Is reading online making us more prone to reading shorter and shorter articles and pieces of writing? I wonder sometimes, at least from my own personal experience.

The Economist (“Reading online: Words, words, words“) has an excellent column on LongReads.com, including its Twitter hashtag origins, and what a long read is (“Mr Armstrong defines a long read as between 1,500 and 30,000 words. Any shorter and it is an article; any longer, and you might as well call it a book.”)

With so many things to potentially read online, websites which do a good job of picking out the interesting from all the rest have a lot of value. So how does LongReads work?

“Curation is key, says Mr Armstrong, at least as customers go. Longreads is an attempt to fish out nuggets of literary genius from the preponderance of online dross. These need not be and, indeed, typically aren’t the most popular stories. Suggestions, some coming from followers tweeting the #longreads tag, are posted on its website, as well as on Twitter, Facebook and in e-mail newsletters. Longreads also automatically constructs a user page on its site for any Twitter user (identified by an @tag) who employes the #longreads tag.”

The Economist mentions some of the dollars and sense behind online reading, reading services, and what kind of impact it might mean for publishers of that online reading content.

And while we’re on the subject, Instapaper and Read It Later are absolutely essential websites/apps in terms of keeping organized with your online reading.

Here’s a great list from Maria Popova (brainpickings.org) list: “7 Obscure Children’s Books by Authors of Grown-Up Literature.”

It’s quite a list of literary names, isn’t it?  I for one am very much looking forward to some day making my kids read James Joyce, Mark Twain, Virginia Woolf, T.S. Eliot, Mary Shelley, Leo Tolstoy, and Oscar Wilde. Start with the children’s books, and we’ll work our way up from there.

I’ll guess that Eliot’s Book of Practical Cats is the least obscure famous-author-kids-lit book on this list (and the Twain one might be the funniest). The most interesting to me is going to have to be James Joyce’s  The Cat and the Devil – “about the cat of Beaugency and a moral dilemma, a classic fable narrative mixing Irish wit with French folklore, shaken and stirred with Joyce’s extraordinary storytelling.” If  used copies were selling for $80.00+, I’d  be very tempted to add this one to the personal library.

I’ll always have a special fondness for Virginia Woolf, so worth mentioning –

“Virginia Woolf’s The Widow and the Parrot is, roughly, a tongue-in-cheek moral story about kindness to animals and though Quentin, Woolf’s older nephew, bemoaned it as a disappointment and “a tease…based on the worst Victorian examples,” devoid of Woolf’s typical subversive humor he had hoped for, it remains a sweet reflection of character, her taking the time to contribute to a small family pet project in the heat of her literary career.”

We Too Were Children, Mr. Barrie has an excellent rundown of this Virginia Woolf-penned children’s book; with some enjoyable Virginia Woolf trivia: “What might have been more startling than the text even, was the revelation shown in a reproduction of the first page of the holograph, that Woolf was the story’s first illustrator.”

From FlavorWire: “The 20 Most Beautiful Bookstores in the World” –

“We can’t overestimate the importance of bookstores — they’re community centers, places to browse and discover, and monuments to literature all at once — so we’ve put together a list of the most beautiful bookstores in the world, from Belgium to Japan to Slovakia.”

Sure, now is a particularly apt time to wonder about the fate of bookstores in general. I’ll admit that I buy a lot of my books online — but for the sheer pleasure of serendipitous discovery, online bookstores are a completely different experience from the physical bookstores that we know and love.  I have some fond memories of Shakespeare & Company in Paris. El Ateneo Grand Splendid (pictured, left) really  is something.

And for what it’s worth, The Last Bookstore in the Old Bank District of Los Angeles is a personal favorite. There’s something about leafing through used books (more on that thought later) that makes for a more personal encounter with those old books:

“The name was chosen with irony, but it has become a self-fulfilling prophecy as physical bookstores are dying out like dinosaurs from the meteoric impact of Amazon and e-books.” 

Have you heard about The Philosophy of Food project at the University of North Texas?

David Kaplan’s The Philosophy of Food covers a fascinating range of topics (including: Food metaphysics, Food epistemology, and Food ethics). The questions raised by food metaphysics (food as nature? food as culture? food as spirituality? as aesthetic object?) seems especially interesting to me.

The introduction to The Philosophy of Food certainly piqued my interest:

“Philosophers have a long but scattered history of analyzing food. Plato famously details an appropriate diet in Book II of the Republic. The Roman Stoics, Epicurus and Seneca, as well as Enlightenment philosophers such as Locke, Rousseau, Voltaire, Marx, and Nietzsche, all discuss various aspects of food production and consumption. In the twentieth century, philosophers considered such issues as vegetarianism, agricultural ethics, food rights, biotechnology, and gustatory aesthetics. In the twenty-first century, philosophers continue to address these issues and new ones concerning the globalization of food, the role of technology, and the rights and responsibilities of consumers and producers. Typically, these philosophers call their work “food ethics” or “agricultural ethics.” But I think they sell themselves short. Philosophers do more than treat food as a branch of ethical theory. They also examine how it relates to the fundamental areas of philosophical inquiry: metaphysics, epistemology, aesthetics, political theory, and, of course, ethics. The phrase “philosophy of food” is more accurate. We might eventually come to think of the philosophy of food as a perfectly ordinary “philosophy of” if more philosophers address food issues and more colleges offer courses on the subject—or at least that is my hope.

But why is this subject – a footnote to Plato just like the rest of the philosophy – not yet fully entrenched as a standard philosophical subject?  Why do philosophers only occasionally address questions concerning food?” 

I was going to insert a comment somewhere about food for thought, but, sometimes those kinds of puns just aren’t worth it (and thanks to The Daily Beast for this very interesting find).

Here’s a book about books worth checking out, courtesy of Maria Popova at Brainpickings.org (“Books: A Living History“).

I spend a lot of time thinking about books as a form of information technology. Thinking about the present and future of books necessarily means thinking about its past — all 2000 years or so of it — and Martyn Lyons’ book covers a lot of ground.

What do we mean by ‘book’? I prefer a more encompassing sort of definition, similar to this excerpt from Books: A Living History – 

“Defining the book itself is a risky operation. I prefer to be inclusive rather than exclusive, and so I offer a very loose definition. The book, for example, does not simply exist as a bound text of sheets of printed paper — the traditional codex with which we are most familiar today. Such a definition forgets two millennia of books before print, and the various forms that textual communication took before the codex was invented.

A traditional definition based only on the codex would also exclude hypertext and the virtual book, which have done away with the book’s conventional material support. I prefer to embrace all these forms, from cuneiform script to the printed codex to the digitized electronic book, and to trace the history of the book as far back as the invention of writing systems themselves. The term ‘book’, then, is a kind of shorthand that stands for many forms of written textual communication adopted in past societies, using a wide variety of materials”

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Selectism.com (“Martyn Lyons’ “Books – A Living History”“) has some excellent page previews of Books — A Living History.

I am utterly fascinated by bookshelves. Specifically, other people’s bookshelves. Whenever I’m visiting someone’s home for the first time, my eyes always seem to find their way to the bookshelves. I can’t help it. And yet, there’s always that sneaking sense that I’m meddling a bit more than I should be, by taking a peak into someone’s inner life in the form of books.

Leah Price has an enjoyable essay on bookshelves which articulates some of that meddling feeling when we sneak peaks at those bookshelves (The New York Times: “The Subconscious Shelf“). The books we and other people tend to display can sometimes be quite a personal thing: “To expose a bookshelf is to compose a self.”

Part of it might be self-motivation (“I’ll read this … eventually”), part of might be vanity on our parts (“Check it out: I read Proust!”), and maybe the motives are equal parts deception and self-deception when it comes to those displayed books that we’ll honestly never read:“We display spines that we’ll never crack; we hide the books that we thumb to death. Emily Post disapproved: her 1930 home decorating manual compared “filling your rooms with books you know you will never open” to “wearing a mask and a wig.”

Part of the appeal of bookshelves to me is that it can be a private and surprisingly revealing look into someone’s internal life — either how that internal life is, or how they hope it might be — and I don’t think it’s a stretch to think that we are all to some extent the things that we choose to read. And now, social reading websites such as GoodReads.com or even the “Books” we decide to list on a Facebook profile are very much a part of that projection of the bookish shelves we want to show to the rest of the world.

“Because books can be owned without being read and read without being owned, bookshelves reveal at once our most private selves and our most public personas. They can serve as a utilitarian tool or a theatrical prop. For a coffee-table book of my own, I recently toured a dozen writers’ book collections. Gazing at the shelves of a novelist whose writings lie dog-eared on my own bookcase, I felt as lucky as a restaurantgoer granted a peek at the chef’s refrigerator.”

Flann O’Brien (aka Brian O’Nolan) may really have been on to something with his book handling service idea. I’m really thinking of bringing this idea back. And I think I’d call it, “Already Read Books” –

“In the 1940s, the Irish humorist Flann O’Brien proposed a “book handling” service for clients who liked the look of a well-stocked library but lacked the time or ability to read its contents themselves. If you joined his book club, O’Brien explained, “we do the choosing for you, and, when you get the book, it is ready-rubbed, i.e., subjected free of charge to our expert handlers,” at a series of different price points:

“Popular Handling — Each volume to be well and truly handled, four leaves in each to be dog-eared, and a tram ticket, cloak-room docket or other comparable article inserted in each as a forgotten book-mark. . . .

“Premier Handling — Each volume to be thoroughly handled, eight leaves in each to be dog-eared, a suitable passage in not less than 25 volumes to be underlined in red pencil, and a leaflet in French on the works of Victor Hugo to be inserted as a forgotten book-mark in each. . . .

“De Luxe Handling — Each volume to be mauled savagely, the spines of the smaller volumes to be damaged in a manner that will give the impression that they have been carried around in pockets, a passage in every volume to be underlined in red pencil with an exclamation or interrogation mark inserted in the margin opposite, an old Gate Theatre programme to be inserted in each volume as a forgotten book-mark (3 percent discount if old Abbey programmes are accepted), not less than 30 volumes to be treated with old coffee, tea, porter or whiskey stains, and not less than five volumes to be inscribed with forged signatures of the authors.”

Here’s one of the better book reviews I’ve read in awhile.

From the Sunday Book Review, New York Times: “What Friedrich Nietzsche Did to America” –

And really, there’s no such thing as too much Nietzsche:

“With escalating intensity, he issued innovative works of philosophy that challenged every element of European civilization. He celebrated the artistic heroism of Beethoven and Goethe; denigrated the “slave morality” of Christianity, which transfigured weakness into virtue and vital strength into sin; and called on the strong in spirit to bring about a “transvaluation of all values.” The “higher man” — or as Nietzsche sometimes called him, the “overman” or “Übermensch” — did not succumb to envy or long for the afterlife; rather he willed that his life on earth repeat itself over and over exactly as it was. In later works, Nietzsche wrote with continued brilliance and growing megalomania of his disdain for the common “herd,” the dangers of nihilism and the possibility that the will to power is the “Ur-fact of all history.”

American Nietzsche by Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen (University of Chicago Press) sounds like an excellent study to me. (interesting note: you can buy a 30-Day ebook license of American Nietzsche for $7.00): “Ratner-Rosenhagen concludes that Cavell, Bloom and the pragmatist philosopher Richard Rorty constructed “an American Nietzsche” by drawing upon “philosophical interpretations which understood that in a world without foundations, our views of truth, language and the self are not mirrors of reality but useful fictions to explore new avenues of discovery, new sources of wonder.”

An intellectual history of Nietzsche in the United States covers a lot of ground, after all (the relationship between Nietzsche and Emerson is particularly interesting). I’ll resist quoting page-long passages here. But, here are a few of the good parts:

• “From the start, Nietzsche’s American readers were bewitched and bedeviled … young Americans who felt estranged from their culture, and has continued to do so. But today’s inescapable and perplexing Nietzsche is not necessarily the same Nietzsche who inspired readers in the past”

• “The German émigré and Princeton professor Walter Kaufmann almost single-handedly revived his standing with his many translations and forceful reminder that Nietzsche hated anti-Semites and German nationalists as well as woolly-headed romantics. Kaufmann’s Nietzsche was a late flower of the Enlightenment, a tough-minded rationalist with the courage to face the Darwinian revelation that there is no purpose to nature or to our existence. The true task of the overman was to overcome himself, not others, and to do so by sculpturing his impulses and thoughts and inheritances into a willed unity that could be called “style.”

• “As Ratner-Rosenhagen shows, a later generation of American interpreters, influenced by Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, esteemed Nietzsche not as the guarantor of the individual but as its dismantler. “The ‘doer’ is merely a fiction added to the deed,” Nietzsche wrote in “On the Genealogy of Morals,” and the implication was clear: If God was dead, so too were equally fictitious entities like the self. There was no objective truth, only the truth-effects engendered by the workings of power and the instabilities of language. Even as this poststructuralist Nietzsche occupied the university in the 1980s, it bred a counterreaction from conservative intellectuals.”

Here’s one that I’ve been thinking about, courtesy of Media Bistro: “Could Selling Used eBooks Work?”

“The whole concept of selling used digital content is tough. Yes, it was nice in the days of print to resell records, CDs, DVDs and books that you have already listened to or read, and to pick up used copies of other people’s old media at a cheaper price. But how do you do this with digital content?”

“What’s actually happening, of course, is not the transfer of a physical object, but the transfer of access rights or data. Data don’t depreciate, so there’s no real reason to discount the product because it’s been used. The straight transfer is therefore rather dull: person A yields it to person B for the same amount he or she paid for it, and person B gets the file via bluetooth or similar rather than via Whispernet or broadband download. Um. No measurable benefit to anyone. Or, yes, you’d end up with a market where people would discount in order to make some money back, and ultimately drive down the value of the book. Not great news.”

We took a look at Melville House’s HybridBooks earlier (“What are ‘Hybrid Books’?“), and the New York Times provided a closer look at the reading experience: “The Book Beyond the Book“.

“The electronic element comes in with the ancillary material. The last page of the Melville edition directs readers to a Web site, where they will find an 1852 map of lower Manhattan: a recipe for Ginger Nuts, a biscuit that plays a role in the narrative; lengthy excepts from Emerson and Thoreau; a contemporaneous classified ad for a scrivener; and similar material.

“Basically, we decided to mimic our own reading process,” Mr. Johnson said “When I read a great classic, if I like it, I want the experience to somehow continue, so I will pursue more information about the writer, or the setting, or some aspect of the plot’s background. (Dueling? What’s up with that?) My mind wanders, imagining what the world of the book looked like. And so on. Now we have curated exactly that kind of material, and it allows you to linger in the world of the book, to understand more about it — to simply luxuriate in the world of the book longer. It’s something more than just the book, but something very much ‘of’ the book. This seems very innovative to me at the same time that it seems kind of an obvious innovation.”

Here’s something to think about: “Should eBooks Be Distinguished From Books?” (eBookNewser)

Sure, it’s a question for ebook-obsessives and publishers to think about now. But, it’s not all that far-fetched to think about how that distinction might seem less and less clear as time goes on (after all, remember that too-cute video with the toddler was confounded that a paper magazine didn’t work like an iPad?) –

“This, in and of itself, points out that the stigma of an eBook over a print book. Aside from the obvious, eBooks being short for electronic books, Archer raises a bigger issue. Should eBooks be distinguished from their print counterparts?

Maybe and maybe not. Unless the format changes the experience as enhanced eBooks do, then a book is a book, be it paperback, hardcover or digital.”

Should there be a distinction? It’s worth some discussion. The fact that such a question can be asked is an interesting one to me. On the one hand, there are some who may well think a book is a book is a book. And, on the other hand, there is of course a pretty set distinction between books and ebooks, and I don’t necessarily see that changing any time soon. But, still.