Well-Read Life™

Boovies Score at the Oscars

Gratifying it was for us boovie lovers to watch the 2008 Academy Awards. There was tuxedoed Cormac McCarthy smiling each time his No Country for Old Men won an Oscar. It beat out three other books and a short story to win the award for best adapted screenplay. It also won Oscars for best picture, best directing, and best supporting actor by Javier Bardem, with his chilling portrayal of evil incarnate.

The Kite Runner received an Oscar nomination for original score.

Ian McEwan’s Atonement was yet another bestselling book paired with a movie adaptation.

That makes three bestsellers that those commenting on this Well-Read Life blog had already crowned as boovies before Oscar did. (A boovie is that welcome serendipity of both the book and the movie being good, if not great.) The Academy apparently agrees with our readers.

The Oscar-nominated short story was Alice Munro’s “The Bear Came Over the Mountain,” which formed the basis for Sarah Polley’s screenplay for Away from Her. Searching online, I see that a book has been issued under the same name as the movie, with a cover showing Julie Christie. Sounds like a great opportunity to do a reverse boovie—watch first and then enjoy a quick read of the book’s 96 pages.

The other short book, at 144 pages, is The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. Its brevity is understandable. The now-deceased author, Jean-Dominique Bauby, was left paralyzed and speechless after a stroke. He wrote the book by blinking his left eye.

All of the above are relatively new writing. The outlier, in terms of its age, is There Will be Blood, for which Daniel Day-Lewis snagged the Oscar for best actor. This movie was based on the 1927 novel Oil! by Upton Sinclair. For an historical description of this relatively unknown work by the author famous for The Jungle, see this fascinating piece by movie reviewer and biographer Scott Eyman.

Personally, I’m going to do reverse boovies with Away from Her and The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. It’s safe to say that I wouldn’t have discovered either of the books if the movies hadn’t achieved acclaim. But happy days! Boovies lead us from one good art form to another.

As “Once” composer Glen Hansard said as he held his Oscar aloft, “This is amazing! Make art! Make art!”

How about you? Are you enjoying a boovie, or reverse boovie, now? Let me know what art you discover while pursuing your viewing and reading.  Just click on the Comments link below. (If you’re reading this as an email, click here and you'll connect to Comments).

The Golden Age of Books: first in a series

  The Greenwich Book Exchange
  Photos Taken by Tom Allen

When people find out I’m the CEO of Levenger, they frequently ask if I’m worried that our business could dwindle as people turn away from books. When I respond that I believe books will be with us for a while longer, most people give me a silent half-nod. It seems they don’t want to disabuse me of my quaint view. I can’t really blame them for thinking I’m out of touch.

Today there is plenty of hand-wringing about how a barrage of new media are stealing time away from reading. Government studies reinforce with statistics what we see by looking around: young people find 3D video games and Facebook more interesting than Jane Eyre.   

Since our business is tied to such social changes, I continuously query people about their reading habits. Yet what I’m finding makes me feel encouraged rather than discouraged about reading, especially the reading of books.

In fact, from all the good news I see, I’m going to suggest that we may be entering a magnificent new era in reading that is already far better than anything we had in those good old days, whenever they might have been.

I’ll here begin a series of postings on why, in my opinion, we are now entering the Golden Age of Books.

Why We’re Entering the Golden Age of Books:
Reason No. 1: Our Historic High Tides of Books

We are swimming in books. In both the number of titles, and the sheer quantities of books printed, the world has never seen anything like what we have today. In 2004, the last year statistics are available, the global production of books in English amounted to a mind-boggling 450,000 titles.

The U.S. production alone increased 15% between 2002 and 2006, surging from about 250,000 titles to 300,000 per year. The only genres of books to show declines over these years were juvenile and computer books. Yet more than making up for those declines are significant increases in poetry, drama, religion, philosophy, fiction and biography.

In 2006, Americans  spent an estimated $24.2 billion buying books, a figure that has been increasing about 3% per year since 2003.  Many, if not most, of the books we purchased at a discount—a discount we have come to expect, although it was rare just a generation ago.

These figures don’t include the millions of books that readers purchase and then giveaway, some of which end up being sold for a dollar or two at thrift shops and libraries.

Libraries get so many donations, in fact, that it’s become a burden for them to process. Few books actually make it into library circulation. Most are sold for a buck or a few quarters (even for nice hardcovers). Uncounted numbers of paperbacks are heaped onto shelves and squeezed into bins marked “FREE.”

Like puppies at the animal shelter, more free books vie for our attention at town halls, company lunchrooms, clubs, hotel lobbies—even waste stations.

The Greenwich Book Exchange is one example. This popular outpost at the Greenwich, Connecticut, waste transfer station started about 25 years ago when two senior citizens who were volunteering there became bothered by the hundreds of books being thrown out. They decided to put some of the books on a table so people could see them. Many then disappeared as Greenwich townspeople dropped off garbage and picked up Gibbon.

The number of boxes grew and grew, soon spilling out of the container being used to store them.

“I finally conned the head of public works into a building—a shed 8 by 16 feet where books are arranged by size and alphabetically,” says Doug Francefort, one of the founders, and the person in charge of the operation today.

You can find P.D. James and Plutarch, Stephen King and Shakespeare, all shelved in proper order. “I’m a retired assistant controller from Pitney Bowes,” said Doug, “and that accountant in me likes things neat and tidy.”

A sign says there is a limit of 10 books per day per family. “I look the other way sometimes,” said Doug. “There’s a woman who comes all the time and collects kids’ books for the center she volunteers for.”

What’s remarkable is that The Greenwich Book Exchange, while being a fine example, is not unusual, but representative of our enormous book wealth. Of the tons of books people won’t take for free, and libraries and thrift shops can’t sell, some are shipped overseas by charitable organizations, while tons and tons more are simply pulped.

Is it wasteful that we print so many books, and have done so for so many decades? Yes, but of all the things we can be wasteful in, this is one of the best. The result is that our ability to enjoy literature and to learn is not limited by our ability to own books. (And I haven’t yet mentioned using libraries, which will be the subject of a future post.) 

Our streets are paved with literary gold. Yet it seems we don’t realize it. Is one of the conditions of living in El Dorado that we must be unaware of it?

Let me know what you think. Do you agree we’re entering the Golden Age of Books? I’d love to hear your reason(s) why or why not.

Boovies Take 2

Awed, humbled, inspired—does that begin to tell you how I feel after reading the hundreds of comments on Let’s Go to the Boovies?

It reinforced my oft-made comment that Levenger customers are the real who’s who of America—authors, teachers, screenwriters, poets, and all sorts of other brainy people with buckets of talent. Thanks to all for your postings.

Do you know what you’ve done? Together you’ve skewered one old misconception that badly deserved it—namely, that it’s a rare thing to find a movie as good as the book it came from.

Contrary to popular opinion, boovies (my term for that cultural star formed when both the book and the movie are good, if not great) are not rare. There are scores and scores of them.

Of course, people can, and do, disagree about whether the book or the movie is better; these are lively, interesting discussions. But more important is that both art forms, though different, are worth experiencing.

That brings me to the question I have for you—two actually:
1.    Have you ever read a book after seeing the movie?
2.    If so, would you comment on the experience?

Wishing you good reading—and good viewing,

Steve

Bibliotheca Alexandrina—Library to the World

Click here for more photos  

 

We had been warned about the fog. Yet we left anyway at 8:00 am from a cloudy Cairo for our three-hour drive northwest to Alexandria.  It was our only day to visit the library.

And treacherous it would have been, had our driver not slowed our van to a crawl in the nearly impenetrable fog. But the six of us were all the more delighted when we emerged at seaside Alexandria into brilliant sunshine.

My family was there to have lunch with officials and then tour this shining jewel in Egypt’s crown—the new Bibliotheca Alexandria, which was born by Egyptian presidential decree to fully live up to the legend of its ancient namesake.  Mike Keller, head of the libraries at Stanford and one of the board members of the new library,  had arranged our visit. He had told me it was a spectacular place but no description could have prepared us for the scale and majesty of what we saw.

The buildings, perched on the shore of the Mediterranean, look as though  they were transported from a World of Tomorrow. The more we learned of what was inside the stunning architecture, the more awed we became.

Sohair F. Wastawy, Chief Librarian, and Noha Adly, Director of Technology, greeted us warmly. Being Friday, the library was closed for prayers until the afternoon, which gave us time to lunch at a Greek restaurant across the crescent bay, right next to the site of the famed Alexandria lighthouse, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World.

Yet it was the library of Alexandria, launched in 295 BCE by Ptolemy I, that left the grander legacy. It was part academy, part research center, and part library that drew scholars from around the ancient world. At its height it contained as many as 700,000 scrolls. 

The library disappeared gradually. One episode was an accidental fire in 48 BCE during the Alexandrian War of Julius Caesar. To make up for the loss, Marc Anthony gave Cleopatra 200,000 scrolls.

The arrival of Christianity and subsequent Roman persecutions and schisms in the church made Alexandria a dicey place for a universal library dedicated to science and learning. In 391 CE, Emperor Theodosius banned all religions other than Christianity. In 645 CE, the Muslim conqueror Caliph Omar effectively did the same in the name of Allah.

Beyond accidental and deliberate destruction, as Matthew Battles has written, “centuries happened” to the library. Gradually the ancient Greek scrolls became incomprehensible to readers. Five centuries was, and still is, a long time for a library to last.

The new Bibliotheca Alexandrina is a chance to begin again with a library “Born Digital,” as librarian Ismail Serageldin says. It is to be a library not only to Egypt, but to humanity. It’s hard to imagine a more noble cause..

The library’s original site is now submerged a few kilometers out to sea from the present shore, yielding up its treasures to underwater archeology. I’ll take you there, virtually, in future reports.