Alexandria, VA, tops Amazon’s list, with Richmond, VA, rounding out the list at #20. In between are, well, a lot of other cities, including my own current hometown, St. Louis, at #18.

Berkeley, CA, residents bought the most travel books, while Cambridge, MA, can boast the most entrepreneurs.

And a Happy Mother’s Day to all!

I offer this review as a good definition of what is commonly known as a “program novel” or a “propaganda novel”: a novel that is written to portray a message but that forgets the first requirement of a novel is to tell a good story and tell it well.

The Storytelling Animal

Jonathan Gottschall is getting a lot of  mileage from the recent publication of his book The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human. In this piece he addresses the issue of whether fiction in all its forms—TV shows and commercials, religious beliefs, and social commentary as well as novels, drama and poetry—benefits or harms society. He draws on new research findings to conclude:

But perhaps the most impressive finding is just how fiction shapes us: mainly for the better, not for the worse. Fiction enhances our ability to understand other people; it promotes a deep morality that cuts across religious and political creeds. More peculiarly, fiction’s happy endings seem to warp our sense of reality. They make us believe in a lie: that the world is more just than it actually is. But believing that lie has important effects for society — and it may even help explain why humans tell stories in the first place.

The research he cites suggests that fiction has the power to influence the thinking of individuals and of whole societies. “Beyond the local battles of the culture wars, virtually all storytelling, regardless of genre, increases society’s fund of empathy and reinforces an ethic of decency that is deeper than politics.” Recent research findings suggest “that entering fiction’s simulated social worlds enhances our ability to connect with actual human beings.” Furthermore, Gottschall says, generally in fiction “goodness is endorsed and rewarded and badness is condemned and punished.”

Questions about the effects of fiction lead up to what Gottschall calls one big question: “Why are humans storytelling animals at all?” The reason may be that “Traditional tales, from hero epics to sacred myths, perform the essential work of defining group identity and reinforcing cultural values.” He concludes:

Fiction is often treated like a mere frill in human life, if not something worse. But the emerging science of story suggests that fiction is good for more than kicks. By enhancing empathy, fiction reduces social friction. At the same time, story exerts a kind of magnetic force, drawing us together around common values. In other words, most fiction, even the trashy stuff, appears to be in the public interest after all.

Fiction Isn’t Good for You

In answer to Gottschall, Will Wilkinson declares himself skeptical of the assertion that fiction is morally uplifting:

I don’t mind if fiction is instructive or edifying. It’s hard to see how time spent inhabiting fictional worlds and fictional minds can fail to expand our powers of sympathetic imagination. I don’t mind if fiction does that, nor do I mind if there’s some profit in it for readers/viewers and their social relations. But if a story is entertaining or stimulating or gripping or beautiful, that’s good enough.

I had intended to summarize Wilkinson’s refutation of Gottschall’s position, but I had difficulty following the logic of the argument here. I don’t want to misrepresent Wilkinson, so I’ll leave you to work your own way through his reasoning.

Let me just offer Wilkinson’s conclusion:

The “stories are good for you” argument, in addition to wrongly suggesting that stories ought to be good for you, promotes complacency about the cognitive dangers of naive narrative. Writing about politics every day has made me painfully aware of just how pathetically idiotic the “good-and-smart vs. stupid-or-evil” stories inside of which even some of our smartest commentators seem to be helplessly trapped. Better stories would certainly help. (There’s probably no non-narrative mode of thinking available to us.) But stories as such don’t look so great once we begin to see moral progress — Careful! History has not a plot — as a process of replacing bad stories with slightly less bad ones.

[How-to] The 4 Commandments of Reading for Self-Education

On the Bucket List Society’s blog Erik says that, now that he’s out of college, his aim in reading “is wisdom– knowing how best to act in any situation.” Nonfiction comprises most of the reading he undertakes for this purpose, and he has developed 4 directives that help him get the most from that reading:

1. A book is only as good as what you remember from it
2. Actually reading is more important than reading fast
3. Don’t be afraid to burn books
4. Read books to become better at non-books

He explains each of these commandments in more detail, but the one I found most interesting is #1. In order to remember more of what he reads, Erik advocates marking books up: using the highlighting function on his Kindle and writing in the margins of paper books. But in addition—and here’s the really intersting part—he keeps what he calls a commonplacedoc:

What’s a commonplace doc?  A commonplace book is something I heard of when I first start getting into reading.  Apparently, in the renaissance and enlightenment, a learned man would carry with him a small notebook for recording thoughts, quotes, passages, and small practical notes like transactions or to-do lists.  This struck me as really pretty extraordinary.  In one little book, you might have inspiration and wisdom from dozens of sources– all the things you found most meaningful and useful to you.  Being able to review those with regularity would be a privilege!

I keep the 21st century equivalent of a commonplace book– a Google doc of quotes from a variety of books and other sources.  Every time I finish a book, I open it up and type out what I want to take with me from that book.

But what’s even more useful is every six months, I take the document, format it for a small paperback book, and print it for ten bucks on Lulu.com, a website that does one-off book publishing.

Now I keep a database file with notes on what I read, and I also keep an Excel spreadsheet of particularly important quotations, which sounds similar to his commonplacedoc. But it never occurred to me to have a book of those passages printed commercially. Take a look at the photo and see if you might want to take a page out of his book.

My Life With Bob: Keeping Track of Reading Habits With a ‘Book of Books’

Erik has his commonplace book, and Pamela Paul has her book of books, described in this essay. She began recording her list of books to help her remember the important details of the books she read (Erik’s commandment #1 above). Over the years BoB, the book of books, turned into a record of where she had been when reading particular books and how some books related to others on her list. BoB became so important to her that:

Were my house to burst suddenly into flames, I would bypass the laptop and photo albums and even, God forgive me, my children’s artwork in order to rescue Bob, the record of every book I’ve read or didn’t finish reading since the summer of 1988.

See the photo of page 1 of BoB at the beginning of Paul’s essay.

Could a book writing competition ever be a reality TV show? Here’s a pitch:

On Entertainment Weekly Stephan Lee offers a modest proposal for a reality show about writing a book:

The prospect of a writing show is sometimes talked about but rarely taken seriously, because writing a book is hard, solitary work, and it would seem nothing could be more boring than watching someone do it. Even shows about writing music and writing movies, which have way more visual and cross-promotional potential than a show about writing books, have fizzled. As someone who loves writers as much as the fiction they create, I’d add a show about up-and-coming authors to my DVR if it’s done in a fun way. Here’s a ridiculously detailed pitch — half joking, half serious — for a fiction-writing competition I’d totally watch. Proposed title: Great American Author. Though a network would probably change it to The Next Best-Seller.

Yet despite the inherent difficulty, Lee has the whole scenario mapped out in detail. Enjoy.

—Tilly Warnock

the decision came down to adapting the book’s challenging narrative, which moves through time and cuts forwards and back. While that works in the novel, it proved difficult to sustain in a series and challenging for viewers to follow, hampering the potential show’s accessibility.

via ‘The Corrections’ Pilot At HBO Not Going Forward.

Matthew Irwin of the Santa Fe Reporter offers up his choices in SFR’s incomplete and totally biased guide to summer reading. He encourages readers to take a chance and try reading outside of their comfort zones. I especially like his concept of developing a personal reading canon:

I read once that Jorge Luis Borges’ father introduced him to the library, saying that it didn’t matter what he read as long as he kept reading. I began to imagine a world in which each reader creates a personal canon, one that speaks to his experiences and helps him navigate life’s questions, rather than a universal canon that makes those of us who don’t fall in line feel like we’re falling behind. This isn’t to say that we should ignore the canon altogether, but rather that we should be like Borges and allow the books to choose us. But we need to make ourselves available by picking the books up.

What’s on your summer reading list? And do you have a personal canon?

This site, a collaboration between the Burke Museum and the Quileute Tribe, aims to set the record straight about the culture that forms the backdrop for Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight saga.

Made famous by the recent pop-culture phenomenon Twilight, the Quileute people have found themselves thrust into the global spotlight. Their reservation, a once quiet and somewhat isolated place, is now a popular tourist destination for thousands of middle-school-age girls and their families. In the wake of the popularity of the book and film saga, the Quileute Tribe has been forced to negotiate the rights to their own oral histories, ancient regalia and mask designs, and even the sanctity of their cemetery.

. . .

In collaboration with the Quileute Tribe, this site seeks to inform Twilight fans, parents, teachers, and others about the real Quileute culture, which indeed has a wolf origin story, a historic relationship with the wolf as demonstrated in songs, stories, and various art forms, as well as a modern, multi-dimensional community with a sophisticated governance system. We also hope to offer a counter narrative to The Twilight Saga’s stereotypical representations of race, class, and gender, and offer resources for a more meaningful understanding of Native American life and cultures.

10 Tweets That Summarize the Book The Lord of the Rings

“Here’s a quick summary of this sprawling tale, in the form of ten tweets that characters might have made at various points in their adventures.”

2011 Shirley Jackson Awards Nominees

The Shirley Jackson Awards are given annually for outstanding achievement in the literature of psychological suspense, horror, and the dark fantastic. The awards are given for the best work published in the preceding calendar year in the following categories:  novel, novella, novelette, short story, single-author collection, and edited anthology.

Storytelling Animals: 10 Surprising Ways That Story Dominates Our Lives

Jonathan Gottschall, author of The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human, offers a list of “10 hidden ways that story saturates our lives”:

1. neverland
2. dreams
3. fantasies
4. religion
5. song
6. video games
7. TV commercials
8. conspiracy theories
9. nonfiction
10. life stories

iBorg: I have become them

In the ocean of ebooks-vs-printed books controversy, this unpretentious little piece by Erica Sadun for The Unofficial Apple Weblog stands out. Read how a recent evening made her realize “I have been assimilated. I am become Borg. I have betrayed the trust of my fellow ex-librarians. . . . I’ve lost the dead-tree itch. I am e-woman.”

The rise of e-reading

In surveys taken in late 2011 and early 2012, the Pew Internet and American Life Project found that one-fifth of American adults (21%) report that they have read an e-book in the past year.

The rise of e-books in American culture is part of a larger story about a shift from printed to digital material. Using a broader definition of e-content in a survey ending in December 2011, some 43% of Americans age 16 and older say they have either read an e-book in the past year or have read other long-form content such as magazines, journals, and news articles in digital format on an e-book reader, tablet computer, regular computer, or cell phone.

Those who have taken the plunge into reading e-books stand out in almost every way from other kinds of readers. Foremost, they are relatively avid readers of books in all formats: 88% of those who read e-books in the past 12 months also read printed books.² Compared with other book readers, they read more books. They read more frequently for a host of reasons: for pleasure, for research, for current events, and for work or school. They are also more likely than others to have bought their most recent book, rather than borrowed it, and they are more likely than others to say they prefer to purchase books in general, often starting their search online.

You can read the key findings or download a PDF of the complete report on this site.

Dr. Jeanne Achterberg

About 10 years ago I read the book Woman as Healer because that is a topic I’ve long been interested in. A couple of years later I decided to go back to school to study for a doctorate in humanistic psychology. I had already enrolled at Saybrook before I realized that the author of Woman as Healer, Jeanne Achterberg, was on the faculty. I worked with her throughout my six years of study, and she chaired my dissertation committee. Jeanne Achterberg died on March 7, 2012. She was a popular and well-known scholar, researcher, and speaker, and she was immediately eulogized by her colleagues (see links below). But I knew her as a teacher—one of the best teachers I’ve ever had in my long academic career.

Jeanne Achterberg made her name in the field of alternative medicine, or mind-body medicine, with the development of the use of guided imagery in the treatment of cancer. In 2001 Time magazine named her one of 100 innovators for this pioneering work. Here are a couple of tributes by her colleagues:

• Marilyn Schlitz of IONS (Institute of Noetic Sciences)
• Don Moss, Chair, College of Mind-Body Medicine, Saybrook

Also, her family has set up a tribute page on Facebook.

Jeannie was passionate about her work in promoting the spiritual nature of healing, but she was equally devoted to mentoring students, particularly in their research. Many professors think of their graduate students as extensions of themselves whose main purpose is to further their mentors’ research. But Jeannie did not think that way. She saw her role of mentor as that of guiding students in pursuing the research topics they were interested in. Trained as an experimental psychologist, her first allegiance was always to science. Her approach was to work with students to find a sound methodology appropriate for their research questions. When, at the beginning of my doctoral research, I asked her for some specific direction, she gently refused—not because she wanted to work me as hard as possible, but because she wanted me to discover my own passion within the topic rather than pursuing hers.

The other characteristic that made Jeannie such a good teacher was her own willingness, even eagerness, to learn. She frequently talked about how much she learned from her students. When I wanted to use the developing methodology of narrative inquiry for my dissertation, she initially hesitated. But she gave me the opportunity to demonstrate its soundness, then declared herself convinced and wholeheartedly supported my work. I was truly blessed to be one of the many students who earned their degrees under her direction.

There is a complete list of her publications on her web site. Here are two of my favorites, in addition to Woman as Healer:

• Lightning at the Gate, her memoir of her own experience of illness
• Intentional Healing, an audio program that sums up her life’s work and her belief in the spiritual nature of healing

And in this 15-minute video she discusses transpersonal psychology in advance of her scheduled appearance as a keynote speaker at the Spirituality and Psychology Conference in February, 2012 (you will need to turn the volume all the way up on both the video and your machine):

Heaven must certainly be a much nattier place now that Jeannie has arrived to offer fashion advice.

Congratulations to all the nominees and winners of the Edgar Awards.