On impulse, I picked a bookplate off the sidewalk near my house. It was the title page for something called “The Future of the Book,” edited by linguist Geoffrey Nunberg and published in 1996. It was sopped with rain, but I thought to carry it home, dry it out and have it framed. It struck such a nerve.
Like a lot of educated people, I’ve been in love with books. Hardbounds. Paperbacks. Fiction. Non-fiction. Coffee table art books. I love not just to read them and absorb their contents, think about what their authors went through to create them, but also to keep them around me, as if they were old friends (or new ones). I certainly couldn’t ride a MUNI bus without spending some time with a book. (“Oh: You’re one of these guys who reads for fun,” a disillusioned school teacher once teased me. But she spent her days with kids for whom cracking a book was a torture, and I could see how my hobby bemused her.)
I dumped 2/3 of my books ─ just left them on the street ─ when I moved from Long Island to San Francisco ten years ago. They were mostly college texts and cheesy paperbacks (including some Peter Drucker and Ayn Rand titles) which I don’t particularly miss. Still, I love the image of myself surrounded by books, floor-to-ceiling, as in the typical book jacket author’s photo. I love places like Bell’s Books in Palo Alto and Powell’s Books in Portland, where they group books by authors and don’t make too many distinctions (except in price) between what’s new and what’s used or Kramerbooks and Afterwords in Washington DC, where they might even feed you. San Francisco’s Green Apple Books is just around the corner from me, but I have to be judicious about dropping in there: It could be a $200-bill.
Though not quite floor-to-ceiling, I have books in pretty much every room of my house. Living room, bedroom, and front hall ─ even the kitchen and bathroom. But as much as I like having books around me, it occurs to me I won’t be able to take these with me when I move. Even if I don’t wind up in a London studio, with children and home ownership behind me, it’s time to think about downsizing. As much as I love my books, I’m just not going to be able to take them with me.
Love and Death above the Arctic Circle
I wasn’t thinking about relocation on my last trip to Europe. (Okay, maybe I was, but that wasn’t what got me thinking about a Kindle.) The 10-hour flight was a great time to catch up on some reading. I had three books with me, and as I’d finish one, and move onto the next, I’d wonder, “Okay, what do I do with this?” My briefcase was pretty heavy.
I’m ordinarily not a mystery fan. I know people who gobble them up like barreled peanuts, cracking the shells, crunch-crunch-crunching briefly on the seeds, tossing the shell, and reaching quickly for another. It’s a genre I needed to learn. (I would hesitantly identify science fiction as my “junk reading,” though few fans of William Gibson would identify likely put his books and the same consume-and-toss category as peanuts.)
Rather, following the incredible popularity of the Stieg Larsson Millennium series (beginning with "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo"), I discovered a whole library of somewhat bleak detective fiction set in Scandinavia ─ Sweden, Norway and Denmark ─ as well as Finland and Iceland. Wisconsin Public Radio underlined this genre in a radio program called "The Scandinavian Death Trip." The Nordic Noir novels were easy to consume (fast reading), compelling in their own way (you want to know who the killer is), but I couldn’t help wondering what do they say about life ─ modern life ─ in these cold and dark places.
In all the Nordic Noir novels I read, the cold and dark of the place (especially in the winter, where the sun sets one day and doesn’t come up for six months) is a character, a palpable presence, dark and foreboding. In the Finland depicted by James Thompson in “Snow Angels,” for example, people gage the temperature according to the speed with which their nostril hairs freeze. Ski resorts with luxury condos have sprung up in northern Finland (far from Helsinki). On weekends, the icy roads are clogged with German-made SUVs. But the working-class people who live there year round often turn to drinking when the winter sun sets; it makes them surly and sets the stage for violence.
The changing demographics of these northern countries (the place of ethnic minorities, for example) seems to be a common theme in the mystery novels I read. In Thompson’s “Snow Angels,” the first person murdered is a Somalian immigrant, leading the detective-hero to ask whether this was an act of racial/ethnic prejudice ─ especially as politicos race to keep the crime away from the news media. In Arnaldur Indridason’s “Arctic Chill,” set in modern Reykjavik, the murder victim is a Thai immigrant, and the first suspects make public noises about “Iceland for Icelanders.”In Karin Fossum’s “The Water’s Edge,” the prime suspect is a pederast, but the hunt for the child killer forces the detective-hero to ask how Norwegians actually feel about homosexuals, “people on benefits” and other minorities.
The woman who took me to see the film version of “Girl with The Dragon Tattoo,” and the Finnish woman who took me to see the sequel, “The Girl who Played with Fire” had a lot in common with their admiration for Lisbeth Salander, the main character of Larsson’s series. She was more than an expert computer hacker. She was the victim sexual abuse, depicted in often uncomfortable detail in the films. But she doesn’t wimp away; she extracts a carefully-choreographed revenge, and the movie audiences cheer when she succeeds. I don’t know what this says about the status of women in modern Sweden, though it strikes me as a long way off from the painful psychological introspection depicted by Ingmar Bergman in (say) “Scenes from a Marriage.”
I lent Thompson’s novel, “Snow Angels,” to my Finnish friend, who spent her early years in Lapland, above the Arctic Circle. She had to read in fits-and-starts, she said; Thompson’s descriptions made her homesick. She remembered with nostalgia the Finnish custom of removing your shoes when you entered someone’s home. She cringed at the Finnish curses Thomson repeated, and remembered seeing the Northern Lights in Finland’s star-filled winter sky ─ “which is why,” Thompson’s detective hero reflects, “I believe in God.”
But my friend had to wrestle with the notion of Finland as destination for Somalian immigrants. The whole notion seemed strange. The native people, like the Swedes, were predominantly blonde-haired and blue-eyed. She never even SAW a black person up close, she confessed, until she emigrated to the U.S. in the 1950s.
The Thompson novel would make a great movie, I think, gauging by current standards. The detective hero gets shot in the face at the end, but survives, probably to make his way to the inevitable sequel. (I can’t help thinking of Bruce Willis who plays roughnecks who survive bloody beatings film after film, though the part of a world-weary Finn might be something of a stretch.)
In the end, mystery writing seems governed by formulas: Begin with a horrific crime (the murder of a child or the mutilation of beautiful movie star). Throw in an aging, cynical (seen it all before) detective, one who may drink a lot and have some personal involvement with the suspects. Mix in a bunch of clues, including red herrings, often earnest theories about what the forensics of the crime suggest, and expand the number of suspects. End with the murderer, explaining or lamenting his crime, in elaborate detail, even as he threatens the life of the detective hero.
I faithfully lugged these books to and from Europe, and added them to my floor-to-ceiling collection when I returned home. But I had in fact absorbed the formula.
The Future of the Book
Freescale, whose iMX processor forms the heart of the Kindle, claims the largest penetration among eBook readers. This is area to watch closely, not just as bookworms like me convert to electronic media, but as permutations of the tablet computer intrude on eBook territory. Analysts looking at the Apple iPad had earlier concluded its color screen and multimedia playback capability could cannibalize eBooks ─ especially as the tablets' form factors morphed toward 7-inch screens. Strap hanging commuters, for example, could hold this kind of reader in one hand on the bus or train to work. But this does not portend a shrinking of the iMX market. iMX-based tablets, using the Android operating system, are starting to appear in Asia.
Two trends will affect the future of the eBook and Amazon promises to play a role in both cases. On one hand, the pricing on eBooks (as expected) is plummeting. Amazon reduced its pricing down to an accessible $139 before Christmas, in an effort to stimulate sales. By all estimates they were successful. One rumor has Amazon moving as many as 3 million Kindles just in the month of December. Wall Street analysts had projected that Amazon will have sold between 4 and 5 million Kindles in 2010, but that number could be as high as 8 million. But it looks as if 2011 will be an even better year for the Kindle.
The other effort, announced just before Christmas, enables Kindle books to be displayed on other platforms, such as portable computers (and tablets), and iPhones. This totally reduces dependence of the media on an eBook hardware, which many analysts believe will turn into a giveaway in any case. The business case for eBooks starts to look like cell phones, in which you pay for the subscription, while the service provider offers the hardware for free.
I can certainly see myself reading books from my Blackberry in an airport lounge or on a standing-room-only commute downtown. I’ve actually become quite ecumenical about my book consuming habits. As one example, I’ve downloaded some non-fiction titles from Audible.com. Randall Lane’s expose on the financial excesses of the last decade "The Zeroes," and Douglas Frantz’ accusation of America’s somnambulance with regard to Pakistan’s theft-and-resale of nuclear weapons secrets, “The Nuclear Jihadist.” Though the stories are disturbing, only a single earpiece is necessary to keep up with the narration, which keeps me company as I prepare a gourmet meal for friends, or cycle weekends through Marin. []
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