Posts Tagged ‘books’

Highlights Atmospheric Disturbances

I found out about Atmospheric Disturbances, by Rivka Galche, through the NYTimes’s UrbanEye mailing list. It’s about a psychiatrist who thinks his wife has been replaced by a doppelganger and tries to find his real wife.

From the very beginning of the novel, it’s questionable whether his wife really has been replaced or if it’s all in his head, especially since the only patient of the doctor’s that we ever meet has similar delusions. Because I have these doubts so early on (hello… the narrator is a psychologist), and because they’re not really answered until the very end of the book, I found most of it kind of boring. You can’t take anything that the narrator says very seriously because you think he’s crazy. I liked the idea of the novel enough to give me hope that there’d be more, but I ended up expecting there to be so much more to it that I was disappointed.

I don’t regret reading Atmospheric Disturbances but it’s not a book I would tell other people to read. Here are my highlights:

Loc. 103-5, added on Sunday, May 10, 2009, 03:00 PM

She does often manage to give people the impression that she loves them in a very personal and significant way; I must admit I find it pretty tiresome dealing with all her pathetic devotees who think they play a much larger role in her life than they actually do;

Loc. 148-51, added on Sunday, May 10, 2009, 03:07 PM

Functionally speaking, Harvey’s main problem—or some might say his “conflict with the consensus view of reality”—stemmed from a fixed magical belief that he had special skills for controlling weather phenomena, and that he was, consequently, employed as a secret agent for the Royal Academy of Meteorology, an institute whose existence a consensus view of reality actually would (and this surprised me at the time) affirm.

Loc. 174-75, added on Sunday, May 10, 2009, 03:11 PM

When asked about his absences, Harvey’s elucidation tended to go no further than to say that he was “laboring atmospherically.” Arguably these disappearances actually endangered his life.

Loc. 186-88, added on Sunday, May 10, 2009, 03:13 PM

I did make a few other efforts to gently instill in Harvey some creative doubt in the internal perceptions of his world—such doubt being the usual cornerstone of delusional treatment and the path back to the consensus view of reality. But I failed.

Loc. 198-200, added on Sunday, May 10, 2009, 03:15 PM

But that I—unlike Harvey—was an agent of superior rank. Who was in touch with an agent of even more superior rank. “Psychotics very much respect ranking,” she announced authoritatively.

Loc. 214-16, added on Sunday, May 10, 2009, 04:17 PM

“There’d still always loom the possibility of being discovered, of being revealed as a liar. I wouldn’t be able to go a day without worrying. I can’t live like that.” “Oh,” Rema answered with a small unimpressed shrug, “but that’s what life is like all the time, no?”

Loc. 262-63, added on Sunday, May 10, 2009, 04:24 PM

it struck me anew that I’d once thought that after enough time with me she would have put on a precious little potbelly and let her hair remain messy at home.

Loc. 277-78, added on Monday, May 11, 2009, 09:01 AM

it seemed like she’d been infected by a very American idea of identity, to think that who you were mostly consisted of what you did to get paid—that seemed silly to me.

Continue Reading >

- Comment - Tagged: , ,

Highlights Buying In

[Buying In book cover]

I bought Rob Walker’s Buying In: The Secret Dialogue Between What We Buy and Who We Are after seeing him in Objectified, a documentary about product design. His attitude was on the verge of being cynical, but I think it was just his no-B.S. way of explaining things that I really liked.

Buying In is about consumerism. It tries to explain why people associate or disassociate themselves with certain brands and make the purchasing decisions that they make. I’m not sure if I’d want to buy any more books on this subject, but it was pretty interesting. The book goes through a lot of different examples of brands and sub-cultures and I think it depended on them a little too much. I expected more conclusions to be drawn and a lot of times he would say he would go into things later towards the end of the book, but I don’t really think he did.

It is pretty obvious that he’s obsessed about this topic, though, and knows his stuff. I especially liked how he talked about Etsy.com and American Apparel, two sort of anti-bad-consumer brands that fit into the bigger picture in interesting ways.

While highlighting this book on my Kindle, it was funny how I kept highlighting big chunks of information, compared to the book I read before, Smilla’s Sense of Snow, where a lot of meaning was packed into one or two sentences. Here are my highlights for Buying In:

Loc. 176-78, added Friday, April 17, 2009, 09:18 AM

But why, really, did I feel so strongly about a brand of sneaker—any brand of sneaker? I know why I rejected the swoosh. In Air Force 1’s, I’d feel like a brand zombie. But what I suddenly couldn’t reconcile was my belief that I could project my individuality through some other brand.

Loc. 195-97, added Friday, April 17, 2009, 09:21 AM

So we can talk all we want about being brandproof, but our behavior tells a different story. This is why I have come around to the view that there is nothing to be gained by simply believing we are immune to brands. But there might be something gained in understanding why we aren’t.

Loc. 262-64, added Friday, April 17, 2009, 09:28 AM

So when Consumer Reports, or whatever other authority is doing the testing, studies some group of products, the conclusion is invariably that most of the choices are, you know, pretty good. All that’s left is to sift among increasingly minor differences to decide which one is the very best value of all, by however absurdly narrow a margin.

Loc. 354-57, added Friday, April 17, 2009, 09:42 AM

Marc Milecofsky grew up in Lakewood, about an hour and a half south of Manhattan, and spent more time in malls than in the streets. His father was a pharmacist, his mother a real estate agent. He had two sisters, one of whom was his twin, Marci. (The name Ecko is derived from a family story: When his mother was pregnant with Marci, the doctor informed her of an “echo,” which turned out to be Marc.)

Loc. 373-75, added Friday, April 17, 2009, 10:23 PM

The first brand logo worn on the outside of a garment is believed to be the Lacoste crocodile: 1920s French tennis star René Lacoste, playing off a nickname given to him by the press, had one embroidered on a jacket he wore and then tennis shirts he designed and sold after retiring.

Loc. 376-77, added Friday, April 17, 2009, 10:23 PM

A logo can acquire its meaning from the product it is attached to or the people who use the product—in ads, in the real world, or in the gray area in between, such as pictures of celebrities in magazines.

Loc. 395-98, added Friday, April 17, 2009, 10:37 PM

A working-class Jewish kid from the Bronx defined WASP status in a way that was accessible on a mass scale. He made it the acceptable thing for the skeptical sixteen-year-old Jersey mall rat who would become Marc Ecko and who never gave a thought to whether the relationship between that Polo symbol and the man who created it was an “authentic” one or not.

Loc. 440-43, added Saturday, April 18, 2009, 03:28 PM

Hello Kitty’s blank, “cryptic” simplicity, he argues, is among her great strengths; standing for nothing, she is “waiting to be interpreted,” and this is precisely how an “ambiguous”—and let’s be frank: meaningless—symbol comes to stand for nostalgia to one person, fashionability to another, camp to a third, vague subversiveness to a fourth.

Continue Reading >

- Comment - Tagged: , , , ,

Kindle DX

People have been asking me if I’m annoyed that the Kindle DX came out after I got the Kindle 2, but I’m actually relieved that the DX is what it is. It’s not a slimmer, lighter, faster version of what I have; it’s almost exactly the same thing in a larger form factor (more suitable for documents than books) and it looks like Amazon is going to keep improving both as separate products in the same family.

One of the reasons I got a Kindle is because I love reading books and I wanted to be able to read more often. I usually read on the subway, but I also like to travel lightly (before the iPhone I was an iPod mini/nano person) so I’d end up leaving heavier books at home half the time. With the Kindle, the size and weight issue is completely gone.

No matter what I’m reading, no matter what books (plural!) I have with me, it’s always 10.2 ounces and 8″ x 5.3″. If I’m squished between two people, or standing up and holding onto a pole, I can still hold it comfortably with one hand and easily go to the next page (a tricky maneuver if you have to turn physical pages with one hand).

Plus I like that when I’m looking at the text of a Kindle 2, it’s still the same size as a real book. It doesn’t feel like the device is altering my experience and pacing of a real novel. Having the text re-flowed to double that size would feel more like reading a Word document on a computer screen.

I would love it when I was in college, especially since college books are way heavier (and all the great features like searching text, seeing definitions of words right on the spot, exporting highlights/notes/bookmarks would be even more useful), but if I’m using it mostly for books the Kindle 2 is a better fit for me.

- Comment - Tagged: , , ,

Highlights Smilla’s Sense of Snow

[Smilla book cover]

Every time I finish a book on my Kindle, I’ll post the phrases that I highlighted (it saves them to a text file), as my personal summary of what I read. I’ll note spoilers if there are any. Sometimes I might highlight things to look up later (like other books or music that were mentioned). “Loc.” is the location of that phrase in the e-book (since you can change the font size, what ends up on a “page” varies so e-books have locations instead).

This one’s for Smilla’s Sense of Snow by Peter Hoeg.

Loc. 1275-76:

“There was snow on the roof that he fell from. I saw his footprints. I have a sense of snow.”

Loc. 1277-78:

“Snow is the symbol of inconstancy,” she says. “As in the book of Job.”

Loc. 2257-58:

He boils milk with fresh ginger, a quarter of a vanilla bean, and tea that is so dark and fine-leaved that it looks like black dust. He strains it and puts cane sugar in both our cups.

Loc. 2565-66:

“I just wonder how you can conclude so much from so little.” “Language is a hologram.”

Loc. 3187-88:

in a nanosecond she’s reduced from the great, proud, sovereign, invulnerable mama to a spiritual gnome.

Loc. 3194-95:

Whining is a virus, a lethal, infectious, epidemic disease. I refuse to listen to it. I refuse to be saddled with these orgies of emotional pettiness.

Loc. 3205-7:

Modesty is part of the fundamental nature of human beings. It makes me sick to think of the European idea that they can solve all their own self-induced sexual neuroses by laying the meat on the table and putting it under a microscope.

Loc. 4030-31:

I hate being scared. There is only one path to fearlessness. It’s the one that leads into the mysterious center of the terror.

Continue Reading >

- 3 Comments - Tagged: , , ,