Some Good News

1. I took it upon myself to read at least one tale by Chekhov or Maupassant every day. I downloaded a whole bunch from The University of Adelaide Library Electronic Texts Collection some time ago (the abundance of free texts from the Internet truly is liberating). Of course, I still want to get myself those paperbacks so I can still read the same works while in the bus or in the jeepney or anywhere else where there are no computers. Printing whole books in our rickety inkjet printer would be a hassle. And buying one of those portable ebook readers? Expensive!

2. I wonder if I can fully adopt myself to reading books entirely on computer screens. I just find it so straining to the eyes. Nevertheless, I did finish Brian Sanderson’s Mistborn: The Final Empire (the only ebook from the TOR subscription that I actually read) and Murakami’s Norwegian Wood in .pdf formats earlier this year. I even reread The Communist Manifesto and Beyond Good and Evil in my email inbox via dailylit.com (the former remains a good read even on screen while I abruptly stopped reading the latter – not because of the format but because I can’t stand Nietzsche’s outrageous ramblings anymore).

3. Anyway, the following should be great for everyone concerned with books. Learned of this “Great news about Google Book Search” from Lisa Gold Research Maven:

Google Book Search has always been controversial because it scans books still under copyright without obtaining permission from the authors and publishers, and Google has been sued by the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers over it. The great news is, according to Publishers Weekly, the lawsuits have been settled, and everyone wins– millions of books under copyright will be searchable online, there will be a way to purchase full online access to many copyrighted works, the full texts of out-of-print books will be viewable for free on library computer terminals, authors and publishers will control whether or not their works are included and share in the revenue generated through online access to their works, a nonprofit Book Rights Registry will be set up, etc.

4. Another great news: I got myself another NYRB classic, Richard Hughes’s The Fox in the Attic (my second after Platonov’s Soul), and a hardbound copy of Irène Némirovsky’s Suite Française from a secondhand bookshop.

5. Still another great news: Jose Saramago’s new book, Death With Interruptions, is reviewed in The New Yorker by James Wood. Just noting this down since I was fascinated by the Nobel Prize-winning Portuguese author’s Seeing late last year. The new book sounds interesting though reading some of Saramago’s earlier books like Blindess and The Gospel According to Jesus Christ would suit me better (it would be a long time before they sold those books here in Cebu though).

6. And still another one: Roberto Bolaño’s new book – 2666 – is now out. Everybody’s talking about it. Well, I hope I’ll get to talk about it too two or three years from now!

7. Meanwhile, the American liberal Bill Ayers talk back. To refresh the forgetful: Ayers got famous in the recently concluded US elections when the Republicans threw his relationship with Obama as a proof of the latter’s terrorist links (Ayers was once a member of the Weather Underground which planted bombs in opposition to the Vietnam War in the 60s). The following passage from Ayer’s article is interesting:

The idea that the 2008 election may be the last time in American political life that the ’60s plays any role whatsoever is a mixed blessing. On the one hand, let’s get over the nostalgia and move on. On the other, the lessons we might have learned from the black freedom movement and from the resistance against the Vietnam War have never been learned. To achieve this would require that we face history fully and honestly, something this nation has never done.

The war in Vietnam was an illegal invasion and occupation, much of it conducted as a war of terror against the civilian population. The U.S. military killed millions of Vietnamese in air raids—like the one conducted by McCain—and entire areas of the country were designated free-fire zones, where American pilots indiscriminately dropped surplus ordinance—an immoral enterprise by any measure.

8. Danielle Steel has a new blog. ■