A bit of follow-up

I thought I would take this opportunity to update some of my previous postings:

Scandivanian mysteries - particularly the Icelandic ones:

I tried a new author: Yrsa Sigurdardottir - Last rituals. It was ok but I think it suffered a bit during translation. However, it is a great way to see Icelandic life, a lot of time is spent on the main character's life. She is a single mom who is establishing a legal practice. It also provides insights into the way Europeans move around various countries like we move around the various states. It is worth a read, but it didn't wow me.

I read the next title by Arnaldur Indridason - Voices. He is my favorite and I wasn't disappointed with this one. It was lovely and dark, nicely developing the characters in this series while expanding our look at Icelandic life, and the mystery is decent too, not only keeping you guessing, but exploring themes of the risks of child stars and children growing up with absent (either physically or emotionally) parent. I really recommend it.

I also had the chance to see a travel DVD on Iceland and Greenland. Way too little about Iceland, but well worth seeing for the risks due to the sudden changes in weather. The host is traveling in April and they are stuck due to a sudden massive (to us) snowfall. It is an interesting underlining of the lost forever in storms that is a constant theme in Arnaldur's books.

The end of the book as we know it:

Once again, there has been a rash of articles predicting and mourning the end of the book, the demise of reading and even the demise of libraries. One article predicted that reading would be an arcane hobby done by a few oddballs. Another based the end of reading and the book on the 4% drop in sales at bookstores (over 5 years) - no mention of the steep rise in prices, the downturn of the economy (and the growth in library use) as possible contibutors to this. Still another in a posting about new library buildings in the US predicted that libraries would be a thing of the past by 2019. All due to the Internet. I keep this all in perspective, remembering all those weeded book predicting that all oil reserves would be exhausted by 1990. After all, the Internet has been supposedly killing libraries for the past 10 years and library use is actually booming. The face of what a library is and does is of course changing with the changing culture - just like it has forever.

I was talking to a colleague who was describing a project at her local high school where students were creating a new civilization from scratch and had to decide what services to include. When the students didn't select libraries, she reminded them that libraries are never just warehouses of books, rather libraries collect, store and distribute human knowledge, the how-to for everything. Not only instructions on how to cook, but also how to live a life. Fiction, after all, gives insight into the puzzle of human behavior. She posed the question - when you build your road, where will you keep the directions on how to build another so that future generations will know how to do it without starting all over? Apparently even the teacher had not considered this aspect.

Most interesting to me was an article by Ursula Le Guin in this February 2008's issue of Harper's. I wish the whole article was available on line, but you can get the magazine issue from your library. The article is called "Staying Awake: Notes on the Alleged Decline of Reading" and is in response to a recent NEA report on the demise of reading entitled "To Read or Not to Read" and an AP article by Alan Fram quoting a telecommunications project manager saying ' I just get sleepy when I read". Ursula discusses that except for a brief period of history, not that many people read at all. She also argues that big corporate business getting into the publishing business is strangling the publication of interesting but not necessarily James Patterson huge titles. That the focus on ever growing returns has cut off the availability of older titles that in the past were steady sellers and the bread and butter of publishers. An interesting counterpoint to much else that is being written.

Book: Hirsch, E. D. - The Knowledge Deficit: closing the shocking education gap for American Children
Movie: Lathe of Heaven (based on an Ursula Le Guin story - for you non-readers!)