Hello Zaptown! It’s been a couple of weeks.  My apologies for the silence since the New Year. I haven’t gotten any columns out this month, and I feel bad about that. I’ve been working my way through a stack of books this month, looking for things to discuss with you instead (Currently, am about half way through UNDER THE DOME) and I’ve also been involved in the current focus on classic movies, so although there hasn’t been any Words on Words, I’ll be posting more and soon.  I also made the decision to try and read Adam Smith’s WEALTH OF NATIONS this year, and have it sitting in the corner, intimidating me. It’s a massive, massive book. Here’s hoping I get through it by July!

Hope you’ve all had a peaceful holiday season, and there was at least one good book under the tree!  One of the reasons why I’ve tried to champion reading fiction over the past year is that, when it’s well-written, fiction can be incredibly powerful. Powerful enough to change the way we look at the world around us, for better or worse. Let me give an example that shows I mean this quite literally: A while back, I was kind of curious about the people I knew and who their heroes were, who they looked up to, so to speak. So I took an informal, not-very-organized poll, and spent a few days offhandedly asking people I knew who their favorite fictional character was, curious to see what they’d say. I received a couple of answers that felt typical, at that time—‘Neo’, ‘Hercules’ and a couple of characters I hadn’t heard of before. However, for me, the most surprising answer was the person, a sometime friend (more of an acquaintance, really) who answered ‘Julius Caesar’.

Julius Caesar.

(This was my actual reaction at the time, too. An awkward silence, followed by me repeating what he’d just said, to make sure we were on the same page, which led to him being confused as to why I was confused, leading to me hastily pointed out, that, hang on, Julius Caesar wasn’t a fictional character, he was a historic one, he’d been a real Roman general and changed the world and everything, and choosing real people was cheating, maaaan….) The end result of all of this was  my buddy staring at me like I’d just grown antlers and telling me that he had no idea what I was talking about, everybody knew that Julius Caesar had been made up by Shakespeare.

Julius Caesar, Shakespeare’s greatest creation. It’s an exchange that really did happen, honest. (I wouldn’t have believed it myself, if it didn’t). If only Wikipedia had existed at the time. As it was, I didn’t think to point out that Shakespeare had written several of his most popular plays about real monarchs, and that Richard III, Henry V, et al, weren’t fictional characters either, but still—thinking of that power, of Shakespeare’s ability to take a real situation, a real individual, and write about him with such authority that down through the decades and the centuries, in the minds of certain individuals, his portrait of Shakespeare would literally replace the real record. The sort-of-friend who gave me the answer was an intelligent individual, fairly well-read. He legitimately thought that Julius Caesar was a fictional character. And so, Fiction can change the way we look at the world around us. In a negative sense, it can lull us into believing things that aren’t true, or confusing misinformation with reality. With assuming that someone who really existed never did, was just made up by an exceptionally-gifted playwright. But in its positive side, it can give us ideas that we never might have stumbled across otherwise, nurture our own creativity and give us hope and understanding of the common experiences that we all share as human beings.

The last decade has been a rough time for many people—after the heralding of the ‘end of history’, new problems erupted, and many people find themselves as bad or worse off than they were ten years ago. If there has been progress, many people feel it has left them behind. Now, more than ever, we need good stories. And hope. That’s one reason why I keep reading, and am looking forward to another decade full of good books. Here’s hoping the upcoming New Year treats you kindly. Thanks for being there.

The decorations are all out. The songs are on the radio. Public outrage erupted when President Obama’s speech bumped the annual airing of A Charlie Brown Christmas. The rituals are as familiar as ever, even if they’re tinged a bit this year by the sense that we’re not out of the woods yet–there’s a hopeful nervousness, a year after the disaster that was the end of 2008, and a lot of businesses seem hopeful that shoppers will come back to them with open arms, and pocketbooks. Products are being pushed. HDTVs. Blue-ray players. Reindeer sweaters. If you go to Amazon.com, the front page features an ad for ‘the #1 bestselling, the #1 wished-for, and the #1 most gifted product on Amazon. Give the gift of reading’ . I’m curious how it feels to actually try to read something using the Kindle–I can’t imagine it would be as comfortable as an actual book (It looks sort of like a Nintendo GameBoy) but I may try and borrow one, if anybody I know gets one for the holidays, and give it a spin. It’s selling for around two hundred and sixty dollars, and at that price, somebody’I know is bound to pick one up, right?

Purely in the interest of scientific curiosity.

The #1 best-selling BOOK (not to be confused with a Kindle, on the other hand) on Amazon.com right now is Sarah Palin’s Going Rogue which appears to have knocked Dan Brown off the #1 slot. The book is currently selling for around fifteen dollars. If I wanted to ride the zeitgeist, it would be a good choice, but the ‘kindle edition’  isn’t being released until December 26. It’s listed at twelve dollars. So, in exchange for getting rid of the physical book and all its properties, the reader saves….three dollars.

Then again, I guess if I was really concerned about cost, I could always try to use  the library.

Just a quick column this week–a lot of the publishing world, and those shrinking book sections in the back of major newspaper weekend editions, have been preoccupied this week with the release of Sarah Palin’s memoir ‘Going Rogue’.  That makes it a rough week for me to peruse the funnypages, as political memoirs are probably my least favorite type of book out there.

It’s not that surprising that the big political memoirs often get a lot of attention, but I’d argue that, even if you’re passionate about the individual who wrote the book, they’re still, as a genre, a bit of a drag. Why? Because they’re written for the moment, often by politicians and/or ghostwriters who are trying to get a certain message across in the moment, aimed at that figure’s base. As one gets further away from the moment of their publication, they become less and less relevant except as historical artifacts, what some famous person wanted to attach their name to when they were gathering money for a presidential run, or how they felt about their first term, or why they wanted to insert a plank for health care into their party platform, or why they were as shocked as anybody when they found out there were no WMD’s.

I’ve always kind of imagined books as a sort of time capsule of ideas. Open the cover, the story’s there. Close the cover, the story goes back to sleep, waiting for someone to come along and find it, down the road. Good stories transcend time and space. Don Quixote. Lord of the Rings. Watership Down. Cosmos. A Tale of Two Cities. Walden. They may be anchored in time, but they transmit someone’s ideas of what it was like, there for a moment, to readers who are separated by time and space, by fate and chance. A book that’s written, or co-written by a politician, aimed at a very specific audience has none of that power–and most of them have very short shelf lives.  That being said, the reviews that are popping up, both positive and negative, of Sarah Palin’s book are interesting, and provide a pretty wide spectrum of how people relate to her public figurehood.  I guess that’s the silver lining.

We all have our biases, after all (I even know a person who only reads cookbooks!) What’s your least favorite genre?