Ebooks...

I was surprised to read in a post on Publisher's Weekly that an industry study negates the popular assumption that ebook sales eat into the print market. Ebooks - particularly etextbooks - were heavily used, but didn't impact print sales. That's good news and bad news. For the promoters of the Kindle, saving trees is a big selling point. But the ebook reader won't necessarily save any trees... instead, there's the additional kilowatts (perhaps just watts) the readers will require. That technically adds to the electrical power we need to generate... so ebooks are hypothetically more convenient (how's the Kindle going to handle getting dropped in sand?), no improvement on saving trees, and another damn battery operated appliance.

So what's the upside? Another gadget, something else to buy. Hmm... do I sense another addition to the junkpile of history where now resides the 8-track tape player?

Literary history

I was thinking of great literary nonfiction I've read, which includes some of Orwell's work, and others like John McPhee. My favorites have been history titles: Son of the Morning Star and Custer and Sitting Bull, Nathan Philbrick's Mayflower the most recent. I'm currently working through Lepore's New York Burning. The latter is not going to make my list of great non-fiction. Lepore has fleshed out pre-Revolutionary New York City nicely, especially its slave population, but her writing bogs down in the way that academics sometimes do when trying to write for a popular crowd.

The lack of zombie novels...

Why, oh why, do I enjoy zombie flicks so? A good one is a real treat, as compared to the many very-low budget flicks one can find on Netflix. I have never read a good zombie novel (correction: I have never read any zombie novel). This may be because I don't read science fiction anymore. Or because there's no Mary Shelley of Zombies.



A quick search of Amazon (don't you freaking love the inter-web?) provides four zombie titles, but only one novel. I expect there must be more than one, but Amazon feeds my suspicion that there aren't many.

So I'm going to write one...

George Orwell

Or Eric Blair. As nonfiction writers go, Orwell is among my favorites. During and after earning my graduate degree in history I found myself reading almost everying he wrote. The one that endures among others is Down and Out in Paris and London. Orwell was a beacon of truth in a time of much bullshit. He favored socialism in postwar England, but he wasn't afraid to take on Socialism, both in the grand and petty forms. In The Road to Wigan Pier he has a famous piece where he's on a bus in the country that stops and picks up two riders dressed - unconventionally - in shorts, with sandals and other accoutrement that elicits the comment from other riders, under their breath, "socialists". Orwell confesses he had the same thought - these geeks are socialists. He goes on to discuss the practical impediments to bringing Socialism to England, but not fatalistically, rather in a way that would ease the transition.
What poverty truly felt like, that was where Orwell excelled as a reporter, in part by living poor. In both Wigan Pier and Down and Out he writes of being poor; in Down and Out he spends months living in flophouses and eating garbage, then returns to England where he discovers the promised job isn't there and once again he is poor. Now he does a tour of the poor houses in England, and one is living again in miserable conditions, living among the unwashed and dying.
Lesser titles: Keep the Aspidistra Flying, which he himself called his least favorite work; again, it focuses harshly on class and economics. Burmese Days covers his early years as a petty bureaucrat in India.
1984 is his best known title, and it is a tour de force, but as a work of ficition left me a little bored. Orwell was at his best writing in the first person, writing about the world he was living in.