This is pathos. The story, the character, appeals to the reader’s emotions, evoking pity and compassion where there might have been little, if any.

So, this study performed by Ohio State University puzzles and intrigues me somewhat.

Students who read about a character who is in nearly their exact same situation had the strongest “experience-taking.” Reading about a student, my age, at my university, having an experience I am closely anticipating having. Perhaps it’s obvious that one should have the strongest relational experience with someone with whom they share the most similarities.

In the study, different students were given slightly different reading material (1^st person v. 3^rd person point of view, their alma mater v. a different school) concerning voting and the researchers observed the outcome. How many students voted after reading about this student who voted? The obvious occurred.

Read more about it here.

The point of the study is clear, direct, and literal. Can reading affect a person’s actions? In what situations can it have this effect? The answer being: when what your reading relates most directly to you. My concern is slightly off-base, but the oh so literal nature of this study bothers me. I would hope we could read about someone not exactly alike to us in every way and it might still have an effect on us.

The study is looking for a direct effect, one characterized outwardly in the form of an action. You read about voting and you vote. But there’s more to the effect that books can have on a reader than inspiring simple, direct actions. They can inspire compassion, and larger changes to our own character if the book is strong enough to move us deeply. Pathos.

I’m not sure if they can do a study about that.

Let books move you.

You New Beau.

The news has been buzzing about Pearson’s English Language Arts test and their nearly unintelligible insertion of a mangled Daniel Pinkwater excerpt. You can see it for yourself here.

This nonsensical story (characterized as such by Pinkwater himself, who specializes in absurdist literature) was given to 8^th graders in New York State along with six meaningless multiple choice questions meant to evaluate the 13 year olds’ reading comprehension skills.

More from Daniel Pinkwater on the test and the Pineapple passage here.

Also in the NYTimes recently: an article about new “e-Rater” technology—computers that grade standardized test essays.

A task once reserved solely for the realm of the sentient evaluator, a number of testing companies are developing e-rating technologies—again including Pearson—and testing the computer’s ratings against human graders.

MIT’s Les Perelman does his own testing of the Educational Testing Service’s e-Rater (Pearson declined to have Perelman show “why it doesn’t work”) in the NYTimes article. The e-Rater awards points to essays that are longer, have “bigger” words, and use conjunctions—all of which indicate a more thought-out, articulate, and complex argument. The e-Rater cannot fact-check.

Where am I going with all of this?

The point of these tests is, supposedly, to evaluate the reading and writing proficiencies of these kids, right? To help make them better readers and better writers?

Here’s a brief explanation of how Pearson creates the tests.

I guess where I am going with this is simply to ask what this world is coming to (as usual). Reading tests that barely show the tester’s comprehension of the English language and writing tests that barely show the tester’s interest in giving a fair assessment of the students’ writing…

And what does all of this mean for books (of course) and literacy in America? Print and electronic publications are the essence of how we communicate with each other (when we are not face-to-face, or screen-to-screen a la Skype). Such a misuse of a literary passage as the “Pineapple and the Hare” fiasco is a disservice to the literature it draws from. How can students be asked to give sensible answers about a nonsensical story? And then, later in life, how will they be able to fully appreciate good absurdist literature (such as the work of Pinkwater, or of David Foster Wallace) without finding themselves asking the same irrelevant questions that these tests do, sorely missing the point and unarmed with the less “standardized” and more abstract analytical skills that could open up the world of good books to them?

A big question, I know. And one I can’t really answer except to say, fight the man!

The tests are not likely to go away…hopefully they don’t discourage the thousands of students who are subjected to them from becoming  readers.

Students! You can all be good readers, and have fun doing it, too! Feel free to view these tests with a resigned disdain. Ace them, because you know what bogus game they’re playing at. Get out of high school and read the books you want with an open, curious and questioning mind. And read some of them with a good professor who will get you asking even more questions (this is good!). And maybe you will find more meaningful answers than “(D) The Owl.”

MORAL: It’s often not about “Which animal spoke the wisest words?” but more about what those wise words are and the implications of those words.

Don’t stop reading books!

Your New BEAU

“Hi, um, tonight is World Book Night, and I wanted you to have this.”

In my first post to the Beaufort blog, I promoted World Book Night, an event I had just found out about. Here is just what I said:

“I want everyone to love reading as much as I do! So, here’s an event I just learned about that seems totally awesome! World Book Night! Sounds cool, right? I know. The idea is that on April 23, 2012, across the nation, 50,000 volunteers will be handing out a total of 1 million free books to anyone and everyone that will take them. The volunteers are being called “book givers” and they will be handing out one of 30 popular titles (listed on the website), like print-superheroes mysteriously emerging from the shadows in the night to revive the secret pleasure of falling into a good book. So cool.”

Well, last night was April 23, 2012 and I was one of those book givers. From the thirty titles, I chose The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri, a book I read my senior year in high school for a final project in English class. I wrote my own personal note to the reader—hoping they enjoy the book and share it with others—opened my giver box and slipped a copy of it in the first page of each of my 20 copies of the book. I carefully loaded them into my bag so they’d be easier to carry and then stepped out onto 42^nd street.

Where to go?

I saw a group of givers on the NYPL steps, but I did not join them.  I thought of setting up camp in Grand Central, but decided against it. Realizing I hadn’t thought this through as well as I’d thought I had, I panicked. What good would it do if I gave all my books to people who will just stick on their over-stuffed shelves and let it collect dust? Who should I give my books to??

I hopped on the 6, intending to start in Union Square. On the train I grew even more concerned. Even if I saw someone I wanted to give a book to, how would I approach them? People in New York are already wary of strangers and skeptical of free handouts. I wasn’t sure anyone would even acknowledge me.  But I found my first recipient before I even got off the subway. Someone on the train smiled at me and figured it was the perfect segue. I stood up to get off the train and as I handed her the book I said “Hi, um, tonight is World Book Night, and I wanted you to have this,” she smiled again, said “thank you” and turned the book over in her hands, and I headed up the stairs onto the street.  Success!

Clearly this was a battle with my social anxiety, but I didn’t want to fail the cause. I wanted to make WBN a success on my own level. My hesitation slowed me down, but I eventually spread the printed word to 20 random New Yorkers. In the process, I got looked at askance, waved away, ignored, thanked dismissively, called “generous,” and “sexy,” and met a few of the most gracious pedestrians.

With one book left in my bag, I descended again into the subway at Union Square. And a woman, not quite waiting for a train, glanced at me and so I went over and offered her my last copy. Just as I was about to walk away she asked me if WBN had anything to do with the festival of St. Jordi (Saint George).

At the time I didn’t know that it did, but she told me that in Catalonia in Spain it was the festival of Sant Jordi and that the day is marked by the tradition of exchanging books. She had posted on Facebook that morning that she hoped she got one! Nearing on 9pm, I was the one to answer that calling. Possibly the best way to end an evening of book-giving.

Happy day after World Book Night!

Step 1. Pick up a book.

Step 2. Read it.

Step 3. Share it with others!

Your New BEAU

Well, this certainly is unexpected news. You would think, with the abundance of fiction oriented in a year, and with a jury that’s already weeded the pool down to three extraordinary candidates, “no award” should not be an option.

The three novels passed over by the Board are David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King, Karen Russell’s Swamplandia! and Denis Johnson’s novella Train Dreams.

There’s been some backlash. Fiction writer Jane Smiley (1992 Fiction Pulitzer Prize winner for A Thousand Acres) can’t believe there wasn’t a worthy book. Fiction Juror Susan Larson has expressed some anger that a choice could not be made after all of the work (reading up and weeding down the entrants) she and her two fellow jurors, Maureen Corrigan and Michael Cunningham, did.

And so we are left somewhat at a loss. And who is to blame? Who makes these kinds of decisions anyway?

Well, I always like to know just who the authority in any matter is and just what they’re credentials are, so I did a little googling to learn just how the Pulitzer Prize really works and how makes the decisions on this stuff. Here’s what I found.

The short version: There are the entrants, submitted for consideration by artists, authors, papers and publishers for the price of $50. There are the Pulitzer jurors, who slog through all of the entrants and select a handful of finalists, and there are the Pulitzer board members, who deliberate over the finalists and choose the 21 winners. 20 of the winners receive $10,000 dollars each, and one winner (the Public Service award in the Journalism category) receives a gold medal.

Each year, jurors (“The jurors are distinguished in their fields and include past Pulitzer winners.” Rich Oppel) are chosen and divided into groups of 3-7 people and assigned to one of the 21 categories.  The jurors will spend anywhere from a few days to a few months (depending upon the category) to select their finalists to submit to the Board. The Board, sequestered and sworn to utter secrecy, keeping all debate behind closed doors, deliberate and decide upon the most worthy ones.  One of their options, should they be unable to reach a majority decision, is to decide upon “no award.”

And the question of who the board members and jurors are? Who chooses them? Well, not much to be found on that, but the Prizes are based at Columbia University and the president of the University presides over the Board. So, there’s your answer? Here’s a bit more info on service terms for board members and jurors.

So, are you mad about this year’s Board’s indecision?

Well, it has been 35 years since a “no award” decision has afflicted us. Since then, we have invented the internet. And the Huffington Post wants to award the Prize by popular vote, so go here and weigh in.

If the silly Board can’t decide, then we’ll just have to decide for them!

Your New Beau.

Before I get ahead of myself, I have been scanning some stats from this study by the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project on e-reading, highlighting this key point: people with Kindles and Nooks et al. read an average of 24 books a year, whereas print readers consume an average of 15 books in a year. And, well, as an exclusively print reader, I feel a little slighted. What are they trying to say about me? That I am not as voracious a reader? That I am slow? How dare they insinuate based on their “statistics” and “averages.” And just what 24 books are these e-reading people devouring in a year? Probably only a few books of comparable substance and 21 romance novels. Yeah.

What they’re really saying, it seems: print slows the average reader down.

Which brings me to my quantity v. quality question. What’s wrong with my 15 book average? Things move so fast in this digital age; everyone wants what they want to appear before them in a fraction of a second, and the faster you can move the more you can get done, more than the other guy, and you always want to stay ahead of the other guy. Maybe print readers don’t run through as many books, but maybe we get more out of the books we read.

And maybe not. Let’s not stereotype. There are plenty of thoughtful e-readers out there and thoughtless print-readers. My point is, I guess, what’s with the numbers comparison? Just how many books I complete in a year should not be a contest; it should not earn you some merit badge. Reading shouldn’t be a race. As much as Joel Stein thinks adults are wasting precious time reading YA books when they could be catching up on “3,000 years of fiction written for adults,” I would here like to grant the world permission to read what it likes, at whatever pace suits it, and get out of it what it will.

And, of course, the requisite advertisement, promoting the love of print: Watch a Book Being Born. Think back to a time when creating the written word for circulation required significant labor (hand-typesetting, hand-sewing, and even, before the printing press, hand-copying). Think about the time it took to just create a printed book. And consider giving that book as much time in your hands as it spent in the hands of its maker.

Slow down. It’s not a race.

” Let’s have the decency to let tween girls have their own little world of vampires and child wizards and games you play when hungry”

Yup, that’s a direct quote.

As Mr. Stein emphasizes in the opening of his piece, and as evident in the above quote, he has not bothered reading any of these popular series and has no idea what they are about, what themes they touch upon, and in a sense has no real relevant opinion on them.  He strongly feels that adults should solely read adult literary fiction, and is sometimes pejorative and condescending in the language he uses to emphasize this point.

Point. Counterpoint. Lev Grossman wrote an op-ed piece for the Times as well explaining why the book group of adults he belongs to only reads YA books.  He feels that YA books are rarely boring, have strong and clear narrators, and rely more on structured plot and character development then on writing style, linear vs. nonlinear plot lines, or metaphor.

Both articles are part of a discourse that is happening today, due in large part to the success of The Hunger Games.  Obviously, whether Mr. Stein wants to acknowledge it or not, the themes and stories told in these books are resonating with both young adults and adult adults.  People are overlooking the suggested reading level of books and are reading them either for personal enjoyment or to keep up with the zeitgeist.

I’m really not a huge consumer of YA, but I’m in Mr. Grossman’s corner, because anyone who tries to dictate what I should or should not be reading isn’t cool in my book.

Check out Mr. Grossman’s article here and Mr’s Stein’s article here

The notion of “digital rights” for a book, believe it or not, has been around for about 20 years, even in the very early days of the personal computer (My family got our first computer in 1997, I think, possibility a little later than some; we enjoy staying fashionably behind the curve). I keeping thinking of the brilliant word processor Richard Dreyfus used in Stand By Me—a bulky beige contraption with a small black screen and blocky green text.

Yes, even in 1986 (when Stand By Me was produced) the digital age was taking hold. Publishing companies began including the “right to publish in unspecified digital formats” in their contracts with authors (you can read an overview of publishing contracts and rights here), though the first eReader (Sony’s, I believe) did not come out until around 2006.

Seeing “digital” as the great unknown looming in the [not so far off] distance, some publishers had the prescience to claim rights to something they did not even have concrete knowledge of—the ways of the future. Those who did were smart. The rest have ended up crawling through their fortresses of paper contract copies hoping they did the same, in whatever vague terms.  And if they didn’t, they have to contact the author and ask if she/he would be willing to amend the contract to include digital rights. And then, once more, they must hope.

A publisher does not automatically have the right to publish a book in eBook format. They may have the print rights, but the two formats are negotiated separately.  Publishers who did not have the forethought to include digital rights in an initial contract may face competition from other publishing houses later on for said rights. For instance, say a publisher puts out book that sells 50,000 copies, but neglected to include digital rights in the contract, when this fact comes to light, other companies would certainly jump on the opportunity to turn a profit by claiming a share of the glory through the eBook.

Alternatively, an author can withhold eBook rights on their book if it was not included in the initial contract. And this is essentially what J.K. Rowling did. Bloomsbury Publishing in the UK, it would seem, neglected digital rights for the Harry Potter series. How could they have known HP would become a cultural phenomenon? And that in a just a few years reading books on tiny portably screens would be the new norm?

Rowling opened the beta version of her mysterious website, Pottermore, last year (scheduled to open to the public in Aril this year). Now, Rowling has created the imprint Pottermore Publishing and is selling her eBooks of the entire HP series exclusively on her Pottermore website. Talk about missed opportunities, Bloomsbury. Barnes & Noble and Amazon want in on the action, but they best they can do is link to her website for the sell.

Life lessons. Plan wisely for the digital future, even if you don’t really know what that is. Or J.K. Rowling will take over the world.

Happy birthday, Robert Frost!

Beaufort Books admires all writers, and we find it necessary to pay homage to those who’ve paved the way for us, and essentially, taken the road less traveled by. 

No matter what your walk of life has been, you have 100 words or less to tell us how about your journey. What was your choice, and what did the road less traveled by entail, or does it still?

The winner will have his/her entry posted on our website, and you’ll win a copy of our “The Outdoor Museum” book of images and poems by Fiddler on the Roof’s Tony Award-winning lyricist Sheldon Harnick and his wife Margery, which portrays the New York City that is less traveled by.

To enter: email your submission to publicity@beaufortbooks.com by Friday, March 30, at 3pm. The winner will then be notified via email the first week of April.

Good luck, and we look forward to reading your entry!

______

The Road Not Taken
By Robert Frost
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

Naturally, it follows that reading is a somewhat solitary activity. I’ve had fantastical notions of “socializing” by spending reading time with a friend—two of us, in the same room, reading together. But what it comes down to is that two people reading together cannot simultaneously socialize without stopping every few sentences or so to comment or what have you. Real reading time consists of silence and solitude. Interruptions disrupt the flow of the narrative; they jarringly press the pause button on the mind-movie.

Now you can bluntly convey to others your wish to read without disruption with a customized “Go Away, I’m Reading” book jacket. Bold and decisive: I would like to be left alone right now. Do not disturb. No, this familiar title is not an invitation to drag me into your own impromptu book club meeting simply because I chose to take my book out in public and you happened to be there.

A bit harsh, but it’s what most of us want, right?

I do know a number of people with a similar pet peeve that they hate when people in the park or on the train crane to see what they are reading. I will confess, I do this all the time—I see the person next to me holding a book and a natural curiosity takes over to find out what the folks are reading these days (fyi for most it’s Tina Fey’s Bossypants). I have heard some people put in the “pros” list about their e-reader that they enjoy the fact that people can’t immediately see what they are reading. Sales of romance e-books have gone up.

Either way, what’s at work here is a desire for some kind of privacy, to exist in our own private bubble, undisturbed. This is by no means anything wrong with this. But a friend of mine did make an interesting comparison. I mentioned to him something I had read by Christine Rosen that examines human behavior in our technological age and how a discrepancy between a wealth of information (to be gained from the internet) and a wealth of experience (to be gained from the physical world) might affect our lives, habits and expectations.

She does not make the somewhat typical argument on this front that technology could be our downfall (an argument you find in books like Virtually You), but she does talk about how we use technology as mediators in our lives, how people walk down the street on their smart phones with their earbuds in and dissociate themselves from the world they are living in. Anyhow, my friend countered with the comment that “well, when the printing press came around, people were probably thinkin’ that those folks were spending too much time reading.”

Books mediate our reality too, sure, that’s true. And when we sit in a public place begging to be left alone with Tina Fey or whatever book, we resist a physical interaction with the world just as much as when we’re texting or what have you.

But it’s better when it’s books, right? Right. Reading is an emotional learning experience. It is not the same as that person who stands there texting because they feel so awkward about being alone in a public place that they need to prove to the world that they indeed have friends who talk to them (it’s okay, I have done it, too, on occasion).

So, yes, go away! I’m reading.

Your New Beau

What’s also great about the list is that it represents authors of varying age, experience, gender, ethnicity, and geography.  Each book is starkly different from the next , each protagonist is cherished for a new reason, and every ending had me thinking about fiction in a new way.  The Marriage Plot, the first book I read from the list, completely blew me away, left me wanting more and loving the three main characters so much that I ached and pained for all of their misery, strife, and challenges.  Open City was a pleasure to read mostly for its ode to the hidden gems of New York City (seriously – I think it’s the first high brow fiction book I’ve read that shouts out Malecon Restaurant in the Heights).  At the end, you’re not sure that you trust or even like Julius, the Nigerian psychiatrist navigating us through memory, time, and New York City, which turned out to be one of the eeriest feelings I had about a book’s ending in a really long time.  And I can’t even begin to wrap my head around how awesome and groundbreaking State of Wonder is…seriously, GO READ THIS NOW.

I used to be really opposed to book lists.  I never really liked knowing what I was going to pick up next.  Discovering new books, or being recommended books (my favorite pastime in the world) was the best component of being a reader.  But now, I salute TMN for guiding me through some of 2011′s best books and leading me to new ones that weren’t on the list (must read The Pale King at some point), for exposing me to new authors I would have never found on my own (Helen DeWitt is hilarious and Donald Ray Pollack makes Stephen King look like Disney).  Reading all of these books has honestly motivated me more in my career, reiterating the already known fact that books are an important part of my personality.  I can only hope to dirty my editor’s hands in a future TOB finalist.

- BeaustieBoy