reading – Jonathan Frei

Promoting old books with new movies

Jonathan Frei — Fri, 01 Mar 2013 19:34:00 +0000

Many books get re-released with new covers when their movie counter parts hit the theaters. Here’s look at several iconic covers side-by-side with their newer versions.

Jonathan Frei — Sat, 13 Oct 2012 23:10:48 +0000

Beach reading

comicsandgraphics:

Lilli Carré, 2012

Jonathan Frei — Fri, 31 Aug 2012 17:19:00 +0000

Weekend Reading

No. You have a problem.

Thanks Gabi for feeding my habit. And thanks to the Lee County Library System for supplying.

What I’m reading

Jonathan Frei — Sat, 14 Apr 2012 10:03:48 +0000

Here is a list of the last 100 things I’ve read (courtesy of Instapaper). This list has items that consists of things I’ve read since March 30, 2012. A few of these things I’ve already linked to or blogged about but most are just things that grabbed my attention long enough to read from beginning to end (which is saying a lot for links on the Internet).

Let me know if this is of any interest, and I’ll keep posting lists of what I’m reading. Maybe I’ll include some comments about items that struck my fancy.

Show this chart to the next person that says the Internet killed reading books

Jonathan Frei — Wed, 11 Apr 2012 11:28:29 +0000

Show this chart to the next person that says the Internet killed reading books

The act of reading books is alive and well. Radio didn’t kill it. Television didn’t kill it. The Internet didn’t Kill it.

Alexis Madrigal muses about Golden age of reading:

Remember the good old days when everyone read really good books, like, maybe in the post-war years when everyone appreciated a good use of the semi-colon? Everyone’s favorite book was by Faulkner or Woolf or Roth. We were a civilized civilization. This was before the Internet and cable television, and so people had these, like, wholly different desires and attention spans. They just craved, craved, craved the erudition and cultivation of our literary kings and queens.

That time wasn’t in some bygone era. That time is now. Grab a book and join the fun!

The Book of the Future

Jonathan Frei — Tue, 10 Apr 2012 11:31:20 +0000

The Book of the Future

This isn’t the book of the future, but the cartoon is still imaginative.

Jet-pack friendly reading material is important. Maybe books will go here, and we’ll have to deal the distracted flying issues.

What is the Future of Books?

Jonathan Frei — Fri, 09 Mar 2012 12:30:05 +0000

What is the Future of Books?

Why read books above your ‘level’

Jonathan Frei — Tue, 06 Mar 2012 12:00:05 +0000

Why read books above your ‘level’

Ryan Holiday:

Reading to lead or learn requires that you treat your brain like the muscle that it is–lifting the subjects with the most tension and weight. For me, that means pushing ahead into subjects you’re not familiar with and wresting with them until you can–shying away from the “easy read.”

Highlight from Joseph Conrad’s “Victory”

Jonathan Frei — Wed, 29 Feb 2012 12:00:05 +0000

I finished reading Victory by Joseph Conrad a few weeks ago. Here’s a few passages (presented without comment or context) that jumped out at me:

Thinking is the great enemy of perfection. The habit of profound reflection, I am compelled to say, is the most pernicious of all the habits formed by the civilized man.

I prayed like a child, of course. I believe in children praying—well, women, too, but I rather think God expects men to be more self-reliant. I don’t hold with a man everlastingly bothering the Almighty with his silly troubles. It seems such cheek.

Every age is fed on illusions, lest men should renounce life early and the human race come to an end.

The last thing a woman will consent to discover in a man whom she loves, or on whom she simply depends, is want of courage.

In his simplicity he was not able to give up the idea which had entered his head. An idea must be driven out by another idea, and with Schomberg ideas were rare and therefore tenacious.

“They give you wages as they’d fling a bone to a dog, and they expect you to be grateful. It’s worse than slavery. You don’t expect a slave that’s bought for money to be grateful. And if you sell your work—what is it but selling your own self? You’ve got so many days to live and you sell them one after another. Hey? Who can pay me enough for my life? Ay! But they throw at you your week’s money and expect you to say ‘thank you’ before you pick it up.” He mumbled some curses, directed at employers generally, as it seemed, then blazed out: “Work be damned! I ain’t a dog walking on its hind legs for a bone; I am a man who’s following a gentleman. There’s a difference which you will never understand.”

“I never heard you laugh till today,” she observed. “This is the second time!” He scrambled to his feet and towered above her. “That’s because, when one’s heart has been broken into in the way you have broken into mine, all sorts of weaknesses are free to enter—shame, anger, stupid indignation, stupid fears—stupid laughter, too. I wonder what interpretation you are putting on it?

Clairvoyance or no clairvoyance, men love their captivity. To the unknown force of negation they prefer the miserably tumbled bed of their servitude. Man alone can give one the disgust of pity; yet I find it easier to believe in the misfortune of mankind than in its wickedness.

Dreams are madness, my dear. It’s things that happen in the waking world, while one is asleep, that one would be glad to know the meaning of.

A diplomatic statement […] is a statement of which everything is true, but the sentiment which seems to prompt it. I have never been diplomatic in my relation with mankind—not from regard for its feelings, but from a certain regard for my own. Diplomacy doesn’t go well with consistent contempt. I cared little for life and still less for death.

One can die but once, but there are many manners of death.

Woe to the man whose heart has not learned while young to hope, to love—and to put its trust in life!

Changing the past

Jonathan Frei — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 12:00:05 +0000

I love e-books, especially on my Kindle, but Nicholas Carr or the Wall Street Journal has some interesting ideas on the danger of e-books.

[A]s is often the case with digitization, the boon carries a bane. The ability to alter the contents of a book will be easy to abuse. School boards may come to exert even greater influence over what students read. They’ll be able to edit textbooks that don’t fit with local biases. Authoritarian governments will be able to tweak books to suit their political interests. And the edits can ripple backward. Because e-readers connect to the Internet, the works they contain can be revised remotely, just as software programs are updated today. Movable text makes a lousy preservative.

This is not an impossible problem to overcome. It is not difficult to compare versions of documents. In the digital age, version control is even easier than when monks copied out books by hand one by one.

Carr goes on to eulogize the death of the solidity of books.

Not long before he died, John Updike spoke eloquently of a book’s “edges,” the boundaries that give shape and integrity to a literary work and that for centuries have found their outward expression in the indelibility of printed pages. It’s those edges that give a book its solidity, allowing it to stand up to the vagaries of fashion and the erosions of time. And it’s those edges that seem fated to blur as the words of books go from being stamped permanently on sheets of paper to being rendered temporarily on flickering screens.

But really, what is a book before you read it? After you read it? It only is what it is as you are consuming its content.