Windshield Replacement Reading List

For reasons too complicated to explain, I find myself in the Fort Wayne, Indiana branch of a major autoglass replacement chain. Here are my reading choices:

Guns and Ammo - April 2010
American Rifleman - 5 issues, July 2009 through January 2010
Handy - 3 issues, Aug/Sept 2009 through Dec 2009/Jan 2010
Car and Driver - April 2011
Family Circle - August 2008
Woman's Day - March 2009
Fort Wayne Living - Nov 2010-Jan 2011
Fort Wayne Business People - 2 issues, February and March 2011
Planning Your Wedding, 2011 supplement to Fort Wayne Business People

Bourbon Trail Day One

For my spring break vacation this year I decided to head towards Kentucky and learn all I could about bourbon as I hit as many distilleries as I could find and talk my wife into enduring. Since I knew they would all blend together like a fine whiskey I knew I has to post some notes while I still had distinct memories.

Distillery	Buffalo Trace	Wild Turkey	Four Roses
Giant Conglomerate Which Actually Owns The Distillery	Sazerac Company A privately-held and family-operated alcoholic beverages company with headquarters in New Orleans	Campari	Kirin Brewery Company of Japan They kept telling us that Four Roses is the top brand of bourbon in Japan
Photo Of Me Doing Something Silly
Grounds	Gorgeous rolling pastures on the way in to a quaint but kinda crowded working area. It's a little surprising how free visitors are to wander around.	A huge complex sprawling all over the landscape. The area is so big that a tour van is needed to get around to the different areas.	Done is Spanish Mission style, the building look less like an industrial plant than a overly busy Mexican style resort.
Pre-Tour Movie	Ten minutes going over the distilling process in a theater room decorated with old-timey equipment.	A five minute show in a stuffy gallery overlooking the mash pots featuring the ancient brewmaster and his son who has been waiting for dad to keel over for 30 years so he could get a promotion.	Fifteen minute film in the tasting area which was surprisingly informative even after two previous distillery tours.
Production Area Tour Bourbon is made by malting and then distilling a mixture of grains which must be at least 50% corn. The distilling process also has odd arcane rules.	None. To see the production area, you have to take the Hard Hat Tour which requires reservations days to weeks in advance.	Wild Turkey has just built a brand-new shiny state of the art building with double the capacity of its old plant. I mean brand-new. They were still paving the roads to it and painting the stair railings. Most everything is looked at through windows but they do let you up close to the fermenters to stare in.	The most up close and personal tour. The aging equipment is front and center and you can reach out and touch nearly everything.
Storage The other crucial definitive aspect of bourbon is that it MUST be barrel aged in virgin white oak for at least four years.	Since they don't let you see the production you linger a long time in the warehouse which is very interesting in its own right. The rows and rows of barrels are mind boggling and its fun reading the dates and labels on all the barrels.	The Wild Turkey warehouses dot the landscape like 2001 monoliths. The one you tour goes back to the 1880s and smells like it too. It overlooks the recently abandoned original factory so it is also a great photo op.	The bourbon is barreled, aged, and bottled at a different site, but they do have photos of their single story warehouses which they claim result in more consistent flavors than the seven-story behomoths of their competitors, which oddly have two warehouses on Four Roses grounds.
Bottling and Labeling Bourbons would all just be fancy brown booze if there weren't cool labels and improbable stories about the founders for the fancy shaped bottles.	You are allowed to wander up and down the filling station line while about a dozen employees process and fill the small batch specialty bottles. They are friendly and fun. While we were there they spilled about half a barrel of aged bourbon all over the floor.	All the bottling is done at the main corporate bottling plant in Arkansas. You can see the giant tanker trucks leaving the site.	Also done off-site. But from a branding perspective there are roses everywhere.
Tasting There is no reason to go to a distillery if you aren't going to get to sample the goods.	They let you taste the "white dog" or unaged undiluted moonshine before it becomes sellable bourbon. They then let you taste a small batch and a single barrel variety but not the super-aged expensive stuff. They also have a bourbon cream which makes Baileys taste like haf-and-half.	They let you try any two of six flavors. My wife and I mixed and matched to get four total. The most interesting was the super-sweet American Honey style.	Four Roses only sells three varieties, an 80 proof blended, a 90 proof small batch, and a 100 proof single barrel. You get to taste all three and the pours are generous. For four bucks you can keep the tasting glass.
Gift Shop	They had buffaloes on everything imaginable and a few things unimaginable. A lot of trinkets and geegaws and even food, but surprisingly little booze. We got a bottle of the bourbon cream since that isn't sold nationally yet and a case of bourbon jam for gifts.	The gift shop tour center is an old-fashioned building all off on its own with lots of tee shirts edging towards the trashy side. For gifts I got two sets of three packs featuring their premium brands.	Four Roses had the classiest selection of accessories and books. The small bottles of the the Small Batch were a little pricey but nice.
Tour Highlights There is a lot of repetition to the shpiels and patters from each tour, but they each do a good job getting across what is unique about their brands approach to making a product which is rather tightly defined.	As a mid-sized distillery this had a nice mix of folksiness and scale. They people were all super-friendly, but the Hard Hat Tour really needs to be less hard to get.	The size of this operation is stunning. It is a huge operation closer to an oil refinery than a moonshiner's still. And the contrast between the brand new factory and the rickety old warehouses is intriguing.	For getting an up-close look at the process this plant can't be beat. Not only is this the most intimate tour, the equipment has a great patina to it.

You can really learn all you ever need to know about bourbon and any one of these tours but each had a cool unique aspect which made glad I went to each one. Plus the samples are always nice.

BooksFirst - January 2011

Books Bought
The Complete Works of Jane Austen (Kindle)
The Complete Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy (Kindle)
Penrod by Booth Tarkington (Kindle)
The Magnificent Ambersons by Booth Tarkington (Kindle)
Tears Of A Clown by Dana Milbank

Books Read
Penrod by Booth Tarkington
Star Island by Carl Hiaasen
Zero History by William Gibson
Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen
Life, The Universe And Everything by Douglas Adams

Books Heard
Inferno by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon

Comments

To get National Just Read More Novels Month off to a brisk start I quickly read Penrod, a short novel by Booth Tarkington that I had bought for the Kindle because Roger Ebert tweeted that it was only 99 cents, presumably because the book is in the public domain. Penrod Schofield is the titular boy who has a series of adventures from about a century ago. Splitting the historical space between Tom Sawyer and the Our Gang movies, this is the small town America that everybody always gets so nostalgic for.

The adventures which are fairly episodic with no real narrative arc do overlap and have recurring characters. The hijinks are humorous and only center around Penrod trying to pull something off on somebody. He scams his way out of a dance class recital. He tricks the town dandy into drinking an awful concoction. He third wheels the wooing of his sister's suitor only to have the same happen to him by the younger brother of the girl he is sweet on.

Also indicative of times in which the tales are set, there is some casual racism which would be deemed offensive by today's standards. But the two neighbor African-American kids hold their own and the primary antagonists in the stories are class-based, not ethnic. There is some bullying which is the closest the stories get to something of contemporary concern. Still, the stories are sweet without being cloying and an interesting window into the mores of the past.

I am a huge fan of Carl Hiaasen and deliberately saved up Star Island for NaJuReMoNoMo. With twelve novels and three 'young adult' books under his belt, Hiaasen is the reigning master of the whacky-Florida genre which he practically invented. Star Island casts its sights a little wider with the main character being the publicity double of a troubled singing starlet. This allows Hiaasen to ridicule the celebrity industrial complex as well as the usual excesses of South Florida.

Cherry Pye is a talentless barely legal singer whose primary occupations are scoring guys and scoring drugs, often simultaneously. Her Dina Lohan-ish mother in deep denial about her daughter's destructive behavior is self-aware enough to hire Ann DeLusia to make public appearances when Cherry can't. When a sleazy-by-even-paparazzi-standards photographer decides to snatch Ms Pye and gets Ann by mistake the usual Hiaasen hilarity ensues.

Part of the problem with the story is that it is impossible to outflank Hollywood on the crazy side. Cherry Pye who is an unholy amalgam of Britney Spears and Lindsey Lohan doesn't even approach some of the better known real-life rocketing off the rails actual celebrities habitually indulge in.

And it wouldn't be Hiaasen if there weren't whacky minor characters. Perhaps indicating how often he has gone to the well, The Former Governor Known As Skink shows up suspiciously conveniently a few too many times. A bodyguard with a weedwhacker prothesis seems like a refugee from a far grittier Elmore Leonard novel.

And despite the general low intellectual level of all the characters, even the smart ones keep doing ridiculously stupid things just to keep the plot churning along. The book is far from bad, but like Cherry Pye's stage act, at points Hiaasen seems to just be going through the motions.

My other must-read this month was the third installment in William Gibson's Bigend saga, Zero History. The history in this case being that of Milgram, a character from Spook Country (reviewed here). Also returning is Hollis Henry, the punk rock frontwoman turned writer. The macguffin in this novel is a brand of clothing so cool you have to be invited to be allowed to wear it.

Set mostly in London with side excursions to Paris, the novel follows the trail of trendsetters and fashion forward hipsters. As with most Gibson novels, the heroes are up against forces they can barely even recognize let alone deal with. While that adds to the suspense of the novel, the Big Picture never gets revealed to the end. And even then it's a little tough to fathom who did what to whom and why.

But that is hardly the point. Gibson is a master of imagery and he doesn't fail to impress here. Like Bigend's suit which is too blue to view on a computer, Gibson's prose is too poetic to describe. There is a mood that pervades the book.


I have seen just about every version of a Jane Austen novel filmed in the last quarter century, but inexplicably I have only read Pride and Prejudice. To remedy the situation, I dove into the similarly alliterative Sense and Sensibility. While not as famous as its sibling, the tale of the Dashwood girls as they make their way in society is perhaps more encompassing of the times. Set about a hundred years before Penrod, the world of English society seems so much more foreign. The culture of manners and thinly veiled civility is astoundingly different from contemporary society.

The enduring appeal of Austen owes as much to her rapier wit as it does to the romantic storylines. The rationalizations John Dashwood must engage to pauperize his step-mother and half-sisters viciously funny. And the various matrons who serve as the gatekeepers to society are always delightfully daffy. While the romantic outcomes are not hard to discern to even those who haven't seen several film versions, the twists and setback are ever so entertaining.

It has been over twenty five years since I read Pride and Prejudice and I am resolved to pick up the pace so I can complete the Austen oeuvre in less than a century.

I have been flying far more briskly through a more modern quintet of books, having finally completed Life, The Universe and Everything, the third novel in the rather inaccurately named Hitchhiker's Guide trilogy. (See my earlier reviews of The Restaurant at the End of the Universe here.) The forward of the book gives some history of the series and casually inserts that this volume is the one with no connection to previous radio or television versions and it shows. And not to its favor.

Arthur Dent, Ford Prefect (who I now realize is a pun completely lost on my American model) and Zaphod Beeblebrox once again save the universe, this time against the robots of the planet Krikket. And while I assume that greater familiarity with the peculiarly British sport of cricket would make the humour funnier, it's not an effort I'm willing to endure.

The plot is flimsy and arbitrary even by Hitchhiker's Guide standards and the enduring geek culture touchstones are few and far between. I invested in the Kindle version of the complete series because the cost was less than the three book I still had to read purchased separately. Let's hope that wasn't money wasted.

I am a big fan of Larry Niven and less so of his frequent collaborator Jerry Pournelle. I saw the both of them a few years ago at Balticon and watching them in person revealed a lot about how their personalities mesh in their writing style. Niven is the Idea man and Pournelle is the story guy. However, for the most part, I don't know who did what for Inferno, their update on Dante's trip through Hell.

In this version, cynical agnostic science fiction writer Allen Carpentier awakes from a premature accidental death to be met by his guide through the underworld. The conceit of the book is that Allen keeps trying to interpret the theology of Dante through the prism of science fiction tropes.

And like how Dante populated his Hell with the people he hated in real life, Niven and Pournelle take the time to take a few potshots as well. While not named, Kurt Vonnegut is abused for his inventing of satiric religions as well as for his refusal to embrace his reputation as a science fiction writer. In Vonnegut's defense, he famously said that the problem with being put in a drawer marked 'science fiction' is that so many critics mistake it for a urinal.

Vonnegut at least gets off easier than L. Ron Hubbard who is encased in a much deeper circle. Published in 1976, some of the politics and science discussed in the trek has not traveled well. The Cold War harangues about missile defenses seem quaint now, although to their credit, a space shuttle disaster episode was prescient.

The theology, however, is timeless and did pique my curiosity about the original, just not enough to make me want to read it.

Another audiobook I picked mostly for its ability to be listened to in a single business trip was The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon. Told in the first person through a teenager who is clearly on the deeper end of the Autism Spectrum (although that word is never used in the book), Christopher is a high-functioning math and science savant with negligible social skills. When he stumbles across the murdered dog of his neighbor who accuses him of doing it, he seeks to find the real killer.

The real purpose is to show him interacting with his neighbors and teachers as well as dealing with the loss of his mother from two years earlier. What he finds in his inquiry pushes him well out of his comfort zone both physically and emotionally. While not wholly medically accurate, the writing style is a tour de force with a peculiarly precise narrative style full of idiosyncratic repetitions and phrasings. The character's understanding of math and science seems very accurate and illuminates much of his thinking and acting.

Guess The Golden Globes

I've been snickering at the phrase 'Golden Globes' since Drew Barrymore wore this dress way back in 2006. Last year I featured Mariah Carey and Christina Hendricks. But this year the amount of pulchritude on parade defied definition. So to see how many of you keep your eyes on the prize, I have developed the Golden Globes Quiz. Just match the celebrity with her hooters and you can declare yourself the master of the red carpet. Maybe next year I will do quiz where you have to guess the celeb by the size of their shoes. Naaah.

1. Halle Berry	a.
2. January Jones	b.
3. Sofia Vergara	c.
4. Christina Aguliera	d.
5. Eva Longoria	e.

And just to double down on the silliness of this post, this year we also have the Baby Bump Division. Match these preggers celebs with their belly.

6. Natalie Portman	f.
7. Jane Krakowski	g.

Just leave your guesses in comments or give your own fashion advice.

BooksFirst - November December 2010

Books Bought
40: A Doonesbury Retrospective by Garry Trudeau
The Accidental Billionaire by Ben Mezrich
The Facebook Effect by David Kirkpatrick

Books Read
Little Brother by Cory Doctorow
The Accidental Billionaires by Ben Mezrich
The Facebook Effect by David Kirkpatrick
Googled by Ken Auletta
Scott Pilgrim series by Bryan Lee O'Malley

Books Heard
At Home by Bill Bryson
Tell-All by Chuck Palahniuk

Comments

Back in October, I saw The Social Network, the movie about Time Magazine Person of the Year Mark Zuckerberg. The movie is based fairly faithfully on The Accidental Billionaires by Ben Mezerich, the author of Bringing Down the House, a book I had previously enjoyed. Since the screenplay was by Aaron Sorkin, I also wanted to see what he brought to the screen which wasn't in the book. Based on just the plot, the two stories cover most of the same timeline and events although sometimes in different order. In particular, the book is far more narratively linear than the movie. Also, the invented dialog is more explicitly noted in the book and lacks those Sorkin oratorical flourishes.

The basic theme is still intact. Zuckerberg is a driven brilliant Harvard undergrad who sees the outgrowth of some of his programming pranks as being The Next Big Thing. Along the way, he crosses the likes of the Winklevoss twins, a pair of preternaturally preening wealthy and connected scullers who come off as not too bright and easily duped. Their conflict with Zuckerberg highlights that even in the rarified air of Harvard, there are hierarchies and cliques.

Another major character is Eduardo Saverin who provided initial funding for Facebook but got eased out in favor of Napster cofounder Sean Parker. Saverin was a major source for the book, but he is not portrayed completely sympathetically. He was clearly far less dedicated to Facebook in its important gestation period than Zuckerberg as well as Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes, who are essentially ignored in this telling of the Facebook origin story.

The book is fast-paced and breezy even if does take a lot of short-cuts with the story and relies perhaps a little too much on reconstructed events. But it is still a thrilling read full of fascinating details about the personalities that built the world's most popular website.

A far more journalistic approach is taken in The Facebook Effect. David Kirkpatrick had a ton of access to Facebook and its employees and it shows. The first three chapters cover the same territory as Accidental Billionaires. Despite the shorter length of this section, it has a greater level of detail and covers the events in slightly greater verisimilitude. Reading both books back to back causes some mental whiplash as the same incidents are told slightly different ways.

The middle section of the book covers the phenomenal growth of Facebook and the growing pains of the website. Each change in the interface created its own problems and controversies. But as Kirkpatrick explains, after initial protests, users accept them and go back to mindlessly updating their statuses. The book also details the financial deals that financed the rapid expansion and how Zuckerberg fought to maintain as much control as possible. During all this the site remains very much the product of its founder. His views on how and what a social network should be drive the company.

Where the books fails is when it tries to paint the bigger picture. While privacy issues are discussed, they tend to get brushed off. And while there is a lot made of the cultural revolution Facebook is causing, it all seems a little glib and shallow. There is a cheerleader aspect to the hype about how Facebook is changing the world. The book reads just a little too much like Zuckerberg friended Kirkpatrick.

Far more nuanced is Ken Auletta's corporate biography of Google, The Next To Latest Big Thing. Google is obviously another game-changing website created by fanatically dedicated college students. Also enjoying astounding access, Auletta subtitles Googled as "The End of the World as We Know It". He makes the strong case for Google being a transformative technology which has shaken entire industries. Being an ink-stained wretch, Auletta focuses particularly hard on how Google is redefining the landscape of media companies with search commoditzing news and internet ads supplanting traditional advertising.

A lot of time is also spent describing how the culture of the company affects the philosophy of the products and services. It's a very warts-and-all look at the company. The three leaders of the company, founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin as well as CEO Eric Schmidt, have distinctive personalities which drive the company. A major observation which I have noticed anecdotally is a reliance on technology. Here is a company that is based on the supremacy of the algorithm. The Google faith in formulas drives both the search engine and the ancillary projects.

Despite being only a year old, the book already shows signs of being dated and being overtaken by events. Facebook, which recently overtook Google in pageviews, is only mentioned in passing. Much is made of how AdSense revolutionized advertising by paying on a per-click basis while The Faebook Effect credits the micro-targeting scheme used by Facebook as being far more valuable to advertisers. Also, the possible impact of Google's Android cellphone operating system was largely hypothetical at the time of printing, but has been one of the major tech stories of the past year.

But of the three tech-related books in this wrap-up, Googled is the most detailed and nuanced. While it sometimes strays from Google itself, it does a much better job of explaining the impact, both for good and otherwise, of a website which truly has changed the world.

Also trumpeting the transformative effect of technology on society is Little Brother by tech evangelist Cory Doctorow. Written to a young adult audience, this short and quickly paced novel envisions the aftermath of San Francisco under the jackboots of TSA thugs after a 9/11 style terrorist attack.

The protagonist is Marcus Yallow, the world's most capable teen-aged hacker with skilz that would make a Heinleinian hero look like a bumbling incompetent. After being unreasonably detained by the cardboard evil federal agents, he starts a techno-based underground resistance movement. From there he takes on the evil government and wins the girl and saves the world. Oops, spoiler alert.

The book is prone to long stretches of exposition on both technology, real or imagined, and a particularly Randian information-wants-to-free political philosophy. Even for a book aimed at the teen market, this book is astoundingly nuance free. Everybody is either a brilliant individualist or a tool or a dupe or worse. The book is patronizing and superior both at the same time. Doctorow is proselytizing to the pews.

Another book that has been made into a movie is the Scott Pilgrim series. Really six separate graphic novels, it tells one continuous story of Scott Pilgrim as he fights his girlfriend Ramona's seven evil ex-boyfriends. But the boyfriends are just a narrative framework for Scott to go on a journey of self-discovery. He has to learn how to be an adult. And he makes a lot of mistakes as he does it. Along the way he faces down his ex-girlfriends as well.

Bryan Lee O'Malleypeppers the book with really interesting minor characters who are often more interesting than the titular hero. The books are also mockingly self-aware and the Canadian setting is nicely used. My favorite book in the series is Volume 4, Scott Pilgrim Gets It Together, which he does humorously and with great bravado.

As a graphic novel it has a clean sharp style. It's got great stylized flight scenes and some surprisingly moving effects. My one quibble is that Kim and Ramona look just alike enough to be confusing. I haven't seen the movie, but my gut instinct is that Michael Cera can't possibly be as cool as the print version of Scott Pilgrim.

It's been a while since I've listened to audio books but I've had several long car trips recently so it was time to get back in the groove. I had previously listened to Bill Bryson's Thunderbolt Kid, so I gave his new book, At Home, a go. The conceit is that Bryson uses items and rooms around his house in the British countryside as taking off points for various long essays about the inventions and innovations of the last couple of hundred years.

Being a British country home, the stories tend to be rather Anglocentric with lots of looney English lords and eccentric nutballs. In fact, Bryson describes how the Church of England's method of appointing parsons and vicars all but guaranteed that a good many of them would be totally off their rockers. A lot of the little historical tales focus on events from the 18th and 19th century when England was at the top of its game when it came to both conspicuous consumption and harrowing class division.

And life in The Isles which is perhaps meant to come off as charming and whacky ends up looking rather Hobbesian (in the philosophical sense, not the imaginary stuffed tiger style), that is to say nasty, brutish and short. Bryson offhandedly exposes a lot of hypocrisy inherent in the age. Which makes me wonder how future light-hearted essayists are going to portray our manners and customs.

While traveling this summer some of my companions could not get enough of Pygmy by gonzo novelist Chuck Palahniuk. So when I saw his latest novel, Tell-All, at the library and snatched it up. It really wasn't what I was expecting, but it was mesmerizing none the less. Told from the point of view of a longtime employee of a mid-twentieth century film idol who makes Elizabeth Taylor look both sane and monogamous, it is a jazz-like riff on fame and power. I say 'jazz-like' because the book is full of all sorts of verbal themes and repeated phrases, each a little different from the previous one.

For example, the narrator Hazel "Hazie" Coogan starts many chapters with a list of jobs she is NOT, despite the fact those are clearly things she does. Another rather psychedelic running motif is the derring-do of Lillian Hellman which starts out ridiculously absurd and then get even more implausible.

The tell-all being told is about aging film actress Katherine "Miss Kathie" Kenton who is constantly manipulated by Hazie. There is an odd co-dependence between the two that ultimately becomes very twisted when a new suitor for the multiply married Miss Kathie appears on the scene.

Palahniuk is an amazing prose stylist with absurd imagery and astoundingly precise wit aimed at even the incidental elements, but something tells me this isn't his best work. Still, I am dying to read more to get a better feel for this very deranged and delightful author.

National Just Read More Novels Month 2011

It's hard to believe it has been five years since the first ever National Just Read More Novels Month (or NaJuReMoNoMo for the abbrevophillic) and it has grown bigger every year. Celebrated every January, it is devoted to the appreciation of fiction. Just in case you are new to it or need a refresher, here is this year's version of the official rules:

1. Must Be A Novel. Works of fiction only, please. Memoirs, non-fiction, how-to books, and Doonesbury collections, no matter how thick, don't count, no matter how obviously fictional.
2. Memoirs Aren't Novels. No matter how made up the story, anything ostensibly true isn't a novel. This used to be known as The James Frey Rule, but is now called the Decision Point.
3. Start and Finish in January. I guess if you got some cool books for Christmas, Hanukkah or some other gift-giving event and jumped the gun, you can't be blamed. But I only count books I start and finish within the 31 day window.
4. Re-reading Doesn't Count. Try something new. Read something by your favorite author or try an entirely new author. This is a great chance to cut down on the height of the nightstand stack.
5. Have Fun. Nobody is grading you or paying you or judging you. Read what you like and like what you read.

Last year we started the Facebook group, which anyone can join. It has several dozen members and it just keep growing.

This year NaJuReMoNoMo is expanding to Twitter. Anytime you finish a novel, just tweet about it with the hashtag #NaJuReMoNoMo.Someone will be curious enough to try to figure it out.

In the past, people have claimed to not have enough notice about the start, so I am posting this a few days early so you can clear the decks and get those novels ready to be read at the stroke of midnight on New Years. It only takes one novel to declare yourself a winner.

As always we have a fine selection of badges and logos which can be downloaded from Photobucket or just swiped from this page.



And have a great month of reading.

Yes, Virginia

"DEAR EDITOR: I am 8 years old.
"Some of my little friends say there is no Santa Claus.
"Papa says, 'If you see it in THE SUN it's so.'
"Please tell me the truth; is there a Santa Claus?




"VIRGINIA O'HANLON.
"115 WEST NINETY-FIFTH STREET."



VIRGINIA, your little friends are wrong. They have been affected by the skepticism of a skeptical age. They do not believe except [what] they see. They think that nothing can be which is not comprehensible by their little minds. All minds, Virginia, whether they be men's or children's, are little. In this great universe of ours man is a mere insect, an ant, in his intellect, as compared with the boundless world about him, as measured by the intelligence capable of grasping the whole of truth and knowledge.



Yes, VIRGINIA, there is a Santa Claus. He exists as certainly as love and generosity and devotion exist, and you know that they abound and give to your life its highest beauty and joy. Alas! how dreary would be the world if there were no Santa Claus. It would be as dreary as if there were no VIRGINIAS. There would be no childlike faith then, no poetry, no romance to make tolerable this existence. We should have no enjoyment, except in sense and sight. The eternal light with which childhood fills the world would be extinguished.



Not believe in Santa Claus! You might as well not believe in fairies! You might get your papa to hire men to watch in all the chimneys on Christmas Eve to catch Santa Claus, but even if they did not see Santa Claus coming down, what would that prove? Nobody sees Santa Claus, but that is no sign that there is no Santa Claus. The most real things in the world are those that neither children nor men can see. Did you ever see fairies dancing on the lawn? Of course not, but that's no proof that they are not there. Nobody can conceive or imagine all the wonders there are unseen and unseeable in the world.



You may tear apart the baby's rattle and see what makes the noise inside, but there is a veil covering the unseen world which not the strongest man, nor even the united strength of all the strongest men that ever lived, could tear apart. Only faith, fancy, poetry, love, romance, can push aside that curtain and view and picture the supernal beauty and glory beyond. Is it all real? Ah, VIRGINIA, in all this world there is nothing else real and abiding.



No Santa Claus! Thank God! he lives, and he lives forever. A thousand years from now, Virginia, nay, ten times ten thousand years from now, he will continue to make glad the heart of childhood.



These photos were taken of the window displays at the Macy's on 34th Street and Herald Square in New York City. The full set of photos can be found here.

Why I Hate The Facebook BBC 100 Books Meme

There is a meme (in the 'internet silly game' meaning of the word, not the Richard Dawkins 'fundamental idea of civilization' meaning) going around the internet and on Facebook in particular which goes something like this:

Have you read more than 6 of these books? The BBC believes most people will have read only 6 of the 100 books listed here…

Instructions: Copy this into your NOTES.

Bold those books you’ve read in their entirety.

Italicize the ones you started but didn’t finish or read only an excerpt.

Tag other book nerds. Tag me as well so I can see your responses! (Or not.) Feel free to add comments too.

It has even become a Facebook app where you can click off your list and then compare yourself to your FB friends. I have grown to despise this list on several levels. Every time it circles around, I hate it even more. Here are but a few of the reasons:

1. The BBC had nothing to do with the list. The closest the BBC has come to doing a list like this is their Big Read from 2003 which has many, but not all of these books on their list. The Big Read was a write-in poll to determine Britain's best loved book. The Lord of the Rings came in first, followed by Pride and Prejudice. No quibble there. But this is not that list.
   
   
2. The actual list is from a UK Guardian listicle published in 2007 titled "Books you can't live without: the top 100". I guess whoever started this as a meme thought the BBC had a greater Appeal To Authority.
   
   
3. There is no explanation of how this list was compiled. If there were a companion article in the Guardian explaining how it was arrived at, it has been lost to the internet. With no methodology it's just a random list of books.
   
   
4. Nobody EVER said most people have only read six. Not the Guardian, not the BBC, not anybody except whoever unleashed this meme on the world. This is a frustrating gimmick meant to raise the interest of the reader and make them feel good they are better than 'most people'. In fact, it is a particularly low bar. If you survived high school you are likely to have doubled that number.
   
   
5. The list includes series as single works (Shakespeare, Narnia, Harry Potter, The Faraway Tree). If The Little Prince counts as one, why do you have to read the entire Bible?
   
   
6. There are also individual books in these series listed separately, such as The Fellowship of the Ring, The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe, and Hamlet, thus double counting them.
   
   
7. The quality of the list is astoundingly uneven. There are some real stinkers that made the cut. Some of the dreck that made the list I have read (The DaVinci Code) but there is no way anybody is ever convincing me The Five People You Meet In Heaven should ever be read by anybody.
   
   
8. It's an odd, odd list. A good chunk of it is traditional Western Canon full of Dead White Men (plus Jane Austen and the Bronte Sisters). Another part is childhood favorites, that is if you were raised by a nanny in a English manor house. And another big chunk is contemporary middlebrow 'serious' literature like you find on the 3-for-2 table in any BigBoxOfBooks. There is just no theme or rhyme or reason to the hodgepodge. The list is both too broad and too specific.
   
   
9. There are books I have never heard of on this list. I spend a lot of time in bookstores. One of my favorite games is to find the back-to-school or summer-reading-list table and see how many I have read. I usually do pretty well, but I have never run across Swallows and Amazons. Wikipedia tells me it is the first book in a British series that dates to 1930. News to me.
   
   
10. The list is getting increasingly tattered. I've seen a couple of sub-variations of the list with different books substituted. The current version, even the one that has become a Facebook app, has a lot of misspellings which have crept in from going too many times through the virtual Xerox machine. A list with the authors' names misspelled is just embarrassing.
    
    
11. There is no Kurt Vonnegut on the list. This is a serious omission. Given the very British roots of it, it's understandable that it is highly Anglo-centric, but any list of a hundred anything without Slaughterhouse Five on it has no credibility.
    
    
12. Memes just annoy me. But that is a rant for another day. Of particular help to me in building up a steam of hate for this one was a very good entry on the PurpleCar blog entitled How Do Memes Start? A Case Study: 100 Books in Facebook.

And in case you think this is all sour grapes, I have read 27+/- (depending on how you count things and how good my memory is) of them, which is perfectly respectable. But at my rather languid reading pace nowadays, my time is precious and I'm not going to go 'birding' just to increase my score on a particularly vapid Facebook meme. I have enough unread books in my house to last me at least five years and maybe ten of these books on the list are somewhere in the to-read pile, but I'm probably not getting to them anytime soon. I read what I want to read because life is too short.

Far more interesting to me is this list which really is from the BBC of the books people claim to have read but really haven't. I've read three on that list. No, nine. Yes, it's nine.

BlatantCommentWhoring™: Stupid Top 100 Book Memes: Harmless Fun or Pretentious Annoyance?

Updated 8:15 a.m.: Changed the title.