It takes an average of 475 hours to write a novel.

That is #8 on 25 Random Things About Reading.

12. Half of all books sold today are to people over the age of 45.

That kind of makes sense. It doesn't seem terribly lopsided.

15. Women buy 68% of all books sold.

We knew this, although it could be that women still do a disproportionate share of small-goods shopping. (Women probably buy 85% of all milk sold, e.g.)

13. Adults who read literature on a regular basis are more than two-and-a-half times as likely to do volunteer or charity work, and over one-and-a-half times as likely to participate in sporting activities.

Is it because doing good deeds, like literature, is good for us?

It's a fun list. Check it out at www.itzabitza.com.

Tweet Nothings

When the [Twitter] service was introduced in 2006, it was ridiculed as the latest narcissistic way to waste time online.

Last year, minds began to change. Twitterers tapped out tweets during the earthquake in China while the ground was still shaking and live during the terrorist attacks in Mumbai, India. One of the first pictures of the airliner downed in the Hudson River last month, picked up by major newspapers and magazines, was “tweeted” by a 23-year-old tourist with an iPhone who happened to be aboard a ferry sent to the rescue. Suddenly, Twitter has become a venue for “citizen journalism,” a way to learn what’s happening sometimes even before news organizations themselves could find out.

"Citizen journalism" certainly is appealing. At CSMonitor.com.

Absorb Everything

Zen Risotto

First, you must know the True Nature of rice. Ordinarily, rice aspires only to cook up into separate, individual fluffy grains. Risotto requires a rice that will give up its boundaries, one that is willing to merge with the grains all around it, to create One Creamy Whole.

Second, saute the rice in hot oil. All rice is born surrounded by a defensive shell. In order for our cooking liquid to penetrate, we must sear through that outer protective layer. But be careful not to burn the kernels. Excessive heat only toughens.

Third, add some sweet wine. Practicing this recipe is slow and painstaking. A little sweetness, in the pot (and in the cook), helps us stay the course. Begin a practice of continuous stirring. Never stop.

Fourth, ladle in warm broth a little at a time. Remember, “Human kind can not bear very much reality.” Don’t overwhelm the rice. Add only what it can easily absorb. But keep the heat fairly high; merely simmering will get you nowhere. Stay focused on your stirring.

Fifth, add your own flavor. I like mushrooms and peas. Some add sex and poetry; others arthritis and old age. The best chef isn’t the one who uses the fanciest ingredients, but the one who best serves up whatever is at hand.

Finally, cook to perfection. Ordinary risotto takes 20 to 25 minutes, but Zen Risotto may need 20 to 25 years before it is truly Ready to Serve. Remember, never stop stirring. Absorb Everything.

Zen Risotto, from Barry Magid of Ordinary Mind Zendo, NYC.

Put Down the Hammer

Amateur talent offers acerbic and increasingly hilarious commentary on faulty products.

Here, a letter to Virgin Airways' Richard Branson about the food on the Mumbai to Heathrow flight. I put this one first because the author was offered a job in Virgin's food services.

Here, a discourse on the (non)virtues of the Chrysler Neon.

Here, a bank, maxi-pad philosophy, police response times.

Yet Another Reader Does Jail Time

Is this any way to encourage kids to read more? It's the second report of its kind I remember in the past few years. Okay, maybe books *are* that valuable, but it's not like she had the only extant copy of anything.

Oh, ha ha -- it *has* been two weeks since I posted something and it *is* another snowy day... Sheeze, be careful what you write.

Anyway, readers who do not wish to risk jail time can check out this site, ReadPrint.com, although you are not likely to find everything you want there.

RIP: John Updike

“From earliest childhood I was charmed by the materials of my craft, by pencils and paper and, later, by the typewriter and the entire apparatus of printing. To condense from one’s memories and fantasies and small discoveries dark marks on paper which become handsomely reproducible many times over still seems to me, after nearly 30 years concerned with the making of books, a magical act, and a delightful technical process. To distribute oneself thus, as a kind of confetti shower falling upon the heads and shoulders of mankind out of bookstores and the pages of magazines is surely a great privilege and a defiance of the usual earthbound laws whereby human beings make themselves known to one another.” From the NY Times.

Updike newbies start here.

Although I do wish more people knew about his post-apocalyptic novel, Toward the End of Time. The end of civilization in the Connecticut suburbs. Priceless.

Dead Poets Read

This is pretty cool, with decent animation:





To see more, go to Youtube and search for "poetry animations."

I have a CD with an ancient, scratchy recording of Whitman reading "America." Here, he sounds like Ian McKellen. But, it's not always for the best to hear the poet read his/her own work. I once bought a record with Dylan Thomas reading his work and it was so overblown in that old-fashioned style -- it quite deflated my enthusiasm.

Why Being Housebound by Blizzard is Good for You

Because you catch up with incredible online reading, such as: Hamlet, the Facebook edition by Sarah Schmelling. At McSweeney's.

Of course, tomorrow will (I hope) be sunny and the roads will be plowed and I won't blog again for two weeks, but here I am today, blogging about everything.

Jane Austen is also out in Facebook edition.

Facebook is fun, btw. One of my friends calls it "Crackbook."

Is this the future of literature?

Or is it those phone novels written by Japanese teenagers?

The Pull of Retro Cool

And speaking of book pricing, let's not forget cheap, but attractively retro covers and how cool it is to own something that looks old but feels new.

The Abebooks blog on Penguin's marketing genius.

For readers, the pictures are mostly in the mind anyway. Maybe it's harder to get people to buy that way, but for me, I know I keep a lot of old books on my shelves, spines out (you can't see the cover) because just looking at the titles jump starts my memory and imagination. And the memories are of pictures I attached to the words in the first place, and had nothing to do with the cover art. Cover art serves to get a buyer's attention, maybe, but Penguin has subverted this brilliantly with cover artlessness that evokes quality and nostalgia.

"Beverage Entertainment

for a hyperprosperous society in search of emotional soothing" is from the Publishers Weekly description of Starbucked: A Double Tall Tale of Caffeine, Commerce, and Culture, by Taylor Clark. It's one of many -- how many? You'd be surprised -- titles about Starbucks, which, it should be noted, is not only keeping us awake long enough to get through all the multiformatted reading we must do in the internet age, but has conveniently located itself everywhere in order to do so, and is now also singlehandedly attempting to revitalize publishing with, er, books about itself. Okay, even if it isn't a direct attempt, it counts.

Somebody has to do it, at least until ebook publishers figure out that they must charge *less* not more for ebooks than for hardcovers. Amazon is already doing this with Kindle, but some old habits just do not want to die. The only books I have read onscreen so far are freebies from online sources, so I am not the target audience for ebooks -- tho I stand accused with the rest of the guilty from the previous blog post on used book buying. To lessen my guilt and otherwise cleanse my book-buying karma, I have bought six full-priced paperbacks and two $25 gift certificates from local bookstores in the last couple of weeks, thus nudging my total of unread books which I already own somewhere into the low hundreds. One of these days I have to start cleansing my book-reading karma.

How We Kill What We Love

Or, how people who buy and sell used books online are the real death of the industry. Bargain Hunting for Books, from the NY Times.

How much do I want to pay, and where do I want that money to go? To my local community via a bookstore? To the publisher? To the author?

In theory, I want to support all of these fine folks. In practice, I decide to save a buck.

Apparently, a practice with enormous repercussions. Powell's bookstore in Portland, Or, is asking its employees to take unpaid sabbaticals. There is no longer any bookstore in Berkeley, Calif. Will we regret our "selfish actions" when there are no longer physical bookstores? Sure, we will. How will we learn about books, then? Those of us who find what we want at the local bookstore and then order it online to save maybe $10. But how do they expect us to give up saving $10 on each volume?

We're loving books to death. Somebody think of something.

And the Good News Is...

Borders has agreed to buy books on a no-return basis. At Galleycat, via Moonrat.

Why Book Publishers Fail

Is there anyone who reads The Drudge Report instead of a good book? Does it make sense to blame the internet for publishing's decline, or is it instead the result of several years of bad decisions? The loss of 2,000 independent booksellers? Dohle's depredations at Random House? Cutting expenses by replacing senior employees with newbies? Or has publishing dumbed down, and "drifted into the paper-thin celebrity culture that defines just about every other domain, and which is rendering American culture as dull and monotonous as anything in Western history." Lawrence Osborne at Forbes.

I agree that publishing seems a bit dumbed down, but in the same article, Osborne says industry insiders blame agents, editorial failures, and lack of "franchise authors" to bolster overall sales. It sounds like you can't swing a cat without hitting someone who is to blame. Agents for trying to make fast money, instead of building authors' careers, editorial failures in the form of cuts in actual editing -- "resulting in longer, sloppier books that bore readers stupid" -- and Dan Brown for not writing an enticing sequel to the DaVinci Code.

A friend in publishing (laid off from Random House, incidentally) makes the point that the market for books is not readers, exactly, but those readers who buy books, and that we buy them for their content and quality -- remember when books were the authority on grammar and spelling? Now I don't remember the last time I got through a new book without noticing a dozen or more sometimes appalling errors. Not to mention the awful shapelessness of "longer, sloppier books" -- for $25 and up. Books used to give the reader the sense that something in the world made sense, or perhaps that sense could be made of the world. Am I naive in writing that? I used to feel, when reading a good book, that someone in the world knew what they were doing, how to think and express things, that the world might actually be in good hands. Okay, I'm naive, but it really was about world view. And now publishing is yelling about the sky falling. I'm not shelling out $25 for that, and neither is anybody else, apparently. Unless it's really well written...

Writers Need Food

I somehow missed this excellent NY Times article, in the form of a memo from Michael Pollan to the next U.S. President. He makes the excellent point that a major ingredient in the food we eat is oil, as in petroleum, whether in the form of transportation, chemical fertilizers and/or pesticides. The cost of food has skyrocketed along with the cost of energy, and the pollution from waste that was once recycled as fertilizer...well, you get the picture. We feed 40% of all our grain to animals to fatten them up in inhumane feedlots, and another 11% to cars and trucks as biofuel.

He makes very good suggestions, from polyculture farming to converting a piece of the White House lawn to a victory garden to having one meatless day a week at the White House. I'd also like to suggest vegetable/vegetarian cooking classes in schools -- it's time we stopped treating meat-based meals as the only acceptable standard. Our eating habits are killing us and our environment.

Michael Pollan is the author of The Omnivore's Dilemma, In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto, and The Botany of Desire: A Plant's-Eye View of the World. Thanks to Food is Love for pointing me to this article.