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So. I loiter in Goons With Spoons quite a lot, and they have a splendid general chat thread for matters unrelated to food. They also have a separate thread for people to ask general cooking/food questions (a need which is diminished in TBB). It occurs to me that TBB could do with something similar, but integrated: a general book barn chat and questions thread. You CAN talk about books and reading and writing if you want; or you can just shoot the breeze. What say ye? I will get things started. I just finished A Pale View OF The Hills, and while I cannot claim to have completely understood the story, it's still pretty drat amazing. Ishiguro is the master of the allusion, the unsaid, the suggestion - so the reader has to do some work (mostly but not always successfully!). What did people think the story was with Sachiko and her daughter, and Etsuko (narrator) and her husband? Also, I was just invited to a weekend in Majorca with a colleague/friend, and it was incredible. Even though the weather wasn't brilliant it is such a beautiful place, and the food was delicious too. It didn't hurt that her mother's house, in which we stayed, was absolutely spectacular. We picked oranges off her trees to make fresh juice for breakfast...
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Mar 1, 2010 17:10
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I was thinking of creating just such a thread last night - but then fell asleep and forgot all about it. I thought it could be more for book news or general chat but if off-topic stuff works well then so be it. Radio 4 is one of the best things in the world and at the moment they have an 8 part series called Capturing America: Mark Lawson's History of Modern American Literature "Mark Lawson tells the story of how American writing became the literary superpower of the 20th century, telling the nation's stories of money, power, sex, religion and war". It features insightful interviews with the likes of: Cornwell, DeLillo, Doctorow, Ellroy, Irving, King, Mailer, Roth, Updike, Vonnegut, (you get the idea). The programmes and the individual interviews are available here for UK users at least (does any of this work for anyone outside the UK?)
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Mar 1, 2010 17:33
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wickles posted:I was thinking of creating just such a thread last night - but then fell asleep and forgot all about it. I thought it could be more for book news or general chat but if off-topic stuff works well then so be it. Yeah, sure you did.  I thought off-topic by people who like books and reading could be neat-o. Radio 4 is awesome. I podcast The News Quiz every week, and "In Our Time" with Melvyn Bragg. It's always on in the background when I am cooking, clearing up, etc.
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Mar 1, 2010 17:45
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Where do you guys read book reviews?  Looking for something that would have a large mix of new/old books (that isn't just Amazon user reviews).
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Mar 2, 2010 15:32
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The Machine posted:Where do you guys read book reviews? The New Yorker, The Guardian (https://www.guardian.co.uk), used to get NY Review of Books and London Review of Books, but cancelled them - only reason I used to get LRB was to read the hilarious personals.
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Mar 2, 2010 16:11
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Why are fiction novels always called <Title> : A Novel ? Isn't it kind of implied that it's a novel when it's sitting in the fiction section? Is this just some kind of throwback thing like adding Esq. to the end of a lawyer's name?
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Mar 2, 2010 16:44
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wickles posted:Radio 4 is one of the best things in the world This is entirely true. Here's hoping the cuts the BBC are having to make won't harm it too badly. I particularly like the 5 o' clock news show with Eddie Mair and the ineffable glory that is The Shipping Forecast. On an entirely unrelated topic, I would like to know why recommended texts for university/college are so expensive. I just bought two midwifery textbooks and paid £70 quid in total. I felt a bit sick handing over all that money, especially when I know that in 4 years time they'll bring out new editions & I might have to get them too. Why can't they make them available in e-book format & charge us poor students less?
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Mar 2, 2010 18:18
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therattle posted:Only reason I used to get LRB was to read the hilarious personals. My creative writing teacher in uni used to read these out to us at the end of every class. Money well spent. This is a good website for sci-fi reviews. I also find the New York Times Review of Books to be interesting. And I'll plug my own book reviews.
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Mar 2, 2010 18:34
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Syrinxx posted:Why are fiction novels always called <Title> : A Novel ? Isn't it kind of implied that it's a novel when it's sitting in the fiction section? It's a marketing thing but it differentiates more "literary" novels (that is, not novels that necessarily actually have more literary value, but novels that are marketed as such) from thrillers, mysteries, scifi, and other kinds of genre fiction. Note that most genre novels don't usually have this, though some thrillers have "a thriller" and some mysteries have "a (name of recurring protagonist) mystery". It's also a fairly recent development, I think it started getting popular in the late 80's/early 90's. Plus, there are of course some books in the fiction section that are not novels. Collections of short stories or novellas for example. And I think it's a fair bet that it's also been used on the cover of "novels" that are really a bunch of bullshit about the writers' personal life as a means of thinly masking that. Earwicker fucked around with this message at 19:27 on Mar 2, 2010 |
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Mar 2, 2010 19:13
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therattle posted:The New Yorker, The Guardian (https://www.guardian.co.uk), used to get NY Review of Books and London Review of Books, but cancelled them - only reason I used to get LRB was to read the hilarious personals. John Crace's Digested Read is one of my favourite things. His breakdown of Amis's Pregnant Widow was great. To the person who asked about reviews, he's doing "classics" now too; as long as you don't mind having a classic spoiled for you--and you'll probably have an idea of the plot going in anyway--it's a entertaining way to get an overview. My dad saves me the books supplements from the New York Times since I'm too cheap to subscribe. They're probably available online and are often good. Also, I just ordered this http://www.amazon.com/Power-Delight-Lifetime-Literature-1962-2002/dp/0393058409/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1267556304&sr=8-2 after having wanted it for a few years. I've read a few of Bayley's essays and he just comes across as a very nice, very clever man who genuinely loved books. Irisi posted:On an entirely unrelated topic, I would like to know why recommended texts for university/college are so expensive. I just bought two midwifery textbooks and paid £70 quid in total. I felt a bit sick handing over all that money, especially when I know that in 4 years time they'll bring out new editions & I might have to get them too. Why can't they make them available in e-book format & charge us poor students less? Can you bring back your books to the university bookstore when you're finished with them and get some of the money back? I can, but it drives me crazy not to be able to highlight and dog-ear and otherwise abuse the books as I usually would. I've got a bunch of Canadian history texts that I never want to see again for the rest of my life but I hate to refrain from scribbling in the margins and stuff.
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Mar 2, 2010 20:06
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Irisi posted:On an entirely unrelated topic, I would like to know why recommended texts for university/college are so expensive. I just bought two midwifery textbooks and paid £70 quid in total. I felt a bit sick handing over all that money, especially when I know that in 4 years time they'll bring out new editions & I might have to get them too. Why can't they make them available in e-book format & charge us poor students less? One course I took, we had to buy a 60 dollar book that was pretty small (less than 150 pages paperback) And at the end of each chapter was a page of questions with empty spaces for answers. During class we were expected to tear out these pages and turn them in. The guy running the class, it was his loving book. Guess what? You tore the pages out of the book, so now you can't sell it back since it is useless to a new student. Pathetic, pathetic scam. I didn't buy the book, just photocopied it from a friend, and cut to the size of everybody else. The questions didn't require a special page to be turned in.
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Mar 2, 2010 20:15
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The worst is when the book you have to buy is written by your own professor. Then when they leave for a new job, the book has no resale value because they're the only people who set that book 
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Mar 2, 2010 20:34
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Irisi posted:This is entirely true. Here's hoping the cuts the BBC are having to make won't harm it too badly. I particularly like the 5 o' clock news show with Eddie Mair and the ineffable glory that is The Shipping Forecast. therattle posted:The New Yorker, The Guardian (https://www.guardian.co.uk), used to get NY Review of Books and London Review of Books, but cancelled them - only reason I used to get LRB was to read the hilarious personals. I can't afford subscription to The New Yorker, NYRB or LRB and used to buy an occasional copy from Borders but now that's closed in the UK does anyone here know where I could buy a copy from? They put up a few articles online but the bulk is subscription access only. Actually, if any one has any copies of The New Yorker, New York Review of Books or London Review of Books they no longer want can I have them? I'll pay for shipping. 
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Mar 2, 2010 20:55
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Paragon8 posted:The worst is when the book you have to buy is written by your own professor. I think the prices are mostly just driven up by the publishers' generous returns policies, which in turn are usually the only reason campus bookstores can afford to keep supplying the books in the face of unpredictable demand. It's a bit of a no-win choice between inflated prices or being told they've sold out of the book you desperately need on a much more regular basis.
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Mar 2, 2010 22:26
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wickles posted:If Radio 4 was ever affected in any way I think there'd be a middle-class uprising! Have you ever heard some of the random poo poo people complain about on Feedback? (Fridays at 1:30PM) Sorry, man - I hoard my New Yorkers. Yes, can you imagine if they made cuts to Radio 4? People would be marching in the streets politely, waving grammatically-correct placards, and registering their objections in the strongest possible terms (without resorting to foul language). They'd egg the minister in charge with Waitrose organic free range eggs. (I must confess to being squarely in this demographic: Radio 4-listening, Guardian-reading, media-working, organic food-eating middle class liberal.) PS glad to see people climbing in to this thread. That's the spirit!
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Mar 3, 2010 12:33
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Paragon8 posted:The worst is when the book you have to buy is written by your own professor. My school has a computer class cowritten by the professor with tear-out homework assignments. You also need the original code in the back of the book to do assignments online. This is a freshman computer class thousands of people take every semester because it counts as a science/math requirement for pretty much every major. The guy is fuckin' loaded I bet.
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Mar 4, 2010 03:19
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Paragon8 posted:The worst is when the book you have to buy is written by your own professor. One of my professors just put his book online. Professors get poo poo royalties on their own textbooks anyway, why not deal with a publisher that will let you provide the book for free to your own students?
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Mar 4, 2010 07:37
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Irisi posted:On an entirely unrelated topic, I would like to know why recommended texts for university/college are so expensive. I just bought two midwifery textbooks and paid £70 quid in total. I felt a bit sick handing over all that money, especially when I know that in 4 years time they'll bring out new editions & I might have to get them too. Why can't they make them available in e-book format & charge us poor students less? They aren't necessarily making anyone much money, because they don't sell many copies. Say you've got a print run of 4000 copies, and after four years you have to pulp any remainder and bring out a new edition. The cover price on that 4000 print run has to pay for: - Author advance/royalty, maybe 7.5% of receipts (don't know about academic) - Bookseller discount, anything from 35% at your local bookshop to 80% if you're buying through Amazon. (Yes, Amazon get an 80% discount from the publisher.) - Print costs, pretty high if the book is full of photos or colour. High print cost and low print run = crippling unit cost - Production costs, also high if the book is full of diagrams and charts and numbers that have had to be painstakingly double checked - Salaries, heating and light at the publisher's office (if a book doesn't make any contribution to that, the publisher goes down) So on the £35 you just paid for a textbook, the publisher gives away maybe 55% in retailer discount on average. That leaves around £17 to cover author costs, image costs, freelance costs like designers, proofreaders, indexers, running costs including salaries, print costs (which could easily run to £3 per book or more for this kind of thing), and the small profit without which the publisher is just not going to bother to do it in the first place. Obviously these costs apply to everything, but you can imagine that when you're printing 30,000 copies of a mass market paperback, and expecting to reprint at 10,000 without changing a thing beyond the copyright page, your unit costs are very small. (You are really getting gouged when you pay £6.99 for a Dan Brown p/b, in terms of cost to the publisher vs cover cost.) If you have to make a new edition every few years, your unit costs are huge, and you have to price accordingly. This is also why travel guides are so absurdly expensive. I completely agree that all travel guides and academic texts should go electronic, though bear in mind what that will do to the costs of texts for people who don't have/like/can't afford e-readers. The London Deanery (NHS UK) has been giving out e-readers already loaded with medical textbooks to junior doctors and apparently it's been really successful. I'd expect that kind of thing to become the norm in the West soon. But again, where does that leave places that can't invest in that kind of technology? (This is not an apologia for publishers and obscene cover costs, we operate on a retarded business model and have only ourselves to blame. Just an explanation...) Shonagon fucked around with this message at 10:07 on Mar 4, 2010 |
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Mar 4, 2010 09:53
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Shonagon posted:They aren't necessarily making anyone much money, because they don't sell many copies. Say you've got a print run of 4000 copies, and after four years you have to pulp any remainder and bring out a new edition. The cover price on that 4000 print run has to pay for: My question then would be why so many very specific textbooks are needed, especially at relatively introductory levels? Why write your own first-year economics textbook (with the corresponding low print run and high costs) when there are plenty out there that would probably be 95% as good?
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Mar 4, 2010 12:50
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therattle posted:My question then would be why so many very specific textbooks are needed, especially at relatively introductory levels? Why write your own first-year economics textbook (with the corresponding low print run and high costs) when there are plenty out there that would probably be 95% as good? Wouldn't you try to be the recognised expert in the subject, and the guy getting the royalties, rather than just telling people to buy someone else's book? Of course a professor would want to pimp their own texts. The real question is why universities don't lean on flagrant abuses such as the above. (Out of interest, how many of those texts were printed by the university publisher?) Hah - my ex studied philosophy at Oxford, with a highly renowned ethicist, who set all his own stuff as required reading for the course and, when asked a question, would reply, 'Let's see what I think about that' and flip to a relevant page in one of his books. Ethicist. I'm not defending the practice at all, I think some of the stuff above is disgusting abuse. I just wanted to point out that academic textbook prices aren't set at £35 purely because the publisher knows people have to buy them (though there's always an element of that in any pricing strategy); poo poo costs money to make, too.
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Mar 4, 2010 14:56
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It also depends on how widely distributed the book is. Like my college professor that set his own book, was only used on that one course he taught ever. Niche subjects are going to have high costs just from supply and demand. Whereas my friend whose dad was a high school teacher and ended up writing a high school textbook that was extensively used throughout Europe made quite a bit of money. Not Dan Brown money, but enough for a nice Volvo. Really nice textbooks though can really be worth the money. The ones with illustrations and diagrams etc. I think people mostly resent the ones that just seem to be copied across from a word document.
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Mar 4, 2010 16:26
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Shonagon posted:Wouldn't you try to be the recognised expert in the subject, and the guy getting the royalties, rather than just telling people to buy someone else's book? Of course a professor would want to pimp their own texts. The real question is why universities don't lean on flagrant abuses such as the above. (Out of interest, how many of those texts were printed by the university publisher?) In answer to 1, sure, yes, but I suppose the job of the publisher is also to ascertain whether the demand would be there, and if said book will be the one to succeed. The ethicist one is classic. I wonder if there was any self-awareness or humour in what he did and said. I certainly hope so... I think that we're both actually seeing both sides, and this isn't really an argument anyway: poo poo costs money to make and distribute, and the system is also abused, with elements of monopoly pricing. Group hug!
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Mar 4, 2010 17:23
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Shonagon posted:The London Deanery (NHS UK) has been giving out e-readers already loaded with medical textbooks to junior doctors and apparently it's been really successful. I'd expect that kind of thing to become the norm in the West soon. But again, where does that leave places that can't invest in that kind of technology? Thank you for the explanation, Shonagn, you're always so informative! It does make sense for the NHS to be giving out the e-readers, given that little details about methods of treatment, etc. are constantly being updated & revised. Wish they'd give them to us poor, underfunded nurses & midwives in training too. (Mind you, that would mean that I wouldn't get to colour in diagrams of the lymphatic system anymore, and I quite like doing that; it's not every field of study that classifies "colouring with crayons" as a legitimate method of revision)
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Mar 4, 2010 21:21
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Irisi posted:... it's not every field of study that classifies "colouring with crayons" as a legitimate method of revision)
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Mar 4, 2010 23:56
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Irisi posted:Thank you for the explanation, Shonagn, you're always so informative! Stop complaining bout being underfunded, whinging nurses. All you have to do is nursery-school-level colouring-in, and changing bed-pans. I'm voting Tory because that George Osborn is sooooo dreamy, and they'll show those lazy public service workers a thing or two!
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Mar 5, 2010 18:15
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Mar 8, 2010 17:48
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Gentlewoman and gentlemen, I implore you: if you are going to write your brilliant observations in a book then give away that book, write is loving pencil. If it's a library book, just kill yourself. That's all.
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Mar 8, 2010 23:53
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McMurphy posted:Gentlewoman and gentlemen, I implore you: if you are going to write your brilliant observations in a book then give away that book, write is loving pencil. If it's a library book, just kill yourself. That's all. Yes. Otherwise it's desecration. People who write on books other than their own make me furious.
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Mar 9, 2010 14:22
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I love getting annotated books. I picked up a copy of Dead Scrolls at a flea market in Brighton and not only got an excellent book but some excellent backstory on Gogol and a short comparison of the influences on him from Pushkin and Lermontov. Writing in library books is pretty dickish though.
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Mar 9, 2010 15:38
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Yeah, while writing in library books is indeed reprehensible, one of the few true pleasures of lending/giving books is to inflict your marginalia on other people.
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Mar 9, 2010 15:48
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I've never been able to write, highlight or make any markings in my books. If something is really important then I'll make a note of it somewhere else.
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Mar 9, 2010 15:52
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The worst part of writing in library books is when someone really dumb had the book before you. I got Light in August out of my University library and there were entire paragraphs underlined with notes like "racism!" and "symbol!". Thanks retard. Who are these people that they don't have other paper to take notes on?
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Mar 9, 2010 15:55
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Half the time the stuff people write in books is completely indecipherable to me. So its as if someone took a book and just started scribbling all over it for no reason. I picked up a library book a few months back and it looked as if someone had drafted a letter in the back. Couldn't make out a single word of it. On the other hand, in the copy of "Roman Revolution" by Ronald Syme, someone managed to correctly translate a couple of the latin phrases within it. Which was nice. quote:I love getting annotated books. I picked up a copy of Dead Scrolls at a flea market in Brighton and not only got an excellent book but some excellent backstory on Gogol and a short comparison of the influences on him from Pushkin and Lermontov. Writing in library books is pretty dickish though.
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Mar 9, 2010 19:21
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I think my favourite library annotation was in a pretty fat history book where the only marking was somewhere in the middle, where somebody had pointed to an "it's" and written "its?". The book was correct.
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Mar 9, 2010 19:41
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I think I saw that once in a book, where someone had marked something that supposedly incorrect, but they were wrong and the book was right. It makes you want to leave a note for the previous person, unfortunately, they'll never see it.
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Mar 9, 2010 20:10
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therattle posted:Yes. Otherwise it's desecration. People who write on books other than their own make me furious. A lot of the time when you see writing in a library book, the library got it that way
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Mar 9, 2010 20:13
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I posted this in the what you finished thread but it got kind of lost in there I think. I'll post it here since this book has been mentioned in a number of threads in this forum. I just finished up Blindsight by Peter Watts and I was pretty confused through pretty much the whole thing. The plot was hard to follow, the characters were all severely unlikeable and it was hard to follow their motivations. Is this what happened? They took their ship to a small but very dense planet past the edge of the known solar system. The ship's AI was controlling the "vampire" the whole time. The crew (except the vampire/ship AI) went into the ship where all the crew that went had their brains hacked by all the EMF. They make a couple of trips back and forth into Rorschach and one of the crew dies. In the process the crew obtains a not-really-dead alien and takes it onto the ship. A new crewman is defrosted and analyzes the dead alien. Did Rorschach kill the biologist because he had all that cybernetic poo poo and that kept the brain hacks from working? Rorschach allowed the specimen to be taken to further an agenda that was outside the main narrator's understanding. The crew makes several trips and takes two live aliens. They hear the imprisoned aliens communicating and decide that even though the aliens are non-sentient they are still intelligent. Rorschach attacks with a cannon and gets the bodies (and experience data) of the two aliens back and also takes the replacement biologist guy with them. Then when the ship self destructs in order to destroy Rorschach the narrator is left to drift through space. He hears that "Heaven" was destroyed somehow. Somehow he knows that the vampires did it and now Earth is devoid of humans and overrun with vampires. Mankind was doomed all along and it had nothing to do with aliens. The inefficiency of sentience did us in all on our own? Is this correct?
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Mar 9, 2010 20:29
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therattle posted:
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Mar 9, 2010 21:07
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I had a technical writing professor who was tired of seeing students get ripped off, so he had his course require only a single book that he wrote himself and sold at cost (About $10). Loved that guy.
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Mar 9, 2010 21:33
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PBCrunch posted:I posted this in the what you finished thread but it got kind of lost in there I think. I'll post it here since this book has been mentioned in a number of threads in this forum. No sorry, you got it all wrong.
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Mar 9, 2010 21:55
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