Got another bike ride in today (and a walk too!). This time I got off the paved areas and did the Jordan's Branch trail at Bryan Park -- I'm happy that my biking seems to be stronger now than it has been -- I think the walking has definitely made my legs stonger!

***
I saw this article on how popular Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged is right now.

I have read Atlas Shrugged on a couple of different occasions in my life, and the only thing that I really remember from the readings was how much "meaner" I felt after each read -- i.e., the book does not encourage kindness so much as it encourages "every man for himself."

After I read the article, I read up on the tenets of Rand's "Objectivism," and I found that I really didn't agree with most of her basic tenets -- or at least I partially disagreed with them. That probably explains why I never much liked the book.

"Atlas Shrugged," her most famous novel, has sold more copies in the first four months of 2009 than it did for all of 2008 -- and in 2008, it sold 200,000 copies. It's been in Amazon.com's top 50 for more than a month.

http://www.cnn.com/2009/SHOWBIZ/books/04/27/ayn.rand.atlas.shrugged/index.html?eref=rss_topstories

I noticed the second revision of Amazon's Kindle has been announced. I have never used one, but from what I understand, some people love the Kindle and that it pays for itself pretty quickly.

Although I will miss paper books, I do think that books are (finally) moving to electronic format.

But I'm conflicted about electronic book readers themselves.

I'm not convinced yet that eBook readers should be single purpose appliances. On the one hand, it makes sense to have a tablet just for reading books -- especially one like the Kindle that downloads new books over the air. (It would be even cooler if they got small enough and flexible enough that you could stuff them in the side pocket of your bag.) With a single purpose appliance, all the controls are designed for just the one purpose -- downloading and reading a book.

But I wonder if, instead of a single purpose appliance, whether our mobile devices will be what we read on in the future.

I know that I currently use my iPhone to read sometimes -- there are a several free apps for downloading books, including the one that Google just recently released. The screen is a bit small for reading a book for any length of time, but it passes in a pinch.

Here's an article that computes that if the NY Times were to give every subscriber a Kindle (and deliver the NYT to the Kindle), then the cost to the NYT would be half of what it takes to print & deliver paper --> http://www.alleyinsider.com/2009/1/printing-the-nyt-costs-twice-as-much-as-sending-every-subscriber-a-free-kindle.

And here's an article on e-books --

The idea that "people don't read anymore," especially young people, will be revealed as false. Young people today read more, and write a lot more, than any generation in history. To date, they've been unexcited about books, magazines and newspapers because they grew up with social networking and social media. Once books are electronic, relevant and social, too, they'll start reading and writing books like crazy.

http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&taxonomyName=Mobile+and+Wireless&articleId=9127538&taxonomyId=15&pageNumber=3

Ouch...I am NOT looking forward to the cold that's coming our way. The projected low for Saturday is 10˚F (-12˚C) -- I know that's no where near how cold it is in other parts of the country (or world), but it is WAY too cold for a Southern boy like me. Heck, the 29˚F (-2˚C) temperature this morning was too cold, lol!

***
I've been thinking that the paint in the living room needs to be refreshed. I wasn't going to change the color, but now I'm wondering...

It turns out that it is hard to take pictures of color chips, lol, and I have no idea how the colors will display on your particular monitor, but hopefully the pics below give an idea of the color.

This is the color of the living room now. It's called Heather Blue and is the color that the room was when I moved in.


I like the blue a lot. But I have also been attracted by a couple of other colors, like the ones below.

One is more of a chocolate brown. The other is a burnt orange color. I think that either would sufficiently match the furniture and rug that is currently in the room.




I probably won't paint the room for a while -- until I am more sure of the color and after O gets all his stuff from the bottomless pit out of the room.

***
I started listening to Persuasion yesterday (see yesterday's post). I imported the first CD into iTunes and transferred the tracks to my iPhone.

Then, I listened to the first few chapters while I was cleaning. What I found was that the listening caused me to pay less attention to my cleaning! So far, I am enjoying the book!

Fellow local blogger, Ms Place, writes a couple of blogs that I regularly visit, including one on Jane Austen's works.

I find her Jane Austen's World blog very interesting because of the articles on life in Victorian England. If you're interested in Victorian England or Jane Austen, I would highly recommend the site!

Since I have never read any of Jane Austen's works, she recently very graciously gave me a copy of Jane Austen's Persuasion as an audio book.

I'm excited. Having heard so much about Jane Austen's works, and having seen several TV adaptions, I'm excited to read, ahem I mean listen, to one of her novels myself.

This morning I was up bright and early to get my blood drawn at LabCorp -- just for the standard set of tests you get with your annual physical. I don't mind going, but I hate sitting in the LabCorp waiting room -- it's always packed, and the guy sitting beside me today was one of those types who seems to have to talk, you know? I don't mind a little pleasant small talk, but that's about all I want -- this guy went on and on, completely ignoring my vacant eyes.

Nothing major on the agenda for today. O wants to go get another load from the bottomless pit (his storage unit), but I'm dragging my feet, not really wanting to do that today.

I received some more of what I call my "gardening porn" today in the mail -- magazines and catalogs with pictures of flowers and plants. I told O that he has his kind of porn and I have mine -- actually I like his kind too...but I digress. I'm not even sure why I look at these gardening catalogs because it's not like I have any more room in the yard. I need to buy bigger property, just so that I have more space to garden!

Cyrano

Last night, we watched Cyrano de Bergerac on PBS. It was surprisingly good. There's a clip of it at the link.

Kevin Klein did a great job as Cyrano. Jennifer Garner, well, not so much -- her acting was way too overblown -- it drew attention to her acting style instead of to the character of Roxane. Klein actually had tears in several scenes, which made it seem very authentic.

While we were watching the show (in English), I followed along in my French version of the play. Of course, the English version was a paraphrase, not a direct translation -- after all the original French version rhymes, so it would be hard to translate it directly. But the English was a good paraphrase nonetheless.

Lewis Ginter

I've continued my reading of that picture book about Lesbian and Gay Richmond that I talked about in a previous post.

I live over in a part of town where most of the land was a subdivision of Lewis Ginter's property. What surprised me was to find that Lewis Ginter and John Pope (Pope has a street in the neighborhood named for him) lived together for more than 20 years. They never sought the company of women and had a "most ardent affection" for each other. I don't know about you, but I know what that sounds like to me!

Pope was much, much, much younger than Ginter -- Pope was 16 when he went to live with Ginter. Ginter later adopted him.

It just reminded me of how it pisses me off that so much of gay and lesbian life has been (is) hidden.

Went out tonight to browse for a while -- looking to see if any of the Christmas decorations were 1/2 price yet -- the closer to Christmas, the more likely lights and such will go 1/2 price.

Anyways, at one point, I stopped in Barnes and Noble and had to buy this book -- if only for the pictures. I'm not originally from Richmond, so I don't know a lot of the people in the pictures. But I do know a few (and know "of" a few more) --




I think I might have met Stephen Lenton once, but I knew others who knew him well. The text mentions the Richmond AIDS Ministry -- the now defunct organization that I volunteered for during the mid-90s.


This was my partner Matt's doctor at the ID clinic --


I don't think I know anyone in this picture, but it surprised me. I had never heard of the Mulberry House commune --

A friend sent me the article below about whether online reading counts as reading. It ties in with the meme that I re-posted just a couple of days ago.

If I just think about articles (discounting discussion threads and 1337 sorts of posts), I know personally that I don't read the same way online as in a book. Reading a book is more of a commitment.

Books

Regarding printed books, I might skim some of the text of a book, but I'm bound to go page by page. And I go from start to finish. It does required more attention and concentration than online.

Online

Online, I will often read the first paragraph or two of an article, then use my mouse and scroll so that I can skim the entire rest of the article searching for what amount to bullet points. If I see a "bullet point" that interests me, then I stop and might read that paragraph, then I start skimming again.

I definitely don't read start to finish, and I don't read for very long. As a matter of fact, the articles in the NY Times are so long that I find I often will skip reading them all together, just due to their length, lol! They really are too long for online posts.

It seems that if something is long, I want it printed. If I have to read a long PDF for example, I will print it before I read it.

“What we are losing in this country and presumably around the world is the sustained, focused, linear attention developed by reading,” said Mr. Gioia of the N.E.A. “I would believe people who tell me that the Internet develops reading if I did not see such a universal decline in reading ability and reading comprehension on virtually all tests.”

....
Literacy specialists are just beginning to investigate how reading on the Internet affects reading skills. A recent study of more than 700 low-income, mostly Hispanic and black sixth through 10th graders in Detroit found that those students read more on the Web than in any other medium, though they also read books. The only kind of reading that related to higher academic performance was frequent novel reading, which predicted better grades in English class and higher overall grade point averages.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/27/books/27reading.html?ex=1217822400&en=1aa9eb0eba6fce8e&ei=5070&emc=eta1

Side Note

As a side note, because I know how I read online (and because I figure others do that too), you'll see me use bold text on my journal when I want you to see something.

If I want to make very sure that you read it, I might use a different color.

You'll also see me using headings, as I did in this post, to draw your eye down the page -- my posts are not long enough to really justify headings, but I do it because of how I figure others read online.

My paragraphs are often shorter too.

Vic (Ms Place) over at Jane Austen's World re-posted a meme from another blog. I figured I'd give it a try. I'm no where near the reader that I was in my younger years -- I think that the Internet provides me with some of the reading stimulation that I used to get from books.

“The Big Read reckons that the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books on the list.....

http://janeaustensworld.wordpress.com/2008/07/25/100-greatest-books-meme/

1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read.
3) Underline the books you love.
4) Strike out the books you have no intention of ever reading, or were forced to read at school and hated.
5) Reprint this list in your own blog. (This list in no way represents the top 100 books. It’s missing the Iliad and Odyssey by Homer. For shame.)

Some of these I read many aeons ago! Some look familiar as if I would have read them, but I can't quite remember. Some I've not read but have seen the movie :)

I said I wasn't going to strike through any. But the instructions say I have to strike one through if I hated it. Oh, the heaths in Jude the Obscure..

I didn't italicize any either -- I figure they're all up for grabs.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen (Sorry, Ms. Place! I've never read any Jane Austen!)
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 The Harry Potter Series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

I just read a book called The Handmaiden's Tale. It's a cautionary tale about a time when the US has become a theocracy, called the "Republic of Gilead," where a woman's role is strictly to be a baby factory.

The book was written back in the 1980s, probably as a response to the rise of Reagan and the Religious Right. It's a pretty quick read -- not the best thing I've ever read and really nothing truly memorable.

What stood out for me though was the way that the book described how women's rights to own property were one day taken away. It was done after there was no more paper money, with all wealth in electronic format. So one day, the accounts of all deposit-holders who were listed as female were frozen and control of the account transferred to male next of kin.

One day, women woke up to find that they could not use their bank cards. It just struck me that it would be relatively easy to do in the computer age.

And without paper money, what would you do without access to your accounts? Even with paper money, a freeze on your accounts would be a big problem!

I've just begun reading a book called The Fourth Turning.

The basic premise of the book is that anglo human culture occurs in four periods, or turnings. The four turnings cycle over and over about every 100 years or so. The book uses the names of the seasons for the turnings and suggests that we are entering "Winter," or the "crisis." Winter would be the final turning in this cycle before Spring arrives.

The author refers to himself as a historian, but I take note that usually historians are not in the business of forecasting the future.

Nonetheless, it's an interesting book so far.

Over the past five centuries, Anglo-American society has entered a new era—a new turning—every two decades or so. At the start of each turning, people change how they feel about themselves, the culture, the nation, and the future. Turnings come in cycles of four. Each cycle spans the length of a long human life, roughly 80 to 100 years, a unit of time the ancients called the saeculum. Together, the four turnings of the saeculum comprise history’s seasonal rhythm of growth, maturation, entropy, and destruction:

• The First Turning is a High, an upbeat era of strengthening institutions and weakening individualism, when a new civic order implants and the old values regime decays.
  
  
• The Second Turning is an Awakening, a passionate era of spiritual upheaval, when the civic order comes under attack from a new values regime.
  
  
• The Third Turning is an Unraveling, a downcast era of strengthening individualism and weakening institutions, when the old civic order decays and the new values regime implants.
  
  
• The Fourth Turning is a Crisis, a decisive era of secular upheaval, when the values regime propels the replacement of the old civic order with a new one.

The book was copyrighted in 1997 -- so it's about 11 years old now. It was written during what the book would call the Unraveling.

The next Fourth Turning is due to begin shortly after the new millennium. Around the year 2005, a sudden spark will catalyze a Crisis mood. Remnants of the old social order will disintegrate. Political and economic trust will implode. Real hardship will beset the land, with severe distress that could involve questions of class, race, nation, and empire. Yet this time of trouble will bring seeds of social rebirth. Americans will share a regret about recent mistakes -- and a resolute new consensus about what to do. The very survival of the nation will feel at stake. Sometime before the year 2025, America will pass through a great gate in history, commensurate with the American Revolution, Civil War, and twin emergencies of the Great Depression and World War II.

As an aside, there was a quote (called an epigraph I think?) at the beginning of the book from Ecclesiastes. The book used the King James version, but I've used a more modern language version below.

What made me laugh was that I immediately recognized the quote as basically the refrain from that Sci Fi show that I watch -- Battlestar Galactica, lol!

Compare:
Ecclesiastes 3:15 (NIV) -- Whatever is has already been, and what will be has been before....

To:
Battlestar Galactica -- All this has happened before, and all of it will happen again.

I bought a book lately called Leonardo's Notebooks -- it's a compilation / translation of his works...including a lot of pictures..I've enjoyed the pictures a lot...

I just finished reading this book by Octavia Butler:


It was a decent, easy read. The plot is essentially that this black woman from the 20th century is transported several times to ante-bellum Maryland, where she has to cope with being free one moment and being treated as a slave the next. The focus of her travel back is the white son of a plantation owner, who it turns out is one of her ancestors.

Because of the time travel, the word science fiction comes up, but Butler called the story a "grim fantasy." The book was published in the 1970s and I suspect it would be a good book to read in high school English classes.

There were some intense scenes, of course, like this one:

I could literally smell his sweat, hear every ragged breath, every cry, every cut of the whip. I could see his body jerking, convulsing, straining against the rope as his screaming went on and on. My stomach heaved, and I had to force myself to stay where I was and keep quiet. Why didn't they stop!

"Please, Master," the man begged. "For Godsake, Master, please . . ."

I shut my eyes and tensed my muscles against an urge to vomit.

I had seen people beaten on television and in the movies. I had seen the too-red blood substitute streaked across their backs and heard their well-rehearsed screams. But I hadn't lain nearby and smelled their sweat or heard them pleading and praying, shamed before their families and themselves.

I've really enjoyed this book. I have never been one to read about fairies and tree spirits, but the woman who wrote this obviously loved nature and gardens so much that it is very enjoyable to read. It also has some really nice "romantic" age pictures.



The author lives in an isolated part of Great Britain and is the great-granddaughter of a healing herbalist who lived in the same area.

The book is no longer in print, so I ordered via Barnes and Noble from a used book reseller.

It takes me a long, long time to actually finish a book. They lay beside my bed month after month as I read just a few pages.

• Bleak House by Charles Dickens  I got into this after seeing Bleak House on Masterpiece Theatre, lol!
  
• Moominvalley in November by Tove Jansson  I've always had an interest in books that attract children at a young age, who will later self-identify as gay. Another gay blogger mentioned that he liked Jansson as a child, so I decided to read one of her books. Turns out she was a gay woman, so I wonder if there are characters/situations in books that attract children who will grow up gay?
  
• The Enchanted Garden by Claire O'Rush  Very nicely illustrated wiccan book about magical properties of trees and how to atract fairies to your garden :)
  
• Blue Jean Buddha edited by Sumi Loudon
  
• Freethinkers by Suan Jacoby