Japan

Like most of the world I’ve been following what has been going on in Japan.  I don’t really have anything profound to say about it.   It’s hard to have words for such a disaster.  A 9.0 earthquake seems bad enough, the Tsunami is like a bad dream on top of it.   But now the nuclear crisis? 

I’ve really avoided watching much television footage.  I don’t want to become numb to the images from seeing them over and over.  Because seeing the images isn’t the same thing as being there and knowing that people you know and, maybe love, are gone forever and worrying about the basics of survival and hoping that, on top of everything, there isn’t a nuclear disaster.

So, like the rest of the world, I will only send thoughts and prayers to and for the Japanese people.

6th Grade Math

I was watching a video from TED this week from the Bill Gates’ TED conference on education that featured a guy I had never heard of -- Salmon Khan.

Salman Khan is the founder and faculty of the Khan Academy (www.khanacademy.org)-- a not-for-profit organization with the mission of providing a free world-class education to anyone, anywhere. It now consists of self-paced software and, with over 1 million unique students per month, the most-used educational video repository on the Internet (over 30 million lessons delivered to-date). All 2000+ video tutorials, covering everything from basic addition to advanced calculus, physics, chemistry and biology, have been made by Salman.

Prior to the Khan Academy, Salman was a senior analyst at a hedge fund and had also worked in technology and venture capital. He holds an MBA from Harvard Business School, an M.Eng and B.S. in electrical engineering and computer science from MIT, and a B.S. in mathematics from MIT.

Remember this guy. I think a lot of people are going to be talking about him after this TED talk.

Khan’s “pioneering” idea is to use technology to humanize the classroom and help students learned at their own pace. Especially math.

It brought back memories of 6th grade math for me. Sixth grade was the only year I ever liked math. My teacher was Sr. Katherine, a School Sister of Notre Dame, who was fairly young. I went to school in the 60’s and early 70’s. Programmed, individualized learning was all the rage. In 6th grade we learned many things but the big things we were supposed to master were fractions and decimals/percentages. And I did! I’m still fairly good at fractions and percentages and it is all due to 6th grade math.

We had 42 kids in our classroom. I don’t mean we had 42 kids in my class; we had about 84 kids in my class. The class was divided into two classrooms and we had 42 kids to a room every year I was in grade school – from 1st grade through 8th grade.

42 kids in a classroom is really not conducive to instruction. It helped that we had nuns who ruled with an iron fist but even nuns couldn’t create extra minutes in an hour.

Sr. Katherine, like other teachers, tried to work around this problem by setting up programmed learning so that kids learned how to teach themselves and she could spend her time with kids who needed extra help. She set up a system where we learned “packets” of information. (She didn’t make it up, packets were used a lot back then.)

In class the student would worked through a packet by herself. The student had background/explanatory readings, exercises, and a test to take. You practiced until you were ready to take the test. If you passed, you moved on to the next packet. If you didn’t, you had additional packet material you worked through. You couldn’t move on to the next packet until you mastered the packet your were working on and had a grade that showed mastery. If you failed a packet more than twice you had to go to “class” which was over in one side of the classroom and involved Sr. Katherine going over the material with you and other students who were working at your pace.

It was great. I’m a self-motivator and I could go over things until I learned them and then take the test. I really nailed fractions and percents. That was the only time in my life I ever liked taking math because it was the only time I felt like I really learned what I was supposed to learn AND there was no one looking over my shoulder judging me on how fast or how slow I was learning it.

I even used to stay after school a few days a week and work on packets. Sr. Katherine, being a nun, had no life of her own. She lived in the convent across the street and of course she could work in the classroom until 4:30 every day so kids who needed extra help or who had detention could be there with her. That was the year my mom was in the hospital for a while and I didn’t like to go home anyway. So I voluntarily stayed after school a lot, either for sports practice or to practice math.

By the way, if you were a kid who needed extra help it didn’t mean you were slow. It meant you had simply reached a point where you could no longer teach it to yourself – it might mean you were far in advance of the rest of the class. So it was a unifying experience for our class because at any given time there were kids working together after school who learned at entirely different paces.

In 7th grade I arrived to find that Sr. Katherine had been transferred to another school. We were back to learning math the same old way. I was back to not liking math.

Watching Khan’s video, which features 5th graders, I was reminded of 6th grade. He has basically come up with a computerized version of Sr. Katherine’s class. Good for him! It sounds exciting to me. A global, one world classroom. Not a student-to-teacher ratio but a student-to-valuable-teacher-time ratio. A great blend of computer technology and real human contact.

St. Louis During the Civil War

Readers might remember my previous post explaining that St. Louis lost control of its police department during the Civil War and the State of Missouri has yet to give it back. 

The Opinionator Blog at the New York Times, which is blogging the Civil War, recently published an interesting piece by Adam Arenson about St. Louis and the Rise of the West during the Civil War (reg. req.).

… in November 1860, the northern free states voted for Abraham Lincoln, most slave states voted for John Breckinridge and three Upper South states voted for John Bell, Missouri was the only state to vote for the Northern Democrat, Stephen Douglas. The results in St. Louis were even more unusual: Lincoln edged out Douglas in a four-way race that — unlike any other that day — mirrored the returns of the country as a whole. St. Louis became the only large city in a slave state won by the president-elect, defying regional stereotypes. And Missouri stayed true to form on March 9, 1861, when its secession convention became the first such meeting to vote for staying in the Union.

Aronsen argues that we should not only think of the Civil War as a struggle between North and South to control the West (slave or free) but also a struggle between East and West.  St. Louis represented the West.

[Missouri] wasn’t a Southern state or a Northern state, but a Western state. The same goes for St. Louis: a city founded by the French, governed by the Spanish and sold to the Americans, a borderland city that was the hub of western movement across the continent. It was a moderate city with a Republican Party leadership in a slave state led by a secessionist governor. It was an ideal place to view America changing — and the see the power of the West at play in the secession crisis.

I can imagine that the people of St. Louis in the 1860’s were tired of being a place to “view America changing” because St. Louis is still a place to “view America changing” as we watch our state actions today.

On Monday, St. Louis Post Dispatch columnist Bill McClellan renewed his tongue in cheek call for St. Louis to secede from Missouri and join Illinois as West East St. Louis.

Enough of this. Why pretend our relationship is worth saving?

Besides, many of us in West East St. Louis have seen enough of this legislative session to know we want out. The legislators in Jefferson City want to repeal child labor laws, lift the restrictions on puppy mills, do away with the voter-approved cost of living increases to the minimum wage and kill unions. Oh yeah, slap teachers around, too. Edge-ee-cay-shun? Who needs it? We'll take those lazy little tykes out of the classroom and put them to work where they belong …

It is really just a matter of dividing the assets.

We'll take urban street crime. They can have the meth labs.

Sigh.  Compare that to the State of Illinois which just eliminated the death penalty.  There are days that I think secession sounds like a good idea. And then we could even get back our police force:

Certain issues will solve themselves. Local control of the St. Louis Police Department, for instance. Springfield won't want it. They even let Chicago mismanage its own police department.

I’m ready to sign on.  Or maybe I should just sell my house and move across The River.  

The UnBEARable Liteness of Blogging

via law professor Ilya Somin at The Volokh Conspiracy, I found this delightful little blog post comparing English Bears and American Bears.

Bear with me as I take a bearly deserved break from serious blogging.

On the English side, we have one of my favorites,  Winnie-the-Pooh.

Pooh is first presented as highly imaginative, if somewhat absent-minded. In the first story he tries to fool a hive of bees by disguising himself as a small black cloud in the sky. But he is worried that he still looks like a bear covered in mud and holding a blue balloon, so he asks Christopher Robin to help by holding an umbrella. "Well, you laughed to yourself, 'Silly old Bear!'" says the narrator, addressing Christopher Robin, "but you didn't say it aloud because you were so fond of him."
Soon, however, Christopher Robin loses any reservations about calling Pooh a silly old bear. Sadly, Pooh internalizes the characterization. Their eventual dynamic is summarized when Christopher Robin is dragging him down the stairs by one paw …

hmmm.  I can bearly bear to think of pooh bear being abused.  Silly old bear.

On the other hand, are American Bears really more more assertive and autonomous than English bears?  Or just more brazen?  Here’s one of my favorite American bears:

Also (overly?) self-confident is the muppet Fozzie Bear, who is pursuing a career as a stand-up comedian, despite the fact that people often throw rotten tomatoes at him.

Fozzie gets by with the bear minimun of talent,

I think I agree with Ilya Somin, who says: “The definitive study of Anglo-American literary bears remains to be written, even as its absence gets ever more unbearable.”

And here’s a little music to make your day more bearable:

… in which I discuss e-Reading and my iPad

So, last July I caved to my consumerist half and bought an iPad even though I couldn’t think why I needed one.  I’m still not sure I need it but I do like it. 

I never intended that my primary purpose would be to read e-books and so far I really haven’t used it that way.  Way back when I bought my iPhone I had downloaded the Stanza app to try it out.  I can’t remember if Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland came with it or I downloaded it for free just to try the app out.  I know I downloaded Death Comes for the Archbishop.  I had never read it and I figured I would try out the app using a free book.  I assumed I would use it when I was unexpectedly waiting somewhere and didn’t have a book with me.

It is still unread.  Reading on a small device just never appealed to me so I never pulled it out and tried it.  If I do pull out my iPhone I use it for my Google Reader or for Twitter.

When the Kindle app came out for iPhone I didn’t have any desire to try it.  Two of my colleagues at work use it all the time and tell me they have read lots of books on their iPhones.  But, the thing is, I’m seldom caught somewhere without a book and the idea of reading something on such a small screen just doesn’t appeal to me.  I figured that if I ever bought a Kindle I might eventually download the app.  But until then I didn’t see a need to have it.

When I bought the iPad I decided to try out the iBooks app.  It came already loaded with AA Milne’s Winnie the Pooh.  I immediately read it and was amazed at how they had recreated the look of the original book on screen.  It was as if I was looking at pictures of the original pages of the book book, complete with the Ernest H. Shepard illustrations.  If I had children I wouldn’t hesitate to download picture books at a moments’ notice to keep them occupied if we were somewhere without a book. 

But I was less sure about reading an adult book.  I like the feel of books in my hand.  Last August I intended to join an internet read-along of James Joyce’s Ulysses.  I had never read it and always felt that I should (note that I didn’t say I’d always wanted to read it).  I figured a reading group led by someone familiar with the book was the way to go.  I think I envisioned it being like the 2666 reading group I joined last year.  We had a weekly assignment and it took a few months to finish.  It was hard to fall behind.  Well, this group worked differently and they moved along at a quite a clip, finishing the book in a few weeks.  I was on vacation when they started so I started out behind and I didn’t even own the book yet! 

To try to catch up I downloaded it onto my iBooks app (it is of course free) and started reading.  After a few days  I found that I didn’t have enough time to keep up with the reading group and I dropped out. But for the week that I tried to catch up, I read the e-version of Ulysses.

Let me start by saying that this probably wasn’t the best book to start with.   One of the things I found difficult was not knowing where I was in relation to the end of the book.  I like being able to see how much of the book is left.  I like to flip forward and see where the end of the chapter is and tell myself that I can certainly finish it in an hour or so. 

Ulysses doesn’t have chapters.  And there are multiple editions of the book so when the assignment was to read specific pages the leader would try to give a general description of what those pages encompassed so that those reading other editions would know where to end.   Trying this on an e-reader just frustrated me. 

Ok, I admit that I’m somewhat obsessive compulsive about “time” but that’s the way I am.  And it drove me crazy not being able to estimate how much time it would take me to read the next assigned installment.  After two days I went out and bought a paperback.  (And then, as I say, I gave up due to lack of time.)

And that was pretty much it for the iBooks app for me.  I downloaded the US Constitution for free – because you never know these days when you might need to prove that something is actually in the Constitution.  But I didn’t feel like reading any more books on it.

Then, in October, I decided to rejoin one of my reading groups on a casual basis.  I decided that I wasn’t going to get all worked up about making sure I had read each and every book.  After all, no one else did.   But I fully intended to read the first book to be discussed when I went back.  The book they had chosen was a non-fiction book called The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh: A Woman in World History by Linda Collett. 

Since this was a snap decision I headed over to Barnes and Noble to pick up the book with only three days to read it.  I couldn’t find it anywhere so I finally asked at the information desk and the clerk told me that they didn’t have it at that store but he’d check other stores.  After a few moments he regretfully told me that no other store had it in stock but I could certainly order it.  As I started to tell him that I didn’t have time to order it, he said “or it is available as an e-book.” 

I thought about it.  I of course didn’t have a NOOK and had no intention of buying one but I did have an iPad and I knew I could download the Kindle app or the NOOK app.  So I decided to try it (since that was really the only choice I had other than not reading the book).  I don’t really like Amazon and I order from Barnesandnoble.com all the time, so I went with the NOOK app and downloaded it.  And got it read before the meeting that week.  On the whole I would rather have read the hard version of it, but since it wasn’t a book I would have ever wanted to read again, and it wasn’t a book I could imagine giving to any person that I know, it was perfectly fine for the circumstances.  More about the experience later in this post.

Then a few weeks later I went to Florida.   On the day I was leaving to come back I realized that I had finished the book I had brought with me and I needed something to read.  I knew I could pick something up at the airport bookseller but I had really been wanting to re-read some Sherlock Holmes after watching the new BBC series.  So I decided to download it.  And this time I decided to use the iBook app to give it another try.  (The iBook store doesn’t have nearly as many titles as Barnes and Noble but I figured even they would have Sherlock Holmes.)  It was easy to find and download and I read a lot of it on the plane.  But, on the whole, I would rather have been reading the hard version of it.

Then, a couple of months ago I watched a TED presentation by Brene Brown that I really enjoyed and on the spur of the moment I decided to read her book, The Gifts of Imperfection:  Let Go of Who You Think You are Supposed to Be and Embrace Who You Are.   I’m not really into self-help or pop psychology books but I enjoyed her talk so much that I wanted to give her a try.   I also wanted to read it right then when the urge was upon me so I downloaded it into my NOOK app and started reading.   Except for one small factor that I will get to later, I was perfectly content to read it as an e-book.  It had easy chapters, so I didn’t start to sweat the whole “time” factor.  On the whole, except for one small thing that didn’t matter much, I was content to read it as an e-book.

Then, a few weeks later, I realized that there was another meeting of my reading group and I hadn’t read the book.  I didn’t really care except that it had been a book that I had wanted to read:  A Short History of Women:  A Novel, by Kate Walbert.  That month’s meeting was the celebratory post-holiday Tea that we have on a Saturday afternoon.  It is intended to be a festive occasion and usually we watch a movie instead of reading a book.  I don’t know why we picked a book this time. I suspected that many people wouldn’t have read the book and those that did wouldn’t talk about it much.  So I really felt no pressure to read it.

But I also suspected that if I didn’t read it now I would never get back to it.  So, since I got home at a reasonable time on Friday evening with a few hours left before I would go to sleep, I decided to download it for the NOOK and see if I could read a few chapters and decide if I’d want to finish it the following week.  I read it all in one sitting. 

It wasn’t very long, less than 200 pages.  It had easily defined chapters.  I liked the writing style, I liked the story.  It wasn’t the best novel I’ve read in my life but it was very enjoyable.  On the whole I probably would have preferred reading it in paperback.  I could definitely imagine passing it on to other people I know who would enjoy it and that’s a problem with e-books.  But I was really glad that I could download it at 9:00 on a Friday night when the urge hit me.

So I’ve moved from not expecting to read on the iPad to expecting that I will read some things on the iPad, particularly things that I want to read on the spur of the moment.  But I also anticipate that I will continue to do my normal reading in real books because I really like real books.   And also because the e-reader is not perfect and I’ve found an annoying problem in a couple of the books I read – both of the non-fiction books.

Non-fiction books tend to have footnotes.  The NOOK app seems to be set up so that you can click the footnote and it will take you back to the note (in this case really an end note) where you can read it and then click the number again and it will take you back to where you were.  That is a great idea but it didn’t work.  It didn’t work in either book, but especially in Brene Brown’s book.  The footnote numbering was completely off and always took me to the very first footnote and then took me BACK to where the very first footnote occurred.  I eventually gave up and figured I’d read them at the end (and her footnotes weren’t full of interesting asides anyway so it was only a minor annoyance).  

I suspect that most books that I’m going to want to read on the spur of the moment are going to be non-fiction.  I only choose fiction on the spur of the moment if I’m in an airport.  And usually I’m more organized in buying reading book groups so I don’t need to buy them on the spur of the moment.   The rest of the time, I make lists of things I want to eventually read and I eventually get to them.   But non-fiction, for some reason, I often look for on the spur of the moment.  I usually do it on the Barnes and Noble site and have them sent to my office and then I read them as SOON as I get home.   A lot of the non-fiction I read has to do with French Colonial times and the fur trade, so there’s a method to my reading.   And the footnotes are important to me, sometimes more important than the book itself.  So if footnotes aren’t going to work well that will be a big problem.  I assume, however, that as ebooks become more ubiquitous they will fix that problem

The Elizabeth Marsh also had a problem with illustrations. As is typical with many biographies, the author had a couple of sections inserted into the book that contained a series of pictures – in this case reproductions of paintings of places and of people who were mentioned in the biography.  The pictures had captions identifying them (as you might expect).  The e-book version of the book made the pictures impossible to follow.  Each picture was put on a different page although I think the “real” book might have multiple pictures on one page.  Then the captions in the e-book often ended up on a different page from the picture.  It was quite annoying.  And there was no easy way to make reference to the pictures – to “flip back and forth” as you were reading as you could do in a “real” book.  It was a real flaw in the e-book version.

So there are a few glitches to work out.  I suspect the fiction books work better because they are more profitable.  In A Short History of Women I was concerned because there was a family tree at the beginning that I just knew I was going to need to consult fairly often.  But it turned out that the ebook was set up to very easily “flip” back and forth almost like you would do in a real book.  So where they have a financial incentive they take the care to make the ebooks work.  Eventually all books will work.

As I said, I doubt I’ll read many books on the iPad.  I mostly use it for my RSS feed (I use Reeder and I love it, I now find it hard to use plain old Google Reader) and my Twitter account.  The TED app is great.  ABC TV has a great app.  I wish hulu had a free app but they only have the paid service so I still watch hulu on my laptop.  But I watch streaming Netflix on my iPad.   I love real solitaire.  And I love the Words with Friends app.   And there are a bunch of other apps that I use occasionally but not regularly.  On the whole I like it.  But it’s a toy, not a necessity. 

A toy that I’m glad I have.

My Reading Life: The Reading Memoir

[Note: This is adapted from something I wrote for for another venue.]

There was a time when I was hooked on memoirs about reading.  Maybe it was just that there were a lot of Reading Memoirs being published.  The title of this post comes from Pat Conroy’s book My Reading Life.  I’m not a big Pat Conroy fan but I could relate to this:

I take it as an article of faith that the novels I've loved will live inside me forever. Let me call on the spirit of Anna Karenina as she steps out onto the train tracks of Moscow in the last minute of her glorious and implacable life. Let me beckon Madame Bovary to issue me a cursory note of warning whenever I get suicidal or despairing as I live out a life too sad by half. If I close my eyes I can conjure up a whole country of the dead who will live for all time because writers turned them into living flesh and blood. There is Jay Gatsby floating face downward in his swimming pool or Tom Robinson's bullet riddled body cut down in his Alabama prison yard in To Kill a Mockingbird.

Yes, all of those same characters are very vivid in my mind.  Except maybe Jay Gatsby.  He is always a blur to me. Tom seems more vivid.

Or how about Anna Quindlen’s memoir How Reading Changed my Life in which she writes: "There was waking and there was sleeping. And then there were books".   In my case there were books when I was supposed to be sleeping.

My own personal favorite book of this genre is Lynne Sharon Schwartz’ Ruined by Reading: A Life in Books in which she asks, “Without books how could I have become myself?"  

There were some books I wanted to possess even more intimately than by reading. I would clutch them to my heart and long to break through the chest wall, making them part of me, or else press my body into them, to burrow between the pages.  When I was eight I felt this passion – androgynous, seeking both to penetrate and encompass – for Little Women which I had read several times. Frustrated, I began copying it into a notebook.  With the first few pages I felt delirious, but the project quickly palled.  It was just words, the same words I had read over and over; writing them down did not bring them into closer possession. Only later did I understand that I wanted to have written Little Women, conceived and gestated it and felt its words delivered from my pen.

Then in the 1990’s I got hooked on the book club memoir. One of my favorites was The Hemingway Book Club of Kosovo by Paula Huntley.  In 1991 Paula Huntley’s husband answered the call of the American Bar Association to help Kosovo build a modern legal system and Paula went with him.  I remember reading about the project in the ABA Journal and wondering what type of person would volunteer.  It sounded like a project that needed people braver than me. 

Ed has taken unpaid leave from the law school to work pro bono in the Balkans and I've resigned from my marketing job of twelve years. We will have no income for a year, but we've decided to make the commitment. The only worry that really remains tonight is whether I can do anything useful for the Kosovars. I don't want to be a voyeur in a country that has suffered so much. Ed will be helping to create a modern legal system with the American Bar Association's Central and Eastern European Law Initiative (ABA-CEELI). But I have no legal training, no medical or counseling skills. And there is certainly no need in Kosovo at this stage for my marketing experience.

Paula became an ESL teacher and taught, among other things, Ernest Hemingway to her Kosovo adult students.  But they taught her much in return.  After reading this book I went out and bought multiple copies and gave them out to people I knew.  I kept a copy in my guest bedroom on the nightstand for a long time, although I see now that it is gone.  Good!  I hope a guest passed it on after reading it.

Another great memoir about a group reading experience (among other things) is Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi.  She writes:

For nearly two years, almost every Thursday morning, rain or shine, they came to my house, and almost every time, I could not get over the shock of seeing them shed their mandatory veils and robes and burst into color. When my students came into that room, they took off more than their scarves and robes. Gradually, each one gained an outline and a shape, becoming her own inimitable self. Our world in that living room with its window framing my beloved Elburz Mountains became our sanctuary, our self-contained universe, mocking the reality of black-scarved, timid faces in the city that sprawled below.

The theme of the class was the relation between fiction and reality. We read Persian classical literature, such as the tales of our own lady of fiction, Scheherazade, from A Thousand and One Nights, along with Western classics-Pride and Prejudice, Madame Bovary, Daisy Miller, The Dean's December and, yes, Lolita. As I write the title of each book, memories whirl in with the wind to disturb the quiet of this fall day in another room in another country.

Most of us don’t have such exotic stories to tell about the venues in which we read books that we loved.  My own reading takes place in snatches these days and there is no sense of danger in my reading group meetings.  It has been a while since I’ve picked up a Memoir about Reading.   Are there any good ones I’ve missed? 

Hello Again

As you could probably tell last weekend, I finally got my laptop back.  All fixed so no excuse to buy a new MacBook Pro.  Although who knows, sometimes I buy things I don’t need.  Like when I bought my iPad last July.

Whenever people ask me if I like my iPad I always say that “I love it, but I still can’t figure out why I NEED it.”   After spending two weeks at home with just the iPad I still don’t think I need it more than I need a laptop. But it did come in handy.  It would have been harder to keep up with online life with just my iPhone.  Maybe I’ll write an entire post about the iPad now that I’ve had it more than 6 months.

It turned out that it was easy to fix my little HP laptop, but it took longer than expected because every time they would order the new RAM I needed it would come in for a desktop and not a laptop.  Finally they went to a different supplier.  The guys at Clayton Computers on Big Bend were great though, and I recommend them.  I always knew my laptop ran hot (apparently all HP computers run hot).  What happened was that all the soldering around the RAM drive (is that what you call it?) melted.  Yes, MELTED.  Pretty scary huh?  

So eventually they called me and told me that if I wanted to pick it up with  lesser RAM and use it until they got in the correct additional RAM, I could.  I took them up on that offer, since it had been a couple of weeks (partly my fault because it took me six days to get around to taking it in).   Boy was I glad I picked it up when I did because three days later we had a Big Storm with Straight Line Winds and it hit the block where my laptop would have been sitting on the shelf waiting for final repair.  It would have taken another week to get it.  It was a mess there.

The telephone and power line poles snapped off at the top and streets had to be blocked off.  When I stopped by yesterday to have the new RAM popped in, I pulled around to the back of the building and my mouth dropped open.  The apartment buildings behind looked like the roofs had just been ripped off.  Trees had been knocked down and back porches were destroyed from where the roof had come down.   Mother Nature can be scary. 

Anyway, my little laptop is safe and sound and worked fine for blogging this week.  But after more than 2 weeks using my iPad exclusively I decided that I should take some time to reorganize my online life.  The iPad works a bit slower than a laptop and I began to notice things I didn’t notice on my laptop.  I noticed that I have a lot of RSS feeds that I don’t read at once and I mark as read fully intending to go back and read later but I never actually do.  On the laptop, skipping over things is quick.  On the iPad, every refresh takes a bit of time (like on an iPhone). 

When I woke up this morning and saw that it was a gray, gloomy day I decided it was a good day to organize.  So while I was doing laundry (don’t you love laundry?  You can do a major chore through which most of the time you are doing nothing) I went through and reorganized all my RSS feeds.  I moved most of the book blog feeds out of RSS and back into a separate Book Blog Roll here at the blog.  I think I’ll be more likely to read them at leisure that way.   My books folder in Google Reader was getting unwieldy so this should help.  Sometimes my heart would sink when I’d check my Reader and find 45 book posts ALONE unread.   So now my Reader only has professional book review sites like the NYTimes and the LATimes etc.  They get clogged on weekends but that’s ok – I have time to read them on weekends. 

I also added a link to Readers and Book Lovers at DailyKos (the Great Orange Satan – if you are conservative you will not want to click that link).   Markos recently upgraded the entire site and now users have the ability to create separate Groups for non-political topics. For the last two years almost my entire participation there was in the book diaries so I was happy to see a Readers and Book Lovers Group.  It has people who write for the Group and also republishes book/reading/writing related diaries that other people at the site write.  The nice thing is that you can ignore everything but the Groups you follow if you want to.   And as I’ve found over the last two years, the people who inhabit the book threads are very nice.    So click the link and check it out if you are so inclined.  For those of you who are dKos members, click the little heart next to the word “follow” and all the diaries from that Group will show up in your “stream” (another new dKos concept which is the best thing they’ve done in years). 

On my own reading front, things have been a bit sparce.  I’ve been reading a lot of non-fiction this year and while I enjoy it I don’t necessarily want to write about it.   And a lot of it is history that is connected to the genealogy work I’m interested in.   I did read Laurence Cosse’s A Novel Bookstore last week and didn’t much like it.  I didn’t buy the premise and the writing seemed stilted which may have been the fault of the translator.  But there was far too much telling and not enough showing for my taste.  I also picked up The Finkler Question, by Howard Jacobson, which won this year’s Booker Prize, but so far I haven’t started it.   I’m still working on Stephen Sondheim’s Finishing the Hat, which I’ve been slowly reading since Christmas.  I’m almost finished but I like to savor it.  And I have Patti Smith’s memoir sitting there too, unstarted.   And I got stalled on Alan Taylor’s Divided Ground because I was so angry at how the Indians were treated that I decided to take a break.  But I keep thinking about it so I’ll probably get back to it this week.

On the TV front, I’m still watching Castle on Monday Nights.  I catch up with Glee on Hulu when I can.  I like that Friday night series Who do you Think You Are although I have to laugh at how easy they make genealogy seem.   I have to catch up on a few weeks of Bones and Fringe.   But that’s it.  

I feel like I just finished writing a Holiday Letter that only goes out once a year.  But it feels a very long time since I’ve been here.  Hopefully that will change.