or composites of real-life characters.
As a novel, though, it isn’t great. Niven’s going for an American Psycho thing here, but American Psycho did it much better. You can’t help but think Niven should have written a memoir rather than a novel.
If you liked NYPD Blue or Hill Street Blues, you’ll like this
…because it’s great.
