Reading about the reading life: November 17, 2023 edition

Welcome to another edition of "Reading about the reading life" here at The Itinerant Librarian. This is where I collect stories about reading and the reading life. Basically, these are items related to reading, maybe writing and literacy, that I find interesting and think my four readers might find interesting as well with a little commentary. As with other features I do on this blog, I do it when I have time or feel like it. Comments are always welcome (within reason).

Once again, it has been a while since I've done one of these roundups, so let's get on with it. As always, in no particular order.

Via LitHub: 

• An interesting question: "Are celebrity publishing imprints the new celebrity vodka?" It seems for some celebrities with literary aspirations writing a book or two is not enough. They need to have their own publishing imprint. It can vary how long one of these imprints lasts. Some survive, others just wither and die as the celebrity moves on to other interesting things or just does not have enough to sustain a publishing operation. 
• They speculate if "School Librarian Memoirs May Just Be the Next Big Thing." Given the Hard Times, censorship efforts by RWNJs, Moms for Bigotry, and other Christofascists plus outright threats to their safety, I am sure one or two feel good school librarian memoirs may be appealing to some. I think it may be more a passing fad that will be forgotten in short time. When I was training to be a school teacher, I had to read one or two of those feel good teacher memoirs for one of my classes. By now, those books are a long forgotten memory, and I read them before I was doing book reviews, so no way to recall them in a handy way. I get the feeling this so-called big thing will be a brief flash and move on thing. 
• Lewis Buzbee writes about something that some of us can possibly relate to: "On the Difficulty of Getting Rid of Books." If you are a book person, and you own books, when the time comes to reduce the collection, for whatever reason, you know it is not an easy thing to do. For me, this is part of the reason I do not purchase as many books as I used to buy. Space is certainly finite. These days I rely more on libraries to satisfy my reading needs and desires.

Via The Walrus: 

• Writing for The Walrus, Jason Guriel looks at the benefits of browsing and what we miss when relying on things like algorithms in "Life in the Stacks: a Love Letter to Browsing." The author starts looking at browsing in places like the local video rental store. Remember those? I do, especially the smaller mom and pop stores where you could find all sorts of movies by just browsing. The author urges us to perhaps slow down a bit in a time when information moves so fast. Personally, to this day, when I teach students about research and reading, I do teach them about browsing library shelves to find books by a subject. It is a skill you learn as an academic, but I do wonder if with the rise of e-books and online databases if it is on its way to extinction or not. Maybe that is an essay for me to write another time, but I can ponder it in the meantime. How about you folks? Any of you still browse shelves at your local bookstore and/or local library? 
• The Walrus also asks a question that some of us have been asking for quite a while now: "Goodreads is Terrible for Books. Why Can't We All Quit It?" That would be a magnificent question for me. I've been a Goodreads user for years now, since way before the Big A bought it. It has gotten worse and worse over time. The catch is that there is no real substantial substitute for it. Sure there are some sites attempting to be successors ranging from Storygraph to Library Thing to Bookwyrm, the Fediverse's alternative. None of them can quite do what Goodreads does in terms of tracking your reading, organizing it, and being social about it. Plus there are the many celebrity and not so celebrity authors who just refuse to leave it and keep playing the Big A's game. As a book reviewer and librarian I wish there was an exodus out of Goodreads, but there is just no place to go that is good enough or that others can agree on. At the moment, it is a monopoly that is not easy to escape. On a side note, this is another topic I am thinking of writing about given I have tried some of the alternatives, maybe a post with some short reviews and impressions of some of the competitors. Anyone curious can check my Bookwyrm as it is at the moment. I have not updated it much, but I did give it a try, yet I am not totally ready to give up on it.
   

Other stories: 

• Lewis Buzbee is not the only writer who has issues when it comes to getting rid of books. Over at Inside Higher Ed, Matt Reed reflects "On Culling a Book Collection." Reed writes about deciding which books stay and which books go. We should note also that academics are notorious for hoarding books, especially in their campus offices. That is not mentioned in this article, but it is sort of common knowledge in academia. Something not many folks mention is that those office collections can be a bane to libraries when retiring faculty need to empty their offices and decide to dump donate their obsolete junk books to the campus library. If a library is lucky, one or two texts might be added to the collection. More often than not, those now unwanted books end up either on the free books shelf or just sent out to be pulped, recycled, etc. 
• At 3 Quarks Daily, Varun Gauri writes that "The Great Books Weren't All Great, But While Reading Them I Sometimes Was." The author reflects on reading books in the Great Books program, the kind of books considered canonical and that cultured people ought to read. They reflect on what they learned and the realization that there is more to literature than just the "Canon." For me, after a previous life as an English major, I make it a point to read widely and read anything but the canon. If you want a glimpse at some of the books I read, feel free to check other posts in this blog. 
• Browsing may not be dead just yet, at least according to BookNet Canada where they are sharing data from the Canadian Book Consumer Survey. They state that as COVID-19 has gone down a bit that browsing in-person for books is making a comeback.
  
• In "Are You a Bookworm?," published in Librarianship Studies and Information Technology, the author makes a list of the benefits of reading and keeping your mind active. 
• At Aeon, they are looking at the libraries of Imperial Rome. Still, back then just as today you had to evaluate the sources and information you found inside the library. 
• True West magazine has a short piece on dime novelists. 
• Michael La Corte writing for Salon looks at single-ingredient cookbooks. 
• This is one of those articles talking about some study's finding that I just find a bit ridiculous, or at least amusing. According to this article out of New Scientist, "Having Books In Your Zoom Background Makes You Seem More Trustworthy." Your other option to look trustworthy? Plants. Usual caveats for surveys and such apply. Having said that, the two locations where I might use Zoom or other teleconferencing, my library office and my home workstation, I would have books in the background. Just saying. 
• The Economist has an interesting piece on the somewhat recent business of author estates basically selling their intellectual properties and licensing them to whoever brings them a lot of money, like Netflix for example. If you wonder why certain old authors are suddenly become hip and getting new series on streamer channels, this helps explain the phenomenon. 
• Finally for this week, El Confidencial (Spanish language) takes a look at a boom in second hand books and their trade. The article compares book prices and looks at how second hand stores, in Spain at least, have risen in popularity. In my case, I am reader who is very happy when I can find a second hand book.