Ben Crowder

Thanks to Hilary for this link. It’s called A Compendium of Beautiful Libraries, and it’s eye candy like you’ve never seen it before. I’m drooling. And trying to figure out if I can ever scrap together enough money to go visit all of these libraries.

Books are the best decoration for houses, I think, even above art. (Art’s good, too, of course. But if I had to choose one or the other, I’d go with the books.) When I first moved into my apartment, it felt so naked and sterile, more like a prison than a home. But then I put my books on the shelves and suddenly I was home again. (I’m up to 887 books now, with two imported bookshelves plus the ones that came with the apartment. And I’m running out of room. This is a crisis. I’ve thought about buying my roommate’s contract, chucking the bed, and filling the space with bookshelves. But I’m not exactly made of money, being a librarian and all.)

Books make me happy. Just the sight of them on someone’s shelves is enough to make me like a person. (And if they’re books I happen to like, then I’ve just found another kindred spirit, and my joy meter in this life goes up a few notches.) People who don’t like books aren’t bad or anything, but I do have to say that I’m giddy with delight whenever I meet a fellow reading addict. And no, I’m not interested in signing up for Bookaholics Anonymous, thank you very much.

Yesterday I was talking with my friend Hilary about a quote I found in Lewis Thomas’s The Medusa and the Snail the other day, and I realized that it’s actually a smashingly good blog post topic. And I need blog post topics, because I haven’t been writing as much lately — I’ve been distracted, you could call it.

But anyway, The Medusa and the Snail is a collection of essays (“Notes of a Biology Watcher”), and in the third essay (called “The Youngest and Brightest Thing Around”), Thomas talks about how “Mars, “from the look we’ve had at it thus far, is a horrifying place. It is, by all appearances, stone dead, surely the deadest place any of us has ever seen, hard to look at without flinching.”

But then on the next page he talks about Earth, and the contrast is beautiful:

“If you dropped a vehicle, or a billion vehicles, for that matter, on our planet you might be able to find one or two lifeless spots, but only if you took very small samples. There are living cells in our hottest deserts and at the tops of our coldest mountains. Even in the ancient frozen rocks recently dug out in Antarctica there are endolithic organisms tucked up comfortably in porous spaces beneath the rock face, as much alive as the petunia in the florist’s window.”

That’s just so cool. Teeming with life. I take our planet for granted, I think.

This is the coolest thing I’ve heard of in months, bar none. It’s called reCAPTCHA, which I read about on Language Scraps (a rather good blog, by the way — one I recommend). You know those spam-prevention things where you have to type in a scrambled word? Well, the brilliant folks at reCAPTCHA have decided to put them to good use:

Yes, that’s right. They’re using the same idea — users typing in scrambled words to keep spam out — but leveraging it to actually do something with it, namely digitizing old books with the Internet Archive. I’m having trouble staying seated, I’m so excited about this. It’s incredible! Wow. Wow. Wow.

[tags]reCAPTCHA, CAPTCHA, Internet Archive[/tags]

My master’s degree is an online program, which means no in-person classes other than occasional seminars (once a semester). And that means no constant reminders to do my homework. And that means it’s nowhere near the front of my mind.

Now, since this was giving me grief (namely that I haven’t remembered my homework until an hour before it was due, which doesn’t do anything to lower my stress level), I took an hour tonight to cull all the pertinent out of the syllabi for my two classes and distill it into a page on my personal wiki, with relevant calendar dates marked in Google Calendar. Out of the darkness and into the light. And now that I’ve finally started doing my reading, I’m finding that I really, really, really like it! It’s so up my alley it’s almost unbelievable. For example, this week’s module is on dictionaries. All the readings are about dictionaries and information-seeking behavior. So cool.

In other news, it’s been a while since I’ve blogged about what I’m reading. After a long period of separation, I’ve picked up A Tale of Two Cities again and I’m loving it. I also started reading Wide Sargasso Sea at a friend’s recommendation (it’s by Jean Rhys and is a prequel to Jane Eyre, telling the backstory of the madwoman in the attic). Definitely not what I expected, but I do like it. (I’m around 70 pages in.) I’m halfway through Elizabeth Marie Pope’s The Sherwood Ring, and while I read the first half fairly quickly, it’s been a couple of weeks since I last picked it up. That’ll change soon. :) Those are the main books near the forefront; the rest are back burner, and there are a lot of them (Tolstoy’s War and Peace; Sir Philip Sidney’s Defense of Poesy; L.M. Montgomery’s Anne of Avonlea; John le Carré’s The Spy Who Came in from the Cold; Tolkien’s The Fellowship of the Ring; Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel; Diana Wynne Jones’ Dogsbody and Cart and Cwidder; Jan Tschichold’s The Form of the Book; George Maestri’s Digital Character Animation; and a few others).

As for the other library books on my shelf — the ones I haven’t yet gotten to — I’ve got a few books on piano playing, two histories of mathematics, As Long As I Have You (the fifth volume of Dean Hughes’ Children of the Promise series), some books on playwriting, some on Unicode, two programming-related books (one on Perl and one on Vim), three books on bookbinding, Dante’s Commedia in Italian, Grimm’s Kinder- Und Hausmärchen in German, and Book of Mormons in a handful of different languages (Tamil, Hindi, Amharic, and Mongolian, if you’re curious) for my BoM bibliography project. I also checked out Gerald Lund’s The Alliance yesterday. And today I checked out some histories of script deciphering (hieroglyphs, Etruscan, Linear A/B, that sort of thing) and Boethius’ De Consolatione Philosophiae, which I’ve never read but heard lots about, and which I thought was much longer than it really is. (I got a nice Clarendon edition, very beautiful to the eye.)

Heck, since this is quite a book post as it is, why don’t I go ahead and list some of the books I’m hoping to read soon. :) In general, my knowledge of the classics isn’t as extensive as I’d like, and I want to read Trollope, Proust, Thackeray, Hardy, and such, including people I know I probably won’t like very much like Hemingway. I also want to read the rest of the Jane Austen corpus (I’ve only read Pride & Prejudice and Persuasion). Ditto for L.M. Montgomery (I’ve read the first two Anne books). There’s a book called The Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman which I started once and got a few chapters into, and which I loved, but I never finished it. I’ve also seen several copies of Good to Great lying around campus and want to check it out. The Arbinger Institute has put out a book called Leadership and Self-Deception which looks rather interesting. I’ve been meaning to read Freakonomics for a while. Back to fiction, Watership Down looks like it’ll be my type, and I’ve also been planning to read some John Buchan novels. Not to mention the massive Scottish novels George MacDonald wrote. I’ve heard The Phantom Tollbooth is really good, by the way. Oh, and I want to read Bushman’s biography of Joseph Smith, Rough Stone Rolling. And my roommate read Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose a while back and I’ve been wanting to read it ever since. Oh, and William Morris’s The Well at the World’s End. (I read The Wood Beyond the World years and years ago. William Morris, by the way, is an inspiration to me with all of his projects, particularly his printing work.) And there’s a children’s book called Snow Treasure which comes to me highly recommended.

Well, I could go on about books forever. I won’t, but since I can, I think I ought to blog about books more frequently. (After all, book posts are easier to write and I enjoy them very much. :)) Yes, libraries are definitely the place for me.

For the past few days I’ve been playing around with a Sony Portable Reader (for eBooks), and I have to say I’m not that impressed. The typography was atrocious, the interface didn’t feel smooth enough, and even if those weren’t the case, the page switching thing (flashing black for half a second) was very annoying and distracting.

Reading Jeffrey Young’s review just now, I rather find myself agreeing — the real book wins out because it “is utterly portable, requires no batteries, has a well-defined user interface, and comes eqipped to be understood by most pairs of eyes.” And books don’t cost $400. You can’t trump the real thing.

That said, I don’t really know that eBooks are meant to replace paper books. I see them as being supplemental devices for times when the real thing isn’t feasible (textbooks, for instance, and reference works). Sure, some people will use them for leisure reading, and that’s great. There are times when it’s difficult to get a hard copy of a book you want to read, and eBooks could definitely fill that niche. (I’m thinking primarily of out-of-print books here.) But for works that are easily available, nothing beats the local library and a real, paper-and-ink book that you can take to bed without worrying about the batteries running out or it falling off the bed and dying an ignominious death.

Even so, I still think we need to continue research into making eBooks more palatable and feasible. And that’s a topic for another post. :)

The other day I came across an article in the Columbia Journalism Review, entitled “Goodbye to All That”. It’s a great article, and here’s a quote that warmed my bookish heart:

[Readers] know in their bones something newspapers forget at their peril: that without books, indeed, without the news of such books — without literacy — the good society vanishes and barbarism triumphs. I shall never forget overhearing some years ago, on the morning of the first day of the annual Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, a woman asking a UCLA police officer if he expected trouble. He looked at her with surprise and said, ‘Ma’am, books are like Kryptonite to gangs.’ There was more wisdom in that cop’s remark than in a thousand academic monographs on reforming the criminal justice system. What he knew, of course, is what all societies since time immemorial have known: If you want to reduce crime, teach your children to read. Civilization is built on a foundation of books.

Amen and amen.

[tags]reading, books[/tags]

On Thursday Google announced a new feature that lets you create your own library on Google Book Search. I haven’t used Google Books all that much up to this point — just occasional browses — but now my interest is piqued. All those old books they’re scanning… Mmm. Right now my own library only has the Llyfr Mormon, since I’m bogged down with a zillion other things at the moment, but before long I’ll start collecting more. And they don’t even take up shelf space! :) (At the same time, by the way, this is getting closer and closer to LibraryThing, since you can also add books that haven’t been scanned. It’ll be interesting to see what happens in the long run.)

Speaking of LibraryThing, I’ve been a bit behind on reading the blog, but today I came across the tag mirror, which is a fascinating concept. Here’s mine:

I figured it would look somewhat like that. :)

[tags]Google Books, LibraryThing[/tags]

When it comes to the arts, I seem to be bounce back and forth between creation and consumption. Both halves are important to the whole, and in a sense they feed off each other. Artistic symbiosis.

The tricky part is balancing the two. Ideally I’d do a good, healthy amount of both each day, but what usually happens is that the balance swings rather heavily toward one side or the other. For example, lately I’ve been far on the creating end, writing and revising a play and working on a number of design projects. All of which leave little time for reading (which is my main form of consumption). On the other hand, there are stretches where I just read, don’t do much else. I’m missing those right now. :) But back and forth I go, and I’m sure that once I finish these current projects I’ll take a little break and finish a few books. And then get inspired again and start running till the next time I run out of breath.

According to an Associated Press poll, “one in four adults say they read no books at all in the past year.” Ouch. And for those who did read last year, the average number of books read was seven. Here I was thinking that the seventy books I read last year was a low figure. Guess not.

It’s really disturbing, though, that reading is so unpopular. I hadn’t quite realized it was that low, perhaps because I’m in a college population and reading may be higher here. (Except according to the poll, seniors and women had the highest numbers. So maybe not.) Or maybe it’s just that my friends mostly tend to be the reading type.

At any rate, it’s time to start a reading crusade. Up with the banners! :)

One of the members of my stake presidency invited me to go to a pre-premiere showing of a new documentary film his company is distributing. It’s the sequel to Journey of Faith, and I think it’s called The New World, but I’m not sure. :) Anyway, it’s about the Book of Mormon, and I really liked it!

Perhaps the most important part, for me, was the feeling I got from it that I need to make the Book of Mormon a bigger part of my life, particularly in my art and writing and other creative works. I want my arts to inspire people to a deeper love of the book, to set a little fire inside them that makes them want to read it and study it and find Christ through it. I’m not entirely sure yet how I’ll go about doing that, but that’s the goal. :)

And looking back over what I’ve done in the past, several of my projects have had to do with the Book of Mormon — from my Moroni 10:3–5 project to Project Cumorah (reader’s edition of the Book of Mormon) to this current Llyfr Mormon digitization project. And I’m sure much more will come out of this love affair between me and the Book of Mormon.

For tonight, here’s a setting of Alma 34:17–27 I put together in Photoshop, called “Cry Unto Him”:

Eventually I’ll get a nice high-quality PDF up on Riverglen Press. Anyway, I think I’d like to do a series of these, though hopefully with more illustration/painting, and perhaps more creative typography. We’ll see.

[tags]Book of Mormon, LDS, Mormon[/tags]