Greed Masked as Convenience

Last week I read that Amazon has put together a "Netflix for books", Kindle Unlimited, which will let you pay $10 per month for a subscription service to its entire library of e-books.

Library. Now I know that word means something outside of the context of Amazon. Hmm...

Oh, right. That free subscription service that has most of the books you could ever want to read, that has helped more lives than Mother Teresa, that (in many districts) has free and easy e-book lending, that has been around since Jeff Bezos's great-great-great-great-grandpappy was less than a twinkle in his daddy's eye.

Look, I'm an Amazon apostle, all right? I gladly pay for Prime and I order a few items a month. I use the site for everything from cooking ingredients to toys for my friends' kids. But this is ridiculous. For probably a majority of Americans, this service is a total waste of money. The timing is good, because we've all gotten so used to paying monthly fees for our entertainment that we'll likely roll over and pay this one without remembering that we can get it elsewhere for free. But we can.

I use my library for e-books with reasonable frequency, and it's great. I use it for physical books on a constant basis, and that's great, too. Sometimes I have to go on the waiting list for a given book, but I rarely have to wait longer than a week. And you know what? I think it's better for me that I have to wait a week for a book rather than getting every book I want at any time. (The virtues of waiting for pleasure are engraved in story and song.) If I desperately need it now, for whatever reason, I can pay for it. But getting everything you want instantly all the time makes you Veruca Salt, and as we all know, she was a bad egg.

[honk honk]

Do me a favor, hmm? Before you sign up for Kindle Unlimited, just try using your library, just for a month, for all the books you would normally buy for yourself from Amazon, whether physical or e. If you succeed, look at the money you've saved. Maybe divide that by your hourly rate at work, see what that money means to you.

Depending on how your library is hooked up to other regional libraries, you may find that you have access to any book you want for free. I got to choose from three or four different translations of Madame Bovary when I read it last year, and of the ten obscure experimental books I had to read for a class this spring, the LA public library failed to find only one of them. Saved me well over $100, because I didn't care for any of the books enough to want to keep them. This very week I saved $30 by borrowing a 2014 GRE guide instead of buying one. At the library, you might not have access to any book you want within ten seconds, but that's another thing you can try for a month: waiting for what you want. I find that I like that better than its alternative, most of the time.

If your library isn't awesome, if you can't use it conveniently and freely and find everything you need, then I take it all back and Kindle Unlimited is great and necessary for some people. But just try it.

It's still up for debate whether Amazon is bad for authors, so I'm not for or against it professionally. Personally, I'm for it, this service notwithstanding. Libraries are technically not as good for authors as bookstores are, but honestly I'd rather someone check out my book for free and read it than buy it and never look at it again. Libraries are good for books, not profit, and the books are the important thing.

Title

For nearly three weeks, I've done posts on Tuesday and Friday. This week I'm still trying to work out what Tuesday's post should have been. I've been reading for others a lot lately, but not writing much, and my synapses are firing in non-bloggable directions.

The semester is kind of screeching hell-bent into its conclusion, throwing off a lot of sparks and steam. I'm doing okay, but spring break's late placement made the whole thing lopsided, and I have a lot of anxiety about whether I'll finish okay.

I don't know. I'm kind of casting about. Here's some nice sentimental stuff about libraries and books from E.B. White, every word of it true. (Click to embiggen.)

Librariana

I keep wanting to write a post on how I feel about the holidays and stopping myself. My inner Grinch is on the rampage this year, and I don't necessarily want to expose her to friends and loved ones.

I finished Airships. Heavens above. I've really picked some incredible books of short stories to read this year! If you want to be amazed, read that thing. There was also an interesting treasure in the inside cover:

Space Library: 1999!

I took out Under the Volcano from the library to read next, but I am so tired of men's writing that I just couldn't take it. Nearly everything we've read for my UCLA class this semester has been by white men, as have most of the books I've read for fun over the same period. I'm used to this, of course, but the insistent feeling of standing outside the party has been a lot worse lately. Male writers often (unintentionally) (?) create worlds in which I stand apart, where all the characters who look like me are trophies or objects or barnyard animals. So I fled to the girliest unread book on my shelf: a Georgette Heyer. I gobbled it in less than 24 hours and I feel such relief. Yes, I do exist after all.

I'm also following two comic books right now: the Matt Fraction/Chip Zdarsky collaboration about which you will get the wrong impression (and I'll draw unfortunate searches) if I name, so I'll just direct you there; and the Kelly Sue DeConnick/Emma Rios book Pretty Deadly. I adored PD #1, but #2 was...largely confusing (and OMG learn to use commas, whoever letters these books). I still can't wait for the next one. The pleasure of following a comic book upon release, book by book over several months, is one I wasn't familiar with until now. And a pleasure it is, indeed.

Matt and I and a lovely friend spent Thanksgiving Day in Las Vegas this year. It was a very cool trip. On the drive back, Matt and I developed an idea about a Western that I am now committed to writing. The landscape inspired us. I've sketched out the idea, and I've already fallen in love with the main character. She's like a much more damaged version of the main character of Highbinder, one who believes in revenge instead of not. I really want to just write it, go go go, but I feel I need to at least read a couple of Westerns before I do; thus far all I've read are Elmore Leonard and Annie Proulx stories. Anybody know if Lonesome Dove is really that good?

That Time I Tried to Go to an Author Event

Well, that was disappointing.

On Wednesday, miracle writer George Saunders came to the Los Angeles Public Library to give a talk with another writer, Bernard Cooper. Saunders has just published his fourth book of short stories, and I think you could call what he's on a book tour, although it seems to be sort of sparse. Wednesday was his only event in the L.A. area, and because he lives in Syracuse and doesn't write very many books, I thought this would be the only shot I was likely to get in the course of a few years to see him speak.

The LAPL where Saunders was speaking (with Bernard Cooper, I'm compelled to add; I'm sorry you're reduced to an also-ran in this post, Bernard, but I haven't read any of your books) was downtown, though, and I mean downtown, like the skyscraper part of Los Angeles that resembles Manhattan. The talk was at 7:15 and I wanted to get there well in time to get a seat, so I left home at 4:30. Traffic was middling, to my surprise, and I got to the library and found parking in enough time to wander around the smallish but amazing garden space that surrounds the library for a little while. If you're ever in downtown L.A., go to the central library. The architecture is remarkable. Very Andrew Ryan.

I went inside and discovered a line of people waiting outside the auditorium where the talk would take place. So I joined them. After 20 minutes or so we were shuffled to a different line behind a sign that read "Standby". Via eavesdropping on conversations a bit, I learned that this event was ticketed, and that those tickets were all totally gone, so the twenty-odd people waiting in line here were people who almost certainly were not going to get in unless the current ticket-holders decided to go to the ballet instead or something.

Here is the website about the event. Here is the website about the lecture series. Do you see any information about having to attain tickets ahead of time? (It was not "off-site" to my knowledge, as I was waiting IN THE LIBRARY.) No, I don't, either.

So, instead of waiting around another 45 minutes for an event for which I was extremely unlikely to get in (I was 13th in line), I just went home. I felt about how you'd expect me to feel. I admire Saunders enormously and would love to see him speak/read/dance one day, but apparently it's not in the cards this year. (Adding insult to injury, it took about 40 minutes to go three miles, getting out of downtown. But once I was on the 5, things were smooth.)

My consolation prize, getting to visit the library itself (a temple to books) and the really interesting surrounding half-city-block of pretty landscaping and fountains, was a decent one. That and getting to see downtown L.A., which I've never seen, and which was sort of an alien experience. It's stupid of me, but I don't think of Los Angeles as a skyscraper-y type of city. When we went into Hollywood to go to the sign and later to see Grauman's Chinese Theatre, that was the L.A. I always think of when I think of it (or just the broad boulevards and ranch houses that exist in the part of L.A. where I actually reside). Definitely citylike, but not glass and steel and all-business. But I am mistaken in my impression; there is a downtown L.A., and it's not much different from Manhattan or downtown Baltimore.

So. I hoped this post would be another love letter to the experience of hearing authors give talks, but instead it's me saying that I can't wait to go back to the central L.A. library. C'est la vie.

Take a Look, It's in a Book

A little reading roundup for today.

Because I'm taking a workshop involving him next year, I'm reading some Steve Almond. My reactions to his work are interesting. I finished a book of essays, (Not That You Asked), and enjoyed it in incomplete, patchy ways. Parts of it bugged the hell out of me. I look forward to his fiction next.

I also decided to try a couple of Wallace Stegner books. I read a few of his stories and enjoyed them enormously. I kind of want to read his entire book of collected stories, which is over 500 pages, but there's so much to read for me right now that I don't think I can set aside the time. He seems like an interesting mix of Flannery O'Connor and Raymond Carver, although with dialogue as sharp and rule-breaking as George Saunders. He's delightful. I want more.

I've never enjoyed reading poetry because I can't get beyond the sensation of drowning in a lack of understanding: a glucky and inevitable losing sensation, like struggling in a tar pit. The only poems that didn't leave me confused were much plainer stuff, like Frost, which I didn't like in a sort of exasperated way, don't pander to me, I'm not eleven years old (even though I didn't understand the stuff that was rated R for adult situations. I am nothing if not huffy about my own possibly nonexistent smarts). The only thing I can figure out when reading poetry is if I like it or not. If it gives me a feeling of "wow" and a shuffled interior, or if it leaves me with a bad taste in my mouth, or if there's just nothing.*

Despite all this, I bought The Dream of a Common Language after reading Wild (an action which I understand a great many readers of Wild took, but it wasn't the first time Adrienne Rich had been recommended to me). I devoured the book in two days and still have no clue what I read. Thus, I moved on, and tried a book of Anne Sexton last week. I've nibbled at it, and my responses swing wildly between the three poles I mentioned earlier. One of the poems I adored and read thrice in a row; one of them I sincerely disliked; some of them leave me with nothing.

One of the curators of this collection also wrote a book about how to interpret modern poetry, and I decided to read it. Why not? Maybe I'll learn something about why I react like this, as if my intellect essentially no longer exists, whenever I read poetry written after about 1950.

Since a day without DFW is evidently a day without oxygen: I also bought This is Water, which is a little hardback book containing Wallace's unbelievable commencement speech to Kenyon in 2005, which I've mentioned enough times in this blog that I see no point in linking to it again. One of the reasons I bought it was to read the whole thing - fiddled with slightly after the actual giving of the address, but not abridged as some online versions are. I knew pretty much how long the essay was, and I knew how much I was paying for the book - eyes open - so I ignored the bad Amazon reviews that said it was a ripoff.

BUT. If you too want this essay to hold in your hand badly enough to buy this book, I tell you, resist the urge. The essay is formatted to be one sentence per page. I didn't care about $10 for an essay you can [mostly] get for free, because I wanted to hold it, but the formatting fucks up the rhythm of Wallace's words very badly, which I think I can get codified into an imprisonable offense if I collect enough petition signatures. And the long version adds some more content, but (I can't believe I'm about to say this) not much of importance. Print out the WSJ version and hang it over your desk instead.

On a related note, this is serious DFW fandom right'yere:

I so don't get everybody's obsession with Pemulis.

A kind soul gave me The Thinker's Thesaurus for my birthday (it was on my wish list). I thought I'd love it, and OMG I TOTALLY LOVE IT. Even if you're not a writer, if you're just a wordnerd, buy this palmary, eximious book.

Ahead of me is Edward St. Aubyn (I really hope I like the Patrick Melrose books as much as I think I will) and Alice Munro. I've read about 1/4 of Dubliners, and am not finding it life-changing or frustrating, which makes me feel like I must be missing something. And I'm careening through Inside Scientology, which is so, so awesome. Stranger than fiction by far, told absolutely straight, and damned compelling.

Finally, and randomly, more than half of the books above would not have been in my orbit without my library. Please use the library. Encourage book circulation without loss of income. Authors will exhort the hell out of you to buy as many books as possible, to support poor starving writers, and I can't disagree with this. But 70% of the books I read are just not appropriate for purchase by me, for one reason or another. And because of the library, I sacrifice nothing. Nothing! Trust and love and believe in your library.

*This is all hilariously ironic because my mom's profession, to which she's devoted, is mostly about interpreting, researching, and teaching poetry, albeit that of several centuries ago.