The World through Publishing

Image from the International Publishers Association

As I continue to avoid reading (last night, I watched Bridesmaids), I have to find other book-related things to read. Since I refuse to post about how Lena Dunham (who I'd never heard of until last week) got a huge advance on her new advice book, I found this:

In an ongoing process to develop an algorithm to approximate the value of the publishing market in different countries, the International Publishers Association produced the above map to visually illustrate the distribution of publishing across the world. They started with the numbers (total sales, number of new titles, etc) and then asked industry professionals to evaluate those findings. The final map came from additional analysis, including things like export statistics and if there's a correlation between a country's population and its publishing market.

Unsurprisingly, the US and Western Europe are largest, since they have not only large populations to buy books but also the majority of publishing houses. I was actually surprised that Southeast Asia has such a large presence - comparable to, if not more than, all of Africa. Also of note, Antartica needs to start a publishing house. :)

More information can be found here.

Disappearing books

I haven't had any time to read lately - been watching Season 2 of Sherlock. In place of a proper post, here's an article from The Atlantic about the implications making books "disappear" when plagiarism or other significant concerns about the validity of the content arise.

Kindles in Africa

I still don’t have an e-reader (add it to the list of new technologies I don’t adopt), but a program run by a former Amazon executive is working hard to get Kindles into schools in Ghana, Kenya and soon Rwanda. Almost a month ago, the New York Times ran an article about this project, which currently has 3500 Kindles in schools through the non-profit Worldreader. This got me thinking about whether or not such a program is a good idea.

Pros

There are several pros to such a program, but I think these are a few of the most important ones:

1. No trees are used. If we were to get one book to each of the seven billion people on the planet, that’s a lot of trees. E-readers allow us to cut down on this paper usage, although donating used copies of books would have the same effect on total paper usage.

2. About half of the books are either African textbooks or storybooks, which is great. It gives students an opportunity to explore literature written by fellow Africans and hopefully allows them access to more current textbooks than would otherwise be available.

3. Cheaper shipping. Actually, I don’t know if this is really true, but it seems like a reasonable assumption. We ship one Kindle, opening up access to potentially thousands of books. Shipping those thousands of books must surely cost more than shipping the Kindle, especially if you include textbooks.

4. Costs are subsidized. I don’t know how much of the cost is covered by the subsidies, but the website does say that books from African publishers are about $3.50 each.

5. Increased access to books can help increase literacy (I suppose, assuming that there are enough teachers to go around).

6. Kindles use low amounts of energy, and Worldreader helps find a solution in areas with unreliable power or no internet access, which could then be used for more than just charging Kindles and downloading books.

Cons

Some of the first concerns that occurred to me when I heard about the project were:

1. The potential for waste. Even though there are no trees used, what’s the environmental impact? Are there rare earth minerals in these units that are either hard to mine or difficult to dispose of? How are broken Kindles disposed of?

2. Kindles are made in China, so any jobs resulting from selling more Kindles will go to China. Similar problems exist when donating used books, and the availability of free used books could increase competition for local bookstores. On the other hand (and the Worldreader website mentions this), local jobs could be available if they train people locally to repair any broken Kindles.

3. Potential issues with licensing – what happens to the e-books if a publisher decides to withdraw from the program or if the non-profit closes? There should be something in place that ensures a permanent license to the books.

Wow, when I break it out that way, it’s pretty clear that the pros outweigh the cons (or else I’ve completely overlooked some key issues with the idea). Either way, I intend to keep an eye on this non-profit, since I strongly believe that education is key to reducing poverty.

The Defining Decade, by Meg Jay

Written after years of listening to people in their thirties and forties lament that they wasted their twenties, Meg Jay has written The Defining Decade: Why your twenties matter-and how to make the most of them now to argue that, unlike what everyone says, you shouldn’t waste your twenties. Instead, they are the foundational years of your adult life, and Jay focuses on three sections in particular: Work, Love, and Brain and the Body. With barely more than a year left in my twenties, I certainly haven’t wasted my twenties – I have a good job and I’m married – but I’m also putting off things like buying a house and having kids. And I still don’t really know what I want to do with my life. However, I thought the book could offer some valuable insight or, at least, I could recommend to my sister, who still has much of her twenties left. I’m going to focus on her section on work here, mostly because that’s the section that I connected to the most. However, the other sections are definitely worth reading – in Love, she offers many good suggestions on how to make the most of your dating life, regardless of how soon you want to marry. The last section focuses on fertility and making a broad timeline to make sure that you can do everything you want to in the amount of time you’ve left yourself.

Watching celebrities, media, and tv, one might think that someone in their twenties should be having the “time of her life.” However, Jay, a clinical psychologist focused on adult development, sees mostly twentysomethings (I’m using Jay’s word here) who find this decade to be “paralyzing” and “hard” (p. xiv). Unlike all earlier generations, twentysomethings now have an unprecedented opportunity to not go straight from school to marriage, kids and a nine-to-five job. And yet, with all this freedom comes an “unprecedented amount of uncertainty” (p. xxi). We end up lost, unsure what to do with our lives and often, before we realize it, the twenties are over and whole decade has been wasted. The first area in which the twenties are more important than we think is in our professional careers, which Jay separates into five separate components.

One of the first values of the twenties is that it’s an opportunity to develop identity capital. First described by Erik Erikson in 1950, identity capital is the personal assets (technical skills, communication skills, etc) that you bring to an employer. Spending your twenties in coffee shops or equivalent low-capital-building jobs “signal[s] to future employers a period of lostness” (p. 11). The twenties are also dangerous because we inherently spend most of our time with our strong ties – people who we know well and who are “too similar [to us] to provide more than sympathy” (p. 21). The problem is that most of our professional opportunities come through weak ties – people who we know, but not well.

Jay next tackles the idea of the unthought known, something that her clients already know – on some level – but haven’t admitted to either themselves or to others. Why does the idea remain unknown? It might be because her client just hasn’t realized what they want. However, there’s also a panic that comes with realizing that “my life is up to me.” By keeping the idea unknown, “not knowing what you want to do with your life is a defense against that terror” (p. 33).Once you have a plan, you have to act on it. As one of her clients says, “If I go for it and it fails, I will have spent it. That choice will be gone” (p. 40). How to find the unthought known? Ask yourself what you want to do if you don’t win the lottery (p. 37).

The last two aspects of work that Jay touches on are the influence of Facebook and the need for a customized life. Briefly, Facebook can be terrible for twentysomethings. It allows everyone to present a tailored version of them, so you often only see the happy side of their life. Furthermore, it keeps you posted on far more people than you would normally be able to track. It can feel like everyone is getting married, having a baby, or otherwise doing amazing things that you aren’t. In short, Facebook is a great way to feel inadequate about your life. Finally, for more and more twentysomethings, it’s more and more important to build a customized life. We don’t want a nine-to-five job; we want something unique. And the dread of landing a boring job prevents us from doing anything. However, while it’s easy to know what we don’t want, the challenge is really figuring out what we do want. Jay argues that in order to have a customized life, you need to start with standard parts (she uses a custom bike analogy here, which I actually think works really well).

Is it worth reading? For the most part, I’d say yes. Although I think she did a better job of explaining “why your twenties matter” than giving you concrete plans on how to get there without your own personal therapist, she brings up many ideas that are worth contemplating on your own. Although I didn’t get as much from this book as I was hoping, if you’re in your twenties, you can use her clients’ stories to look for reflections of yourself, which may be enough to trigger a more active approach to the rest of this important decade. If you’re beyond your twenties and still struggling to make a plan, the book is full of reasons to get on it.

Books of interest 1

It's the end of the month! I can't believe 2012 is already three-quarters of the way done. Here are the five books that I've come across in the past month that I think might be worth reading, along with any comments.

1. The Half-life of Facts, by Samuel Arbesman - I came across this because I was reading his Probability and Game Theory in The Hunger Games article. The book hasn't been published yet and there are no reviews, but the title intrigued me.

2. Jantsen's Gift by Pam Cope - I saw this recommended in the recent edition of Runner's World, and it got good reviews from Amazon as well.

3. The Geography of Bliss by Eric Weiner - I saw this at the local bookstore, and who doesn't want to learn where to find the happiest place on Earth?

4. The Art of Hearing Heartbeats by Jan-Phillipp Sendker - I found this at Costco early in the month, and added it to my list only because it said "Burma" on the back cover. A New York lawyer disappears without a trace, leaving his wife and daughter to figure out what happened to him.

5. My Life as Emperor by Su Tong - this one was recommended by the guy who wrote All the Flowers in Shanghai, which I hated. However, I have higher hopes for this book.

Wild, by Cheryl Strayed

If you want to find my polar opposite, someone like Cheryl seems a good place to start. She got married at 19 after a short relationship; when she was 22, she watched her mother die of cancer; she dropped out of school one paper shy of a degree; she dabbled in heroin (and possibly other drugs) after that; and she cheated on her spouse. Oh yeah, by 26 she was divorced and setting out on the Pacific Crest Trail, having never gone backpacking before. Despite our complete lack of similarity, I love this book (and I haven’t even finished it yet), which I first heard about from my uncle when we all went backpacking a few months ago. It has, of course, become wildly popular, was included on Oprah’s book club list, and as I write this, is #63 on Amazon’s Books Best Sellers list.

Before diving into why this book is awesome, I want to mention that I love the idea of hiking the PCT. Well, for the most part. The idea of traversing from Mexico to California on foot, covering the High Sierras among others, intrigues me. Less intriguing are details such as having to mail yourself resupply boxes along the PCT and, at least in certain parts, having to carry out your, um, waste (or so I’ve heard, but haven’t verified). I’ve done a lot of short backpacking trips, including lots in the Adirondacks and some in Yosemite, but never more than 2-3 nights. Even as a somewhat experienced backpacker, I wonder how I would survive a multi-month backpacking trip. Could I push through the blisters on my feet that would inevitably appear after a few days? How would I handle doing nothing but hiking day after day after day? The credit goes to Cheryl who, with no idea that most backpackers train intently for the PCT, chooses to make it her inaugural backpacking adventure.

One of my favorite things about this book is how well she blends in her hiking trip with the back stories of why she’s here. For example, early on in the book, she takes a break, removes her sock, and looks down at a black bruise on her ankle. We are transported back to her last trip to Portland, just before leaving for the PCT. She’s met up again with Joe, her heroin partner, and he’s looking for a vein in her arm. He can’t find one, asking for her ankle instead. The result of her final dance with heroin is the bruise on her ankle. She continues to do this – equally well, I might add – as the book continues. There’s the part where she talks about the condoms she brought on the PCT (who in the bleep does that?) and then transitions into a conversation with her therapist about how she’s like a guy when it comes to sex –completely “detached.”

Part of the success for her book comes from her ability to weave these stories into her trail experience. Her history is one that I think many would be likely to dismiss (I can see people thinking, “you were an addict, divorced a perfectly good husband, and then decided to hike the PCT with a pack you could hardly lift? Idiot” – and then putting the book down). However, but putting the focus on her experience hiking the PCT, she’s made herself into a character that you sympathize with and keeps her bouts of “woe is me” short and relevant. So yes, I quite liked this book, all except for one thing.

I think she messes up her chronology of the first few days of her hike. I, too, couldn’t believe it, but I’ve been through this a bunch and have no other conclusion. On p49, DAY ONE. She leaves her hotel (I believe midday, although I couldn’t find this referenced again) and hitches a ride with two Coloradoans to the PCT trailhead. She signs into the register. P51-57 is a flashback to when she thinks she’s pregnant (again, well written) and how she buys her copy of Pacific Crest Trail Volume 1: California. On p57 again, she references that she’s in a grove of “Joshua trees, yuccas, and junipers,” and also points out that she’s 1200 ft higher than she was at the start. On p59, she sees a sage plant that reminds her of her mother and gives up for the day at 4pm, even though she had intended to continue on farther. Chapter 5, p61, starts with DAY TWO. She wakes at dawn, stays in bed for an hour. She packs up, as she had done “the day before in the motel” and by noon, is over 6000 ft. She stops for lunch, falls asleep, and wakes up to rain two hours later. On p63, we’re in the “late afternoon and evening”, where she recounts seeing snow and appreciating the significance of climbing a mountain. She mentions that her “existence was beyond analogy, I realized on that second day on the trail,” confirming that we’re still on the second day. Then, on p64, chronological disaster strikes. We’re still on DAY TWO, but she realizes that it’s only been “little more than 48 hours since [her] goodbye to men who had given me a ride to the trail.” But it can’t be more than 48 hours – we’re only in DAY TWO. And we know this, because on p65, she stops for the night at 7pm, still not having reached Golden Oak Springs. She doesn’t reach Golden Oak Springs until a few hours into her third day, where she spends the night before venturing out on her fourth day on p67.

Is this really the end of the world? No, not at all. In fact, given that she took the hike in the mid-90s and the book was only published this year, I can’t imagine that there aren’t at least a few errors in recollection – although I will say that I have no proof of any such errors, and she does say that she kept a journal on her trip. It was mostly just disappointing that no one caught this discrepancy, and I post this mostly hoping that someone will correct me and prove me wrong. Even if it turns out that I’m right, the story is still worth reading, mostly because the many other errors she makes turn the book into an entertaining read. Better yet, rather than laughing at her, you’ll find yourself rooting for her at every turn, encouraging her to keep going and to discover in her journey whatever it is that she needs in order to find a better place than where she’s been since her mother died four years earlier.

All the Flowers in Shanghai, by Duncan Jepson

I...I...I, I, I..I...I. I hated this book, and I don't usually say that. I truly could not wait to finish it and forget about it. But first, the general plot line.

Feng is a young girl living in Shanghai during the 1930s. She is the second of two girls and written off by her middle-class parents, who are focused on securing a strong (ie, higher class) marriage for her sister. Freed from any responsibilities, she spends her days playing in a nearby garden where her grandfather teaches her the Latin names of flowers and gardens. She is the polar opposite of her sister, who wears make-up, dresses well, and is eager to do everything required to secure a good marriage. After finding a good suitor and going through all the wedding preparations, her sister dies. To save the family face, Feng must marry the suitor, who she's only met once. The story follows her life and how she copes with this unexpected and unwanted marriage.

I randomly picked this up at the library, based solely on the cover illustrations and the fact that I had loved Snow Flower and the Secret Fan, despite all its criticism about failing to properly represent Chinese culture and foot-binding. I saw the word "Shanghai" next to a woman's picture and thought, "wow, maybe this will be half as good as the Snow Flower one. Silly me.

My first complaint is the writing style. I really felt like every sentence started with "I". I this, I that, and I this, too. It led to a limited sense of self-reflection on the part of Feng, and made it hard to bond at all with the main character. And she needs the reader to bond with her in order to justify all of the annoying things she does. You spend half the time going "Would you please just talk to your husband?" and the other half sighing. She comes across as a self-centered spoiled brat, which is extra frustrating because she starts out the book as a down-to-earth child.

My other criticism is that the author fails to convince you that he (yes, it's a he) actually how a young Chinese woman in this situation would feel and behave. One problem with the fact that her parents had devoted all their energy to the older sister is that Feng has no understanding of sex. Now that she's married, she's supposed to give the family an heir, and her husband comes to her room nightly. As he understands her inexperience, he takes several nights before actually having intercourse, and these nights drag on and on, not only for Feng but also the reader. (This is the part where you scream "Why don't you just talk to your husband?") I understand that a Chinese woman back then might have had minimal exposure to sex, but the author does a terrible job convincing you that Feng truly doesn't even know what a penis is for. So instead you struggle through pages and pages, mostly pitying her husband. When she finally gets pregnant, it's a huge sigh of relief.

I may try Lisa See's Shanghai Girls later on, in hopes of getting a better reading of how Chinese women survived in Shanghai before the Cultural Revolution. But for now, I'm off to read something completely different.