Beyond the Elements of Style

Need Help with Book Club Launch

I’ve decided (with some help) to launch a local book club, with monthly meetings, and I need your help! Yes, you, gentle reader. Who out there has started a book club? Who participates in one? I’m a relative neophyte (have actually belonged to more virtual groups than realtime ones), having once upon a time been in charge of a reading group through my place of employment, which happened to be a bookshop … with emphasis on the “once upon a time.”

So I turn to you. What are your experiences? What works, and what doesn’t? In particular …

• Can I mix fiction and nonfiction?
• How are authors and books selected?
• Is a dessert café a good venue? (I have one in mind: the Purple FeatherHow many people is considered a good size for a book discussion group?
• How long should the discussion last? One hour? Two? Open-ended?
• What questions have I forgotten to ask?

Do please email me at jcezanne@jeannettecezanne.com and tell me your experiences and advice! It will all be greatly appreciated, and will put me well … beyond the elements of style!

Let’s Talk Search!

It’s something I haven’t done lately … talk about, that is, though I’m doing plenty of search engine optimization these days, and for very good reasons: in a failing economy, customer/client/donor acquisition is more critial than ever, and yet budgets for doing so are smaller than ever. SEO offers a relatively low-cost way to get potential clients and customers to one’s website, and Customline Wordware is offering a number of recession-special SEO Lite packages.

But it’s not fun always working with the Big Three of search engines — Google, Yahoo! and MSN — so today I was delighted to come across this article that announces some new and interesting search engines. I looked at them with some trepidation (after all, who doesn’t remember the dazzling failure of Cuil?), but was pleased with what I saw. No, we won’t be optimizing for them anytime soon, but they’re great tools to keep tucked in the back of your mind as you roam the web.

I won’t rehash the article, but will note the names of the new search engines reviewed:

• Soovle
• facesaerch
• Tastekid
• fasteagle
• FanSnap
• compfight
• Kedricx

Check the article out and play around with the engine that interests you most. With Google’s domination of the search engine landscape, we often forget that there is more than one way to skin a cat. These (and my own perennial favorite, Kartoo) will challenge your boxed-in thinking. And then you’ll be … beyond the elements of style!

Beyond Insular Reading and Writing

A lot of American writers (and readers!) were up in arms recently when the Nobel prize committee issued its opinion that American authors are too insular, too cut off from the rest of the world and international literary thought. That committee awarded this year’s literature prize to an amazing French author, Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio, said to be an “author of new departures, poetic adventure and sensual ecstasy, explorer of a humanity beyond and below the reigning civilization.”

They’re right, by the way. Run, do not walk, to wherever you purchase or borrow your books, and get yourself a copy of le Clézio’s Wandering Star. I promise that you won’t regret it.

The Booker Prize doesn’t need to deal with Americans at all, as it’s specifically for British Commonwealth citizens. If you’d like a glimpse into the creation of this year’s winning novel, take a look at the very good interview here.

Interested in exploring books outside of the United States’ insular outlook? Try one of these, recently reviewed on National Public Radio:

• The Funeral Party by Ludmila Ulitskaya
• Spring Flowers Spring Frost by Ismail Kadare
• The Three-Arched Bridge also by Ismail Kadare

Fall’s a great time to curl up with a book; but think about challenging yourself a little more this fall. Stepping outside of your usual genres can be a terrific intellectual and cultural experience! And then you’ll be … beyond the elements of style!

Another Site That May (Or May Not) Help Publicize Your Books

Disclaimer: I haven’t tried this site out myself yet, and it isn’t the most eye-catching website on the Net, but it might give you a little SEO mileage if you wanted to post your book covers on it.

It’s called Link Tiles, and you can click around a bit to find where you fit in its schema (I’d suggest starting with “prose”).

Let me know what you think! And then you’ll be … beyond the elements of style!

It Isn’t What You Read, It’s How You Read It

The history of world includes the history of ideas; and ideas require communication in order to flourish. How does that communication happen?

People talk, and people write. Talking hasn’t changed much over the years; but reading and writing certainly have.

I like this brief history, neatly summarized by David Usborne last year in The Independent:

The first “manuscripts” are thought to have been produced around the seventh to 13th centuries, with largely religious texts produced by hand. A well-known example is the Book of Kells, a Latin collection of the Gospels lavishly decorated with an eight-circle cross. From the 13th century, with the “secularisation” of book production, books changed from being objects of worship to descriptive works. This expansion – though limited, given the lack of printing presses – was driven by the Rennaisance (sic.), and with it the rise of European universities and the return in the 13th century of Crusaders, who brought texts from Byzantium – books from ancient Greek and Roman times about world affairs.
The first printed – religious – books emerged in the 15th century but books as we know them took off in the 17th century. In the 1600s Gutenberg printing presses were invented in Germany. By 1424, the Cambridge University library owned 122 books. Woodblock printing and paper arrived from the Far East and in 1800.

I’ve finally taken my own first steps into the future of the manuscript: last week I bought my first ebook reader in the form of Amazon’s Kindle. And it’s certainly an interesting experience.

I bought it mostly because, as a writer myself, I feel I need to experience what is clearly the future of books, at least for many people. I also am enormously attracted by the ability to carry a whole library with me when I travel, and (with the easy ability to order more books) no more panic when I’m on a trip and run out of things to read.

So while it’s early days, for what it’s worth, here are my impressions so far:

• The screen is terrific. It’s really easy to read and the font size can be changed quickly if necessary.
• I have not yet gotten used to the page forward and page back buttons, which are all aligned on either side of the screen — the places where I’m most likely to grasp the “book” and therefore inadvertantly flip around. I expect that ease will come with practice, but right now it’s damned annoying.
• Also annoying is the fact that the spiffy jacket fits loosely and falls off easily.
• I thought I’d be mostly reading books, but it’s absolutely marvelous for magazine reading. So you don’t get the pictures (and obviously Smithsonian and National Geographic aren’t therefore good candidates); but I get to read articles in one of my favorites, the Atlantic Monthly at a fraction of the offline subscription price, and don’t use dead trees to do it. That pretty much rocks my world right there.
• I haven’t yet got the process down, but a deal-breaker for me had always been that I was confined to buying books from Amazon to read via the Kindle. This is not the case: other ebooks and even pdfs can be sent to the Kindle from my very own MacBook. It’s trickier to do than to simply buy from Amazon, but it’s feasible, and some rainy Saturday afternoon soon I shall learn how to do it.
• The looks aren’t as bad as I’d feared, Yeah, it looks like a clunky version of some medical device that would be used in sick bay on the starship Enterprise, but it grows on you. I have dreams, still, of what Apple’s eventual ebook reader will look like, but for now I’m willing to settle for this one.
• The first three days I had the Kindle I was in Boston taking the subway all over the place and it’s absolutely terrific for reading in small crowded spaces. It remembers what page you were on and gets you admiring glances from people around you.

I don’t yet have any gradiose conclusions about the future of printed books or how we’ll communicate our ideas in the next century. But I’m having a lot of fun in this one dipping my toe into the waters of the future.

As long as there are words, I’ll survive … beyond the elements of style!