Today's Fun Facts

Catching up with The New Yorker, here's a quote from "Future Reading" by Anthony Grafton, Nov. 5, 2007 p. 53:

A conservative reckoning of the number of books ever published is thirty-two million; Google believes that there could be as many as a hundred million. It is estimated that between three and ten per cent of all known books are currently in print, and twenty per cent - those produced between the beginning of print, in the fifteenth century, and 1923 - are out of copyright. The rest, perhaps seventy-five per cent of all books ever printed, are "orphans," possibly still covered by copyright protections but out of print and pretty much out of mind. Google, controversially, is scanning those books although it is not yet making them fully available; Microsoft, more cautiously, is scanning only what it knows it can legitimately disseminate.

No surprise here, I guess

What Kind of Reader Are You? Your Result: Obsessive-Compulsive Bookworm You're probably in the final stages of a Ph.D. or otherwise finding a way to make your living out of reading. You are one of the literati. Other people's grammatical mistakes make you insane.
Dedicated Reader
Book Snob
Literate Good Citizen
Non-Reader
Fad Reader
What Kind of Reader Are You? Create Your Own Quiz

Yeah, I've read a lot - - though, given my famously Low tastes, I hope it's not accurate to characterize me as a "book snob". And, again, given my own imperfect mastery of spelling, I'm not especially offended by others' grammatical mistakes. But, yeah, I guess I'd have to say that "obsessive-compulsive bookworm" is probably a fair cop.

(A shout-out to LJer "ecbatan" for the link.)

Gardner Dozois' List of Essential SF (pre-1980)

Thanks to James Nichol on LiveJournal for pointing to this:

http://www.sfwa.org/reading/rec_dozois.htm

Dozois lists the essential novels and short story collections for someone interested in pre-1980 SF. Like any such list, it has its problems in detail (a couple - Okla Hannali, for one - aren't actually SF), but, overall it's not a bad list of the SF I grew up with. Here's GD's list of novels - books I've actually read are italicized.

Brian W. Aldiss :
The Long Afternoon of Earth
Starship
The Malacia Tapestry

Poul Anderson:
The Night Face
Tau Zero
The High Crusade
Brain Wave
Three Hearts and Three Lions

Isaac Asimov :
The Caves of Steel
The Naked Sun

Gregory Benford :
Timescape

Alfred Bester:
The Stars My Destination
The Demolished Man

Michael Bishop:
A Little Knowledge
Stolen Faces

James Blish :
A Case of Conscience
Cities in Flight

Leigh Brackett:
The Long Tomorrow

Ray Bradbury:
Something Wicked This Way Comes

John Brunner:
The Shockwave Rider
Stand on Zanzibar
Polymath
Squares of the City

Algis Budrys:
Rogue Moon
Who?

Arthur C. Clarke:
Childhood's End
The City and the Stars
A Fall of Moondust
The Deep Range
The Sands of Mars

Hal Clement:
Mission of Gravity
Cycle of Fire
Needle

D.G. Compton :
Synthajoy
The Unsleeping Eye

Jack Dann:
The Man Who Melted
Junction

Avram Davidson:
Masters of the Maze
The Phoenix and the Mirror
Rork!
Rogue Dragon
Clash of Star Kings
The Enemy of My Enemy

L. Sprague de Camp:
Lest Darkness Fall
The Glory That Was
Rogue Queen
The Hand of Zei
The Tower of Zanid

L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt:
The Complete Enchanter
Land of Unreason

Samuel R. Delany:
Nova
Babel-17
The Einstein Intersection
The Fall of the Towers
Triton

Lester del Rey:
Nerves

Philip K. Dick:
Ubik
The Man in the High Castle
Martian Time-Slip
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
Time Out of Joint
The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch

Gordon R. Dickson:
Soldier, Ask Not

Thomas M. Disch :
334
Camp Concentration

G.C. Edmondson:
Blue Face (a.k.a. Chapeyeca)
The Ship That Sailed the Time Stream

George Alec Effinger:
When Gravity Fails
What Entropy Means to Me

Philip Jose Farmer:
The Lovers
Night of Light
The Fabulous Riverboat

James Gunn :
The Listeners

Joe Haldeman:
The Forever War
Mindbridge
Worlds

Charles L. Harness:
The Rose

Harry Harrison:
Make Room! Make Room!
The Deathworld Trilogy
Bill, the Galactic Hero

Robert A. Heinlein:
The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress
Double Star
Starman Jones
Red Planet
Between Planets
Citizen of the Galaxy
Farmer in the Sky

Frank Herbert:
Under Pressure
(a.k.a. The Dragon in the Sea)
Dune
The Green Brain

Daniel Keyes:
Flowers for Algernon

Damon Knight:
The Man in the Tree
The Other Foot

C.M. Kornbluth:
The Syndic
Not This August

R.A. Lafferty:
The Reefs of Earth
The Devil Is Dead
Okla Hannali
The Fall of Rome
Past Master

Keith Laumer:
A Trace of Memory
A Plague of Demons


Ursula K. Le Guin:
The Left Hand of Darkness
The Dispossessed
Planet of Exile
City of Illusions
The Wizard of Earthsea
The Lathe of Heaven

Fritz Leiber:
The Big Time
Our Lady of Darkness
The Wanderer
Conjure Wife


George R.R. Martin:
The Dying of the Light
Fevre Dream

Walter M. Miller, Jr.:
A Canticle for Leibowitz

Ward Moore :
Bring the Jubilee

Ward Moore and Avram Davidson:
Joyleg

Larry Niven:
World of Ptavvs
A Gift From Earth
Ringworld

André Norton:
The Time Traders
The Beast Master
Galactic Derelict

Edgar Pangborn:
Davy
A Mirror for Observers
West of the Sun

Alexei Panshin:
Rite of Passage

H. Beam Piper:
Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen
Little Fuzzy
Fuzzy Sapiens

Frederik Pohl:
Gateway
Man Plus
A Plague of Pythons

Frederik Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth:
Wolfbane
Gladiator-at-Law
The Space Merchants

Keith Roberts:
Pavane
The Chalk Giants

Joanna Russ:
Picnic on Paradise
And Chaos Died
The Female Man
The Two of Them

Eric Frank Russell:
Wasp

Fred Saberhagen:
Berserker

Pamela Sargent:
Cloned Lives

James H. Schmitz:
Agent of Vega
The Witches of Karres

Robert Sheckley:
The Status Civilization

Robert Silverberg :
Dying Inside
Downward to the Earth
The Book of Skulls
Nightwings
Tower of Glass

Clifford D. Simak:
Way Station
City
Time and Again

Cordwainer Smith:
Norstrilia

Norman Spinrad:
Bug Jack Barron

Theodore Sturgeon:
More Than Human
Some of Your Blood
The Synthetic Man
(aka The Dreaming Jewels)
Venus Plus X

William Tenn:
Of Men and Monsters

James Tiptree, Jr.:
Up the Walls of the World

Wilson Tucker:
The Long Loud Silence

Jack Vance:
Emphyrio
The Star Kings
The Killing Machine
The Blue World
The Anome
Big Planet
The Dragon Masters
The Last Castle
The Dying Earth
The Eyes of the Overworld
The Languages of Pao
Trullion Alastor 2262

A.E. Van Vogt:
The War Against the Rull
The Weapon Shops of Isher
Slan
The Players of Null-A

John Varley:
Ophiuchi Hotline

Kate Wilhelm :
Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang
Margaret And I
Let the Fire Fall
The Clewiston Test
City of Cain

Jack Williamson:
The Humanoids

Gene Wolfe:
The Book of the New Sun
(several volumes)
The Fifth Head of Cerberus
Peace
The Devil in a Forest

Roger Zelazny:
Lord of Light
This Immortal
The Dream Master
Isle of the Dead
Doorways in the Sand

(that's 166 of 'em; about 31 unread (but those 31 titles include a trilogy and a quartet)

"There's more to life than books, you know..."

I was participant in a conversation over on LibraryThing that touched on the question of, well, how many books is enough? How many books do you think you're ever going to get around to reading?

The conversation moved on before I could recall enough of the following anecdote to cite it (or even find it: but, yay Google) - but at the time I was vaguely reminded of a factoid that I eventually tracked down to Diana Trilling's obit in the New York Times, October 25, 1996 (this is snipped and re-arranged - and I should learn how to do 'block-quote'):

"I graduated from Radcliffe without having read a line of Homer or Dante or Chaucer, without knowing anything of Shakespeare," she said.

Diana Trilling's career as a critic began in 1941, at the age of 36, when she overheard a telephone conversation between her husband and Margaret Marshall, the literary editor of The Nation, who had called to ask if he could recommend someone to write the magazine's literary notes column. When her husband hung up, Mrs. Trilling looked at him and offered herself for the position.

She began writing in 1941 and never stopped.

At one point, as a critic for The Nation, Mrs. Trilling read a novel a day for six and a half years, delivering challenging reviews on some of the most important works of the modern era: Evelyn Waugh's "Brideshead Revisited," Robert Penn Warren's "All the King's Men," Jean-Paul Sartre's "Age of Reason" and George Orwell's "1984." {end NYT quote}



Assuming that's literally true: six and a half years @ one per day = 2374 books. (two leap years makes it an even number....)

Now note that Trilling lived to be 95, so ten times that number of books is certainly possible.

How many people here have had periods when they've read a book a day?

Hand-crafted vs. factory-made

Over at LibraryThing I've been involved in a long-running discussion of Why That Stuff You Read Sucks. I'm recycling a point I made over there:

By this point in the thread, I think we all understand that people read for different reasons. What I'm still not getting is why this is a problem.

Because it's also true that people write for different reasons:

1) Because they need to express themselves.
2) In hope of entertaining others.
3) In hope of making a living.

These are not necessarily mutually exclusive reasons.

But I can only speak for myself. I read, I write. I long ago decided not to ever try to make a living from my pen.

I also do a bit of carpentry. I do it entirely for my own purposes, I derive satisfaction from the activity, and the end products are useful. People who come by admire my bookshelves. People often see my bookcases, and then ask if they can commission me to build some for them.

But I work wood for myself, for my own purposes. A few extra bucks might be nice, but I have no need to make custom bookshelves for others. I especially don't want to try to make a living as a cabinet-maker. For one thing, taking such a step would place me too much at the mercy of the taste of others. The craftsmen who DO meet this market - and I've talked to a couple - I rather tend to admire. Are they prostituting their art? I doubt they see it that way.

I also have no need to resent Ikea for selling the ignorant masses cheap, wobbly, factory-built bookcases. I especially have no need to yell at the customers of Ikea for not appreciating fine custom carpentry. People buy what suits their own needs. MY need is for several hundred feet of built-in custom bookshelves; other people can be perfectly happy with a DIY Ikea "BILLY" unit.