Reading – Page 27 – Auxiliary Memory

Lessons from Blogging

Exercise for my flabby memory is the top reason why I put so much time writing on these blogs. If I go too long without writing, I’ll notice that I’m forgetting more words in day to day conversations – I have to keep writing to fight the decline of my mind. But am I writing anything worthy of reading? I have no trouble thinking up zillions of things to write about, but are my random inspirations really interesting to anyone but me?

I wished I had the discipline to knock out one 1,000 word essay each night, and only in an hour. What a fantastic workout in my word gym! I’m lucky to finish two essays a week, each taking 4-8 hours. And that doesn’t count the two to three abortive pieces each week I don’t finish.

Every evening when I sit down to write, I hope to have an idea that I’ve been contemplating all the day to polish. It helps if I’m thinking clearly and not tired, which means I need to keep my body in shape. Sometimes when I’m tired, focusing on an idea will generate energy, so it helps to try to write. I wish I could say that I’m always inspired by my topic, and it allows me to chisel out one clear expression of a carefully considered thought.

What really happens is I start with one vague concept that causes me to vomit out a torrent of words as fast as I can, which I shape by rewriting several drafts. As I write, I research with Google, hoping to find concrete pieces of information to support my ideas. Between struggling to retrieve lost words, phrases and memories out of my own noggin, I trawl the net looking for new words and verifications of poorly remembered details. Often I use Google to find the words I can’t recall by searching on related ideas.

I’m sure if I didn’t write these essays, my mind would turn to mush. Rereading my essays I realize I have a long ways to go towards developing coherent structured writing. So a new theory has occurred to me about blogging. What if writing is more beneficial than just strengthening my ability to recall words. What other lessons am I learning from my WordPress exercising?

It’s quite easy to blather away about anything, but that’s not good neural exercise. And, quite often I might mention, I’ll tackle a subject that’s either too big for a blog post, or beyond my ability to define clearly, and I’ll have to abandon the project. Finishing a piece is part of the healthy process, and giving up on an idea leaves me feeling the same way as when I’m having a conversation and I can’t find that damn word I want.

Up to now, I’ve mostly been working to express an idea that quickly flashed by in my brain. Sometimes, if I write about a specific topic I’ll do a lot of research to gather facts, like when I write about subscription music services. This gives me a taste for journalism. Just a small taste, but enough to realize the work required to write non-fiction. Opinion essays can be as creative as writing fiction, but both are way to easy to do badly.

The next question is: Do I write anything useful for other people to read? If all I’m doing is exercising my wimpy brain, why would a reader care? My life is no more interesting than anyone else’s, so why would anyone want to read my thoughts? I think the next stage in the evolution of my writing, I should think about each essay as a product that is useful in some way. Since my product is free, I don’t actually have to worry about it’s monetary cost to readers, but I personally consider time, extremely valuable, so I don’t want to waste your time.

That means the next challenge I work on learning from blogging is to write 5-10 minute essays that are well worth their cost in time. That’s quite a challenge, one I’m not sure I can achieve.

Looking at my statistics tell me which essays have been more successful than others. I know from the WordPress stats that I have around 20-25 people subscribing to my blog as a RSS feed, and 200-300 people finding their way to my pages accidently, through Google and other search engines, or by links put up on various blogs that are kind enough to list Auxiliary Memory. It is flattering that people actually read my blog at all, so I feel a responsibility to write something time-worthy.

When I think of all the great books and magazine articles I read, I can’t believe people would waste their time on any blog, much less mine. And there are thousands of blogs better than mine. I have to assume that there is a quality to blogs that people like that they don’t find in regular magazines. Or I have to wonder if people only read blogs because they are like kudzu growing over the net, choking up search engine returns, just too visible to ignore.

Learning about what people want to read will be my second lesson from blogging. My most popular essay is, “The Greatest Science Fiction Novels of the 20th Century,” with over 10,000 hits total, and getting 30-60 more each day. In other words, I’ve accidently picked a topic that a small number of people want to know about daily. If you search on that title in Google, I’m 3rd in the returns at the moment, after two links to books at Amazon.com.

This doesn’t say anything about the quality of my essay. I’ve just hit the right combination of words and ideas to be rated high with Google, and the topic has a steady interest. I call that “topic background radiation.” Occasionally I’ll write about something that people have a time related interested in, like the Toshiba NB205 netbook, which just came out and I immediately reviewed. I’ve gotten 74 hits on that one so far today. When the Toshiba NB205 gets outdated, those numbers will drop off. But until then, was my review useful? I know I solved one lady’s problem, with her new netbook.

Generally, I talk about my reading. For instance, I wrote a weird take on “The Veldt” by Ray Bradbury. I’ve gotten almost a 1,000 hits on that one, trickling in at 3-4 a day, which is a revealing topic background radiation. I’m guessing it is a story used in schools for discussion, because I’ve written on far more famous SF novels, and their topic background radiation is very low, like 1-2 a week.

Of course, this all depends on how Google ranks my page. For some reason, I’m in the first page of returns for “The Veldt,” but on the second page for Have Space Suit-Will Travel by Robert A. Heinlein and Childhood’s End by Arthur C. Clarke, two books I think are very worthy of reading but seldom get hits at all. Or is that because people seldom go past the first page of Google returns when searching for a review? And if someone is thinking about reading one of those books, did I say anything to help them make their decision?

Once in a blue moon I’ll accidentally mention something that’s in the news, like the Kindle Reader for the iPhone. That post got scads of hits for a day or two, and hardly ever got called into reading action since.

If I wanted to just get hits, I would go to Google Zeitgeist everyday and pick a topic. Why are “basking sharks” and “raging elephants” so interesting on July 14th, 2009? And who the hell are Shane Carwin and Lisa Loring? Shows my lack of pop culture knowledge. It is quite doubtful that Google will rank my page within its first 100 returned just because I mention those hot search names and phrases. It’s not that easy to get noticed. And God knows, many people try. For what value are hits, really? There’s no guarantee that people read what they hit on.

Take this essay, for example. What value is it? Because I’m not reviewing a book, movie or computer product, I’m pretty sure it won’t get many hits at all. Hopefully, I haven’t bored my handful of regular readers, but have I given them anything worth their time? If anything, I’ve taught them not to read blogs but write them, it’s good memory exercise. If I had some quantitative way of proving writing blogs helps with memory, I might have a good article. Readers love self-help topics.

Here’s something to consider that might be worth your minutes spent here reading. If everyone read a little each evening, but only read the absolute best essays and articles, the English speaking world would only need ten monthly magazines, but let’s stretch that to one hundred for reading variety and the coverage of the diversity of sub-cultures. All writers would compete to write the very best essays and articles each month to sell to those one hundred editors. Everything else could be considered crap and thus time unworthy.

So why read off the web? Because it allows you to read exactly what you want to read, at the moment you choose. It’s pitiful to think that any of my essays come up on the first page of Google returns. If you search on the phrase “The Time Machine by H. G. Wells” my essay comes up 5th. It really shouldn’t. The real lesson from tonight, is why the very best essays ever written on any topic, aren’t the ones that Google links to in your search.

JWH – 7/14/9

Books Read 2008

2008 was a year of reading about the world and looking back at classic science fiction. 18 of the 45 books I read this year were SF. 11 were non-fiction. 12 books were ones I had read before – for some reason I listened to many SF classics that I first read back in the 1960s. Although I enjoyed many science fiction and fantasy novels this year, the stories that moved me the most were two by Edith Wharton. Two other novels stood out, The Road was intense and Oscar Wao was dazzling.

Science fiction books from the 1950s and 1960s are starting to show their age. I think Childhood’s End by Arthur C. Clarke holds up the best. I liked City and The Case of Conscience, but structurally they had problems. City and Way Station presented wonderful sense of wonder ideas, but the writing is so dated that I worry that kids today will find them hard to read. I still have nostalgic love for the Heinlein juveniles Red Planet, Starman Jones and Podkayne of Mars, and they hold up enough to get reprinted as audio books, but I also worry that young people will have problems reading them. Their science is very dated, with canals on Mars, Venus being habitable, and people doing calculations for interstellar space jumps with pencil and paper.

Favorite Fiction:

The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton
The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton
The Road by Cormac McCarthy
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz

Favorite Non-Fiction:

Hot, Flat and Crowded by Thomas L. Friedman
The Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell
The Post American World by Fareed Zakara
Einstein by Walter Isaacson

The Whole List:

Old Man’s War – John Scalzi
Candy Girl – Diablo Cody
The Road – Cormac McCarthy
Running with Scissors – Augustine Burroughs
Northanger Abbey – Jane Austen
Einstein – Walter Isaacson
Marsbound – Joe Haldeman
The Cult of the Amateur – Andrew Keen
The Book Thief – Markus Zusak
The Coming Economic Collapse – Stephen Leeb
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? – Philip K. Dick (3rd time)
The Cat Who Walks Through Walls – Robert A. Heinlein (2nd time)
Ethan Frome – Edith Wharton
The Maltese Falcon – Dashiell Hammett (2nd time)
Death by Black Hole – Neil deGrasse Tyson
Territory – Emma Bull
Drop City – T. C. Boyle
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao – Junot Diaz
Podkayne of Mars – Robert A. Heinlein (4th time)
The Age of Innocence – Edith Wharton
The Post American World – Fareed Zakara
After Dark – Haruki Murakami
Twilight – Stephenie Meyer
City – Clifford Simak (2nd time)
Proust was a Neuroscientist – Jonah Lehrer
Lord of Light – Roger Zelazny (2nd time)
Starman Jones – Robert A. Heinlein (4th time)
The Little Book – Selden Edwards
The House of Mirth – Edith Wharton
Hot, Flat and Crowded – Thomas L. Friedman
Way Station – Clifford Simak (2nd time)
Spin – Robert Charles Wilson
The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch – Philip K. Dick (2nd time)
The Little Guide to Your Well-Read Life – Steve Leveen
Red Planet – Robert A. Heinlein (4th time)
Swords and Deviltry – Fritz Leiber
METAtropolis – ed. John Scalzi
The Space Merchants – Pohl & Kornbluth (2nd time)
Living Dead in Dallas – Charlaine Harris
When You are Engulfed in Flames – David Sedaris
A Case of Conscience – James Blish
The Outliers – Malcolm Gladwell
Childhood’s End – Arthur C. Clarke (3rd time)
Like a Rolling Stone – Greil Marcus
The Last Man on the Moon – Eugene Cernan & Don Davis

JWH 1/2/9

Further Adventures with eReader on the iPod touch

For some reason I’m getting more hits on the iPod touch eReader eBook post than anything else I’ve written lately, so I must assume that the iPod touch and eReader are a hit combination. Since I wrote that post, eReader has come out with version 1.2 that offers many nifty new features and they’re promising 1.3 real soon now. Also, the eReader.com site, a spin-off from fictionwise.com, seems to be expanding daily, which implies another kind of success. eReader software isn’t just for the iPod, there’s also versions for Palm, PocketPC, Windows Mobile, Symbian, Windows, Macintosh and OQO systems.

When the Kindle came out stories about it on the blogosphere were more common than stories about Sarah Palin today. Using the iPod touch and iPhone for an ebook reader hasn’t garnered that much notice. I prefer the larger screen of the Kindle, but never wanted to carry it around. The touch/iPhone is designed to commute wherever you go, and wherever you go you can now read your book when you get there. That’s pretty cool.

The screen of the touch/iPhone is better than PDAs and most other smart phones, so for a portable reading device it does very well in the visual department. The screen is physically about one fourth to one third the size of a paperback book page, but the number of words varies because you have several font size settings. Even though the screen is smaller than the Kindle, it’s brighter and sharper. Overall though, the Kindle’s screen is much nicer to read from because of it’s perfect size.

Flipping pages is much nicer with eReader on the touch/iPhone than with the Kindle or the eBookman I used to have. You can set eReader to swipe or tap for page turning. I set mine to tap, so I just touch the right side of the screen to page forward, and the left to go back. Having a touch screen greatly reduces the need for buttons.

My 1st generation touch has 2 buttons, and the newly released 2nd generation touch has three, adding a volume control and tiny speaker, something I wanted. I’m quite anxious for another button though, an on/off switch for the Wi-Fi for the iPod touch. The wireless system drains the battery fast. My touch will drain in 1-2 days even doing nothing if the wireless is on. I now have to go through several taps to turn the wireless on or off. An even more sophisticated solution would be software that turned the wireless on when I sent a request out on the Internet and turned it off after a set period of time.

The iPod touch is about four times heavier than a Nano, and much bigger, so it’s more of an effort to carry around, but still just 4 ounces, or 120 grams. It fits in my shirt pocket like the Nano, but its very noticeable there, whereas the Nano is unfelt. I’ve started carrying my touch some, but I’ve got to admit I’d rather carry the Nano. Whether I carry the touch all the time will depend if I get completely hooked on it. 99% of my use is for listening to audio books, so unless I start using the touch more, I might go back to my Nano. I think I’ll need several months to grow into the iPod touch, to know if I regularly need all of its features.

The frequent low battery message is what keeps me switching back to the Nano. I can get a lot more time if I shut off the Wi-Fi, but that’s annoying to keep up with. Another way to improve battery life is shut off the screen. This is only good for listening to music and audio books, but eReader does have a feature for showing white text on a black background. I wonder if that saves energy. The claimed battery life improvements in the 2nd Generation iPod touch makes me wished I had waited a month to buy a new iPod. I certainly wouldn’t buy a 1st generation touch now unless it was very cheap.

One way to adapt to the touch’s battery weakness is to buy a cradle and leave it on it whenever I’m not using it, but with the battery supposedly only good for 400-500 full cycles of charging, would that be good for it? The iPod touch loses it’s charge so fast when the Wi-Fi is on that I’m thinking mine is either defective or it has a serious flaw. The Kindle, even with the broadband on lasts four or five days.

The iPod touch also does not seem as robust as the Nano. Upgrading to iTunes 8.0 crashed it completely and I had to do a restore, which took a bit of fiddling to get done. I kept wondering why the touch was always backing itself up, well now I’m glad it had. The restore loaded my upgrades, settings, eReader books, and extra applications, but not my music and audio books.

I bought the iPod touch because I wanted walk-around access to the Internet. I was also thinking of buying the Asus Eee PC for the same reason. After a few weeks of ownership I’ve learned that I don’t actually need to access the Internet that often when I’m away from my work or home computer. It is fun to play with the touch while reclining in my La-Z-Boy, but weirdly the best function I’ve found for those idle moments is cleaning out old email. Browsing the web on the touch’s 3.5″ screen is the coolest I’ve seen on a small device, but it’s not any fun in practicality. Good for emergency searches.

When it comes down to it, the real use I have for an iPod is audio books. I spend hours and hours every week listening to audio books, and the Nano is far superior for that task. The best thing I love about eReader is getting free classic books, but not to read. When you listen to books you never know how many names and words are spelled. Having the text on eReader makes a great supplement to audio books. It’s not something I use often, but it’s very nice.

Audio books have ruined me for reading printed books, so when I do read with my eyes it’s mainly email, RSS feeds and the web pages. That makes the touch good for email and RSS feeds if they are nearly all text. HTML email is better read on a big screen.

The iPod touch is a novelty that I may or may not get addicted to carrying around. Buying it made me glad I didn’t rush out and buy the iPhone. I love the Internet as seen through my 22″ Samsung LCD. But anyone who grew up carrying a Gameboy around will probably find the touch a fantastic device.

Jim

Has Reading With My Ears Ruined My Desire To Read With My Eyes?

I have hundreds of unread books sitting on my shelves wagging their tales anxious to be read, but of the 28 books I “read” so far this year, only one was read with my eyes. And that one, Marsbound by Joe Haldeman, was read as a magazine serial. Had it been available on audio at the time, like it is now, I wouldn’t have read any printed books this year. Of the 39 books I read last year, only two were printed. Before I discovered audio books on digital players through Audible.com in 2002, I read on average 6-12 books a year. After digital audio, I’m reading 35-55 books each year.

I read more audio books now because, one, I can multitask reading with walking, driving, doing the dishes, eating alone, and other quiet mindless activities. Second, I listen to more books than I read because I’m enjoying them more. When I was kid I was a real bookworm, often reading a book a day for weeks at a time. I discovered a lot of fun books back then, but I have since reread some of those books on audio and discovered I missed a lot from reading too fast and poorly. Third, audio books got me out of my science fiction rut and into a wider range of literature because listening gives me the patience to read books with my ears that I would never take the time to read with my eyes. Fourth, and this is the most important, I think I experience books better through audio because I’ve discovered I’m not a very good reader, and the quality of audio book narrators have constantly improved in recent years and I flat out prefer listening to a great reader than doing a botched up job myself.

Now, the the question is: Has reading with my ears destroyed my desire to read with my eyes? When the seventh Harry Potter book came out last year I raced through it like everyone else, so I know I can still enjoy eyeball reading, but the whole time I wished I had waited for the audio edition to arrive from Amazon.

To force myself to read a book with my eyes, I bought Incandescence, a new novel by Greg Egan. I was in the mood for some cutting edge science fiction and it wasn’t available on audio. And, I am enjoying reading it. I read slower than I used to – that’s something listening has taught me. But as I go through the sentences I can’t help but think this book would sparkle far greater if I was hearing it read by a fine reader.

So, have audio books become a crutch? Or have I just discovered a better way of experiencing books and have become addicted? If EMP killed off all the iPods in the world I think I’d want to try and recreate audio books in the old fashion way. I’d want someone to read to me, or I’d want to learn how to read aloud and try to dramatically present stories like the narrators I love so much to hear.

Yet, if this return-to-the-19th-century catastrophe happened I might end up reading more books because all the computers and televisions would be out of commission too. I started reading like crazy in junior high school when I outgrew Gilligan’s Island and I wanted to break away from my family unit. I had lots of time and even though I had plenty to do, I preferred the laziness of reading.

In our society, literacy is a virtue, but being a kid gorging himself on science fiction does not confer a lot of social status. It was plain old escapism. If iPods and Audible had been invented in 1965 I would have grown up listening to books, and I would have listened to better books than I had been reading.

I’m currently listening to The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton. That’s one book I would never read with my eyes, but if I had read it and The Age of Innocence at 13, I would have had a much better understanding of those scary junior high girls. I think I’m a much better person at 56 for reading Wharton. That wouldn’t have happened if it hadn’t been for audio books, and I was an English major during my college years. I had a hard time reading classic novels – I kept hoping they’d assign fun modern novels, but they didn’t. If I had gotten to hear the classics back then I would have been a much better literature student. I know this is true because when I took three Shakespeare classes I listened to the plays on LPs and aced my exams, plus I admired the writing so much more.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m not suggesting you should give up reading with your eyes. I think many people are better than I am at reading. I just discovered late in life, at around 50, that I was a lousy-ass reader. When I do read now, I do try harder try to hear what I’m seeing. That requires reading slower and thinking about the dramatic quality of the sentences in front of me. I wish I could read like Jeff Woodman or Jim Dale, but I don’t.

Last night I pulled down several novels that I’ve been meaning to read and read a few pages from each. I admired the writing but I realized I would never read them. Middlemarch, Vanity Fair and Call It Sleep are just too dense for me to read with my eyes. I brought them to work today and put them on our book give-away table. They disappeared in a few minutes and I hope they have found good homes.

Audio books have greatly enriched my life. I truly don’t think they have ruined my urge to read with my eyes, because that urge was already fading. Without audio books I’d probably continue reading 6-12 books a year for the rest of my life. Before I turned fifty I was thinking I might only read another 200 books before I died, and wondered why I owned 1,200 and was buying more all the time. I’ve already listened to more than that planned 200, so audio books have already expanded my reading lifetime.

My desire to “read” books is greater than any other time in my life, but strangely I’m going to stop buying books, ones printed on paper, that is, because they will sit on my shelves, unread, and I’m feeling way too guilty to add any more lonely unread pages.

Jim

iPod touch eReader eBook

I just bought an iPod touch 8gb for $199 refurbished at the Apple Store. I’ve been wanting a carry around Internet device and the iPod touch is very elegant. It took nothing to set up – just typed in my Wi-Fi code and I was connected. I immediately upgraded it to the new 2.0 software so I could have the Exchange client. That also worked smoothly.

And I’ve already gotten my first App, the eReader, which lets me read ebooks on the iPod touch. The eReader allowed me to log into my Fictionwise.com account and access my Bookshelf there. That’s the great thing about Fictionwise, it remembers your purchases and will let you download any book again, even in a new format. I’ve had ebooks I bought from Fictionwise on a eBookwise 1150, Kindle and now the iPod touch.

The eReader on the iPod touch offers crystal clear type, but small, so it’s not as comfortable to read on as the Kindle. However, after buying the Kindle I discovered I’m not much of a book reader any more, and that I’m really an audio bookworm instead. It’s extremely easy from within the eReader program to jump to sites like Manybooks.net, to find free or commercial ebooks. eReader has it’s own URL entry box to take you to places that provides PDB formatted books.

From inspiration to reading, it only took me about a minute to find and download “The House of Mirth” by Edith Wharton. That’s the next audio book I plan to listen to, so I thought it might be fun to read it while I listen to it.

Even though I’m primarily an audio book person, it will still be nice to have visual books on the iPod touch for times when I’m at loose ends somewhere away from home and want to read, but that brings up the next issue.

Carrying Around the Internet

The advent of smart phones inspired me to want a way to carry around the Internet for 24×7 instant access to information, but I never could stomach the idea of paying their large monthly bills. I’m currently on a pay-as-you-go plan with T-Mobile and I add $50 worth of minutes about every 4-5 months. It’s wonderful not having a cell phone bill. When small mobile Wi-Fi Internet devices showed up on the market, I thought they were a good compromise – not perfect, but pretty good. So I started researching. I finally decided on the iPod touch when I saw it for $199 refurbished. I like it, but I’ve got to learn how to carry it around.

I currently carry a 2nd generation iPod Nano in my shirt pocket. The iPod touch might be too heavy to put there. I carry my cell phone in my left front pants pocket, so the iPod touch could go on the right side, but I worry about it getting damaged, so I’m thinking about a small iPhone holster for my belt, but my pants are already overburdened with keys, wallet, phone, change, handkerchief, and sometimes voice recorder, so that I’m constantly hitching them up. Carrying around another device is going to be annoying. An iPhone would have been ideal because one device would replace two.

The obvious solution would be to start carrying a purse, but I think a bandolier would be better, although my wife already thinks seeing my white iPod headphones permanently hanging around my neck is nerdy enough. I wouldn’t be bothered by any statement my carrying a purse would make, but so far I haven’t seen one I really liked. I’d want something like a small sleek messenger bag made of leather, but if I’m going to start carrying a purse, why not plan to throw a few more items in, like a camera or a Eee PC, which means I’d want a bigger bag.

Also, I haven’t decided if the iPod touch is the perfect portable Internet device. I can browse the net fairly easy with it, with some sites a lot more readable than others. The iPod touch provides a convenient way to read and delete old emails, but it’s primary function would be to look up data, like movie times, weather info, or trivia, and listening to audio books. I’ve wondered if I jumped up in size to the 7″ Eee PC if it wouldn’t make a substantially better carry around Internet device.

You don’t realize how important a keyboard is as a human-machine interface until you hunt and peck on the iPod touch. The iPod touch certainly does a lot with it’s 3.5 inch 480 x 320 pixels screen. I think it will take me weeks to truly explore the potential of this device. Sooner or later I will want broadband access, because I figure in five years everyone will carry around the Internet. I just don’t know what the device we will carry will look like.

Part 2: Further Adventures of eReader on the iPod touch

Jim