Monday, June 25, 2012

Books #18, #19, and #20

The reading this year comes in fits and starts. I’m bored by books for the first time in my life. More later about this?
  I read this on the Kindle Fire (and iPad3). I like the way the book was formatted to focus on one frame at a time if you choose, or the entire page. It’s interesting to read V for Vendetta as a first-timer after seeing OWS and Adbusters use the Guy Fawkes mask to such effect. Will the radical change of consciousness Chomsky believes necessary before an anarchist revolution actually occur, or are we too distracted and complacent even now? I fear we’re going to have to deplete the Earth even further before we can make positive change.
  Got this for my classroom library. YAWN. The characters are boring and predictable types, the supernatural aspects of the story are tired cliches, and the art was uninteresting. Kids who hate reading might like it, which is all that matters I suppose.

  Picked up a donated copy for the classroom library and read it on a whim. It was, after all, one of the books by which I can measure a good chunk of my near-decade as a bookseller. How many copies of this did I ring up? How often did I stack it at the Info Desk? Who knows? It wasn’t a bad book by any means, though at the time it was hot I had a snooty kind of attitude, something akin to “the Herd is reading this, it can’t be good.” As a descriptor of perennial truth it’s not too shabby. I wonder if the Celestine Prophecy is as good? Will I find out? Likely not.

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