QUESTIONS for the AVID READER Part V

image from La Fargeville Public Library

QUESTION 33: New Books

It's Labour Day, always the start of things, a new year and a new thread. What's new in your library? New takes two forms here:

1. the newest /latest book that came into your possession ( NB "new" here is new to you, it can be a well loved ancient book that just came to you)

2. the newest /most recently published book you've acquired

Where did the books come from and under what circumstances? Had you sought them out, or was it serendipity? Are they the same book?

1. Strong Opinions by Nabokov. Just arrived today from Amazon. Part of my Nabokov theme.

2. Great Circle by Maggie Shipstead, from Audible. Published May 4, 2021. For the Booker 2021 longlist. (I have ordered The Fortune Men by Nadifa Mohamed, pub May 27, 2021. But it hasn’t arrived yet.)

Mr Fortune's Maggot by Sylvia Townsend Warner. Beautifully written story about a kindly missionary on an imaginary South Seas island who seems to be experiencing a kind of conversion, tho not in the way his archdeacon approves of. New to me, rec by someone in my movie club who knows how much I love Lolly Willowes.

Bookseller of Florence Id read several of his other books, and some one here mentioned it. Also several more from Oliver LaFarge, A Pause in the Desert and the door in the wall both collections of short stories Both from our local rare/used bookstore after I read Laughing Boy.

Another category Books I am waiting for

Lincoln Highway Hidden Palace and Matrix been waiting for new ones by these authors and just ordered them last month! (touchstones fixed)

The newest book to physically come into my life (house, etc) is a copy of 84 Charing Cross Road sent to me by AnnieMod (so I could reread whenever I felt like it!). The most recently published book is actually two books, released simultaneously by the author; Dragons' Fealty and Scions' Flight by M.C.A. Hogarth. I follow her various places (newsletter, etc) and picked up the books the day they were released, August 27th. I checked, and they were released after my latest Early Reviewers book - or at least, the latest one I've actually received so far (another will be published sometime in the future, but I haven't gotten it yet, just won it).

I have already read and enjoyed all three...

Three books from the second hand market stall last Wednesday:

Pourquoi le Brésil Christine Angot
Un roman français Frédéric Beigbeder
L'amour fou André Breton

And one new one from the bookshop:
Climax by Thomas B. Reverdy

oops better finish what I am reading coz a memory called Empire since my scifi/fan group is discussing it Thursday!

1) Newest acquisition: The City We Became

2) Most recently published: Interior Chinatown

(I had to look up all my 2020 books individually and discovered that out of 18 books, three were published on 3/3/2020).

Q 33

My answer to both parts of the question are the same: Blue: In Search of Nature's Rarest Color by Kai Kupferschmidt. I was wandering in a book store two days ago and this one jumped out at me. I'd never heard of this 2021 book before, and I couldn't resist it.

Great Circle by Maggie Shipstead published May 4, 2021, and The Bombay Prince by Sujata Massey published June 1, 2021….both from the library

The Madness of Crowds by Louise Penny, published August 24, 2021….Purchased from audible

>4 cindydavid4: I have Matrix on my wish list. I approach hist fx with a certain amount of skepticism and dread. I studied Marie de France and Eleanor's Awful Family decades ago, and I hope it won't be ban anachronistic mess.

>8 ELiz_M: Really liked Interior Chinatown. Very clever and fresh narrative style.

well two people I know who like HF really liked it so thats promising

I got Lean, Fall, Stand by Jon McGregor bought for me for my birthday a few weeks back. I think that's my newest book acquisition.

Q33:

1. Book that came into my possession most recently: Tijl Uilenspiegel by Charles De Coster. I picked this up from a little free library about a week ago. I hadn't realised until I brought it home that this Dutch edition is a translation. It was originally written in French, so I might look for the original instead, and just read the introduction in this one.

2. Most recently-published book: I picked up two 2021 books at the bookstall on the Gare du Nord two weeks ago. The more recent of these is a novel called Artifices by Claire Berest, published in August. I didn't know anything about the author, but it looked interesting and I liked the cover...



(I'm not counting ebooks for this question)

The newest book to come into my possession and the newest release are the same - Ash Davidson's Damnation Spring. I got it in August as my Book of the Month selection (a subscription gift from my sister). It was excellent!

Q33:

For both questions, the answer is What Strange Paradise by Omar El Akkad which showed up as the last Indiespensable book before their hiatus (and its official publication date is July 20, 2021) some time last week.

I have a semi-moratorium on buying books these days or that would not have been the latest arrival... :)

Recently pubbed—the books I have that dropped today are: Lauren Groff’s Matrix, which I read last spring and thought was terrific (and I’m a bit of a stickler for historical fiction, though more about the tone than the actual dates and details in this case, since I’m no expert on the time period), and a few I have yet to read: Cadwell Turnbull’s No Gods, No Monsters, Shruti Swamy’s The Archer (I loved her short story collection A House Is a Body, so this is high on the virtual pile), Venita Blackburn’s How to Wrestle a Girl: Stories, and David Liss's The Peculiarities.

As far as the newest book in my collection, that would be Seanan McGuire’s Every Heart a Doorway. Published in 2016, but I’ve kept hearing about it and even though I’m not the biggest consumer of fantasy and am not big on series, the premise of this one sounds like fun (and the ebook was on sale, something I’m always a sucker for no matter how much I hate Amazon on principle).

*1 Recently released edition of a book published in 2018, after it won the John Burroughs Medal for Distinguished Natural History Book.... A Wilder Time: Notes from a Geologist at the Edge of the Greenland Ice by William E. Glassley.

*2 Another would be Peterson Field Guide to North American Bird Nests, published this year, 2021.

Now, if I could just find some time to read them, or spend more time with that last one....

New-to-me 2018 nonfiction was the most recent acquisition: A Wilder Time: Notes from a Geologist at the Edge of the Greenland Ice

Runner-up would be Peterson's new Field Guide to North American Bird Nests, 2021

I have perused the bird nest book but really haven't had much time to pick up the Greenland book.

image from capitaldaily.ca (Victoria BC)

QUESTION 35: Little Lending Libraries

Little Free Libraries and other less formal book boxes are familiar sites in many places.
Do you have any of these in your neighbourhood?

Does anyone monitor them for unwanted items?

Do you think these encourage people to pick up books or are they just a way of disposing of books?

Are they largely a feature in more affluent neighbourhoods, or are they spread throughout your city/town? Have you found any in rural rambles?

How do you use them: drop off, pick up, both, or ignore altogether?

Do the ones you see provide other items such as masks or food?

Have you set up one?

Feel free to add pictures of your favourite.

I don't have one because we live at the top of the cul de sac so not many people walk by wish I did!

I have seen them everywhere, including on hiking trails (always assume they belong to some one.) Ive seen some at schools

I think people use them to drop off and pick up, I know thats what I use it for..

A few years ago someone went through all of the libraries on the block and stole all of the books! When the neighbors found out we immediately filled them!

We like to go on walks around the neighborhood and have chatted with some owners. Fun talking books with them

Went to one that had me close to tears. The sign said in memory of her son. Inside there were books about anger issues, being highly sensitive, help for depression, and finally a help for addiction book. None of them looked used. I was tempted to go to the house nearby and express my condolences but didn't feel comfortable..Poor guy, poor family

I found one of my fav books of the year at one in San Diego Laughing Boy cant remember what I left; hope it gave someone the same pleasure this gave me

There are a lot around my town/city (it's on the cusp. Officially city, feels mostly like a big town). There are some I really like - one has a living roof (succulents, mostly). But I mostly see them driving by so don't stop. I have gotten some good books there, and given some (children's books to the one by the elementary school, particularly). Also (when it was happening - not last year or this) my library book sale had someone at the end gleaning books for LFLs. I help with breakdown, and I've found a few books for him to take.

So - I see a lot, I visit a few, I've taken and given books, and I seldom see the same books twice (though I don't visit any one very often), so I think there's pretty good rotation.

We have two or three within a mile of my house, and I live on the edge of a cornfield in a town of 1,700 people. Local kids set them up for other kids, so not sure how much they are used.

When I had money, I gave out Ronald Dahl books to older elementary kids for Halloween one year. Some kids were thrilled. Some asked for extra candy instead.

Q 35

We've had a handful scattered throughout my area for quite a few years but in the last couple of years there seems to be a lot more. I hope that means they are a success. And now that I think about it, I wonder if the increase is due to COVID and not being able to donate books to charity or go to book sales, etc.

If I'm walking past, I always stop and take a look. I've never taken a book, and I've never left a book. But one day! I have a huge TBR pile, so I don't need any books, and unless I come across a book I'm actively looking for, I resist temptation. If I was looking for books though, I'd head for a former neighbour's Little Library at her new house a dozen blocks away -- she has great taste.

The Booktuber E M M I E has a video of exploring Little Libraries. She's a university student in I think Ontario, and her mom drives her and her brother around exploring them. It's a fun and somewhat heartwarming video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_aeW6sR4ICs&t=4s

Our village started one of these during COVID (early stages - no cute little depository as yet), but it seemed to quickly become a mass dumping ground for books that people couldn't be bothered bringing to the charity shop. I'm not sure that the genre of the adult books generally being deposited makes it anything I'm desperate to visit, which is a shame as I like the idea of them.

I've used this kind of thing a few times on holiday, e.g. when hotels or apartments keep a little place for guests to drop off or take books, and I love it. I've picked up many a gem that would never have come across my path otherwise.

loved b&bs who did this. Left what I'd finished and grabbed one to start!

I love the little libraries at my grandson’s school.
https://www.instagram.com/p/CQMtmNFnPT6/?utm_medium=copy_link

oh that is adorable. Would love to see the others (all I see are instagram photos)

I’ll see if I can find them. The school has had the painted cows for several years. I posted the Instagram photo because I had never taken a picture myself. I’m sure the others are similar. Each little library is for a different age group. The school is for ages two through eighth grade.

These aren’t such a big think in the U.K. although I have seen similar things here. The ones I have seen have all been in decommissioned red phone boxes - no call for those now that everyone has mobile phones.

I have not seen any around here, but I have had big plans to build one and place it in the neighborhood, probably on the corner of our property near the fire pond (we don't have hydrants, we have fire ponds). I think we might add a bench nearby. If other things clear up it would be nice to build it over the winter and put it up in the spring.

>25 AlisonY: Our town 'dump' (i.e. the transfer station") has an area for book cast-offs, and there are always people pawing through it. Michael has come home with a book from time to time. He says it's mostly popular books and older children's books.

>30 SandDune: Those repurposed red phone boxes have even made it to France! I've also seen repurposed French phone boxes, but most little free libraries I've come across are small wooden boxes with perspex doors. The first one I saw in France was an old metal oil drum left on the ground, and it was not at all clear that it was for books and not rubbish. That one did not stay long.

Do you have any of these in your neighbourhood?
Off the top of my head, I can think of 4 within walking distance of my place, but then I live in a densely populated area. They're fairly common and tend to work as places to get rid of books and get new ones rather than as lending libraries.

Does anyone monitor them for unwanted items?
I don’t think so. I like to check whether my books have been picked, though! Typically, they’re all gone in a week. That makes me very happy :)

Are they largely a feature in more affluent neighbourhoods, or are they spread throughout your city/town? Have you found any in rural rambles?
I'm not sure a neighbourhood’s income level is a relevant criterium where I live. Typically, they’re near public spaces: community centres, schools, public parcs, libraries, town halls, etc. I’ve not found any in rural rambles, unless you count shelves of books left by tourists in pubs, rural bus stops, etc.

How do you use them: drop off, pick up, both, or ignore altogether?
Both! I’ve left books that I didn’t want to keep at all and books that I could have kept, but thought they would be more useful to someone else. I like to look at what’s on offer and play amateur sociologist, but don’t pick books very often – they’re not often things I want to read.

Do the ones you see provide other items such as masks or food?
I’ve seen magazines, flyers, local newsletters, but nothing non-paper –based.

Have you set up one?
No.

>27 NanaCC: That's a great one - unfortunately I couldn't copy it from instagram. It did take me a minute to recover though - there was a cow in the Faculty of Agriculture with some sort of transparent covering on her side so that students could see digestive processes at work. After I got over my shock at another cow with a hole in her side, I thought it was a great idea!

>24 Nickelini: in the last couple of years there seems to be a lot more. I hope that means they are a success. The ones in the photo are from Victoria, and the article seems to suggest they are increasing in popularity there, so it makes sense for Vancouver too. (I know, the people are nothing alike!)

>31 avaland: Hope you manage to get it built. Seeing it was you, I immediately thought of one for patterns, fabrics, yarn etc. That would be fun.

>25 AlisonY: The dumping is unfortunate.

>30 SandDune: Speaking as the last person on earth without a mobile phone, I always make a mental note of public phone boxes, just in case. What a surprise it would be to find it full of books.

I don't think I had ever seen a Little Library in the area I live it or when I had traveled. Which... surprises me. :)

Annie, heres a map, just add your zip code and they pop right. We have several here in the east valley that I know of

https://littlefreelibrary.org/ourmap/

Well, we have lots here in the east valley! There is a map of them but they are just for ones that are registered https://littlefreelibrary.org/ourmap/

>36 cindydavid4: None in my zip code. :) I can see the closest ones on the map where one would expect them to be but my area is a bit weird (condos, apartments and businesses only - no houses, schools and so on) which explains it. :)

Do you have any of these in your neighbourhood?
There were many where I lived before moving. I see them in a lot of places as we are driving around.

Does anyone monitor them for unwanted items?
The local Friends of the Library and also Literacy Coalition would monitor them and weed the selections. There were always a lot of romance and westerns, as well as magazines and self-help books, sometimes religious tracts.

Are they largely a feature in more affluent neighbourhoods, or are they spread throughout your city/town? Have you found any in rural rambles?
I do not think they are related to income. The one I used the most was outside a grocery store.

How do you use them: drop off, pick up, both, or ignore altogether?
Both.

Do the ones you see provide other items such as masks or food?
Yes, some had masks and there were also some with food.

Have you set up one?
No, although I would like to. The community to which we recently moved does have a book exchange in the main building, and there were several shelves of books there.

My best donation (location) was left in the LFL on the beach at Waikiki!

There are very few Little Free Libraries in my neighborhood. I think a combination of the fact that most of it is very urban working class, plus it's New York—folks don't have lawns or places to mount them. You're more inclined to see a cardboard box with a pile of books that says "Take one." A block or two east of me the demographic is a little more middle class, and there are two LFLs that I know of—one outside my regular walking orbit, so I haven't seen it in person, and the other that I pass by pretty regularly. I'll drop off books there from time to time, but I don't think I've ever seen something I wanted there, although I always check.

I think there's a Little Free Fridge somewhere down in the main shopping district, but I haven't seen that one either.

I'd love to have a LFL myself, but my front stairs butt right up onto the sidewalk, so there's no place I could put one that didn't involve more power tools than I own. I'm more of a cardboard box person.

But here you go: Hopefully Neighborhood Children Enjoy 2004 Coding Textbook Man Added To Lending Library

>39 lisapeet: Hahaha! of course its from Onion. Gosh are they even writing any more? The last four years I kept thinking every headline was from the Onion. Wasn't sure they could top those.

ETA ah, here they are!
https://www.theonion.com

Q35 Little libraries

They seem to have become quite popular in the Netherlands in recent years — there are three or four in my neighbourhood, one of which I visit regularly because it often has interesting stuff in it. Others tend to be dominated by airport novels and children's books.

I think I've probably got twenty or thirty books from "the good one" over the last two or three years, and dropped off about twice that number. It's occasionally frustrating to pick up a book thinking "that looks interesting", only to realise that you put it there yourself a week earlier. The people who look after that one seem to keep a pretty good eye on it, the rubbish disappears quickly and it's rarely either over-full or empty. Some others I know are frustrating because you can't open the door without risking an avalanche.

It's fun to come across them on rural walks and see what's on offer (village ones often have interesting stuff in them), but I rarely have books with me to drop off, so I generally limit myself to looking. Very nice to see that some communities have really fancy purpose-built structures (or the ubiquitous ex-GPO phone boxes, cf. >30 SandDune:), although you do sometimes wonder if they got them as a replacement for a proper branch or mobile library that was taken away.

There are some nice ones at railway stations here too, but when I look, those often seem to have been stripped of everything except the inevitable handfuls of evangelical tracts and the equally-inevitable out of date textbooks.

Surprisingly, there used to be quite a good one at Schiphol airport, in the same area as the Amsterdam Public Library branch in the non-Schengen departure lounge. I've found one or two interesting books there. Not recently, though: I haven't been there much in the last two years. I don't know whether it survived Covid.

I've not had much luck with the ones in hotels and marinas, but it's always worth a look, just in case.

It would be fun to run one myself, but I live on the third floor, so I'd have to limit it to bird-books.

>41 thorold: "that looks interesting", only to realise that you put it there yourself a week earlier.

hee, yes, this is exactly why I come home with a book realizing I had it already!

BTW are you familiar with Peter Cashwells the verb to bird? Hes a long time buddy of mine from an online book group,and loved to talk about birding. I remember liking the book very much, opened my eyes to a world I hadn't know about

image from The Globe and Mail

QUESTION 36: Politics: The Nuts and Bolts

It's Election Day in Canada. Russia has just finished counting ballots in its election. Germans will vote in an important election this Sunday.

Voters follow campaigns, the candidates' ups and downs, and polls. How much do they know about their actual political systems, let alone the systems in other countries?

Do you read about political systems in your own country and in others? Do you read the history of elections in your country (books like Theodore White's The Making of the President series)? Have you ever read your country's constitution or equivalent document?

Do you read novels about politics? Which ones would you recommend?

Ah, such a timely question! :) I just got back from voting--didn't think it would take me that long, had to wait an hour in the line!

Ummm Q 36...

I follow politics but as I'm highly flammable I go through cycles of more or less immersion. I have read a few constitutions but not Canada's charter. I know more than average about several countries' systems... in theory. I don't particularly look for political content in books but unsurprisingly given my other interests I often find some. In general, historical politicking is easier to take than whatever may hit to near the contemporary bone. But I'm not drawn to stuff that's ALL politics, like those Washington D.C. stuff from Clinton's era (Anonymous etc.), that's too insidery and everyday to appeal.

I can't think of a political novel to recommend at the moment, but instead would pitch a call to see again Alan Pakula's The Parallax View, recently issued in a Criterion edition.

I am too much of a newsie , and worry about my blood pressure, to feel the need to read most of what comes out. I did love Obama's dreams of my father and I have proba bly read everything by Madeliene Albright, former Secretary of State. I remember reading political novels like The President's Plane is Missing, loved that stuff, and saw the movies Dave and The American President, oh and the one about the two ex presidents who come together to save the country.

Q 36

Voting day for me on the west coast of Canada and no line up at all at 4 PM. I've lived in this area for 25 years and the same party has always won both national and provincial elections by a huge amount. So really, it doesn't ever matter in these elections if I vote or not. But I go anyway and throw in my voice for someone else.

I'm sure I've read political books in the past, but it's certainly not a topic I'm drawn to read about in book form.

>43 SassyLassy:

I voted on the Labour Day weekend; I was the only person there at the time — once I'd actually found the office, tucked up on the second floor of a strip mall with an unremarkable entrance.

Having just used tag cloud to see which of my books other people have tagged as politics, I can confidently say that I read very few books about Canadian politics but do read regularly about political issues in general.

Current politics I get from various mainstream media. Final year history course in high school devoted half the year to the US political system and half the year to the Canadian (the Rowell-Sirois Report anyone? guaranteed cure for insomnia, although its recommendations still largely define the division of financial powers today). And a particularly dreary undergraduate course in Canadian politics. So I've certainly read our constitution and have read about several of the significant Supreme Court decisions interpreting the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

Am I watching/listening to the election night coverage? Nope! I only care about the result, and that won't be settled until, possibly, later in the week after all the mail-in ballots have been dealt with.

Q36

I'm interested in politics as a process, but not obsessive about the details and personalities: I tend to scan the news fairly superficially except at moments of high drama or low farce. Being an expat and having fallen outside the basket of eligibility for voting in either the UK or the Netherlands for much of my adult life, I suppose it's inevitable that I feel a bit detached from the process.

I took a course in UK constitutional law about twenty years ago (so I know there is no actual British Constitution!), whilst I only have a vague general idea of what's in the Constitution of the Netherlands. But I do have occasional bouts of reading political non-fiction. Political fiction isn't really a serious interest, apart from Trollope, perhaps.

Worst election ever. And now we are stuck paying the salary of that ex-Liberal slime who got cut off by the party, what a look for the city and province. I can't believe there is no recourse to boot him out?

I used to have students read the Declaration of Independence in American lit class. Took a strictly reader response approach: Here's the Original Beefs, all laid out in clear, 18th century prose and in listicle format, what strikes you as interesting? The students, most of whom had never read this before, could fill up a period and a half talking about it or looking up stuff they didn't know, like press gangs.

I read a lot of dystopian novels, and they frequently feature Governments Run Horribly Amok, which I find comforting because at least I know that others have the same dim view of governments that I do. I tend to be an anarchist at heart, though I have come to the conclusion that peaceful anarchy requires a certain amount of respect and tolerance beyond the capacity of most people, including me. I tend to want less government until Next Door's dog starts barking its fool head off or Across the Street starts up his diesel truck and lets it run in the driveway for 30 minutes while I am trying to read with the windows open.

Never much interested in political thrillers, self-aggrandizing political memoirs, or those Bob Woodward exposes. I did enjoy Madeleine Albright's Fascism.

I have uncoupled from current events except for a skim of the Washington Post and 30 minutes of Outside Source from the BBC. My husband screamed at the TV news every night of the Trump presidency and had a massive heart attack in April. Had to make some changes.

I do not read political novels or nonfiction, although my husband is quite a history and political science reader. He reads a lot of biographies about different historical and political figures. I check my phone for news or current events for the most part, but I try to limit my exposure as I tend to get too upset and then worry about the overall state of the world and the USA in particular.

>49 LolaWalser: Was that your riding? Yikes! Maybe if voters read more about politics they would have known he was cut loose and would have voted for another candidate.

>46 Nickelini: >47 librorumamans: A similar experience here in the advance polls on a beautiful Saturday afternoo; no other voters in the hockey arena.

>44 LolaWalser: I had that wait in the recent provincial election, outside in the blazing sun, but it's always worth while when a group of Maritimers is catching up!

Additional question for those who read politics, fact and fiction

Do you read about parties and people other than those you support?

Politics is very hard on anyone with a sense of fairness. It’s painfully unfair and the power games are often really really hurtful to undeserving peeps and to society in general. I have a hard time with this. W and Trump both sent me into variations of depression.

I have no reading system with politics. It’s just random. I don’t like reading anything with an agenda, so I have to find apparently impartial knowledgeable takes - which wipes out most of the published stuff. Plus I’ve begun avoiding the hopeless horror stories, like our failed response to climate change, which wiped out most of the remaining stuff. Then i want good stuff by qualified and good writers. That again wipes out most of the remaining stuff. But that’s maybe what i’ll read. And that only when the motivation strikes me.

>52 SassyLassy:

Yes, alas. When it was Trinity-Spadina it was an NDP stronghold; since restructuring it fell to the Liberals. Grrr, I should get a tee: Not My MP!

>53 SassyLassy:

Hm, did you mean "in their own words" as opposed to reading about them? I mean, I definitely get info on the opposition but I don't bend backwards to look at their media. Part of it is self-preservation but also I think after a certain age we've generally earned enough experience and discernment that we don't need to be convinced from the foundations up which principles are good and which are not.

That said, from my personal perspective I'm exposed to more of the opponents' views than my own since the "mainstream" is so thoroughly centre, centre-right. It takes less effort to get insight into that camp than into the left, which is obstructed in Canada almost as much as in the US.

>55 LolaWalser: I hadn't been thinking "in their own words", but more academically in terms of ideology, history of how they have implemented that ideology, and who is behind it all, not to mention how it 'compares and contrasts' with other political ideas closer to your own.

I need that tee for my riding too! Although the incumbent was out of her depth, I didn't want her main opponent, who actually won.

>54 dchaikin: Do you think if people understood political process better, it could be more fair with less rancour? Would more people participate?

Is civics taught in the US? Today some of us were bemoaning its demise in schools here. Many voters have difficulty distinguishing between federal and provincial responsibilities, and sometimes vote for or against a given candidate based on their misconceptions of what it is possible for that candidate to try to do.

>51 LadyoftheLodge: Interested in how you limit your exposure - is it reading, viewing, online?
__________________________

Novels from other times

As alluded to in >48 thorold:, there can be politics in fiction from other eras. Nineteenth century English literature was full of it. Does this stand out for you when reading these books, or do other aspects of these novels hold more interest?

>57 SassyLassy: >54 dchaikin: dchaikin: Do you think if people understood political process better, it could be more fair with less rancour? Would more people participate?

Speaking for the US, there is divide between those with and without college degrees. That means uneducated people hold a lot of political voting weight and vote in an uneducated manner. I don’t think knowledge of process is the issue when the problem is heavily dependent on lack of general education. But, not sure what anyone who studies this carefully has come up with.

>57 SassyLassy: Do you think if people understood political process better, it could be more fair with less rancour? Would more people participate?

Civics used to be taught, in fact passing the exam was a requirment before graduating 8th grade. Loved that class, learned so much about the constition and amendments, how our govt is structured, who does what, as well as how to vote and become involved. Not sure when it stopped or why. It really kills m e that more people don't know and/or understand the basics. And yes I think we'd have less divisoin and more people would be interested. Problem is that you need to find a teacher who is impartial and keeps opinions to herself. And anything she says will be gone through with a fine tooth comb. Not sure it can happen now

>58 dchaikin: I agree about the divide between educations, but not having a degree does note mean they are uneducated. Thats one of the complaits I hear, is that those in college feel superior to them And I think they have a point.

totally agree with education. Tho my parents went through the depression and voting was a very big deal. they wanted us kids to know civics and our part in the government. Not sure if this can be required again.

My husband grew up in a poor family with limited education. But he read everything he could to pass his GED and ended up getting a degree. Dont assume others like him dont want to learn. Ofter there is a lack of resources as well as lack of transporation to go to these.

>60 cindydavid4: right. This is just population trend kind of thing. For example, polling showed non-college degree populations leaned Trump, and college degreed leaned Clinton or Biden. But plenty of people without college degrees are well educated. (Bill Gates, for example)

and of course there is the elephant in the room: the internet and social media. Its turned so many people crazed and foaming at the mouth (on all sides) , its difficult for people to know whats true, or maybe its not i dunno. I just know that the political climate has changed so much since I was in school and I don't see a way of calming people down enough to communicate with each other.

>53 SassyLassy: >55 LolaWalser: parties and people other than those you support?

Those are the most interesting ones to read about, surely? As Lola said, there’s a difference between reading critical accounts of people you disagree with and diving into their own propaganda, but if you’re going to claim to hold any kind of political opinions, you need to understand something about the other side’s point of view: what could make people hold such (repugnant) opinions, where those ideas came from, what the people who purvey them are hoping to achieve, and so on.

Also, there’s always the small but not negligible possibility that you might be wrong. Ideas have to be tested.

>57 SassyLassy: politics in fiction from other eras.

Yes, I think there are different things going on there. In Trollope it’s not usually about the political ideas, it’s satire about the way political decisions are taken more or less accidentally in the course of private struggles for power or influence. Some of that is very specific to the time and place, and fun for its historical interest, whilst other parts are more universal. But you don’t (unless you’re John Major) read Trollope with the idea that you are going to learn deep human truths. It’s politics as entertainment.

Novels-of-ideas that are still worth reading speak to us across time in quite different kinds of ways. When you read Independent people or The ragged-trousered philanthropists or 1984 nowadays, for instance, you can react to the political ideas in them in a very direct, emotional way, without getting deep into a discussion of how the world has changed in the last century.

I don't read political stories from other viewpoints, and very few from ones close to mine - I dislike conflict, and that's all politics is (especially nowadays - older ones sometimes have had the conflict filtered out over the years. Or, history is not truth...). I do, however, read editorial cartoons from both (many) viewpoints. I mostly end up thinking "how could they think that way" - but at least I see the other viewpoints.

>57 SassyLassy: Civics/government is supposed to be a required high school course, at least it is in Indiana.

Re limiting exposure--We do not watch TV often, so most of my info comes from news feeds on my phone, unless we happen to catch a news broadcast in someplace like a restaurant.

>63 thorold: When you read Independent people or The ragged-trousered philanthropists or 1984 nowadays, for instance, you can react to the political ideas in them in a very direct, emotional way, without getting deep into a discussion of how the world has changed in the last century.

Excellent books all, especially The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, one of my all time favourites.

>48 thorold: Knowing there is no actual UK constitution made it difficult to word >43 SassyLassy:, ending up with the awkward equivalent document, which should have been plural to reflect the large body of law guiding decisions that would be constitutional in nature (more awkward language).
_________________

Another one of my absolute favourites is The Reluctant Fundamentalist.
That leads me to this Guardian list of top 9/11 novels: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/dec/17/top-10-9-11-novels-porochista-khak...
I'd also put The Garden of Last Days in that group.

Thinking of older books people in the US might have read
All the King's Men, Uncle Tom's Cabin and the nonfiction Armies of the Night come to mind as different ways of looking at the country in their respective times.

image from Pingtree

QUESTION 37: Stars and Threads

How people use LT always intrigues me. In CR's Talk and in other groups, people often use the "star" function to highlight particular threads.

If you use this function, do you read starred threads first and then go on to others?
Do you read only starred threads?
If you read only starred threads, how do you discover people new to CR?
How do you discover new topic threads?

If you don't star threads, how do you navigate through the multitudes: by remembering common reading interests, by catchy title; what grabs your interest in a new thread?

How about finding a thread you've never read before and reading through it - no names need be mentioned. You might find a new kindred spirit.

>67 SassyLassy:

Um, what's CR?

>68 librorumamans: Club Read

I star favorites, keeping track when they change by month or year to keep up. I have at times searched through the groups list to see what else might interest me and have starred some.

I start off the year with good intentions of popping by everyone's threads but then quickly realise that I'm failing miserably. Having said that, I do tend to star the majority of threads in CR, unless someone has completely polar reading tastes to me and it's unlikely we're ever going to read common books. I star the threads of a few people outside of CR too who have been in CR at points in the past and drifted into other books (where they have common book interests with me).

I do tend to look at the Talk page by the starred view, and then every few months look at the general CR page and realise I've missed a few new threads in the meantime. I must try to look at the general page more regularly.

Q37:

The question made me realise that I do star quite a few threads (currently around 20 in CR alone), but very rarely actually use the “starred topics” view to look at them. I think it’s mostly useful for keeping track of one or two interesting threads in groups I don’t spend so much time in, but most of the time those are threads I’ve posted in and can retrieve just as quickly with “your posts”.

Looking at CR, there doesn’t seem to be a big difference in the amount of diligence I display in keeping up with starred and unscarred threads. At the moment I’m falling behind with a lot of people I usually follow, mostly because I’ve been away quite a bit lately. And my heart sinks a bit when I see that Darryl (not to name any names…) has a whole new thread with seventy posts in it since last time I looked, which surely can’t have been more than five minutes ago :-)

I do often star the threads of new people in CR in an effort to remind myself to have a look at what they are posting about, but it doesn’t always work.

Goodness, I’ve tried all sorts of methods and none seem to be able to help me keep up. At the moment, in a kind of surrender, I have only mine own thread starred. ☺️ Otherwise, I kind of rotate through trying to catch up with at least a few threads at any one time.

I have starred several threads in CR and a few in other groups. I read all of my starred threads daily, and if I have time I read all of the unstarred threads in Club Read. I don’t always comment on threads. I think I lurk without saying anything more than I should.

It varies a lot with how much time I have. I like to peek at All Talk or whatever it's called, to note if there's something new site-wide, but usually I look at Your Posts or Your Groups. My main "control" happens on group level actually, where putting the most active groups on Ignore helps to keep the post view manageable. Then I visit some of the Ignored groups from the group page to keep abreast with what's going on there--Bug Collectors, Talk about LT etc.

>67 SassyLassy: I star only the threads that I start and for which I know I need to pay attention to - my own thread, any administrative threads (the "What you are reading" and so on) - it makes it easier for me to get to where I am supposed to be without going through the whole group or the full list of threads I had started.

For threads in CR - I try to read all the threads - even if some are really outside of my usual patterns, that's part of the beauty of CR. And we are a small enough group for that to (mostly) work. So I just start from the top and read through anything I had not read through yet. Sometimes it can take awhile to get back to some threads... sometimes I just give up and open and close the longer ones - I know which threads they are so I can always go back and read them but they are not sitting in my unreads (I may be a bit obsessive about that...)

I have a few more groups like that. For the rest I follow/am member of - it is usually based on a title... or I just keep on top of the group. But I made a decision early on not to join any of the BIG group - Green Dragon and the like...

I don't use stars. If someone on here makes interesting comments in the Interesting Articles, Favourite Reads, or general threads, I look in on their reading. I don't comment there much, but I sometimes do put things on my TBR list as a result of what others read.

I would like to see more threads about specific books or group reads. I am on Matrix now, which a lot of people on here have read. Almost threw it in the DNF pile as anachronistic and inspired by Ser Brienne of the TV version of Game of Thrones. But I stuck with it because folks whose opinion I value liked it. I am not ready to forgive the silliness of the book's first 50 pages or so, but the abbey story is interesting and more historically accurate. So I am not ready to deem the first part an unforgivable flaw in the novel as a whole.

wow, I need to reread the first 50 pages, I didn't detect anything Brienne like, just the fact that Maria learns how to sword fight But I am glad you continued reading it!

Q 37

I only star the threads that I start and want to follow regularly (if I just start a thread to ask a question, I won't star that unless it turns into something more). I very occasionally will star a super interesting conversation. When I open Talk, I read these first. Then I click on Your Posts . . . this takes me to any thread I've posted to. I make sure I review a groups page at the beginning of the year and every so often. If I see a thread that I want to follow, I try to make some kind of semi-intelligent comment so the thread will pop up in my feed going forward. If I can't think of a good comment sometimes I'll wait because I know eventually I'll have something to say. I do sometimes lose people when they start new threads, and I sometimes miss new interesting threads, so every week or so I open my groups and see what I've missed.

Q37

I star several threads in CR and a couple of other groups that'd I like to regularly check on or have similar reading interests. Even if I am going to fall behind. I do once a month try to check on unstarred threads in throughout CR in chunks to scan over things that I missed. The number of posts are bit overwhelming to keep up with on a regular basis. It's not a great system and I would like to visit more threads regularly if there was a more efficient way to take in the fire hose of information available in CR.

Interesting idea about starring your own threads, I hadn't thought of that.

I only have one thread on LT starred: the HTML one in the Viragos group. Other than that, I like poking around to see what's out there, which is mostly how I discovered the main threads I follow. Periodically I also check out new to me groups.

I think I am afraid of narrowing my range of learning about new books and ideas if I start starring threads.

>78 cindydavid4: Giant sized, carries a dagger, talks about going on quests, scares people, constantly getting undervalued and underrated ... pretty much seems like a Brienne ripoff to me. Once she takes over as prioress, her character rounds out. The real Marie de France may have been the abbess at Shaftesbury, which was a very rich establishment. Far from being punishment, appointment as prioress of Shaftesbury would have been a very juicy career and a mark of the king's favor. But I like the nuts and bolts of how the fictional Marie revived her abbey from ruin, even if many other abbesses had been doing the same in pre-Conquest times.

oh ok - just didn't feel like a ripoff, Im sure there were more woman like Brienne among charactes in the middle ages. But I get you (egads, I miss that show!!!!)

>Not a fan, alas.

I star threads in groups that I don't belong to. So I have several threads starred in the 75 books group. I don't want to belong to that group because it is so active, but there are people there that I've met in other groups or who I've found through the "similar libraries" feature that I star. Then I can follow their thread without having to weed through the group's other posts.

I don't star any threads in Club Read or 1001 books because I read or skim every post in those groups. I find them small enough to be manageable. I am horrible at commenting, but I do keep up with all of the threads there. In the category challenge, which is a little bigger, I just recognize certain names and keep up with those without a star system.

I also star my own threads to find them easily and some admin threads in groups that I like but don't frequent.

It is so interesting to see how differently we all use the LT features!

Going back a couple of weeks to Q35: Little Libraries (>20 SassyLassy: above) — here’s a particularly fine one I came across today, in the village of Wolfheze in Gelderland. Someone seems to have built a child-size version of a builders’ tea-caravan and filled it with kids’ books:

>86 thorold: oh thats so cute!

>84 nohrt4me2: I get you. :)

>86 thorold: Adorable!

>86 thorold: Damn! Now I want to build a tea caravan and live in it by the ocean. You know, selling tea and telling other people how to live their lives and what books to read, the three things I am best at. Loan officers would be fighting each other to fund that business plan!

I star my own threads and those of the people I want to follow (because interesting books and/or interesting conversations). I basically read from the Starred view on my homepage Talk module. Every once in a while I go to Your Posts or Started by You (sometimes I forget to star my own threads, especially bug reports and similar) and check if I've missed anything.

If someone posts interesting things in a thread I'm following, I'll go see if they have their own thread - other than that, I'm really bad at finding new people. I mostly read in CR and 75, because that's where the people I want to follow are posting. I used to spend quite a bit of time in Site Talk, Bug Collectors, What's That Book, etc, where I could be helpful - but recently I simply haven't had the time. I have no idea where the time goes - or more specifically, what I'm doing now that I wasn't doing before when I had so much time for LT...

Sassylassy has asked me to do this week’s question while she is on vacation. I don’t have her master list of questions she has used this year, so I apologize in advance if this question has been asked already.

Her request has interesting timing as today is my Thingaversary! and thus I am celebrating 15 wonderful and enriching years here on LT ...



QUESTION 38: OTHER” READING

Here on LT we tend to talk mostly about our reading of physical or digital “books”. And we most often think of that as a' cover to cover' read, something we love to quantify and easily review. But, our reading certainly doesn’t stop there, so let’s talk about our OTHER reading... which may or may not necessarily be in book form.

Other writings/books: —— diaries, scholarly papers, speeches in print, magazine articles (or literary magazines), collections of letters, manuals, reviews, guide books, individual short stories, individual articles, newspapers, dictionaries, historical records, recipes, art books, comics, children’s books, encyclopedias, scripts, ….

Beyond what you might commonly list and review here on LT, and eliminating forums of social media, what other reading do you enjoy?

Perhaps between books, you indulge your penchant for the NY Times obituaries.... Or maybe you are lounging at the beach browsing an old cookbook or perhaps you are hung up on letters written during WWII?. Are you reading scholarly papers for fun or work? Are you reading James and the Giant Peach to the children or grandkids?

Why don’t we generally talk about, or review, this kind of reading? Is some of it not amenable to review or discussion? How different would LT be if we talked about our reading more broadly?

Q38 "Other" Reading

— Well, I've just been auditing my spice shelf, getting rid of the empties and duplicates and relabelling the anonymous or re-used containers, but that's probably not what this question is about...

— Things I have catalogued on LT but don't tend to review or post about:
Dictionaries, obviously. I'm always looking words up in my Shorter OED or my pile of language-to-language dictionaries, or online. Or in Fowler's Modern English usage (not a useful resource, most of the time, but a very entertaining one).
Maps and atlases. There are all kinds of superb modern and historical maps available on the web, but somehow nothing beats the sense of immersion you get from spreading out a paper map on the table (or the floor!) and following the thing you're looking at across it. Web maps all suffer from the problem that you can never see the overview and the detail at the same time, as you can on paper. The out of date Michelin road atlas under my coffee table got a lot of heavy use when I was reading Zola...
Poetry collections and anthologies. Again, the web is great when you're looking for "that poem about aspens", but not when you're looking for "something nice I could read at X's party tomorrow". Or when you're not looking for anything specific at all, but just want to fill ten minutes with a good poem. My poetry shelves are the most "within reach" bit of my library. (I do sometimes post about new poetry collections I add to the library, but not about ones that have always been there.)
General reference books. Sadly, this is a dying category: I'm more likely to look up a quotation or an obscure composer online than in a special purpose dictionary, I haven't had a new paper railway timetable or phone book for over a decade. The technical and legal texts I used to have to refer to when I was still working are all online now as well; if I ever needed them for any reason now I wouldn't use my out of date paper copies.

— Things I have not catalogued on LT:
Journals/Magazines. Most of the time, those go together with (hobby-, campaign-, historical-, etc.) groups I am or used to be a member of, and they have their own fora for discussion: there's no obvious reason to duplicate that here, and it wouldn't interest many people. I have my own local database for indexing journal articles, and even that is largely redundant, as these things get indexed on the web. I don't read many book-related journals (occasionally the LRB) — when I do and I see something of obvious general interest I post about it.
My own diary. “I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read in the train.”

I was a contributor to Commonweal long ago and still read the magazine as a fallen away Catholic.

I also enjoy reading McSweeney's, which reminds me that my favorite essay over there, "It's Decorative Gourd Season," is due for a re-read.

Interesting about diaries. I re-read emails from long ago. I find them way more interesting than my diaries, which I basically use to vent and buck up, and they get burned up as soon as I fill them.

New york times: Like always on Sunday mornings, I separate the sections to read now or later. I put the front page and sunday review for the last, giving me a break from the serious. First is the NYT Magazine, followed by the book review, Arts, Style, Business and the NY section for the Metropolitan Diary, which Ive been hooked on for decades. Usually takes a few days to get though it all (Im retired; used to take me a week!)

Magazines: New Yorker, Smithsonian, Archaeology Today, a few professional news pages

I agree about maps and get miffed if a book about travel or history does not include them. Then I resort to the net. But I much rather be using a map or atlas.

>94 cindydavid4: I do the opposite with NYT - read the first section on Sunday (news and so on so not wait and slam stories get updated through the week so it kinda makes sense to me) and slowly work through the rest through the week. Same with the Arizona Republic which I keep getting off and on - I like the local focus but I don’t have time to read it often (even on a Wed/Sun schedule). :)

I read but don't catalog the newspaper every Sunday - but I mostly read the Datebook (Style) section, and Food & Wine (which has fewer and fewer recipes and more and more restaurant reviews - boring). I'll skim the news but 98% of it I've seen as headlines at least in various newsletters via email. Occasionally there's an interesting story about people - there was one last week about a hiker who got lost in the mountains and was rescued barely in time. But often such stories are mostly about celebrities, which I find dull at best.

I catalog cookbooks (re: previous question). If I just look through for a particular recipe, I don't count that as reading - but if I read through (possibly marking recipes I want to make) I'll review that. Which means mostly the new cookbooks, that I pick up at a yard sale or similar (new to me).

I'll sometimes reread old diaries of mine, which are neither cataloged nor get counted as reads. Though they're fun to read.

I read a lot of comics on the Web...don't count those, either. Only if I get a collection (usually paper) will I catalog it, and then record reading dates (and I'll count my first read of the book as a new read, though all the comics are usually familiar to me).

If I actually cataloged and recorded everything I read...I'd be in the case of the person who decided to write in their diary what they did every five minutes. After the first few times, the entries were mostly "Wrote in my diary"...

I buy The Times on Saturdays, and usually read through that on Saturdays and Sundays when I'm having my lunch and some more during the week. As I catch up on the news daily Monday to Friday online I tend not to read the actual newspaper bit of it so much, but I enjoy the magazine, the Weekend supplement and the Saturday Review, especially the book review section.

I find I don't have time to read papers and magazines and stay at a reasonable pace with my book reading, so over the past few years I've pretty much stopped buying magazines. I used to enjoy interiors magazines, especially Elle Decoration, but I get my interiors fix on Instagram now.

I used to enjoy some of the better women's lifestyle magazines, but so many have shut down in the past few years, and those that remain often get on my nerves with their consistent peddling of BS aspirational stories ("I got off the corporate treadmill and opened my dream coffee shop / candle-making company / life-coaching business / guest house, and now I earn twice as much but only work 2 hours a day and still have time to make-over my idyllic country cottage that cost £1m in the Cotswolds"

Q38 OTHER READING
My print subscriptions: New Yorker, Paris Review, New York Review of Books, One Story. I read at least the headline stories in the New York Times and Washington Post most days—e version, since I've given up on having newspaper all over the damn house (though I miss it when it comes time to light the grill in the summer—NYRB does not burn well). A friend sent me a year's worth of Slightly Foxed magazine, which I've been dipping in and out of, and I'm still working my way through a couple of years' worth of Kenyon Review, which I had as a gift subscription a while back.

I keep saying I'm done with cooking magazines, but people keep giving me subscriptions to Food & Wine, which I like—I don't eat meat or poultry or drink alcohol at home, or even cook big meals much anymore, but it's fun on a voyeuristic level.

And I read a lot of news online all week for my job—if nothing else, the past five years have gotten me more adept at taking what I need and not going down rabbit holes of horror and outrage, because I just don't have the time or psychic energy for that.

I don't log any of the above, here or elsewhere. I will log something meaty, like an issue of Granta or Freeman's, but the rest I just read as grout in between books, and if you don't hear from me for a while you can assume I'm just catching up on journals (which, of course, will never ever happen).

I usually read some of the Washington Post and the highlights from our local public radio both via email. Until a few years ago I read World Literature Today, which is a lovely 'zine for those who love literature in translation, but I wasn't keeping up so I let it go :-(

I have been doing a lot of genealogy work on Ancestry.com over the last ten years and, for me, that has meant an amazing amount of reading of local and general New England histories, even social and cultural histories, all in various readable forms, for context and just to satisfy my curiosity.

A few of you may have noticed I have recently re-read one of my mother's five-year diaries and wrote about it on my thread. I'm going to do my grandmother's 1945 diary next as I have been enjoying reading it over and over. In the past I have read a few other notable women's diaries that have been published as books.

I read articles and essays from various publications. I have a Joyce Carol Oates 1997 essay from the Kenyon Review on Fairy Tales on my desktop waiting for the right reading moment. I've picked up three different lectures from the Henry Kreisel Lecture Series at the Univ of Alberta in book form, although they are available in other forms.

I read a fair bit of poetry these days, not usually cover to cover, but when I've read it all I try to comment on it, as I know there are other poetry lovers here. I consider poetry an individual thing so I don't try to review and critique it in the usual way.

I'm a very visual person also so I love art books, instruction books, field guides (birds, wildflowers, rocks... ), those great illustrated guide books (before, during and and after we have traveled). All these books are a nice mix of text and illustration.

I browse cookbooks but I really wouldn't call it "reading".

And I love reading books to our grandchildren.
-----

I admit this question rose out of personal experience as I have been having difficulties with reading the usual books for the last two quarters, possibly longer. The reason could be any number of things and I won't speculate here, but after struggling with a lot of two steps forward, one step back sort of reading, and a fair bit of frustration I have started to adapt. And now I'm experimenting with reporting on 'other' reading on our thread.

>92 thorold: "General Reference Books" -- that is sad, I agree. I remember my first encounter with the Encyclopedia Britannica...alone in a dim church basement....

The bulk of my reading is what I post on LT - novels and nonfiction.

I also skim news headlines and articles from Washington Post, NYT, and the Wall Street Journal (started that for a little balance as it skews to the right).

I read out loud to my 8 year old son every night. I've periodically tracked the chapter books I read to my kids but I haven't been thorough with it. Right now we are reading the Little House on Prairie Books. I will occasionally quickly read a book my 11 year old is reading if he wants to talk about it, and I rarely add those to my tracked books on LT.

Other than that, well, I read LT threads. And I read forums on reddit sometimes. I suppose the more I think about it the more things will come up that I don't think of as reading but involve reading.

>101 japaul22: I wish I had had the ability to track what I read to my children, what a great idea. It seems like something that could definitely get away from you.

Q38 (before I get distracted again and forget to post):

I go in phases - some weeks/months all my reading is in books form and some weeks, there are a lot of things I read on the side (and occasionally contemplate posting about). These can include:
- individual comics
- short stories - usually online, sometimes in magazines/journals/random collections
- long articles (for some value of long) - I like long form journalism so I tend to read some of it all over the place

Some things I read almost every week but don't ever plan to report on
- The Sunday papers - I miss the Weeklies of my teen years but US Sunday papers are as close to that as they can go. Some weeks I will also grab a Saturday and Sunday Times (the London version) but all of these are huge and... I wish I had the time
- Current event magazines - think Economist, Times and so on
- Work related stuff
- LT :)

Although for the Sunday papers and current events magazines, if I ever start writing again about the long articles I read, I may end up mentioning certain articles... who knows.

I'd love to talk/write about everything I read/watch/listen to. BUT... there is barely enough time to do all the reading/watching/listening as is... adding the time to write about it will be an overkill. Books and longer pieces kinda make sense (well... in my head they do).

And I will stop rambling. But the question made me think again about what I want to do with my thread next year (besides trying not to disappear again...)

>103 AnnieMod:

there is barely enough time to do all the reading/watching/listening as is.

This is my problem too. Add to it that one (well, me anyway) needs also some time to process, and it all takes even longer.

>104 LolaWalser: You know - I actually tend to process better when I talk/write about it - that used to be the case back in school and it had not changed - writing kicks off something in my brain that mere reading requires longer to. Which is why I occasionally do write about articles and things I listen to - when I try to write about it, I need to process it. Except you cannot do that under the shower... or while walking - which are often the only times I do not read... :)

>105 AnnieMod:

That's very true about writing and talking helping to process, except for me that's too slow and actually walking is when I do my most enjoyable thinking-through! Maybe I'll just embrace muttering aloud in public into the phone*--if there's one thing to be said for these times, it's that no one cares a whit anymore about such things.

*need first to remember to carry the thing, ofc

>106 LolaWalser: Maybe I'll just embrace muttering aloud in public into the phone . . . need first to remember to carry the thing, ofc

Nah. You just need something in one ear that looks bluetooth enabled. Almost any sort of tech-inspired costume jewellery would pass.

>107 librorumamans: This is true. Also, one is no longer considered weird or perverse if one is seen in public on the street, or anywhere for that matter, gesturing and talking aloud to no one in particular.

SassyLassy designated me as volunteer to deputise for her here in the second week of her absence, so here goes:



QUESTION 39: PAGE VERSUS STAGE

The play's the thing / Wherein I'll catch the conscience of the king (Hamlet, II:2)

This was prompted by the recent announcement that Nigerian playwright and Nobelist Wole Soyinka has published his first novel since Season of anomy (1972). That shouldn't be big news: Soyinka is hardly a Harper Lee, he's brought out a steady stream of plays and essays over the intervening half-century. But it does seem to be significant somehow — a novel obviously has a different kind of impact from a stage-play, and perhaps reaches a different cross-section of people.

Since Club Read seems to be largely a community of people who read novels, I thought it would be interesting to dig into our thoughts on prose literature's elder (and more respectable) brother, the stage. Obviously Covid has had a big impact on everything connected with the theatre, so maybe it makes sense to separate out what the theatre means to us "in normal times" and what we think about the long- and short-term impact of the virus:

— Are you a theatre-goer? (In normal times:) how often do you see live theatre? Locally? On trips to the big city? At festivals?
— Are you involved in any kind of drama group producing plays for public or private consumption? Or did you do that sort of thing when you were younger? (And if so, is that where you met your life-partner?)
— Do you read plays in printed form? Classics? Recent works?
— Do you read books about the theatre? (Fiction, non-fiction)
— What do you think about writers who create stage-works as well as prose fiction? Is that something that matters to the way you approach their work?
— Soyinka obviously shares Hamlet's notion that stage-plays are the most direct way to engage the audience's emotions, at least in an African context: do you think that's also true where you live?
— Do you have a Significant Theatrical Experience you're prepared to share here?
— Any thoughts on how live theatre will look in a post-pandemic world?

Good questions, Mark!

I have to admit that my exposure to theatrical plays has been limited. And I will also admit that I have not done much in the way of exploration in the area. Of course, there was the usual Shakespeare readings in school and accompanying bus ride to a play in Boston. And there were a few other plays read, The Crucible, and Death of a Salesman come to mind. And having lived in the Peterborough, New Hampshire area, one cannot escape seeing, in summer theater, at least once, Thornton Wilder's Our Town(the play was inspired by the town). I do love musical theater though, and have seen productions seasonal productions here and in Boston and NYC (and in various college and local productions, and anything my children were doing) ...

I will read plays from time to time. I have read several of Joyce Carol Oates's plays, one by Claudia Rankin, some Chekov and Pushkin. I will admit it is not my favorite literary form on paper.

Soyinka's comment is really no surprise, is it? And perhaps Shakespeare was correct for his time. I think now, in this modern time, I might argue something else. Perhaps that there are many ways to engage an audience's emotions depending on the audience, the production, or the writing.

"... prose literature's elder (and more respectable) brother, the stage."

Huh? Respectable? Did we just get transported back to the 18th century when novels reading was considered trashy?

I enjoy reading plays. Lots of blanks for the imagination.

I cannot afford to go to the thea-tah, but I appreciate filmed versions of plays. I do take my husband to a holiday show put on by the local talents. It's like the poor man's Lawrence Welk, but he enjoys the dancing. Local stage groups are often a snake pit of big egos and mediocre talent. I don't get involved with them.

I did enjoy teaching the drama unit in the intro to lit class. I had the students do The Harrowing of Hell. They learned about the history of Western drama, came up with a dream cast (Russell Crowe as Jesus and Arnold Schwarzenegger as Satan), and setting. Then they did a table read.

Q39

I think one reason this question came up in my mind is that I'm conscious that theatre was a big part of my life once, but it's almost dropped out of sight. I grew up on the tail end of the British theatre boom of the (fifties and) sixties, and with parents who took it for granted that you went to every new play within reach, and took the kids along if it was even minimally suitable. So we saw a lot of amateur and professional shows — there were big name actors like Tom Courtenay working in Manchester, and there were local rep theatres, well-funded in those days, in all the surrounding towns. I carried on going to the theatre at university — student shows as well as trips to London at weekends — but then I moved to Holland and started going to a lot more operas and concerts and almost forgot about the drama. Obviously that was initially because of the language problem, and later because I'd got out of the habit. There is a lot of presumably very interesting theatre here in The Hague, I don't have any excuse...

I've never tried acting — too self-conscious to get up on a stage when I was young.

I do read plays occasionally, but it tends to be classics (e.g. my recent read-through of Schiller) — I'm not really in touch with current dramatists. There's exactly one shelf of "drama" in my library, including set-texts from courses I've taken and opera libretti that don't really belong there. "Poetry" is five shelves, "fiction" takes up forty-six.

Books about theatre — I have a few critical works about Shakespeare and so on from student days, otherwise not much non-fiction. I did enjoy Anthony Sher's rehearsal diary Year of the king last year. J B Priestley is probably my favourite author of backstage fiction, but there are plenty of others I've enjoyed, e.g. Beryl Bainbridge's An awfully big adventure.

Obviously Hamlet never doubted for an instant that his uncle would show up for the first night, but I suppose the problem the modern dramatist faces is that the people she wants to criticise aren't likely to be sitting in the audience: the theatre will be full of people who already share her opinions, and they will go home afterwards reinforced in their convictions but leaving the world unchanged. Like Facebook, but you have to pay for it.

Significant Theatrical Experience — I must have seen all kinds of Great Actors in my early years, but the thing that leaps to mind first is a relatively banal production of Under Milk Wood in our local rep theatre, which was an early purpose-built theatre-in-the-round. I was about twelve, and by some mischance sitting in the front row. And the actress playing Polly Garter seemed to be delivering all her most lubricious lines straight at me. You can imagine how uncomfortable I was. Definitely not the anonymous experience of TV, especially since that actress was lodging with neighbours of ours, so I knew her slightly "in real life".

>109 thorold:

Q 39

Love theatre, in high school I used to go to the performances almost every night (drama or opera mostly), in uni I still had subs to several venues but as time passed I couldn't keep up that sort of schedule in grad school etc.

During high school my mum was admin for the summer festival (drama-opera-ballet-symphony) so we had a constant stream of theatrical folk of every description calling and dropping by and visiting and sometimes staying, to my dad's eternal dismay. That's when I fell in love with actors forever, poor things, and also when I decided I'd never ever act myself. Every summer I did some interpreting and translating for visiting artists but only once I took part in a production as an extra.

I loved reading plays, especially philosophical ones like Sartre's, and still do although that too has lessened. For the very experimental or movement-based stuff I'd prefer seeing it. I also enjoy books about theatre of all kinds, even some technical (for instance, history), but also fiction (like the Charles Paris mysteries).

I do think that there is no connection like a live connection with the public. It's particularly important for the actors, and a responsive public can make them blossom in ways no one can predict.

I'm still hoping we'll bury the pandemic and revert to old normal.

Q 39

I don't think of myself as a theatre buff, but when I look back, I actually have seen a lot. Trips to London and New York always include at least one theatre event (and they don't have to be expensive*); we usually go to some sort of play a few times a year (sometimes my husband gets tickets through his work); we have some decent community theatre in our area; and both my daughters were involved in high school theatre, so we always saw those plays.

I'm not a fan of reading plays, but I had to do many at university, and when my daughters read Shakespeare in high school, I read along with them.

*for example, we saw Theatre in the Park in New York, and the tickets are free. You just have to line up for them. And in London, we went to see the Woman In Black which was downright cheap because it's been playing forever (Roman-era Britain, I think)

>109 thorold: Oh dear, these questions remind me of all my "shoulds"

I live in NYC and regrettably rarely see theater. I work for a performing arts organization and see a dozen of our performances for free each season, so I tend to find other venue's ticket prices quite expensive. It's always a NYE resolution to see more theater, but that usually amounts to only one or two shows a year. :(

My work-study and most of my free-time in college were spent backstage. And while I didn't find a life partner in theater, as stated above, I did find a career.

I read an occasional play. And during the Brooklyn Book Festival I always buy at lest one work from the Theater Communications Group booth -- usually a new work that I have never heard of but looks interesting.

I think in the US, and quite a bit of the modern world, TV/Movies fulfill the desire for dramatized storytelling that previously was represented by theater. While there is a magic in being an audience member that can only partially be replicated by movie-theaters, the economics doesn't really seem to be there. Aside from the occasional Hamilton, there are just not as many people willing to pay hundreds of dollars for a show (especially a non-musical show) as will pay for a live sporting event or concert. But this also has to do with the inability of theater to be effectively magical and make emotional connections in a large arena.

Not exactly significant, but here is the most memorable theater experience: I spent a semester in London on Shakespeare program -- reading 2-4 plays a week and seeing just about every Royal Shakespeare Company production, both in Stratford and the Barbican. This included non-Shakespearean plays, such as John Webster's The White Devil.

The misery and horror of Webster's play play are unrelenting, just a building and building of terrible revenges. One character is dispatched by use of a poisoned fencing mask in an extended death scene which is interrupted by another scene. Then the actor RE-ENTERS and continues dying onstage. At this point I had had enough and whispered to my classmate in a bad English accent during an unfortunate pause in the onstage dialogue "I'm not quite dead yet" and set a dozen people around us, rows 10-11-12 orchestra level, giggling. My professor was not amused.

I enjoy theater but haven't prioritized it the last decade. In another few years my kids will be old enough to not need a babysitter and we will likely go more often. I'd also like to start taking them once in a while - likely broadway shows or holiday plays (like Christmas Carol). They've been to a few children's theater events and have seen me perform pretty regularly so they do know theater etiquette. I really prefer opera to plays, but ticket prices are (understandably) so expensive.

Even though I enjoy attending plays I really don't like reading them that much. It just leaves me cold compared to seeing them acted.

— Are you a theatre-goer? (In normal times:) how often do you see live theatre? Locally? On trips to the big city? At festivals?

Yes, my family was very involved in theatre, my big sister was my drama teacher in HS, and Iwas taken to theatre as soon as I could sit still. I well remember watching of all things Antigone, when I was about 8 (first play I remember tho I know there were many more)

I probably see a local show and a broadway touring show at least once a year, more depending on what is playing. Unfortunatly my DH isn't big on theatre, so My sis and I usually go together, and on our decade birthdays, we've flown in to NYC for several plays and musicals. (our next one is coming this January! cant wait)

— Are you involved in any kind of drama group producing plays for public or private consumption? Or did you do that sort of thing when you were younger? (And if so, is that where you met your life-partner?)

I was in drama throughout HS. Loved it, I usually was backstage, but had a blast and met life long friends who I still am in touch with

— Do you read plays in printed form? Classics? Recent works?

I did in HS but I much rather watch it onstage

— Do you read books about the theatre? (Fiction, non-fiction)

The Fosse bio for sure, others that I cant remember

— What do you think about writers who create stage-works as well as prose fiction? Is that something that matters to the way you approach their work?

not sure, cant think of an author off hanc who has done both

— Soyinka obviously shares Hamlet's notion that stage-plays are the most direct way to engage the audience's emotions, at least in an African context: do you think that's also true where you live?

? don't know who that is

— Do you have a Significant Theatrical Experience you're prepared to share here?

OMG - in HS watching my first Broadway touring of Godspell, and wanted to see more. Seeing Lion King, Wolf Hall, King and I, Hamilton Meeting Lynn Redgrave locally after her performance in The Importance of Being Earnest. She chatted with us for a bit, and we were so amazed that we ran out screaming. Didin't realize until we got into the car that we did not take a pic, or get her autograph. Saw her later in Joad Didions Year of Magical Thinking.

— Any thoughts on how live theatre will look in a post-pandemic world?

I think there will be more flexibility in how its all set up and how its shown. Thinking there might be more local theatres starting up, giving us more options of what is playing

In the last ten years I saw Hamilton, when it came to Houston. I think that’s it.

As a kid my parents took me to see musicals. I remember Cats and, in London, we saw Le Mis. And I remember a few others. As an adult we’ve bought season passes once I think. I enjoyed it.

I’ve never felt a connection to the performance, exactly. It’s just, for me, a different medium. And, as in all things, I have a desire to watch without being seen, so to speak. So when small performances engage audiences directly I have found it uncomfortable. But I appreciate the live performance. I don’t think i’ve ever been to an opera.

Of course, I’ve been reading Shakespeare, and, one year I read through several Classic Ancient Greek plays. But I haven’t hunted down performances, even on the screen. I find myself impatient watching. Not sure why or how long that sense will last.

There are two reasons I don’t go to the theater now. The cost of money and time. But I can afford it. It’s really the time and effort to plan yet another crazy evening along with the kids athletics and concerts and other activities.

— Are you a theatre-goer? (In normal times:) how often do you see live theatre? Locally? On trips to the big city? At festivals?s
Not so much, though I enjoy it. But I have family members who are or have been actors, writers, singers, and dancers, both as amateurs and professionally, and so have attended many performances I’d never have seen otherwise.

— Do you read plays in printed form? Classics? Recent works?
That Stratford-upon-Avon fellow. Some of the ancient Greek cats. A few from U.S. theater. And long ago read some plays from an old book titled El Teatro Hispanoamericano Contemporáneo, the works dating from 1909 to 1931.

— Soyinka obviously shares Hamlet's notion that stage-plays are the most direct way to engage the audience's emotions, at least in an African context: do you think that's also true where you live?
For me, personally: Oh, yeah. Actors, who are right there, live, make a huge difference.
But I live in southern California. Stage work seems, with exceptions, subsidiary to performance on the small and big screens. Sort of like a proving ground for the large number of talented peformers hereabouts.

— Do you have a Significant Theatrical Experience you're prepared to share here?
Mini-mini-significant.
Our fifth-grade teacher wrote a play for us to perform before the school: Let There Be Music. Most of the kids played the roles of the symphony’s musicians or the roles of musical instruments (I forget which, the latter more likely). I was assigned “The Announcer” role, and discovered I had a talent for getting up and speaking to an audience (which is different, I stress, from having a talent for acting). It felt as natural and as easy as could be. Quite a surprise.
More significant:
Watching my youngest sister’s solo performance as the Dancing Laurey in L.A. City Opera’s sold-out summer presentation of Oklahoma at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. Also, any time I’ve heard my oldest sister sing.

— Any thoughts on how live theatre will look in a post-pandemic world?
No, but I hope no one does a play set post-pandemic in which people are captured, masked despite their writhing resistance, and then eternally chased about stage by enormous grinning syringes.

>109 thorold:

I'm grateful to live in Toronto, which is one of the top three cities for live theatre in North America. For many years I've subscribed to one of the non-profit theatres that specializes in developing new Canadian plays. I've seen some wonderful productions there. As time and money permit, I sample productions at others of the independent theatres in the city.

During the seventies and eighties, while Robin Phillips was the AD, the Stratford Festival in Ontario was where English-language theatre was happening. I spent a week there every summer packing in a dozen or more productions and having my mind blown repeatedly. After he left, the emphasis became increasingly commercial and careful, and I stopped going.

I taught literature for years and so read plays from Aeschylus to yesterday with much enjoyment; books about theatre now and then.

Some writers are confident writing in various forms and choose which one will convey what they have to say in a particular piece. What I don't appreciate is writers who write fiction with an eye to how attractive it will be to the film industry. Looking at you, Ian McEwan among others.

Wole Soyinka was on my Commonwealth lit course as a prominent Nigerian author in 1968 when I was an undergrad. I'm astonished that he's just released a novel. I think ritual is the most direct way to engage an audience's emotions, and live theatre is an effective form of that. Ritual really only works in person. In urbanized cultures, for various reasons, professional sport is a more efficient mode of ritual, partly because sport does not rely on dialogue or much on facial expression and so can use much larger venues.

>120 librorumamans: very interesting comments in your last paragraph.

My thoughts about theatre are similar to poetry - I feel that to be a fully rounded arts appreciator I really should love it more, but I've yet to come out of a play feeling that I've been moved in any great emotional way, so I remain ambivalent towards it.

Given the age of my kids, most plays I've seen in the last 10 years have been children's plays, and although they've been good enough touring productions, dare I say it they've put me off theatre a little. I'm really conscious of the actors acting in a way that I'm not when I watch a film or TV programme - all that 'loud projection' and running on and off stage (granted, the latter happens more in comedic plays). I feel like I'm paying a lot of money (and here the decent plays are expensive, particularly those touring from GB) to watch a bunch of people enjoy living out their hobby.

That being said, if I try to forget the recent adaptations of Roald Dahl and David Walliams books I've sat through, I've been to some great theatre venues in the past to watch Shakespeare productions, such as the Swan Theatre and Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon, and an amateur production that stands out was an outdoor production of 'The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie' at one of the Cambridge colleges which was great. I've also enjoyed some fun musicals in London such as Mama Mia! and Dirty Dancing. Serious musical theatre I'm generally not a fan of, though.

It was a good question, as it's made me think about why (pre-COVID) I haven't gone to the theatre more, and I think it's something I should probably make more of an effort with in the future. Perhaps I go in with too high expectations. I get quite moved by ballet and opera productions, but I've yet to feel that way after a play. Perhaps I've just not seen the right one yet.

>119 dypaloh: Lois (Avaland) pointed me in the direction of this thread and Q39, as I was at the theatre for the first time in 20 months, last Saturday.

I've been a theatre lover since about age 12 when I was taken to a production of 'Oliver'. Mostly I prefer serious plays, with the odd comedy or musical. Living in Greater London, I'm spoilt for choice, although costs now are much higher, so I see less. In my 20s and 30s I went at least every 3 weeks, now probably 6-7 productions a year.

In my 20s I wrote a couple of plays, one was nearly performed in an out of town theatre, but the council changed the rules, and as I didn't live in the same borough as the theatre they were unable to put the play on. It's something I'd like to take another crack at.

It's been a while since I've read a play, but I have had binges of doing so. I do read books about theatre and its makers, actors, directors, writers. I'd highly recommend Antony Sher's Year of the King, and I've just bought David Hare's new book.

I like ambidextrous creators.

I do believe the stage is an intensely direct way to engage with an audiences emotions, but the audience member has to be open for it to do so. So it is less about where and more about who.

I have seen so many extraordinary productions we'd be here all week, but one big Wow was a dramatised reading of The Great Gatsby I saw about 8 years ago called 'Gatz'. I should declare I am about to read this novel for the 41st time next month. The show was 6 hours long, special seating had been erected to improve comfort. The cast were an American company. It was set in an office where the computer system has gone down, and one of the staff finds a copy of the novel in a drawer and starts reading it out loud. They throw it between each other taking turns to read, then some start acting bits out, taking on the persona's of the characters. Then, for the final chapter the actor threw the book over his shoulder and declaimed the rest extempore (strictly speaking that's not the word as I'm sure a lot of practice went into it). The audience held its breath, he paused once but didn't waver.

Literally, this is what coming out of (hopefully) a pandemic looks like:



Saturday night at the National Theatre, London.

I saw Larry Kramer's 'The Normal Heart'. It's a fine play, and excellent performances from all, including Ben Daniels and Liz Carr. I saw it's first London Performance 35 years ago (I can't believe that) with Martin Sheen in the lead, at the Royal Court. It was obviously more shocking then, and I think one of, if not the first play about HIV/AIDs.

But in a broader sense I think the experience of the last 20 months is going to provide an endless source of material for the stage as writers interrogate what has happened to us on many levels.

I'm not sure what the equivalent of photobombing is to an LT thread, but apols for the extensive thread-bomb from a group outsider.

>121 dchaikin:

Thank you!

>119 dypaloh: Ha!! tho I think it best not to give any of them an idea...

>123 Caroline_McElwee: welcome! glad you dropped in, no one isan outsider here! and I so agree with your picture. What I really hope tho is that we have vaccinated enough people that we can sit together without fear and without masks. That may be a while unfortunatley

>125 cindydavid4: Thanks Cindy. Yes, the US seem to have more problems with vaccination take up, I appreciate. I think the majority of 30+ folk ate double vaccinated here, as well as a % of the younger ones.

Q39

— Are you a theatre-goer? (In normal times:) how often do you see live theatre? Locally? On trips to the big city? At festivals?

In normal circumstances I go to the theatre reasonably regularly. Possibly 3 or 4 times a year on average. We’ve always gone a certain amount, with a brief hiatus when my son was small, but that only lasted until he was old enough to come along himself, and we decided he was old enough at a pretty young age. It frequently worked out cheaper to get an extra ticket than to get a babysitter! We go into London to the theatre most often, and probably go to the National Theatre most often of all. Occasionally we go to Cambridge, but there obviously isn’t the variety of productions as there are in London.

I think that the last theatre production we saw was ‘Touching the Void’ in December 2019. We do have tickets to an adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s An Ocean at the End of the Lane in November, which we will probably go to, albeit nervously.

— Do you have a Significant Theatrical Experience you're prepared to share here?

I don’t know about significant theatrical experiences but some of the best dramas that I’ve seen are as follows:
- various productions of Richard III (probably my favourite play), in particular those with Anton Lesser (as part of the RSC’s ‘The Plantagenets’) and Kevin Spacey in the lead roles.
- ‘The Lehman Trilogy’
- ‘Les Liaisons Dangereuses’ with a young and very wonderful Alan Rickman
- ‘Becket’, with Derek Jacobi & Robert Lindsay
- ‘The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time’ at the National.

We do go to musicals sometimes, although not as often as I’d like. ‘Return to the Forbidden Planet’ was wonderful back in the 80’s, but the one I’d see again and again is ‘Guys and Dolls’ - I think I have seen at least three different productions. And recently ‘Fun Home’ was wonderful too.

Incidentally the first ‘proper’ play I saw as a teenager was Henry VI Part I at the RSC in Stratford with a (very, very) young Kenneth Branagh, which was probably a good start!

Q39

— Are you a theatre-goer? (In normal times:) how often do you see live theatre? Locally? On trips to the big city? At festivals?
It's complicated. I grew up without theater. Then for awhile I would try to see a play every few weeks (living in the big city helped). Then my job changed and I was traveling a lot and things deteriorated. Since I moved to the States - it had been even weirder - I never miss a Bulgarian play when it passes through (happens every couple of years) but I am yet to go to a local play...

— Are you involved in any kind of drama group producing plays for public or private consumption? Or did you do that sort of thing when you were younger? (And if so, is that where you met your life-partner?)
No. Outside of helping some of the lower grades in high school (we had an yearly festival where each class which wanted to presented a play or a musical number or anything in between)

— Do you read plays in printed form? Classics? Recent works?
Oh, yes. All of the above. I did not use to but then my library conspired with the universe and... They shelve new poetry, plays and short story anthologies on the same shelf (small branch, not too many books so a shelf is enough for these). I was looking for stories and the play (Mary Jane was just there. The rest is history. Before that I was reading Shakespeare and the classics (including the Russian ones) - but never touched a modern play.

— Do you read books about the theatre? (Fiction, non-fiction)
Fiction - yes. Non-fiction - mainly Shakespeare and Shakespeare productions related.

— What do you think about writers who create stage-works as well as prose fiction? Is that something that matters to the way you approach their work?
Prose, poetry, plays and graphic novels are just 4 different ways to express ideas and feelings (and sometimes you have mixes...). Some authors use just one of the form. Some use multiples. If I know that the author uses more than one form, I often try to find at least a work in each - but what else the author had done rarely changes how I approach a work.

— Soyinka obviously shares Hamlet's notion that stage-plays are the most direct way to engage the audience's emotions, at least in an African context: do you think that's also true where you live?
Depends. I don't think it is the format per se - it is the execution - and a live person talking to you will always have more impact if they know what they are doing.

— Any thoughts on how live theatre will look in a post-pandemic world?
Hopefully back to normal in a few years :) I know, I know I am an optimist but...

And one more topic that noone is asking about but I think belongs to the question - radio and other audio plays. I tend to listen to these a lot more often than I read or attend a play - both modern (BBC Radio, the few theatrical groups that do these besides them or the 21st century format - podcasts) and old time radio (which range from original plays, through adaptation of stage plays and novel and to adaptation of movies, often retaining the original cast for the 30/60 minutes play). Some of the authors of stage plays and prose work these days also for radio/audio. These need to be different - you cannot add stage directions and you do not have the visuals. So stage plays need adaptations usually (Shakespeare is one of the playwrights who can be done as is and still work).

I find these fascinating. That's maybe because this is the theater I grew up with (6:50 am, Monday-Friday on the national radio, there is a child play before the news at 7; my Mom always turned on the radio to wake us up with it). And there are cases where I will read the stage play and listen to the radio adaptation and consider the changes when the play jumps from the visual to the audio only - and usually got shortened in the process (and sometimes wonder why they had to change THAT much). But there is also so many original works that start as radio plays and just stay there.

>120 librorumamans: Yes, that comment about ritual seems to make sense. Theatre is about much more than just the words the actors speak, the audience is a crucial part of it too. I think some of Soyinka’s plays use ritual elements as part of the storytelling, as well.

>123 Caroline_McElwee: Thanks for “dropping in”! And good to see that the National Theatre is still there. I have a lot of happy memories of queueing up for student standby there!

>128 AnnieMod: Good point about radio-drama. Under Milk Wood was one famous case that started off as radio but is now often done as a conventional play. I’m sure I’ve read something somewhere arguing half-seriously that Goethe’s Faust must have been written for the wireless.

I remember listening to all the Shakespeare history plays when they did them in weekly parts on the BBC, years ago — some of the time you didn’t quite know who was who among the minor characters, but that happens in the theatre as well. And radio seems to make you listen to the words more closely.

My dad used to say he was an actor with a side-job as a diplomat. He either joined or set up acting groups in every country we lived in. So I saw a _lot_ of plays growing up.

But it's never been an art that greatly appealed to me...I have problems with seeing people acting in stupid or embarrassing ways (stage and screen both); I can't separate the people from the roles. And so many plays (and movies, and TV shows) are about at least one character being truly stupid/nasty, and many are about all of them being some form of idiot...ugh.

So - I've seen a lot of plays; I remember some from when I was young fondly, but most of my strong memories of plays as an adult are negative (The Tempest in the Globe Theatre, with Vanessa Redgrave playing Vanessa Redgrave playing Prospero (no, that's not a typo. She carefully made sure no one would forget for a moment that it was her - she never disappeared into Prospero). Another Shakespeare play of Midsummer Night's Dream, in which they chose to EMPHASIZE the sexual aspects...Puck humping Oberon's leg, ew).

Fond memories (though I'd probably hate it now) included a classic Pantomime put on by Dad's acting group in Tabriz, Iran. Ali Baba and the Four Tea Thieves - that was Earl Grey the Englishman, Lip Ton the Chinaman, ...I've forgotten the Irishman's name... Oh, Sam O'Var, that was it, and Mustapha Cupatee the Turk. And a man playing a woman (with coconut "breasts" that kept slipping) and...lots of silly stuff. I was 9, I loved it.

I've read a good many of the Shakespeare plays - I prefer reading them to seeing them (I can handle people on the page being idiots better!). A few modern ones, a few Greeks. Not a genre I look for, but I come across one that appeals every now and then.

I've never been a play-goer by choice - I went when my parents took me (and still did the last time there were plays, though I'm in my 50s). My only experiences behind the footlights were in high school, and I wasn't very good (did a meller-drammer, one step worse than melodrama, and I couldn't keep from laughing at my own lines...fortunately I was Old Ma and could hide my face in my shawl from time to time).

I don't know if Mom will still want to go to plays. Concerts, yes, and I'll probably go along, but I think the plays were mostly Dad. So I don't really care, personally, what will happen to theater post-pandemic - abstractly, yes, I'd like them to keep going, but not personally.

I've read the play created by Agatha Christie and three or four other mystery writers...that's the only play by a novel writer(s) that I'm aware of having read. I may have read others without realizing it (or without remembering, now).

>129 thorold: Yeah - the lack of the visual leaves you with only one of your senses to appreciate what you are reading - I can get distracted in a movie or a play by the decor or by how someone moves; with audio/radio plays, all you have is what you can hear. That also makes them a wonderful companion for walks (and for all kinds of domestic tasks - which is what some of the early radio dramas were designed for) ;)

In a way, the audio plays are possibly the oldest format out there - they are the descendants of the oral tradition that came long before any writing - storytelling and playacting had always gone together. :)

>127 SandDune: ‘Les Liaisons Dangereuses’ with a young and very wonderful Alan Rickman

Oh I would have given a lot to see that. Ditto Jacobi in Becket

Maggie Smith and Brian Bedford in Private Lives

Peter Ustinov as Lear (see Every inch a Lear)

Maggie Smith as Virginia Woolf. This was a revelation because it wasn't a comedy and she had dropped her comedic mannerisms. I actually needed several minutes to figure out which role she was playing.

>132 cindydavid4: Ditto Jacobi in Becket it was Derek Jacobi that we primarily went to see. But it was Robert Lindsay that we came away talking about - he was absolutely wonderful. I’ve seen him in another stage production relatively recently (Prism) and he was very good in that as well.

>127 SandDune: Sadly I didn't see Alan Rickman in 'Les Liaison Dangereuses' Rhian, though I saw him in several other plays, including 'Tango at the End of Winter', which I saw three times. I saw Jared Harris in LLD.

Another extraordinary performance was John Malkovich in Lanford Wilson's 'Burn This', with Juliette Stevenson.

Helen Mirren in The Audience. The costume changes she manages to do on stage is worth the ticket

Daniel Radcliff and Josh Maguire in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead (this was through National Theatre Live, a great way to see play performed there, on the screen!)

Adrian Lester in Othello

And we have tickets to see My Fair Lady! sold out quick, we are in the balcony but we'll bring binoculars!

>133 librorumamans: Is that the one-woman show where she talk talk talked for two hours in a cardigan sweater with pockets for the rocks? Saw Maggie Smith in that show in Stratford , Ontario, late '70s. Even Smith could not save it.

>136 cindydavid4: Funny Cindy, someone just gave me a pair of snazzy theatre binoculars.

I saw the Daniel Radcliffe Rosencrantz and Gildenstern. David Haig was amazing as the Player.

>137 nohrt4me2:

I expect it must have been. I have positive, albeit indistinct, memories of the production.

Did you, then, see during the same period Robin Phillip's production of The Winter's Tale? That one is seared on my memory.

>137 nohrt4me2: no not the same For sixty years, Elizabeth II has met each of her twelve Prime Ministers in a weekly audience at Buckingham Palace, a meeting like no other in British public life, it is private. This is the playwrights imagined meetings, tho many of them seem true to life.

https://www.playbill.com/video/highlights-from-the-audience-starring-helen-mirre...

>140 cindydavid4:

>137 nohrt4me2: replies to my >133 librorumamans:, not >136 cindydavid4:

>138 Caroline_McElwee: yes he was. did you see the film? Loved the actor who played the player, Richard Dryfuss

sorry got my posts mixed up

>138 Caroline_McElwee: Yes he was. DId you see the movie? Richard Dreyfuss was the plaer. also sublime!

>140 cindydavid4:

I've also seen The Audience locally, with the excellent Fiona Reid [Wikipedia].

>144 cindydavid4: I haven't seen the film yet Cindy.

>139 librorumamans: Yes! I loved that production of WT! They had some kind of Greek Orthodox vibe going. A lot of people were sniffing into hankies at the end of that. I thought the husband got off too easy, but the theme of forgiveness was strong enough to make me overlook what the SOB deserved.

>147 nohrt4me2: They had some kind of Greek Orthodox vibe going.

You're recalling the shepherds' interlude on Delphos, perhaps?

Remember the first tableau? You were sitting there looking at a perfectly bare thrust stage, chatting or looking through your program. The lights went down for fifteen seconds of total dark and total silence. Then, bang! full lights on a freeze frame of the whole cast in formal dress at a grand ball. You could hear the gasps.

I saw that performance when I was attending the McMaster University seminar, which was a way to get excellent seats. That evening I had a seat in the front row exactly at the point of the thrust stage, where there is nothing but a foot of space between you and the first level of the stage.

The first act ended, if you recall, after Herminone's feigned death, as her Lady, Paulina, excoriates Leontes for his responsibility for his wife's death. This was Martha Henry at her peak. For how long? fifteen minutes? she eviscerated Brian Bedford, the two of them not three feet from me, until he broke and was reduced to a dishevelled wreck.

And, immediately, it was intermission. I was too stunned and hollowed out to move, as was the woman seated to my right in the other seat at the point of the stage. The two us, total strangers, actually clung to each other, speechless, for a minute or two until we gathered enough strength to stagger to our feet and climb the steps to the lobby.

>148 librorumamans: Nope, I'm thinking of a WT I saw later in about 1985/6. Memory does not always serve. It was set in Greece, ca. 1890s, and the Orthodox angle ran thru'out the production.

I saw Brian Bedford in the Merchant of Venice over there. As I recall that production came under some controversy because of claims they bowdlerized out the anti-semitism. That story filtered into the Detroit paper.

The years I could afford to go there were about 1978-1990, and the performances run together.

Seems like I saw The Mikado twice and Pinafore once. I acquired a husband in those years somewhere, and he insisted on seeing Gypsy. It was good if you like musicals. There was a version of The Tempest that was quite a glittery spectacle with people on trapezes, but I was too dead tired to enjoy it. And a version of Two Gentlemen of Verona that had a very charming trained dog, who got most of the applause. Also one of the real bloody earlier plays, the one where they make some villains into pies.

I knew nothing about the back stories of the productions. I was just a Yank whose father worked in a factory and felt happy to be allowed into the cheap seats.

Have you read Atwood's Hag-Seed? I wondered how much of that contained some oblique satire of the Stratford scene.

>149 nohrt4me2:

Ah yes, I saw that Titus Andronicus.

>149 nohrt4me2: Have you read Atwood's Hag-Seed? I wondered how much of that contained some oblique satire of the Stratford scene.

I started it but bailed. As much of it as I read was almost literally about Stratford and Robin Phillips, not oblique at all.

Did any of you catch Complicité's production of The Street of Crocodiles? That was magical! And the surrealist staging so suited what I understand is the style of Bruno Schulz's writing.

Hello, busting in on the conversation to answer Q39 while it’s still up and I have a minute to think about it…

I grew up a theatergoer—my parents were very into the theater, and we lived in a town with a ton of good regional theater and close enough to NYC for the odd trip in (this was in the ‘70s). Aside from the local stuff, I remember my folks taking me to see Equus on Broadway (I was 13 or 14, probably too young for it, but I don’t remember it messing with my head too much), and then just tons of community productions. I was a fringe theater geek kid in high school.

I carried on for a while when I lived in New York, especially in the ‘80s when you could still see all sorts of great awesome on an art student budget—first NYC runs of Fool for Love and True West (with John Malkovich!) because my best friend and I had crushes on Sam Shepard, and the first run of Hurlyburly with ohhhh man, William Hurt, Christopher Walken, Harvey Keitel, Jerry Stiller, Judith Ivey, Sigourney Weaver, and Cynthia Nixon. Those were the days.

After a certain point I couldn’t afford to go much, and I kind of lost touch with the more experimental, smaller run stuff that was more in line with what I could swing. My kid went through a Gilbert & Sullivan loving phase, so we saw a few of those, but otherwise not so muchThese days I’ll pick and choose something I really want to see, but still fewer and farther between than I’d like—like >115 ELiz_M: I don’t go half as often as I’d like because theater tickets are so steep. A few standouts in the past decade or so—Beckett’s Endgame with John Turturro doing a hell of a job, Richard III with Kevin Spacey chewing up the scenery. And this weekend my sister- and nephew-in-law and his girlfriend are here for a visit and we’re all going to Wicked on Broadway, which is so not my first choice but that’s what they want to see and who knows, may be fun. So then I can report back on whatever this is—early post-pandemic? Late mid-pandemic?—theater.

I don’t read plays often, though I used to in my 20s… probably a holdover from high school.

I don’t consider plays the best way to engage an audience’s emotions, just a different one. Many factors in play there, and to me it’s apples and oranges.

>146 Caroline_McElwee: We watched it when it came out and saw it multiple times, laughing through it all. Didn't realize it was a play till much later. Catch it if you can

>149 nohrt4me2: oh my, its a master class in how to teach acting to less than enthusiastic people. Setting it in a prison was pure genius, and I loved the revenge the teacher got over the snobby theatre group he was in. Not sure if I remember any mention of the stratford scene, but I may have skipped it.

>153 lisapeet: we’re all going to Wicked on Broadway, which is so not my first choice but that’s what they want to see and who knows, may be fun.

If youi read the book be prepared to be disappointed they leave out a ton of important stuff and focus on the romance, and changed the ending!!! However the acting was great the costumes were stunning, and the music was really to die for. SoEnjoy!

>151 librorumamans: Too bad that ruined it for you. I enjoyed the book more than most of those Hogarth efforts. She made quite a good case for prison arts funding.

>153 lisapeet: Was Gary Sinise in that version of True West? I saw a filmed version of that, super poor quality, with him and Malkovich. It was pretty hilarious.

>158 nohrt4me2: He was! The two of them were great bouncing off each other, as I remember.

Just getting in my two cents before we move on to the next question. I love theatre and have done so since I first went to see high school productions with my sisters when they were in high school and I was in elementary school. The first productions I attended were Arsenic and Old Lace and Oliver!.

When I was in high school I participated onstage in Oklahoma! and also in children's theater which was a lot of fun. I also have worked theater professionally as a sound and light techie, plus whatever other stage hand jobs I inherited. (I was the only female techie at the time, which was interesting.)

My hubby and I still attend theatre whenever we can. We have tickets to Beef and Boards this season but are not enthralled with next season's lineup so will skip it. We usually have tickets to Indiana Repertory Theater but will also skip it this season, although we are patrons. We have enjoyed summer Shakespeare at Indiana University, but that has been held up due to the pandemic for two years. We are sticking with symphony this 2021-2022 season, for two different symphony orchestras.

During the pandemic, the plays for which we had tickets were streamed, which just does not have the same effect as live theatre. I am not in favor of that form of theatre at all.

I do not read plays very often, unless the play is one I really like. Again, not the same as seeing live theatre. I prefer the old "tried and true" shows and musicals, and am not a fan of experimental theatre or some of the current offerings.

When I lived in London I was a regular theatre goer. My favourite theatres were The old and the young Vic. I used to go to Sadlers Wells a lot too, but that was mainly for dance.

I read quite a few plays but they are all from the 16th century. I have also read plenty of books about the Elizabethan theatre

I think a stage play can be a significant event. It is certainly much more immediate and lively than reading a play and is more liable to stay in the memory. Seeing a film of a stage play is not the same thing at all.

At University I went and auditioned for a part in Samuel Beckets play Endgame. There are only four characters I think. Anyway I didn't do any preparation thinking my natural talent would just shine through - It didn't and so my acting career never got started.

>109 thorold:

To say the obvious, but to say it nonetheless, that was a great question, Thorold!

>162 librorumamans: Well, it obviously unlocked something that was waiting to come out! Maybe next year we ought to think about a standing thread for our experiences with live theatre — I suppose we would have to call it "Il teatro" by analogy with the other standing thread...

>163 thorold: I think that would be a great idea!

>163 thorold: I like it!

do we have a theatre thread? I looked and didn't see one. Love the idea

>166 cindydavid4: Not yet. The plan is for next year I think. :)

Will it be just for experiences with stage play or do we want also recordings and radio plays (either way is file with me - just throwing questions).

Any type of theatre should be included from any media. Love Readers Theatre too. And should we include films of stage production? The movie made of Hamilton was amazing, and gave me a much clearer picture of what was happening on stage. Then their is the National Theatre Live that films productions and offers them to be viewed by anyone.

>91 avaland: I've often wondered why LTers don't discuss their "other reading" more often. Perhaps they are afraid it is of limited interest to others; perhaps they feel there is too little in a pamphlet or like piece to write about; perhaps they're just embarrassed to admit how much they love reading a particular columnist. At any rate, I'd say jump right in and discuss it - it broadens everyone's LT world!

>109 thorold: Way back in university I did some costumes for a Ionescu play. It was fun researching the era and fabrics, and then trying to find something that would work.

During the five years before I moved here, I belonged to a Shakespeare reading group. We met every two weeks during the winter and read a given play each year. Between meetings, we would discuss the last and next week's reading by email. In the summer we would go on our own to Stratford to see the production of the previous winter's play, and then meet to discuss it in the fall. I do miss that group. It taught me the value of reading plays.

There is little theatre here, but the compensation is tons of live music.

>163 thorold: Great idea!

Thanks so much to avaland and thorold for jumping in over the last two weeks. Travelling again did make me wonder about how others fit book searches into their away time, be it business or vacation.



The incomparable Patrick McGahern Books in Ottawa. Image from WordPress.com

QUESTION 40: Book Stores as Travel Destinations

Do you seek out book stores first thing when on vacation? Is this part of what a holiday is to you?
Is there research involved before leaving home, or do you just wing it, trusting to serendipity?
Would you travel to a given location specifically for its bookstore(s)?
What is your best book dispensary discovery away from your usual haunts?

Yes, definitely. My mom and I enjoy shopping - _used_ shopping, not so much the new stuff. So thrift shops and used book stores are always on the list (I like the book stores better, and spend most of my time looking at books (and kitchenware) in the thrift shops, while Mom looks at clothes). We have been going to my parents' timeshares together for...I don't know, 10 years? And we know where the good stores are in the area(s) and make a point of visiting them.

I do check out an area I know I'll be staying in to see what shops there are there (book and thrift). I don't travel much, though, so it's not something I do a great deal - aside from checking the timeshare area to see what shops have closed and opened there (even in normal times, there's usually turnover).

I have made a side trip, when I was traveling to a place near Portland, to Powell's - how could I resist? And it was a great place to visit...but I got very few books. The ones that were interesting were too expensive for me. That's why I love thrift stores.

Bookworks in South Lake Tahoe is always worth a visit - small, crowded, in the back of a small mall, nicely organized by genre and I nearly always find a few books there. And there is a fantastic ice cream shop at the front of the mall, too (Aloha Ice Cream).

oh powells is incredible and overwhelming. Like you, didn't spend all that much, but enjoyed the experience!

Do you seek out book stores first thing when on vacation? Is this part of what a holiday is to you?

yes been doing it for years as I traveled on my home and yes its part of the holiday; David points them out to me, or finds where they are. There are a few place that we we travel to frequently: san diego, san franscico, flagstaff, tucson where we know where they are and just make a beeline there.

Is there research involved before leaving home, or do you just wing it, trusting to serendipity?

I have a running list of books Im looking for. If we are going to a big city we'll do some googling. Otherwise its what ever used store indie or thrift store we happen to come to, and usually find treasure of some sort.

Would you travel to a given location specifically for its bookstore(s)?

I did go to Powells in Portland, but it wasn't the only thing we did

What is your best book dispensary discovery away from your usual haunts?

Ive probably told this story, so ignore if nec: a few summers after we were married we traveled through northeast coast to visit relatives and explore historic sites. One was Cambridge, Mass, the house where Luisa May Alcotts famly lived and where she wrote her books. The gift shop had a few books including an early edition of Little Women. I looked at it, held it, probably drewled a bit, but knew we couldn't afford it. When we returned home we went out to eat for out anniversary and david handed me a package. Nope no precious jewels, but the very same book I coveted. This is what started my collection and the books I find are much more than that one was, but its dear to my heart, as is David.

We went to wisconsin to visit some friends and they took us to Arkdale book; an elderly couple took a surrey turned itno a castle filled with books. I wanted Daddy Longlegs, first edition but wasn't sure. When I got home I called her up and asked her if it was still there. She took off a bit of the price, sent it to me free of charge, , She wrote a note saying she was glad it came to me (they passed away a few years ago, so its closed, but would love to know where their huge collection ended up)

ETA apparently the collection changed hand and ended up in Driftless Books, still in wisconsin, in a old tobacco shop. The photos actually look like arkdale, so not sure how that worked. Im going to check and get the story

https://www.onlyinyourstate.com/wisconsin/enormous-warehouse-of-used-books-wi/

>169 SassyLassy: "I've often wondered why LTers don't discuss their "other reading" more often. Perhaps they are afraid it is of limited interest to others"

Yep. Plus how much time it takes compared to how much time you read it... :)

>170 SassyLassy: Q40

I tend to travel with the kindle and a few extra books (and before the kindle with half a suitcase of books - sometimes literally). So I rarely visit bookstores when I travel for work or for business. Unless the bookstore is literally next to me (although people who I travel with often know not to let me get anywhere near a bookstore) or if it is a place I've meant to visit a bookstore it - Powell's for example when I was working up there a lot.

I often think I want to go visit a bookstore but I am yet to travel just to visit one. There is always a first time I guess so we will see.

The only place I am bound to buy books (and a lot of them) is conventions...

I definitely look for local bookstores when I travel. I haven't ever planned a trip around a bookstore, but whenever we arrive at a destination I do a quick google maps search for bookstores and if I find one I'm sure to go. Luckily my kids like them too and know I'm a sure thing when it comes to buying them books!

In the same way that I enjoy the randomness of finding books in a second hand shop, I also enjoy the randomness of coming across a bookshop on my holidays. I wouldn't make a trip just because of a bookshop, but if I come across a bookshop on holiday I'm definitely going in.

On the question of best book shop on my travels, I'm thinking about the word best. Best for me isn't one of the book mega stores - although they're impressive I find them overwhelming. I probably get more joy over discovering a single shelf of books in English in a foreign bookshop and feeling it's fate that a certain book's just asking me to buy it rather than having masses of square footage of books in front of me.

Q40 We were doing this just yesterday as we are away for a week in West Wales. We went to Aberystwyth for the day, which is a town reasonably well supplied with bookshops, and made a point of visiting two of them. Actually, we would have gone in a third bookshop but they wouldn’t allow the dog. (Given its location on the edge of the harbour in prime dog walking territory that seemed a bad commercial decision to me. I find that most book shops will let dogs in so was quite surprised.) I did specifically want to visit the bookshops of Aberystwyth as I wanted some ‘easy-reader’ Welsh books as I am learning Welsh at the moment and it seemed a likely spot to find them. We always go into whatever bookshops are available but I wouldn’t travel somewhere purely to visit the book shops.

I’ve had quite a few holidays where we’ve been searching out the local bookshops for children’s books in English, as when my son was younger he would invariably run out of books to read, despite having taken a lot with him. The Netherlands pretty much won hands down for this purpose.

Q40:

I like to travel light — to the extent that it sometimes turn into an unreasonable obsession — so I don't usually allow myself to bring back more than three or four books from a trip (in special cases I have been known to have books mailed home...). But exploring bookshops is always part of the fun of being in new places, whilst revisiting the bookshops I know is part of the ritual of going to familiar places. And there's always the option of leaving a book or two for your hosts or the next visitors to your holiday accommodation.

On the whole, I think it's more fun to visit an obscure little bookshop that "nobody knows about" and that has stock that "nobody wants" than to go to some popular place everyone recommends on social media. What I'm looking for when I go to a bookshop are books I didn't know existed, and a big, high-turnover place probably isn't going to give shelf space to anything obscure enough to be interesting.

Of course, when I'm somewhere other than the Netherlands or the UK, I'm typically looking for interesting things in the local language, and then, since I know little about the writers-of-the-moment in that culture, sometimes even quite a mainstream bookshop can be interesting. Even things I would avoid at home, like the FNAC or the station bookstall...

I don't plan trips around bookshops, but when visiting a new city I do often have a look beforehand to see if there are any specialist booksellers dealing with topics that interest me. There usually aren't, these days, or if there are they are only open on rare occasions and do their business mostly online. But that has led me off on one or two interesting excursions off the usual tourist beat.

Favourite unexpected discovery of recent times: a giant bookstall in St-Valéry-en-Caux, Normandy, run by a trust that restores old fishing boats. It was directly opposite where we were moored in the harbour, and the weather kept us in port — with plenty to read — for a couple of days. (This was a couple of years ago)

>169 SassyLassy: re: "other" reading. Perhaps it's all about what we want from this forum. Do we feel we need to please an audience? Do we fear no one will visit us if we write about reading that are not books? (OK, possibly I might be turned-off from a review of the back of a cereal box...)

>170 SassyLassy: Question 40. I can't think of a time where a bookshop was the motivating cause for a vacation choice, but one does often check out the bookshops.* But, we have done museums of all kinds and they have books, too.:-) We do know most of the used book stories in the area, and we enjoy stopping by but these days we always keep in mind the houseful of books we have.

*I think we have a photo of some part of the Vatican Library from trip to Italy.

I used to travel with someone else on his business years ago, so I had a fair amount of time to explore on my own. I always looked for a public library or book store (or art gallery or yarn store) where I could spend time and then have something new to talk about in the evening.

That was in the days before e-readers allowed you to tote your library around with you or when Google would tell you where the nearest bookstores were. It was fun to just walk around a metro area and come on these places unexpectedly.

I will say that I visited New Orleans a couple times for fleeting visits and never ran into one bookstore, library, art gallery (or yarn store). However, there were other interesting distractions in the part of town I was in ...

>177 SandDune: One of our fav places in Wales was Hay on Wye, the town of bookstores, Not only were those shops fun, but they also had shelves outside where you could pay by putting cash in the box. Loved it!

What is your best book dispensary discovery away from your usual haunts?
'
Um I misinterpeted this for some reason sorry! Best book store discoverys? Hay on Wye, Castle Arkdale, City Lights, Shakespeare and Co were one that popped up unexpectedly.

I don't usually look for a specific bookstore when traveling, but definitely stop in if I find one. Since we were traveling on cruise ships mainly, there was not always an opportunity to seek out bookshops. I did find a few though when we were onshore and just wandering around--one in Bar Harbor, Maine and a few in Alaska. (I also sometimes find Little Free Libraries when we are traveling. The coolest one of those was in Boston, but there was no time to stop since we were on a walking tour. It was on a street corner, and all I got was a quick photo of it.)

If we visit historic sites, we stop in the souvenir shop and usually look for books. Pearl Harbor site has a huge bookshop. I like to look for local history or topics when we are traveling.

I really do not like shopping, but you cannot call going into a book shop shopping in my opinion. On vacation I will inevitably find myself in some sort of shopping event; I then search out any bookshops and there I will stay until someone comes to collect me.

If we fancy a night away from home I will usually plump for a town with a bookshop. My favourite place is Lectoure in the north of my department, it is just far enough from home for us to stay the night. It has an excellent little bookshop Le Cochon Bleu which also doubles as a restaurant. I can't think of anything better than perusing the menu while gazing at the books on the shelves above the table (assuming also that I have a glass of wine in my hand)

Some friends considered moving to Lectoure so that they could be near the bookshop, but I think this is a little over the top.

>170 SassyLassy: QUESTION 40: Book Stores as Travel Destinations

Do you seek out book stores first thing when on vacation? Is this part of what a holiday is to you?
Is there research involved before leaving home, or do you just wing it, trusting to serendipity?

It depends where I travel . . . travel within my province of British Columbia . . . I know which places have good bookstores. I live in Vancouver, which is extremely sad in terms of bookstores for a metro area of about 2 million. . . but when I go to Victoria, there is a wealth of amazing book shops, Kelowna has the lovely Mosaic Books, Whistler has Arm Chair Books. I don't visit these places without making sure I get to make some supportive purchases.

Places like London and New York I leave up to serendipity, knowing I'll bump into a good bookstore along the way. In Los Angeles I'm too busy with family. In Switzerland and Italy, I will dive into any book shop we walk past, but I don't usually find much that I can actually read. I've found more English in Switzerland but their prices are painful; in Italy I'm more looking for Italian versions of something I've read in English that I can bring back home for my mother-in-law, who only reads in Italian.

One trip to England, former LT member Julie (Juliette07) and her lovely husband, took us to Oxford and we had a fabulous time in Blackwell Books.

In places like Hawaii and the Bahamas, I haven't bothered. I bring my own books!

Would you travel to a given location specifically for its bookstore(s)?: I haven't done that yet . . . I mean, everyone ships, so why would I? I know Portugal has some spectacular bookstores, so maybe if I was in Portugal I'd travel to another town to see an amazing bookstore. But I'm not going to Portugal just to see cool book shops.

Next time I go to London, I won't have teenagers along (even if my daughters are there, they are in their 20s and know London better than I do now), and I'll explore more of the book shops I haven't been to yet.

What is your best book dispensary discovery away from your usual haunts?: See all the places listed above. Blackwells in Oxford was really special. They were having a fabulous Alice in Wonderland event the Saturday we were there in 2009.

ETA: yes, Powell Books in Portland, Oregon. We went to Portland for a holiday one year, and the focus of the trip was pretending we were in a Portlandia episode, going to the actual Feminist Bookstore, and yes, two visits to Powell Books. I had a list, and did very well!


I've forgotten about Portlandia . . . off to go watch some old episodes

>184 Nickelini: For the ignorant, what's so special about Powell Books? It's been mentioned by a few folks in this question. Is it the sheer size?

>184 Nickelini: Gah, the Feminist Bookstore. Whenever I have a yen to visit the Pacific Northwest, I watch Portlandia until the urge passes. That's no place for a solid Midwesterner.

>185 AlisonY: For the ignorant, what's so special about Powell Books? It's been mentioned by a few folks in this question. Is it the sheer size?K

Yes, that's pretty much it. It has new and used books. I went with a long list of books that were more unusual, and found almost everything. I did look up your question though to see if there was something else, and no, it's just the sheer size. The main location takes up a complete city block. They claim to be the largest bookstore in the world. I know I only went to one corner of it. According to Wikipedia, they have 1.6 acres of floor space. It also claims they have 3.500 sections. Not sure what makes something a section.

>186 nohrt4me2: Whenever I have a yen to visit the Pacific Northwest, I watch Portlandia until the urge passes. That's no place for a solid Midwesterner.


LOL. I go through months and months were I forget that show ever existed, but when I remember it, I love it so much. Is it accurate to the PNW? Some parts are.

>185 AlisonY: The sheer size=hundreds of opportunities to run across something you were meant to read. Like nicklelini, I had a long list and found everything, including a few children's Illustrated that I had my eyes on. Loved that I could ship it all home.

However I discovered that many booksellers in the region do nt like Powells because it has a tendency to over shadow other local places I vaguely remember there was a suit about but I lost track

>170 SassyLassy: I seem to be the outlier here. I have been known to go well out of the way on various road trips to make visits to favourite used book stores. Two years ago that found me in West Fairlee, VT, where the general store had a side room that was always a favourite. For some unknown reason, it carried a fair sized selection of books about China. Unfortunately, the room had been transformed with baskets and jewellery. The books were completely gone. The side trip was saved to a certain extent by the ice cream stand across the way getting rid of its ice cream for the end of season. Most enormous cones ever, and had it not been a road trip far from home, the massively discounted 40 gallon tubs would have been a real bonus. A quick trip across the river to Hanover NH cured the book itch for a while.

When travelling, I am also always on the look out for new to me book stores. I don't research these in advance, just looking for the thrill of the (book) chase. On my most recent trip, the book store was the first place visited in two different locations before checking in to accommodations.

>184 Nickelini: Somehow completely missed Portlandia

>183 baswood: Moving there would have spoiled the fun of a day away, but I do understand the thought.

>178 thorold: Have definitely mailed books home. I've also been known to use all physical strength going through customs with a laden suitcase, to make it appear there is nothing in it but the usual, as I have discovered in the past that customs agents never quite know what to do with a declaration that's almost entirely books.

>172 cindydavid4: Wisconsin is a long way away, but maybe someday. The US will actually let vaccinated Canadians in again starting in November.

Thinking about avaland's comments in >179 avaland: above, so thought I would pose it this week, slightly differently, as a question.



QUESTION 40: Do we feel we need to please an audience?

How much does the opinion of others on LT affect whether and what you write about a given book, film, or other?

Do you write reviews for yourself, or for others?

If you post to the review page, do you look for thumbs of your reviews, or thumb others reviews?

___________

This should really be QUESTION 41

Of course I want to please an audience otherwise I wouldn't bother posting reviews of books on LibraryThing; I would just store them on my computer. I am conscious of other peoples opinions in this group and for much of the time I feel I probably do not cause too much offence, however my political views are left of centre and this may well come across in my writing. I know I can be opinionated, about all sorts off things, but try and keep this under control. I feel strongly about any literature that stirs up hatred against people of different races, the other sex, sexual orientation, people with disabilities etc. I will call this out, especially in contemporary writing, however I am unlikely to have chosen to read such a book in the first place. I like to be tolerant, but there are limits

I write reviews because I enjoy writing. Reviewing other peoples work has the advantage that the subject matter is there right in front of you. I like to express my opinion and knowing it is going to be read by others I try and make it as lively as possible. I write the reviews for myself and others. I like to be able to check back on reviews, so that I can remember what I have read. I read other peoples reviews and like to fill in the gaps when I have read a book where there have been few or no reviews posted.

The thumbing of books seems to have gone out of fashion on LibraryThing and this is because it does not feature so prominently as it used to. I can understand why this is so, because thumbing other peoples reviews can be more about feeling an affinity with the person writing the review, rather than the quality of the reviews. It can all get a bit too cliquey (I will thumb yours if you will thumb mine). I still do thumb reviews that I like when I remember to.

Yeah so glad thumbing was long gone. I don't review many books, but when I do, its to share the love, and tell others why they might love this book too. I don't want to pls anyone, just my opinion of a book I read, which often leads to very interesting discussions when they disagree with me (amazing how ofter these conversations will make me take a second look at a DNF, and often they are right!)

I see I'm a little late to add to the bookstore question. I just came across this delightful admission in Carlo Rovelli's Helgoland: making sense of the quantum revolution. He is recounting his undergraduate encounter with quantum theory when, for an assignment, he needed to quickly swot up the relevant mathematics:

I bought [Paul] Dirac's book, in the gray Boringhieri edition. It smelled good. (I always sniff books before buying them: the smell of a book is decisive.)

It's not decisive for me, but it is a factor, even for new books.

Q40

That's an interesting question - I write my reviews mainly here but lately I had been also copying them over to Goodreads because most of my real life friends are there and I've caught myself considering if I want to add a book over there, let alone review it while that rarely crosses my mind here. I shrug it off quickly and just add it but...

Here in LT? I care about what people think and I like it when a review sparks a discussion but Club Read had been feeling like home so I am not worried about posting about anything I read/see/do. Yes, I know it is a wide-open forum and google can index and all that but... that's the reality of 2021. It also helps a lot that Tim decided a long time ago not to allow thumbs down or to attach discussions under the reviews directly (even if I wish that this latter thing was there some days, having the thread here instead for the discussions makes it feel less open and less out there).

Most of my reviews are both for me (so I remember 10 years from now) and for who is reading it (so I try to avoid spoilers even if they will be better for me when the review is for myself only). I like reading good reviews and even though most of mine are nowhere near good, I am trying :) I thumb reviews I like when I find them on a book page (but that does not happen often) and I still like getting a thumb on my reviews - call it vanity if you wish.

>190 SassyLassy:

Writing is hard. I guess that's why we're not born knowing how.

I'm more likely to write a review if there are few or no other reviews. I sometimes review if I judge that a number of other reviewers have missed the point or underrated a book. I've used a couple of reviews to warn people off a book and to point out errors.

So, I think I've just clarified that I mostly write reviews for others, although there's also pleasure and satisfaction in producing something that is structured, lucid, and. ideally, contains some insight.

Q40: Book Stores as Travel Destinations
Nope. I mostly travel(ed) for work, so I already had a reason to go where I was going. I like to seek out the local indie bookstore if I can, just in my walking-around moments while I'm wherever I am, but I probably won't go way out of my way. Definitely checked out City Lights when I was in San Francisco, though, and Powell's in Portland. I almost never buy books, because I always come home with galleys from the conferences and my back can only take so much.

Actually, Powell's is a neat story. On the line to board the plane out of NYC I started talking to the guy standing next to me—I was headed to a library conference and he looked like he might be a library person too, plus he had a really great bag, plus he just looked like a nice guy (I don't usually strike up conversations with strangers because I think they're attractive, but I will definitely comment on folks' clothing or accessories). I asked him if he was going to Portland for the conference and he said no, he was an author and was headed out there to do a reading. And it turned out his book was something I was already interested in—Delicious Foods, and he was James Hannaham. And THEN we ended up seated next to each other so we talked a bit, and he gave me his reading times, and I took the streetcar out to Powell's and saw him read and got a signed copy of the book. So that was fun/serendipitous.

Q41: Do we feel we need to please an audience?
I love it when my reviews spark a conversation, or people say they want to read the book after reading what I have to say about it, but I'm not super concerned with what people think in general. BIG EXCEPTION being authors whose books I'm reading because I'm going to be interviewing them for work or my website. I won't post a false or misleading review, but I'll soft pedal a bit if I don't like the book, often with the caveat that I'm reading a galley so I'm sure it has a few more rounds of editing ahead, because I really don't want to alienate someone through something I say on a casual basis before I talk to them in a professional setting. I don't think I've ever read a book by a friend that I really disliked, but if I did I definitely wouldn't post a review here or on Goodreads. These forums are for fun, and doing something that might impact a real-life relationship is just not worth it.

I'm a super erratic thumber and don't pay attention to how many thumbs my reviews get, though I'm always pleasantly surprised if I notice that they got any at all.

Great question. There are lots of different reasons I’ve written reviews at different times and they include a quest for thumbs/likes, an effort to advertise a good book, an effort to clear my head, a chance to pan or praise a book, a place to put down my thoughts so I don’t forget, a capturing of the moment, manufacturing closure, (sadly) trying to show off or at least express I accomplished something and others. Many of those reasons are silly, but some feel valid, and they are all some kind of effort at expression. I like to think that the main reason I write reviews is to have a conversation. We read these inanimate things and yet they live in our heads and I want to share, communicate, do something social with all this information and experience.

But also reviews are a very imperfect way to communicate. They are one-way. And silence is kind of a normal response. I often try to convince myself I write them only for myself, although I’m not sure what that means for me other than an effort to manage the silence when what I really want is to talk about the book i just read.

I do care about other people’s opinions. I don’t know why.

I like the idea of thumbs but I feel it doesn’t work here. On goodreads i get a notification if someone likes a review. So every so often an old forgotten review from 5 or so years ago gets an isolated like and that’s nice. Here, nothing happens. I likely won’t even notice.

>196 lisapeet: Actually, Powell's is a neat story. On the line to board the plane out of NYC I started talking to the guy standing next to me

...BIG SNIP...

we talked a bit, and he gave me his reading times, and I took the streetcar out to Powell's and saw him read and got a signed copy of the book. So that was fun/serendipitous.

OMG I love that story soooo much

Q41: Pleasing an audience

>191 baswood: Of course I want to please an audience otherwise I wouldn't bother posting reviews of books on LibraryThing

Exactly! Whenever I write something, I’m aware of whom I’m writing it for, and that modifies what I say in subtle or not-so-subtle ways. That’s how writing works. It’s always a dialogue with an imagined reader of some kind, even if it’s only your own future self. When I post a review on LT I’m trying to organise my thoughts about the book and say things that will be helpful for others trying to decide whether to read it, and at least interesting or amusing for those who are simply curious about it. Perhaps some of the time I’m also trying to show off how clever I am to have made sense of this obscure book — the discipline of writing gives me a chance to catch the kind of silliness and tone it down, but I expect it leaks through sometimes.

I’m only very rarely in the position of reviewing a book by someone I’m in contact with personally, but — of course — I do always try to avoid saying things that could be misread as damaging or hurtful unless I’m sure that an author is safely dead or too well established to care about what I have to say. I’m less inhibited about making fun of publishers.

I enjoy it when I get reactions to what I say, but I don’t necessarily expect it, especially when it’s a book that isn’t likely to be of interest to many others here. As >197 dchaikin: says, silence is kind of a normal response. I know I don’t acknowledge other people’s reviews as often as I would like — it gets a little repetitive if you have nothing else to say other than “thanks, great review!” or “interesting! I must read that/I read that thirty years ago and have forgotten all about it”.

The thumbing-up button is several clicks away when you’re starting from a review in someone’s CR thread, as well as being — by design — a rather impersonal way to acknowledge someone’s effort in writing the review. I use it when I remember, but not often enough. About 40% of my reviews over the years have acquired one or more thumbs — there’s a handful, mostly deliberately comic reviews, that freakishly got a lot of thumbs in the early days of LT, but otherwise most of the thumbs have appeared on reviews of books in a few specific categories, so they probably come from particular individuals who have the habit of thumbing reviews, rather than reflecting the quality of the reviews they are attached to.

Darn, I just dumped my post...trying again....

Question 40

Re: about reviewing books and "other" reading material. I suppose reviews of BOOKS were the "norm" and that filled the time well. But, I'm a bit sad I didn't start reviewing poetry collections/anthologies until fairly recently. Poetry has always been part of my reading.

Maybe my thoughts about LT have changed, opened up. I suppose when I joined I thought of LT as a community of, not just readers, but book readers; and sometime in the last few years that, for me, has morphed into "LT is a community of readers" period. AND why NOT talk about your "other" reading? Especially in a group of readers who have been together for many years.

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I post to the book's page most of the time (I intend to do it 100%, but i miss some). Can't remember the last time I thumbed something, and I never really got into it. As some have noted, it could be a very clique-ish, and were poor indicators of whether a book was any good. I do like the "flag" feature, though (my favorite is to flag a one word or one sentence review, which is not a review, imo)

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As far as reviews, I write my reviews: 1. for myself as a record of what I thought about the book 2. to share with others who might also like the book and 3. As Dan notes, to maybe have a conversation.

And here I must confess that while I seldom read a book from LT recommendations, I very much enjoy reading reviews. To explain, long story very short, what seems long ago, as a bookseller (I prefer "reading evangelist") I had some data entry responsibilities which allowed me to shop the publisher catalogs; and I still very much like to do that, especially the smaller publishers.

But, as noted, I do love to read reviews here, I admit I prefer shorter than longer ones. It's being around a wonderful, diverse community of readers I get off on ;-)

>1 SassyLassy: I love reviewing books and I review EVERYTHING I read. I go out of my way to write a review, good or bad. What I strive to avoid is spoiling the book. I have noticed that more and more reviewers are completely breaking the book down and utterly spoiling it. Of course it can be difficult sometimes to get the concept of the story across. In that case the book just needs a shorter review. The writer deserves an opinion on their work. They may not like it but they deserve it.

The last book I bought, I ‘Lucifer, received a rather scathing review from me. I don’t like being negative and I make a point to highlight strong and weak points in reviews. I leave normal lanes in search of books, OLD out of print books. If I like an author I will buy their entire catalog on the strength of one story. I love buying old out of print pulp series, Doc Savage, Richard Blade, The Horseclans, etc. The older a book the better. NO genre is out of bounds for me. Unlike many. I keep everything I read, I seek out people who are inclined to toss out books and take them off their hands, regardless of whether I like the subject. I am a firm believer in the ANTI-LIBRARY concept. The more books you have around you when you are reading another book……..THE BETTER.

As a child I was always given books by adults around me. Whenever my family visited someone….I always came away with grocery bags full of books. Birthday money was always spent on books. I am a government librarian by profession and many times I come across military personnel who are throwing boxes upon boxes of books in the trash. They always wind up with me in the end. My approach to books is to rescue them, repair and read as many of them as I can. There is nothing more noble than preserving the written voice.

It is beyond enjoyable to participate in early reviews for writers. Buying newly published books take a back seat to purchasing and finding old and out of print volumes. However there are dozens of writers I do follow. Dan Simmons, Clive Barker, Stephen Pressfield. In the History arena. Dan Jones, Thomas Asbridge and Susan Wise Bauer. So many voices...….and nowhere near enough time in the world to hear them all.

Interesting questions!

How much does the opinion of others on LT affect whether and what you write about a given book, film, or other?
--None, though I am interested in how others viewed a book.

Do you write reviews for yourself, or for others?
--When I wrote them, I wrote them entirely to impress myself with my own amazing insights.

If you post to the review page, do you look for thumbs of your reviews, or thumb others reviews?
--I don't review books here any more, tho I do keep a written list with musings about what I read because my memory gets muddled. I used to think my opinions were of vital import, and I was happy to push them, probably to the point of being abrasive. Now I think the world has probably heard enough from me, and it's time to blab less and listen more. No one wants to hear from Boomer any more anyway.

>201 JHemlock: wow, your house must be gargatuan to have kept all those books! My DH was a super at our apt complex and would often notice boxes of books by the trash containers, and would bring them home. Would find some good reading there, tho every move, or everytime I went to a sale , I would make a point to purge some shelves, and trade them in or donate. Keeps me from overwhelming every square foot of my not so big house!

My approach to books is to rescue them, repair and read as many of them as I can. There is nothing more noble than preserving the written voice.

Yes, I feel the same, and feel the frustration to know that I can't read them all! But I feel like that is the reason for my collections, not just because I get a kick out of all the old illustrations of well known books, but because I feel like I am preserving them for the future. I have no kids, but hope these books will go to places that will continue to appreciate them.

>203 cindydavid4: and any book collectors/rescuers/hoarders: I have very basic will, but a separate inventory of my favorite things that I have given to my husband, brother, and son. It stipulates where I want things to go, including the few books I still own, if they don't want them. I found it very satisfying to release all but a few of my physical books into the wild, as it were, in my lifetime. I know that those who got them wanted them. I still pass most physical books on to another reader, and I find that more enjoyable than dusting them.

There's a possible future Avid Reader question: What do you want to have happen to your liberry when you are dead? Or maybe that's only the type of morbid topic that I enjoy ...

Interesting question. I do like writing reviews, and initially it started on LT as very much a self-orientated exercise. I find it makes me think more about what I've just read, and I enjoy going back and reminding myself what I thought of a book when it comes up elsewhere for discussion. Having said that, I feel that over the years as I've 'got to know' the folks in CR (in so far as you can know people you've never met), I equally enjoy (if not more) the debate that a review might start, and hearing everyone else's differing inputs on a book.

I hope that other people's opinions don't influence my reviews - I don't consciously think they do, anyway. I'm happy to be in the minority in my opinion on a book, and find that everyone here embraces the differing perspectives on what we read.

Thumbs I don't really care too much about. I don't tend to look back at my review in the Home section, so I tend not to see them anyway.

>204 nohrt4me2: Oh I have one like that too, as well as places to take unwanted items to (like a specific antique book store, used bookstore, thrift shop)

I still like having books around me so Im not at the point of totally purging. I get too much enjoyment out of them (most are in glass covered cabinets so I can look and don't have to dust! :) )

>205 nohrt4me2: yes that would be an intersting question/discussion.

I feel that over the years as I've 'got to know' the folks in CR (in so far as you can know people you've never met), I equally enjoy (if not more) the debate that a review might start, and hearing everyone else's differing inputs on a book.

I still have online book friends from way back in the Atlantic Table Talk days. They are part of my community as are the new folks I 'met' here. We laugh and talk together, and mourn for those who have passed and celebrated milestone events. I am very comfortable debating or discussing a book without fear of censure, and find I learn so much about my reading through them. Good place to be

>203 cindydavid4: I have a large converted garage with its own living facilities, attached to my house, so I walled it up and turned it into a nicely organized library. Sitting on about 5000 volumes at the moment.

I mainly write reviews as a record for myself. I have absolutely terrible book memory, so having a review to go back to when discussion comes up about a book is valuable to me. Usually reading my review will jog my memory about enough of the details of a book that I can have a competent discussion about it.

If I'm reviewing a book that I've seen other LTers review, I will naturally address some things that I concur or differ with in those reviews. So in that sense it's "for" people on LT that I know will read it, but mainly I review books because I enjoy writing and I like having an easily accessed record of my impressions of a book.

Oh, look, it's jet another thread I'm behind on. Like, all the way behind on. But these are really interesting questions, so massively belated or not, I'm going to takeat least a stab at answering them all:

Question 33: New Books

I think "latest book in my possession" and "most recently published book I've acquired" might actually have the same answer, since I believe the most recent book I obtained isn't technically even out yet. It's Cosmogramma by Courttia Newland, a short story collection I got through LT's Early Reviewers a couple of weeks ago. I really need to get around to reading it soon so I can review it, but I like to save short stories for times when I know I'm not going to be interrupted in the middle of one, which I can't always do when, say, I'm reading for twenty minutes at a time on my way to or from work.

Anyway, the answer for why I ended up with it isn't very mysterious. It looked interesting, and it was free, so I requested it. What more reason does one need?

Question 35 (wait, was there not a 34?): Little Lending Libraries

Haven't seen any of these in the small town where I live. Honestly, I'm not sure I've ever encountered one in the wild at all. Which is a pity, as I do like the idea.

We do have take-a-book/leave-a-book shelves at work, though, and I have seen those elsewhere, too, such as in a resort hotel I once stayed in. Really, I suppose the principle is the same, only the name, housing, and placement is different. Although that last one is fairly important in terms of who can and can't access them.

QUESTION 36: Politics: The Nuts and Bolts

I read probably less about politics than I should, to be properly informed. I did read Barack Obama's A Promised Land recently, and I've also read Hilary Clinton's What Happened. And a couple of books about Donald Trump that were probably bad for my mental health.

QUESTION 37: Stars and Threads

I almost feel narcissistic saying it, but I really mostly only star my own threads, so I can bring them up quickly when I want to update them or something. Which I could do by clicking on "started by me," but the stars also make it very obvious at a glance whether anyone's posted anything new in my thread, which I check for often.

Otherwise, I just try to at least quickly skim over everyone's threads in CR, starting from the least-recently-updated bottom, maybe just one or two or a handful at a time, as I have spare moments. Which, at times like these when I've gotten far behind, means I'm mostly only looking at conversations so old that I'd feel a bit silly chiming in on them. It is possibly not the most ideal system...

QUESTION 38: OTHER” READING

I read a lot of random stuff on the web, most of which is not very memorable or worth sharing. I used to be subscribed to a few magazines, but these days that's just limited to the Planetary Report, the small, quarterly publication put out by the Planetary Society (which I've been a member of since I was a teenager), which tells me interesting things about what's going on in the solar system at the moment. Also a lot of long e-mails back and forth with friends. Sometimes we're practically writing each other essays.

And embarrassing quantities of fan fiction, but let's not talk about that.

QUESTION 39: PAGE VERSUS STAGE

I can probably count on my fingers the number of times I've been to a play of any kind, and that might be including the time I played Buzzy the Bear's mother in the first grade school play. It's not that I don't like theater. But rural New Mexico is hardly a hotbed of thespianism. Nor was it something my family ever went in for when I was a kid in New Jersey. Hell, we barely even went to the movies.

If I'm absolutely honest, some uncharitable part of me nurses a bit of a grudge against theater as a medium that, by its very nature, is kind of exclusionary. Write a good novel or make a good movie or TV show or album, and a lot of people can experience and enjoy it, even if they live in the middle of nowhere or don't have much money. Put on a fantastic Broadway performance, and all I get to do is hear about it secondhand, usually from people who don't seem to understand quite how privileged they actually are to even have access to such things.

Maybe that's unfair of me, though. No doubt I could get out to see at least some kind of live theater on occasion if I really made an effort at it. And I did deliberately skip my co-worker's community theater performance that one time, so maybe I've got no room to talk.

In any case, I do read plays. Not often, but occasionally. Nothing wrong with that, but it is, of course, not nearly the same thing as seeing them performed.

My only memorable theater experience was going on a class trip in middle school to see an otherwise unmemorable performance of a play based on The Three Musketeers. An actor's wig fell off when he made a low bow, and at first I thought it was a deliberate bit of comedy, but then he just completely froze. It was awkward.

Hmm... It does occur to me belatedly that I have been to see some live productions of Welcome to Night Vale stories (based on the podcast of the same name). It hadn't even occurred to me to count those as plays, but I suppose they really are, even if they're primarily audio-based. Those were pretty memorable, and a lot of fun. It's always a crap shoot whether something like that is actually going to bother making a stop in Albuquerque, though. Or whether my work schedule will allow for it, especially given that it's a 2-hour-plus round trip to get there.

QUESTION 40: Book Stores as Travel Destinations

Oh, god, yes, everywhere I go, I want to stop at a bookstore. I'll never forget how bitterly, bitterly disappointed I was that time in Hawaii when my guidebook recommended an awesome-sounding bookstore, and I looked for it only to discover that it had closed. *sob* Or that time I was in Portland for my sister's wedding and never had the time for a trip to Powell's. (Fortunately I get up there to visit reasonable often, so there are always other opportunities.)

I also always want to buy a book from visitors' centers and gift shops, even when they don't actually have anything good. Which they often don't.

I've never planned a whole trip around book-shopping, though. Yet.

QUESTION 40: Do we feel we need to please an audience? (wait, now we've had #40 twice, lol)

I do write reviews mostly because I enjoy writing them, and because it helps me put down and remember my thoughts on the book, but I am certainly conscious about the fact that I am writing them for others to read. Which sometimes creates a little bit of tension, or at least a little bit of an odd situation, given that I post the reviews on the book's LT review page, and on my CR thread, and elsewhere, as well, so I may be writing for more than one audience at once. If I'm reviewing a Doctor Who novel, do I review it for Doctor Who fans (who are, presumably, the people interested in it), or for anyone who might be idly browsing my CR thread, or what? I think being a little too aware of that might sometimes result in me writing something that's not ideal for either audience, honestly.

I do sometimes leave thumbs-up on LT reviews if I think the review is especially great, either by being extremely well-written or by really capturing my own feelings about a book I've read. It's always nice to see when someone's left one for me, but it's hardly something I expect.

>211 bragan: f I'm absolutely honest, some uncharitable part of me nurses a bit of a grudge against theater as a medium that, by its very nature, is kind of exclusionary. Write a good novel or make a good movie or TV show or album, and a lot of people can experience and enjoy it, even if they live in the middle of nowhere or don't have much money. Put on a fantastic Broadway performance, and all I get to do is hear about it secondhand, usually from people who don't seem to understand quite how privileged they actually are to even have access to such things.

Im not denying this happens, and I readily admit that I can afford to go. I well know I am 'priveledged' and it is unfair. There are shows like hamilton that regularly give low price tickets. Didn't always be that way consider the history of theatre; in the middle ages there were players that went out through the towns to put on a play, often for just donations from watchers. In Shakespears day, typical people would get tickets for the pit, which were cheap. In Italy, Commedia del Arte was ofter performed outside, i front of crowds. Then there are the puppet shows, a form of theatre that often performed for the community. Later of course there were special performances for royalty and such. Back in the day prices were much more reasonable. What has happened now is that we got away from the community, the the price of making these block busters raised the prices (esp musicals).

So what can be done to open it up to more people? Often HS will have plays that get kids involved There are so many community art theatres that can bring in the crowd, at least where I live, plus college and universtiy plays usually for a few dollars If someone wants to see a play at these venues they usuallly can. And of course now with streaming, Hamilton and Dune are both available. So things will change the way they alway do. It will be interesting to see what happens when more plays are streamed then not. I think we lose a chance to see something onstage that was meant to be there, but then again, if it allows all people to see it, its a good thing.

It hadn't even occurred to me to count those as plays, but I suppose they really are, even if they're primarily audio-based.

Yes of course!!! there are many forms of theatre, some dont need a stage (see radio plays or reader theatre) some dont need a known plot (see improv) The possibilities are endless. Keep listening, see if you can find more going on (I suspect there are podcasts doing story telling that can be a form of theater) Enjoy!

>212 cindydavid4: For me, it's not even the price. I could afford Broadway tickets, if I really, really wanted them. But I'd have to travel 2,000 miles to use them. And lots of shows and concerts and all kinds of live, touring things don't get closer than an 8-hour drive from me. I do think people who live in places like New York and LA tend to take the availability of such things a bit too much for granted sometimes.

I would love to see more plays recorded and/or streamed and made available that way. I know it's not remotely the same experience or the same as sitting in a theater watching it unfold before you as part of an audience, but at least you get to see the performance.

>190 SassyLassy: Q40
Reading and writing reviews was part of what attracted me to LT when I joined in 2017.

I think of the reviews as serving two functions. First, they are useful when prospecting for books that could prove to be memorably good. Also, after I post a review, I sometimes check out what other reviews say. It becomes a retrospective experience joined to people who may not be active members anymore (or even alive). Prospective reviews I prefer to be a bit shorter, maybe 400 words or less. I better appreciate longer reviews when reading them retrospectively.

As for thumbs, it feels good whenever they happen to show up for a review I’ve written. I appreciate the thumber’s gesture. If I read a review that impresses me, then I award a thumb too.

A bit off topic, I’ve noticed three other platforms that display LT’s reviews: googlebooks, scribd, and, amazingly, Walmart. So, if you invest effort in reviewing and post the review with the work, it’s possible it will be seen more widely than you realized. Of course, that may be a displeasing thought if you don’t like any of those specific enterprises.

>213 bragan: would love to see more plays recorded and/or streamed and made available that way. I know it's not remotely the same experience or the same as sitting in a theater watching it unfold before you as part of an audience, but at least you get to see the performance.

You are so right. I have a tendency to want to fix things and so I come up with ideas that might help. Not trying to persuade you to be a drama freak, but if you want to watch theatre,i wonder if these might be interesting to you)

Check this out https://www.ntlive.com/ National Theatre Live. This is a theatre in London that films plays and presents them to movie theatres around the world. Ive seen some amazing productions this way, and the price is decent. Its a thought. It would be cool if other theatres did this

(I also remember finding Cyron Berguac video of the HBO production starring Derrick Jacobi. It was amazing. do you have a library nearby? they might have similar DVDs of performances.

good luck!

>215 cindydavid4: Thanks, I may check that out.

And "Cyrano de Bergerac" and "Derek Jacobi" are both phrases of immediate interest to me, so I really may have to look for that one! (Apparently there's also going to be a new movie version starring Peter Dinklage, by the way. I'm very intrigued by that.)

I'm mildly conscious that others read my reviews, but it's primarily for me. I mainly write reviews for me - to remember that I read this book and which book it was. I try not to spoil, less for others than for myself - if I reread my review I don't want all the detail laid out. Though for me, it's more about how something happened than that it happened, so stuff that isn't spoilers for me may bother others.

I write my review, then (before saving, usually) scroll down and read any other reviews. Sometimes it reminds me to put in something; sometimes I'm totally bewildered by what someone else wrote (did we read the same book?). I don't think I've ever gone to find a thread or a conversation about a book, though...I might, sometime, but I haven't.

I don't thumb, I find that kind of one-button like useless and annoying (did that thumb mean they liked the book, the review, the reviewer, they thumb everything...???).

>216 bragan: !!!!! Peter Dinklage, what a suberb choice! Oh I am very excited about it. Re the HBO production it took me forever to hunt down a dvd of it, came out in the 91 I think? I did see it on youtube, in parts, which works out as well.

ETA omg there is already a trailer for it! comes out in December!

And whats more, its a musical!!!

Oh and here is the link to the jacobi production
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YjPe_J9HUmI

>218 cindydavid4: I know, isn't that cool? I would never in a million years have imagined him in the role, but you re-write the jokes for him and it could be absolutely brilliant. And who wouldn't want to see Dinklage buckle some swash? The guy's amazing!

And thank you so much for that link. I now have it saved. :)

>216 bragan: Well, that caught my attention too! I am very intrigued - Dinklage seems like an awesome choice.

>190 SassyLassy:
Q 40

I agree with a lot of what others have said for answers here . . .

Do you write reviews for yourself, or for others?

I started out 1000% writing for myself . . . and then I started to get conversation, and people said they were "following" me, and I was taken aback. So I do tweek what I write about a book to be easier to follow and not just my brain dump, which is more what I write in my book journal. On my threads on LT I use the word "comments" rather than "review" because it's less formal and gives me more flexibility on what I want to say about any particular book. I think of the idea of a "review" to have expectations (even though most of us ignore those. I guess I'm pedantic that way)

I don't often copy my "comments" to the book's page. My exceptions are if I really loved a book and there are 4 reviews there, or if I really hated a book. Also if I feel strongly opposite to the popular opinion posted.

If you post to the review page, do you look for thumbs of your reviews, or thumb others reviews?

I am one to thumbs up on social media generally, because I like to be supportive (and sometimes teach the algorithm, because it never gets me at all). The thumbs up here on LT are sort of vague though, aren't they? Sometimes it's not clear what exactly you're liking. Still, I like to give positive feedback, so I'm generous with clicking like. I don't check my likes because I don't care. However, when I post a scathing review, and then check back and see 40 likes, it does make me incredibly happy for at least a minute

>214 dypaloh: A bit off topic, I’ve noticed three other platforms that display LT’s reviews: googlebooks, scribd, and, amazingly, Walmart.

What?! I had no idea . . .

>220 Yells: oh and Kit Harrington is doing Henry V, later in July, on national theater live. Cant wait!

>222 japaul22: Welcome to the Internet, where people are going to steal your stuff for purposes nefarious or commercial. I had students who used to plagiarize from GoodReads. I expect they've cribbed from here, too.

>224 nohrt4me2: >222 japaul22: Not necessarily stealing. There is a setting in your account settings where you specify who LT can share your reviews with - commercial entities, non-commercial only or none. That had always been part of the LT business model.

The students - well, that’s plagiarism. :)

>225 AnnieMod:
Thanks, Annie. I had forgotten those settings existed. While it doesn't bother me if my reviews can be viewed elsewhere, I can understand how not everyone feels the same.

>224 nohrt4me2:
Before the internet, students use to plagiarize using books of literary/historical criticism from the library. But at least they had to go to a library to do it. Bit more effort in that.

>226 dypaloh: That's why I posted about them - if you had not looked at your account settings for a long time, chances are you don't remember you could restrict that.

I've accepted a long time ago that if I post something on the internet, it can and will show up elsewhere - legally or not. "If I can read it online then it must be free" and "Online means free" are just entrenched in some people's minds. After all - the only reason books cost money is because of the paper they are printed on, right? Ergo - why pay when no paper is involved.

I looked and do have the most restrictive setting on regarding reviews. It actually doesn't bother me that people would use reviews from LT, I was more reacting with surprise that LT reviews would be on Walmart's radar! I think that's kind of funny and surprising!

>225 AnnieMod: I had no idea those settings existed. But, yah, I consider it stealing unless someone asks my permission, but that ship sailed long ago.

Fwiw, I was cited as an expert on something in a Wikipedia article. I am a) not an expert and b) not a Frenchman (whoever wrote the article referred to me with masculine pronouns assuming that Jean was the French Jean). I corrected the Wkipedia article, but lots of other sites steal from Wikipedia, and on those sites, I am still a man. Too numerous to fix the error.

>226 dypaloh: Plagiarizing on the Internet is a lot easier than it used to be. But so is nailing the perps. You just type in one of their million-dollar sentences and Google finds the original for you.

>228 japaul22: Walmart are a bookstore (well... in a way) so that was always a possibility. I doubt that they bought from LT directly (who knows though) but things tend to get consolidated weirdly.

Considering that Amazon is a competitor, they cannot use their reviews or Goodreads' (because it is Amazon's). So they had to get reviews from somewhere. LT is kinda logical choice. :)

>229 nohrt4me2: In a lot of sites, you "lease" your content when you post it so people who want to use it do not need to ask you - you gave a permission under the site's conditions so as long as they follow the site's policy, they've technically asked you. Other from that - I agree.

Also, publicists and publishers read book reviews here (and on Goodreads)—what they do with that information is up to them, and hopefully ethical. But I've had publicists write and thank me for a very favorable review of an under-the-radar book, so it doesn't hurt to be aware that they're looking.

>231 AnnieMod: Yes, I understand how it works. We all basically agree to give up our content to the site in exchange for using it. It works as long as everyone understands that. I would never have shared any ideas on here that I was looking to publish before retirement. I was a bit taken aback when someone on another group summarily informed everyone he had collected their info for some kind of songbook database he was associated with. At least we knew who was trolling for content and how it would be used.

>233 nohrt4me2: Ouch - that hurts (the songbook thing). But then people will be people - offline or not. If anything, being online convinces a lot of people that they are anonymous (or nearly so) and they get even worse. Oh well.

Add people to anything and you end up with worst case scenarios more often than not :)

>170 SassyLassy: This question made me think of rebeccanyc, who would sometimes list books she was contemplating taking with her on trips, and ask for comments on what would work. I really liked that idea.

>190 SassyLassy: Each day when I sign on to LT, I first look at my home page to check for "Recent News" and "Hot Reviews". I like this feature, especially as "Hot Reviews" often displays reviews by people not in Club Read, so I get a quick look at what books are being read elsewhere. If people didn't thumb reviews, the books wouldn't appear here, and I would miss out on discovering a lot of interesting books. It was through reviews on the home page as well that I first got a look at LT in general.

I do thumb reviews, but not as often as some of them warrant. (Poor wording, I know I can only thumb once, but I don't thumb enough reviews).

Naturally I would like it if others read and especially commented on my reviews in my threads. However, they are written mostly so that I can look back and see what I was thinking at a given time, or use them to help formulate my thoughts on related books. I also like using them to compare my thoughts on a given book to someone else's who has a very different take on it. It sometimes helps me see something I completely missed, or causes me to think about the book differently.

>211 bragan: It's never too late!
Yes, I do seem to have had difficulty counting in this thread. Time now to move onto the next one, and hope I can keep my numbers straight!

__________

ETA Over on dchaikin's current thread, I just found another reason to post reviews to a book's review page: you don't have to search old threads to find your own comments on the book

>235 SassyLassy: ☺️ But they look nicer in the threads.

>235 SassyLassy: Oh, good idea to add "Hot Reviews" to the homepage. That extra click means I don't always go searching them out, and I like that feature.

> 237

Where do you find "Hot Reviews"?

If you are not using it anywhere else, look at https://www.librarything.com/home#unused

If it is not there, check https://www.librarything.com/home#reviews

Once you locate the module, press on the + sign and it will let you chose where to put it - then you get on that page and do your ordering any way you want :)

>239 AnnieMod:

Thanks! The second strategy worked, and I'd completely forgotten the purpose of the + icon.

>240 librorumamans: Anytime :) It is usually under reviews UNLESS you removed it (then it would be in unused) or moved it. :) So I usually start hunting things in Unused, then go to where it natively is - it is bound to be in one of the two places. If it is not in either, you just need to hunt down which page it is on.

The plus is not very intuitive - so I tend to remind people that this is what you need in order to move it to a different page :)

Anyway - glad to hear that you are back on track! :)