Over the Hedge by T Lewis and Michael Fry for June 17, 2013

not in today’s world, it ain’t…

My biggest problem with books today is they have lost the ability to transport me to wherever I’m reading about so that I can watch the action first hand. Books sure have degraded over the last nearly 60 years.

Like they say about Linux, it is user friendly, but it’s choosy about who its friends are.

I like books and slide rules – neither is ever unusable due to dead batteries

My granddaughter has a friend where everyone in that family is “connected”. There isn’t a book in the entire house except for the telephone directory, and they use that as a mat for a potted plant. I don’t think any of them have actually talked to each other in years. Even the three year old has a smart phone, a device which will be one heck of a lot smarter than that child will ever be.

Now educators are even discussing the merits of whether or not to teach kids to write. What the hell do they think is going to happen when the aliens show up and blast all of the satellites out of the sky?

Did the books become formulaic, or did your growing personal experience and wider familiarity with literature give you more things to compare against? My son used to think the Animaniacs were the newest thing, so I made him watch every Marx Brothers movie I could find. After he got over the shock of a movie in black and white, he realized why I saw the Animaniacs as derivative – clever derivative, good derivative, but still derivative.

Technology changes, contexts change, but when it comes to human nature, there is nothing new under the sun. (And yes, multiple people have said that, too.)

God love the Marx Brothers! They were just great. Even as a child, I liked the stooges, but loved the Marx Brothers. The Stooges had great physical comedy, but the Marx Brothers had subversive wit, wild inventiveness, verbal wit, and a Harp! And a piano (gotta love Chico).

When the lights go out I fall back on an old saying.When it is dark, light a candle.

No matter what happens to the rest of the world, a book will never get a virus, or crash, or do any other thing that causes computer mishaps.

If this one ever makes it to a T-shirt I will buy it. (sad owner of around 4000 paper books and a few more electronic ones)

You make several good points Nabuquduriuzhur, but I would take issue with this one:

“Nabuquduriuzhur said, about 11 hours ago:The downside is they don’t have an organization that advertises the books. The upside is that one generally doesn’t see the mediocre trash put out by the large publishers.”

Have you SEEN the tide of self-published trash out there? I’m not just talking about poor spelling and punctuation, either. Childish, poorly constructed dialog, absent character development, gaping plot holes… the list goes on and on.

I use my Kindle to explore indie authors I might not have seen otherwise, but I have been disappointed many times. Often, a ‘preview’ is available from Amazon, and I thank the gods for that, as well as the free or low priced titles of a new author; but with a published book in a bookstore, you ALWAYS have the preview option. And smaller presses still put out interesting and engaging titles.

I thinking of getting one for my birthday. Hope the battery is as good as they say.