When you think Bill Gates, you think Microsoft co-founder and big-time philanthropist. Now you can add to the list, book critic. This weekend, The New York Times profiled Bill Gates’ penchant for reviewing books on his blog, Gates Notes, and how (much like Oprah) when Gates gives a book a thumbs up, it moves copies. Many copies.
Above, you can watch a Gates-narrated video highlighting his five favorite books of 2015. It includes: 1.) Thing Explainer: Complicated Stuff in Simple Words by Randall Munroe, which “explains various subjects—from how smartphones work to what the U.S. Constitution says—using only the 1,000 most common words in the English language and blueprint-style diagrams”; 2) Mindset: The New Psychology of Success by Carol S. Dweck, a bestselling book that uses “clever research studies and engaging writing” to illuminate “how our beliefs about our capabilities exert tremendous influence on how we learn and which paths we take in life”; and 3) Sustainable Materials With Both Eyes Open, a book written by Cambridge researchers that explores the question, “How much can we reduce carbon emissions that come from making and using stuff?”. Other books on Gates’ short list includes David Brooks’ The Road to Character and Being Nixon: A Man Divided, by Evan Thomas.
You can find a number of Gates’ book reviews in the Books section of his site.
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Since the Harry Potter craze began, we’ve seen young adult fiction gain massive popularity with adults, in ways some critics have lamented as a trend that infantilizes the buying public. (Some say the same about superhero films and adult fans of boy bands). Katie Couric identified the phenomenon as “the rise of so-called Peter Pan activities,” throwing “adult summer camps and Lego leagues” in the mix. Critics of Peter Panism can add another trend to their battery of examples: the rise of the adult coloring book. Business Insiderreported in April that “in Britain, four out of the top 10 Amazon bestsellers are coloring (or colouring, as the Brits insist) books for adults.” Currently, Amazon’s top 20 bestsellers for 2015 includes three adult coloring books. Among so many other consumer signs and portents, adult coloring books may indeed herald a coming apocalypse, at least for Russell Brand, who wonders, “What has turned us into terrified divs that want to live in childish stupors?”
Well, whether “childish,” art therapy or “Zen,” adult coloring books meet a need millions of grown-ups have to soothe their jangled nerves, and it seems almost cruel to mock people so anxiety-ridden they’ve returned to kindergarten remedies. Then again, it’s worth noting, as Smithsonian did recently, “the adult coloring concept is not exactly new.”
It dates back to the 1960s, when “bookstores exploded” with coloring books geared exclusively toward adults. The difference between then and now lies in the fact that those books were adult in content as well as form—“satirical and subversive,” offering “a mocking look at American society.” The first of these, The Executive Coloring Book, arrived in 1961, followed by The John Birch Society Coloring Book and many similar titles “satirizing conformism, John F. Kennedy and the Soviet Union,” among other targets. And yet, “Unlike the adult coloring books flying off the shelves today,” Smithsonian writes, “these books were not created with the intention to be colored in.”
Take the two pages from The Executive Coloring Book above. The first, at the top, shows us our executive preparing for his day with the caption “THIS IS MY SUIT. Color it gray or I will lose my job.” Above, a line of identical executives boards a train. Hammering home the point, we’re told “THIS IS MY TRAIN. It takes me to my office every day. You meet lots of interesting people on the train. Color them all gray.” A notable exception to these dreary instructions, below, tells us “THIS IS MY PILL. It is round. It is pink. It makes me not care. Watch me take my round, pink pill… and not care.” The contents of the pill may have changed, but the medicated worker bee is still very much with us, though the gray flannel suit is a thing of the past.
Rather than giving its target audience a chance to become kids again, The Executive Coloring Book pokes fun at the ways in which pampered executives of the Mad Men-era could themselves be shallow manchildren. One page, below, shows the executive’s secretary with the caption “THIS IS MY SECRETARY. I hate her. She is mean. I used to have a soft, round lady. But my wife called her papa.” Another (bottom), reminiscent of the business card scene in American Psycho, shows us the executive’s important phone: “THIS IS MY TELEPHONE. It has five buttons. Count them. One, two, three, four, five. Five buttons. How many buttons does your telephone have? Mine has five.”
From its faux-leather cover to its final page of business-speak gibberish, the whole thing is a masterfully simple, self-contained piece of conceptual art. The next publication by the same authors, The John Birch Coloring Book, made its intentions a little more obvious. A Sunday Herald review quotes from its introduction: “This book is respectfully dedicated to Dwight D. Eisenhower and many other loyal Americans who have been maligned by extremist groups.” One caption reads “This is our eagle. We cut off his left wing. Now he is an all American eagle. But he flies only in circles.” The “Birchers will have to learn to smile,” writes the reviewer, as the book “spare[s] not their feelings.” Not likely. Rather than selling relaxation, the adult coloring books of the 60s were “engaged,” wrote Milton Bracker in a 1962 New York Times review, “in political warfare.”
Needless to say, before the development and widespread use of photography in mass publications, illustrations provided the only visual accompaniment to religious texts, novels, books of poetry, scientific studies, and magazines literary, lifestyle, and otherwise. The development of techniques like etching, engraving, and lithography enabled artists and printers to better collaborate on more detailed and colorful plates. But whatever the media, behind each of the millions of illustrations to appear in manuscript and print—before and after Gutenberg—there was an artist. And many of those artists’ names are now well known to us as exemplars of graphic art styles.
It was in the 19th century that book and magazine illustration began its golden age. Illustrations by artists like George Cruikshank (see his “’Monstre’ Balloon” above”) were so distinctive as to make their creators famous. The hugely influential English satire magazine Punch, founded in 1841, became the first to use the word “cartoon” to mean a humorous illustration, usually accompanied by a humorous caption. The drawings of Punch cartoons were generally more visually sophisticated than the average New Yorker cartoon, but their humor was often as pithy and oblique. And at times, it was narrative, as in the cartoon below by French artist George Du Maurier.
The lengthy caption beneath Du Maurier’s illustration, “Punch’s physiology of courtship,” introduces Edwin, a landscape painter, who “is now persuading Angelina to share with him the honours and profits of his glorious career, proposing they should marry on the proceeds of his first picture, now in progress (and which we have faithfully represented above).” The humor is representative of Punch’s brand, as is the work of Du Maurier, a frequent contributor until his death. You can find much more of Cruikshank and Du Maurier’s work at Old Book Illustrations, a public domain archive of illustrations from artists famous and not-so-famous. You’ll find there many other resources as well, such as biographical essays and a still-expanding online edition of William Savage’s 1832 compendium of printing terminology, A Dictionary of the Art of Printing.
Old Book Illustrations allows you to download high resolution images of its hundreds of featured scans, “though it appears,” writes Boing Boing, “the scans are sometimes worse-for-wear.” Most of the illustrations also “come with lots of details about their original creation and printing.” You’ll find there many illustrations from an artist we’ve featured here several times before, Gustave Doré (see “Gorgons and Hydras” from his Paradise Lost edition, above). As much as artists like Cruikshank and Du Maurier can be said to have dominated the illustration of periodicals in the 19th century, Doré dominated the field of book illustration. In a laudatory biographical essay on the French artist, Elbert Hubbard writes, “He stands alone: he had no predecessors, and he left no successors.” You’ll find a beautifully, and morbidly, 19th century illustrated edition of 17th century poet Francis Quarles’ Emblems, with pages like that below, illustrating “The Body of This Death.”
Not all of the illustrations at Old Book Illustrations date from the Victorian era, though most do. Some of the more striking exceptions come from Arthur Rackham, known primarily as an early 20th century illustrator of fantasies and folk tales. See his “Pas de Deux” below from his edition of The Ingoldsby Legends. These are but a very few of the many hundreds of illustrations available, and not all of them literary or topical (see, for example, the “Science & Technology” category). Be sure also to check out the OBI Scrapbook Blog, a running log of illustrations from other collections and libraries.
“Read, read, read, read, read, read, read, read, read… read, read… read,” Werner Herzog once said. “If you don’t read, you will never be a filmmaker.” The director of Aguirre, the Wrath of God, Fitzcarraldo, and Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans hasn’t distanced himself from that pronouncement in assembling the curriculum for his Rogue Film School, which we first featured last year. Herzog’s unconventional crash-course in auteurship may promise to cover “the art of lock-picking, traveling on foot, the exhilaration of being shot at unsuccessfully, the athletic side of filmmaking, the creation of one’s own shooting permits, the neutralization of bureaucracy, and guerilla filmmaking,” but it also demands that its students hit the books.
Like a more standard film school, Herzog’s program also has a required film-viewing list, which includes a few of my own favorite directors (though with nothing by Herzog himself, not that any student ignorant of the man’s work would want to enroll in the first place):
Where is the Friend’s Home? (1987, dir. Abbas Kiarostami)
Once these materials have filled your head with visions of big-game hunting, rebellion and counter-rebellion, Roman agriculture, ventures into terra incognita, coming of age in the third world, and the Texas School Book Depository, will you then find yourself able to make a film? Only if you take these lists as but a starting point, and keep on reading, reading, reading, reading, and reading, as well as watching, watching, watching, watching, and watching. And what about other trivial matters, like financing? In more of Herzog’s own, direct words (though surely said in jest): “Rob a bank, for god’s sake!”
Note: The image used to highlight this post on Twitter and Facebook was taken by Erinc Salor, and it’s available by Wikimedia Commons.
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In English-speaking countries where Christmas is celebrated, A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens’ secular Victorian tale of a Grinch restored to holiday cheer, usually plays some part.
How many children have been traumatized by Marley’s Ghost in the annual rebroadcast of the half hour, 1971 animated version, featuring the voices of Alistair Sim and Michael Redgrave as Scrooge and Bob Cratchit?
Personally, I lived in mortal fear of the cowled Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come from Scrooge, a movie musical version starring Albert Finney.
And in some lucky families, an older relative with a flair for the theatrical reads the story aloud, preferably on the actual day.
It’s a tradition that Charles Dickens himself observed. It must’ve been a very picturesque scene, with his wife and all ten of their children gathered around. (Presumably his mistress was not included in the festivities).
Eventually, the torch was passed to the next generation, who mimicked and preserved the cadences favored by the master.
Dickens great-granddaughter, novelist Monica Dickens, who narrated a condensed version of the classic tale in 1984, above, was schooled in the family interpretation by her grandfather, Henry Fielding Dickens, who said of his famous father:
I remember him as being at his best either at Christmas time or at other times when Gad’s Hill was full of guests, for he loved social intercourse and was a perfect host. At such times he rose to the very height of the occasion, and it is quite impossible to express in words his geniality and brilliancy amid a brilliant circle.
Before the reading, Ms. Dickens shares some charming anecdotes about the original publication, but those with limited time and/or a Scrooge-like aversion to jolly intros can skip ahead to 7:59, when Big Ben chimes to signal the start of the story proper.
Last week we featured a list of 100 novels all kids should read before graduating from high school. Chosen by 500 English teachers from all over Britain, the list happens to have a lot of overlap with many others like it. Invariably, these kinds of young adult reading lists include Ray Bradbury’s novel of dystopian censorship and anti-intellectualism, Fahrenheit 451. Why, I’ve always wondered, should this novel be pitched almost exclusively at teenagers, so much so that it seems like one of those books many of us read in high school, then never read again, even if we are fans of Bradbury’s work?
A strange disconnect emerges when we look at the history of Bradbury’s novel as a teaching tool. Although most high school students are presented with freethinking as an ideal, and given cautionary tales of its suppression, their own educations are just as often highly circumscribed by adults who fret about the effects of various bad influences.
Whether, as a student, you read the bowdlerized or the “adult” version of Bradbury’s novel, perhaps it’s time to revisit Fahrenheit 451, particularly now that freedoms of thought, belief, and expression have again come under intense scrutiny. And in addition to re-reading Bradbury’s novel, you can listen to the 1971 radio play above. Produced in Vancouver by the CBC (and re-broadcast in recent years by the Radio Enthusiasts of Puget Sound podcast), the abridged, one-hour adaptation by necessity changes the source material, though for dramatic purposes, not to expressly soften the message. Ray Bradbury’s reputation may have been tamed over the decades. He became late in life an avuncular sci-fi master, primarily known as a writer of books for high school students. But at one time, his work—and science fiction in general—were so subversive that the FBI kept close tabs on them.
I don’t know about you, but I’ve sort of always associated Charles Dickens with the kind of humorless moralism and didactic sentimentality that are hallmarks of so much Victorian literature. That’s probably because the work of Dickens contains no small amount of humorless moralism and didactic sentimentality. But it also contains much wit and absurdity, inventive characterization and rich description. While novels like the short Hard Times, published in 1854, can seem more like thinly veiled tracts of moral philosophy than fully realized fictions, others, like the strange and whimsical Pickwick Papers—Dickens’ first—work as fanciful, lighthearted satires. The big, baggy novels like Great Expectations, Bleak House, and A Tale of Two Cities (find in our collection of Free eBooks) manage to skillfully combine these two impulses with his own twist on the gothic, such that Dickens’ work is not overwhelmed, as it might be, by sermonizing.
For all of this tidy summation of that giant of Victorian letters, one adjective now comes to mind that I would never have previously thought to apply at any time to the writer of A Christmas Carol: Borgesian, as in possessed of the scholastic wit of 20th century Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges. I’m not the first to note a resemblance, but I must say it never would have occurred to me to think of the two names in the same sentence were it not for an extra-curricular activity Dickens engaged in while outfitting his London home, Tavistock House, in 1851. Letters of Note’s sister site Lists of Note brings us the following anecdote:
[Dickens] decided to fill two spaces in his new study with bookcases containing fake books, the witty titles of which he had invented. And so, on October 22nd, he wrote to a bookbinder named Thomas Robert Eeles and supplied him with the following “list of imitation book-backs” to be produced.
You can see the complete—completely Borgesian—list below. Borges is of course well known for inventing titles of books that have never existed, but seem like they should, in another dimension somewhere. His invention of alternate realities, and publications, manifests in most all of his stories, as well as in oddities like the Book of Imaginary Beings. Like Borges’ made-up books, Dickens’ contain just the right mix of the self-serious and the ridiculous, so as to make them at once plausible, cryptic, exotic, and hilarious—both Pickwickian and, indeed, proto-Borgesian.
History of a Short Chancery Suit Catalogue of Statues of the Duke of Wellington Five Minutes in China. 3 vols. Forty Winks at the Pyramids. 2 vols. Abernethy on the Constitution. 2 vols. Mr. Green’s Overland Mail. 2 vols. Captain Cook’s Life of Savage. 2 vols. A Carpenter’s Bench of Bishops. 2 vols. Toot’s Universal Letter-Writer. 2 vols. Orson’s Art of Etiquette. Downeaster’s Complete Calculator. History of the Middling Ages. 6 vols. Jonah’s Account of the Whale. Captain Parry’s Virtues of Cold Tar. Kant’s Ancient Humbugs. 10 vols. Bowwowdom. A Poem. The Quarrelly Review. 4 vols. The Gunpowder Magazine. 4 vols. Steele. By the Author of “Ion.” The Art of Cutting the Teeth. Matthew’s Nursery Songs. 2 vols. Paxton’s Bloomers. 5 vols. On the Use of Mercury by the Ancient Poets. Drowsy’s Recollections of Nothing. 3 vols. Heavyside’s Conversations with Nobody. 3 vols. Commonplace Book of the Oldest Inhabitant. 2 vols. Growler’s Gruffiology, with Appendix. 4 vols. The Books of Moses and Sons. 2 vols. Burke (of Edinburgh) on the Sublime and Beautiful. 2 vols. Teazer’s Commentaries. King Henry the Eighth’s Evidences of Christianity. 5 vols. Miss Biffin on Deportment. Morrison’s Pills Progress. 2 vols. Lady Godiva on the Horse. Munchausen’s Modern Miracles. 4 vols. Richardson’s Show of Dramatic Literature. 12 vols. Hansard’s Guide to Refreshing Sleep. As many volumes as possible.
Out with the Coke cans, potato chips, Twix bars and other junk foods.
In with the Haruki Murakami novels.
That’s what happened last year when Muzu, a publisher in Poland, created three vending machines stocked with copies of Murakami’s Colourless Tsukuru Tazaki and the Year of His Pilgrimageand then placed them in Polish train stations located in Warsaw, Poznan, and Wroclaw. It seemed like a natural thing to do, seeing that (notes the fan blog Haruki Murakami Stuff) Tsukuru Tazaki, the main character of the novel, “likes train stations and works as a train station designer for a Tokyo railway company.” Let’s cross our fingers and hope this is the start of a healthy trend.
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