Following up on our thoughts from yesterday (The Joys of Rereading) …

The Millions (“The Books We Come Back To“) discusses a very specific type of rereading: people who reread the same book, every year (“Faulkner read Don Quixote once a year, ‘the way some people read the Bible’”). Kind of a neat ideal for an annual ritual.

The New York Times (“Read It Again, Sam“) looks at  rereading from the writer’s perspective: “Some authors reread as a kind of calisthenics”.  And I actually like James Wood a little more now, knowing that he rereads To The Lighthouse every single year. And for some reason, I loved this detail from Sherman Alexie on Emilie Dickinson:

“Another writer who rereads to prepare for the day’s work is the poet and novelist Sherman Alexie, who admires Emily Dickinson so much he doesn’t just reread her — he physically retypes her poems.”

And The Telegraph (“Rereading old books ‘enhances the experience‘”) shares some recent-although-not-quite-profound research on the possible cognitive benefits of the repeated, but different experience of rereading the same books –

I could see an argument being made that there are different sorts of pleasures for the multiple reading experience. Knowing when a favorite part of a book is coming creates a sense of expectation that isn’t present the first time through.

The Guardian (“The pleasures of rereading“) refers to rereading as a sort of ‘time travel.’ And knowing what to expect from a story does provide a certain amount of security –

“Rereading is therapy, despite the accompanying dash of guilt, and I find it strange that not everybody does it. Why wouldn’t you go back to something good? I return to these novels for the same reason I return to beer, or blankets or best friends.”

Here’s a good question, from The Guardian: Who Stole Our Reading Time? Of course, the answer itself is no great mystery:

“Now, the reader is under assault from hundreds of television channels, 3D cinema, a computer-gaming business so large it dwarfs Hollywood, iPhones, Wii, YouTube, free commuter newspapers, an engorged celebrity culture, instant access to all the music ever recorded, 24-hour sports news, and DVD box-sets of shows …  A leisure time that was already precious has been chewed into by text-messaging, Facebook and emails. Almost everyone I speak to claims that they “love books but just can’t find the time to read”. Well, they probably could – they’re just choosing to spend it differently.”

Sure, many more things are competing for our attention now. But it’s too convenient for us to blame the things; it’s still up to us to make a decision to read or not read, after all. And choosing to read means choosing not to do something else. But that also doesn’t mean it is always easy to resist those tempting distractions. When I need to carve out reading time, I prefer to remove myself from even the possibility of temptation: no email, no Internet, no iPhone. Being offline for an hour or two isn’t the end of the world (at least, that’s what I try to tell myself).

The Wall Street Journal (“Finding Time to Read“) chimes in with some additional helpful thoughts: “Reading simply fills all the interstitial moments in my day. I read with my coffee in the morning. I read on the subway, while waiting at the doctor’s office, while on hold with the cable company, in the checkout line at the supermarket and before falling asleep at night.”

And, Nicholas Carr talks about this topic in greater detail in his book, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains.

For more perspective, here’s a 2009 survey from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (which you can download right here). The survey  queried some 13,000 people, covering all sorts of age groups and other demographic breakdowns. The usual caveats aside — graduate students probably read more than busy parents, people working 10-12 hour days may not have much reading time, etc. — the average is somewhere around 15-20 minute of reading a day. Kind of makes you want to pick up a book, doesn’t it? I do wonder what a 2012 survey would look like.

Want to read more? Here’s a few useful tips from Lifehacker: “How to Fit Reading Into Your Schedule and Actually Finish the Books You Want to Read.” I’m a proponent of Tip #1: Schedule a Daily Reading Time, because for the most part, we are creatures of habit. And keeping schedules can mean keeping up good habits.

Do you take notes in your ebooks? I am a chronic note-taker, so the topic of ebook notes is a fairly significant preoccupation of mine. In terms of note-taking and highlighting, most of the significant ebook apps and devices range somewhere between “O.K. to Functionally Non-Existent”, so there is still lots of room for improvement. To that end, the-always interesting O’Reilly TOC (“How to improve ebook marginalia“) brainstorms some of the ebook note-taking features we’d like to be seeing sooner rather than later –

• Jot notes anywhere you like (e.g. blank pages in the back) to keep track of your overall reaction to the book.
• Highlight non-contiguous phrases on a page, editing out all the boring bits and spotlighting the author’s best points.
• Draw arrows, circles, and all manner of geometric curlicues, reminding you of how this section here relates to that point over there.

The Guardian (“Ebooks: a more civilised way of scribbling in the margins?) also weighs in on ebooks and “the contested area of marginalia and underlinings.” They correctly point out that main virtues of ebook notes is that they are searchable, indexable, and shareable (ideally). I love searchable book notes.  An integrated, easier way to share book notes would be awfully nice, too. GigaOM asks a rather important question: “Who Owns Your Notes in e-Books?”

“You buy a paper book and you physically own it. The same is not true of the e-book; the seller can revoke your “ownership” given a violation of set conditions. Even worse, a company can choose to stop handling a given reader, putting all of the content that has been “purchased” in a legal limbo.

These worst-case scenarios are not likely to happen with the big companies, say Amazon and Barnes & Noble, but the fact is these things can happen. While it would be bad enough to lose the right to read the books you have purchased, what if you’ve taken notes in the books you can no longer access?”

Portability of ebook notes is so, so important; they are the notes that you take, and you should not have them locked within a single device, just because that’s the way things are. I think notes and highlighting exporting is absolutely one of the best things about Amazon Kindle. Lastly, here’s a useful post from the Google Books blog — “Take Note(s): Highlighting your Google eBooks”

Do we remember what we read better from paper books, or ebooks? Other than our own personal inclinations, the early — and fairly preliminary — research at University of Leicester gives paper books the edge. From Time (“Do E-Books Make It Harder to Remember What You Just Read?“) –

“What we found was that people on paper started to ‘know’ the material more quickly over the passage of time,” says Garland. “It took longer and [required] more repeated testing to get into that knowing state [with the computer reading, but] eventually the people who did it on the computer caught up with the people who [were reading] on paper.”

I’d say that I read about half of my books in print and ink form, and half in ebook form; personally, I haven’t noticed much of a difference between my ability to recall between paper or screen. Although, for ease of use, I would still prefer paper books for studying, etc.

Also, I don’t know if I fully grasped the distinction being made here between ‘knowing’ and ‘remembering’:

“Second, the book readers seemed to digest the material more fully. Garland explains that when you recall something, you either “know” it and it just “comes to you” — without necessarily consciously recalling the context in which you learned it — or you “remember” it by cuing yourself about that context and then arriving at the answer. “Knowing” is better because you can recall the important facts faster and seemingly effortlessly.”

Neuroscience on the topic does indicate that spatial context is an important cue for our memories. Therefore, if we’re talking about textbooks which tend to have more visual landmarks (diagrams, tables, etc.) there is an argument to be made:

“Context and landmarks may actually be important to going from “remembering” to “knowing.” The more associations a particular memory can trigger, the more easily it tends to be recalled. Consequently, seemingly irrelevant factors like remembering whether you read something at the top or the bottom of page — or whether it was on the right or left hand side of a two-page spread or near a graphic — can help cement material in mind. 

…   E-books, however, provide fewer spatial landmarks than print, especially pared-down versions like the early Kindles, which simply scroll through text and don’t even show page numbers, just the percentage already read. In a sense, the page is infinite and limitless, which can be dizzying. Printed books on the other hand, give us a physical reference point, and part of our recall includes how far along in the book we are, something that’s more challenging to assess on an e-book.

Even for non-textbooks, I tend to believe that page numbers, and chapter breaks are good markers of memory for us. Granted, reading on screens is a fairly new development — and there’s an interesting quote from Jakob Nielson on something I had not thought about: screen size. “The bigger the screen, the more people can remember and the smaller, the less they can remember.”

I wonder about what will come of our ability to learn new reading strategies on digital compared to paper reading. When, and how that happens, remains to be seen.

Have you ever wondered what a Haruki Murakami playlist would sound like? Music feels like second nature in a Murakami novel — and when you put all of those songs together, it is quite an eclectic mix.

For some background, you should check out Murakami’s essay (The New York Times: “Jazz Messenger“) with his reflections on music, and writing –

“Whether in music or in fiction, the most basic thing is rhythm. Your style needs to have good, natural, steady rhythm, or people won’t keep reading your work. I learned the importance of rhythm from music — and mainly from jazz. Next comes melody — which, in literature, means the appropriate arrangement of the words to match the rhythm. If the way the words fit the rhythm is smooth and beautiful, you can’t ask for anything more. Next is harmony — the internal mental sounds that support the words. Then comes the part I like best: free improvisation. Through some special channel, the story comes welling out freely from inside. All I have to do is get into the flow. Finally comes what may be the most important thing: that high you experience upon completing a work — upon ending your “performance” and feeling you have succeeded in reaching a place that is new and meaningful. And if all goes well, you get to share that sense of elevation with your readers (your audience). That is a marvelous culmination that can be achieved in no other way.

GalleyCat has this wonderful post: “Spotify Playlists for Writers: Haruki Murakami” (including Sinfonietta, It’s Only a Paper Moon, Archduke Trio, The Thieving Magpie, and lots of others). Random House has a list of classical music and where it appears in Murakami’s novels.

And Wind-Up Bird Chronicle set to music? Cool.

“Wind-Up Bird Preludes engages in some pretty head-spinning musical and literary referencing. The title of the set comes from Haruki Murakami’s massive novel The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. Murakami’s novel itself is divided into three separately published parts, each named after classical pieces, respectively Rossini’s The Thieving Magpie, Schumann’s Bird as Prophet and “Birdcatcher” in reference to Mozart’s The Magic Flute. Jazz music also plays a central roll in the musical backdrop of the novel. I was always impressed by the sophistication and depth of meaning in Murakami’s choices of these pieces and thought it would be an interesting project to bring these presences of to Rossini, Schumann, Mozart, and jazz full circle as fleeting presences in a set of pieces that respond to the form of his novel.  

Throughout Chronicle, the titular “wind-up bird” is heard—though never seen—by various characters, and its appearance often coincides with, or even prophecises, the onset of some calamity. That role of the bird in his novel seems to draw a clear line to that of the magpie in Rossini’s opera, whose thieving ways create the central dramatic conflict. In a more earthbound reference, the novel’s protagonist is searching for his wife, with the parallels to Papageno being obvious.”

Not that I’m obsessive, or anything, but Murakami translator Jay Rubin also did a book which also delves more into the topic (and other things): Haruki Murkami and the Music of Words.

And The Guardian (“Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood to score film of Haruki Murakami novel“) has a Radiohead/Norwegian Wood connection that I did not know about before.

Well it’s no T-Rex iPad cover, but the Out of Print eBook Jackets ($40-$45) are pretty slick. It’s a neat way to make your Kindle, Nexus 7, or iPad feel a little more book-like. I’m not going to lie. I kind of want one.

Here’s a link to their KickStarter page, with more details and more pictures of the reading device covers in question:

“Our cases are made just like books using the real thing: book board and book cloth, assembled by hand at the oldest bookbinder in the country. The cradles are made of a protective rubber with 30% recycled materials. The finished cases are 100% made in the U.S. The book cloth is treated to improve durability.”

Here’s a creative idea, while the world wonders about viable ebook pricing models. From Mashable — “Unglue.it Wants to Make a Creative Commons for E-books”

“Through a crowdfunding platform inspired by Kickstarter and the public radio model, Unglue.it is hosting campaigns to turn individual, already-published books into Creative Commonslicensed e-books. This means that you could legally read and share e-books for free with anyone across the globe.

… The cost of a Creative Commons license varies with every book: “A Creative Commons license could cost nothing if the author wants to give it away,” Hellman said. “A Harry Potter novel would be nine figures. Unglue.it has a $1,000 rights minimum, but we’re expecting an average campaign to close around $10,000.”

It’s not cheap. But I do think it’s a laudable goal. At the very least, it’s a fascinating social experiment: will enough people pay for a book that will then be available, DRM-free, for everyone else in the world? From the Unglue.it website:

“What if you could give a book to everyone on earth? Get an ebook and read it on any device, in any format, forever? Give an ebook to your library, for them to share? Own DRM-free ebooks, legally? Read free ebooks, and know their creators had been fairly paid?

At Unglue.it, you can pledge toward creating ebooks that will be legally free, worldwide. These books have already been traditionally published, but they’re stuck: legal restrictions keep you from being able to enjoy and share them.

Unglue.it gets them unstuck. Authors and publishers decide what amount lets them freely share their books with the world while still making a living. We raise that fee here through crowdfunding: people like you chipping in. When campaigns succeed, the rights holders get paid, and they issue a free electronic edition under a Creative Commons license.”

Food, and literature? Yes.

Here’s a fun one from Flavorwire (“How to Eat Like Your Favorite Authors”). It is quite a list, with varying levels of complexity (ranging from Vladimir Nabokov’s Eggs à la Nabocoque to Salman Rushdie’s Lamb Korma).

Personally, I like F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Turkey Recipes – 

“TURKEY REMAINS AND HOW TO INTER THEM WITH NUMEROUS SCARCE RECIPES

At this post holiday season, the refrigerators of the nation are overstuffed with large masses of turkey, the sight of which is calculated to give an adult an attack of dizziness. It seems, therefore, an appropriate time to give the owners the benefit of my experience as an old gourmet, in using this surplus material. Some of the recipes have been in my family for generations. (This usually occurs when rigor mortis sets in.) They were collected over years, from old cook books, yellowed diaries of the Pilgrim Fathers, mail order catalogues, golf-bags and trash cans. Not one but has been tried and proven—there are headstones all over America to testify to the fact.

Very well then. Here goes:

1. Turkey Cocktail: To one large turkey add one gallon of vermouth and a demijohn of angostura bitters. Shake.

2. Turkey à la Francais: Take a large ripe turkey, prepare as for basting and stuff with old watches and chains and monkey meat. Proceed as with cottage pudding.

3. Turkey and Water: Take one turkey and one pan of water. Heat the latter to the boiling point and then put in the refrigerator. When it has jelled, drown the turkey in it. Eat. In preparing this recipe it is best to have a few ham sandwiches around in case things go wrong.

4. Turkey Mongole: Take three butts of salami and a large turkey skeleton, from which the feathers and natural stuffing have been removed. Lay them out on the table and call up some Mongole in the neighborhood to tell you how to proceed from there.

5. Turkey Mousse: Seed a large prone turkey, being careful to remove the bones, flesh, fins, gravy, etc. Blow up with a bicycle pump. Mount in becoming style and hang in the front hall.

6. Stolen Turkey: Walk quickly from the market, and, if accosted, remark with a laugh that it had just flown into your arms and you hadn’t noticed it. Then drop the turkey with the white of one egg—well, anyhow, beat it.

7. Turkey à la Crême: Prepare the crême a day in advance. Deluge the turkey with it and cook for six days over a blast furnace. Wrap in fly paper and serve.”

Jonathan Franzen’s Pasta with Kale is the most likely recipe I’m going to try this weekend –

“This is good food for a working writer: cheap, easy to make, handsome, elegant, nutritionally well-balanced, devoid of saturated fat, private, erotic, virtuous, delicious. I eat it hot the first night and then cold as leftovers for two further dinners and maybe one lunch.

1 lb. fresh kale
1 lb. good dry pasta, ideally Del Verde brand
1 kettle of water with lots of salt
3 medium-size garlic cloves
1/2 cup (or less) extra-virgin olive oil
Salt and pepper to taste”

It actually sounds pretty good … but what makes it “erotic”? Freak.

Honorable Mentions:

Ernest Hemingway’s pan fried trout

Elizabeth Bishop’s Brownies

Salman Rushdie’s Lamb Korma

Allen Ginsberg’s Cold Summer Borscht

And check out at NPR Emily Dickinson’s Coconut Cake recipe.

“In all, slightly more than 10 percent of Dickinson’s poems employ images of food and drink,” she writes.”