ᔥ What if the world’s best-selling books are actually misleading? ()
inTag: Books
On the face of it, the gamification of reality looks like fun. But when everything becomes a game, it turns out, that game ends up dissolving into its merely apparent opposite: work. The dupes of the new ideology, underlain by the metaphor of the game, think they’re giving us life in an arcade —a child’s dream!— but what we’re really getting is life in a global warehouse, monitored and metricized, forced at every turn to devise strategies that maximize engagement with whatever it is we’re putting out there… all in the name of scraping by.
This reminds me of Cory Doctorow’s reflection on the challenges of self-publishing, as well as C. Thi Nguyen’s discussion of the problems with the gamification of social media.

If you read Irene Vallejo’s Papyrus (don’t worry, it’s an academic!), you’ll learn that books did not (only) originate as a way to preserve knowledge. Sometimes, knowledge is boring. And we’re not even talking about fiction yet.
There’s a lot of crap out there. That statement is true beyond the context of books. Sifting and decision-making while buying is up to you. To ignore everything but academic authors when it comes to non-fiction is just ridiculous.
This book is the result of a belief: that “digital” fundamentally alters the mechanics of publishing books. There is much talk about this shift in the publishing world — a calendar filled with conferences, a blogosphere popping with opinion, and not a few op-eds and even books on this very top…
In “Opening the Book”, a 2012 presentation I delivered at the late/great Books in Browsers conference, I offered this definition of a book:
A book is a discrete collection of text (and other media) that is designed by an author(s) as an internally complete representation of an idea, or set of ideas; emotion or set of emotions; and transmitted to readers in various formats.
Books that give insights into an artform that is so aligned with our culture and identity
Here is an idea I love that may or may not be true:
Some books are centripetal — they suck you in from other books.
Some books are centrifugal — they spin you out to other books.
We are now past the mid-way point in February, which is technically the shortest month, but is also the one that—for me, anyway—feels the longest. Especially this year, for all of the reasons that you already know. At this point, if you keep monthly reading goals, even vague ones, you may be looking for few a good, short novels to knock out in an afternoon or two. Last year, I wrote about the best contemporary novels under 200 pages, so now I must turn my attention to my favorite short classics—which represent the quickest and cheapest way, I can tell you in my salesman voice, to become “well-read.”
One way you know if a book is any good is if you are still thinking about it a year after you read it. (Or five years, or a decade, etc. The longer you think about a book the better you know it is.) Another way to know if a book is good is if it seems like every week you read an article that could be a supplementary chapter.
‘The Great Gatsby’ is not a book about people, per se. Secretly, it’s a novel of ideas.
In one day, you can sit with the brutal awfulness of nearly every person in this book—booooo, Jordan; just boo. And Mr. Wolfsheim, shame on you, sir; Gatsby was your friend. In a day, you no longer have to wonder whether Daisy loved Gatsby back or whether “love” aptly describes what Gatsby felt in the first place. After all, The Great Gatsby is a classic of illusions and delusions. In a day, you reach those closing words about the boats, the current, and the past, and rather than allow them to haunt, you simply return to the first page and start all over again.
Sarah Churchwell, Philip McGowan, William Blazek and Melvyn Bragg talk about The Great Gatsby on the In Our Time podcast. They discuss Fitzgerald’s legacy and how it came to be so important within the American literacy canon.
For an audio version of the book, the team at NPR’s Planet Money have done a reading after the book was added to the Public Domain:
ᔥ Pluralistic: 18 Jan 2021 – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow ()
inFiona Hardy’s funny and heartfelt new novel How to Write the Soundtrack to Your Life is a celebration of music, creativity, and listening to the world around us. Here, Fiona shares some of the music that has shaped her life.
‘Self Improvement’ doesn’t mean what it used to
In response to the challenges created by the global public health crisis of COVID-19, Project MUSE is pleased to support its participating publishers in making scholarly content temporarily available for free on our platform. With many higher education institutions moving into an exclusively online learning environment for the foreseeable future, we hope that easy access to vetted research in the humanities and social sciences, from a variety of distinguished university presses, societies, and related not-for-profit publishers, will help to support teaching, learning, and knowledge discovery for users worldwide.
via Public Books
- 84k by Claire North (@cmplxtv_studies)
- A Gentleman In Moscow – Amor Towles (@allis_land)
- A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara (@johnny_boy1988)
- A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini (@Speedgonzaeles)
- A Yellow Raft in Blue Water by Michael Dorris (@capaldi_phil)
- Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy (@MarianTaudinCha)
- Boy Swallows Universe by Trent Dalton (@ZephanieP)
- Flowers For Algernon by Daniel Keyes (@TheWayneGibbons)
- Invisible Boys by Holden Sheppard (@johnny_boy1988)
- Libra by Don DeLillo (@Amy_Futures)
- Life After Life by Kate Atkinson (@TaraMcEndo)
- Musashi by Eiji Yoshikawa (@JasonOshima)
- My Absolute Darling by Gabriel Tallent (@mamamialia)
- Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler (@lauranissen)
- Parable of the Talents by Octavia E. Butler (@lauranissen)
- Riddley Walker by Russel Hoban (@sharplm)
- Suttree by Cormac McCarthy (@ChrisWalsh05)
- The Boy In the Striped Pyjamas by John Boyne (@1jorobson)
- The Dark Tower series by Stephen King (@MrCarlsonsClass)
- The Man Who Folded Himself by David Gerrold (@TheWayneGibbons)
- The Overstory by Richard Powers (@Czernie)
- The Power by Naomi Alderman (@lauranissen)
- The Passage by Justin Cronin (@GlenviewMath)
- The Raw Shark Texts by Steven Hall (@e_lewisc)
- The Ten Thousand Doors of January by Alix E. Harrow (@erikasmith)
- The Wasp Factory by Ian Banks (@raymondsoltysek)
My latest podcast is a reading of the author’s note from “Attack Surface” — the third Little Brother book, which comes out on Oct 12. I recorded this for the audiobook edition of Attack Suface, which I’ve been recording all last week with Amber Benson and the Cassandra de Cuir from Skyboat Media. If you like what you hear, please consider pre-ordering the book — it’s a scary time to have a book in the production pipeline!