Books
Book Networking
Amongst all the rest of social networking sites, to which I am moderately reluctant, we can even network thru books online.
What I am talking about is not new, as Shelfari exists already over a year, but I was out for the last year;) so it is new to me. Shelfari enables us to make our private online library with all the books we own, the books we want to own and the books we are reading. We can network thru these book lists with friends we invite or with other people profiling in Shelfari (depend of a level of a privacy we set).
I had a bit of a fun this afternoon and started to put the books I own on my virtual shelfs. Every book has a number and it tells how many other Shelfari readers chose that book to put on one of their lists. Even more, one click on that number shows all other readers of the book. You can then leave them a note. It is an amusing task this shelf business, I must admit. Tho I will not use it for networking. However, I am sure it will be useful to keep the record of all the book I want to buy and also a very nice image-like way of going thru the books I own. It suits nicely to my EndNote library.
P.S.
Speaking of books (and because I was absent and didn’t share this yet), I have to say that this year my best book buy was at AAPOR conference in Los Angeles in May. Wow, what a book selling system;). There was a great discount to start with, then after a while they reduced all the books to a half price (had I known that from the beginning!!) and finally, all the books without prices on them were sold for 10$. I got the Handbook of Ethnography this way, YAY!
So I bought a great amount of books and was seriously concerned with how to get them to the beautiful Slovenia. I managed to pack them all up but the luggage was heavy as hell. Luckily, my luggage got lost (first time and it transpired just the right time) so I got it delivered straight to my door;)))). I looove books!
By Nana | October 30, 2007 | Topics: Academic books, Books | 1 Comment »
ねじまき鳥クロニクル
Nejimaki-dori Kuronikuru or The Wind-up Bird Chronicle is a book by contemporary Japanese writer Haruki Murakami. I discovered the guy only last week in London when I accidentally bought his book. Then I told Airo, a Japanese friend (who btw is my age), how excited I was with the writer and the book, and he went: “Oh, wind-up bird cronicle reminds me of the college time!”. Erm, better a bit late than never;)
Anyway, the book *consumed* me in one go. Once I had started reading, I was not being able to stop. And even when I finished, I just went to the first page again and re-started. Then I realised that it was time to let the book go;)
I am not writing a plot summery here, as I believe no such thing can be written at all. I will just list a few simple passages from the story that have left me moved, impressed, shocked, disturbed, seduced, disgusted, at ease or all that together:
- the passage about the “men with thinning problem” and the nature of hairpieces;
- the one about the nature of pain - plain, ordinary and direct physical pain;
- the passage on skinning a man alive in the episode out of the Japanese historical event from the World War II;
- the one on namelessness of money;
- the passage on finding the answers to fundamental questions in the depths and darkness of a waterless well;
- the one about the prostitute of mind and the power of shared dreaming, latent eroticism and phantasmagorical seduction;
- the stories of consultants of the elements of the body - Malta Kano and Creta Kano;
- and I could actually go on, ending up listing nearly every passage in the book;)
This minimalist-surrealistic account of an unemployed man, searching for a lost cat, fading marriage and mystical self-examination gives the reader a sneak preview of the simplicity and complexity of modern Japan.
HM wrote more than a dozen of books so plenty of excellent reading out there …
By Nana | January 28, 2007 | Topics: Books | 6 Comments »
Kunderian Sighting and Boarding
I have always enjoyed Milan Kundera’s fiction, and especially his magnificent short stories, collected in Laughable Loves. In this piece of work, which has been first published before 1968 in Prague, he shows himself as a master of graceful illusion and illuminating surprises. All seven short stories deal with one big concern of human nature - love. Or rather with strategic and complex erotic games. Both, women and men desperately try to come to terms with their sexual and emotional needs and impulsive actions which can culminate in rather terrifying snowball-effect-like chain of reactions and consequences. In one of these stories, The Hitchhiking Game, the young couple pretend to be strangers, he picks her up, and as the story goes on, they indeed become strangers to one another.
Anyway, yesterday when I was cleaning my book shelf, I ran into this fabulous book again and I went directly to one specific piece of one story, that always made me laugh so much. The little story that got me to write this post is a story about two friends, who went on a hunt for girls. And one of them came up with a little theory about Sighting and Boarding.
Those of you who haven’t read about this little theory yet, here’s some explanation:)). Martin (the story character) came to conclusion that it is not as difficult to seduce a girl than is to know enough girls one hasn’t yet seduced. So, this sighting theory says that a guy needs always, at every opportunity, systematically to sight women. How? Well, he needs to record in a notebook (or better iPAQ or palm, lol) or even in his memory the names of girls who have attracted him in order to be able to board them one day:)). So, apparently boarding is a higher level of activity, and means actually getting in touch with a particular girl, make her acquaintance and gain access to her (sounds bit like ethnographers task of gaining access to their key informants in their field).
So, guys, according to this Martin guy’s theory, it’s not wise and perspective to boast with names of girls you have slept with before, but to have a perspective future in the field, it is necessary to have plenty of girls, being sighted and boarded.
Good that the story is so cute and funny that my feminist self couldn’t be bothered at all.
By Nana | January 6, 2005 | Topics: Books | No Comments »