Ghost libraries

Lovely short piece about ebooks in the November 3 London Review of Books (I am only currently one issue behind in my reading, which for me is pretty good going, but anyway you don't read the LRB for its topicality ...) by James Meek. It is only short and you can read it in full on their website, but some choice quotes below.

Once there were private libraries; then there were public libraries; now there is the ghost library, where poltergeistic fellow readers may not only be reading the same book as you at any moment but actually underlining the page of the book you are reading seconds before you get to it. They may be next door; they may be in Kamchatka; they may be anywhere, so long as they have Kindle and wifi.

The lightness of the ebook medium, literally and figuratively, holds a terrible allure and an insidious threat to the heavily booked-up among us. How many marriages, seemingly held firm by the impossibility of moving several hundredweight of vinyl or CDs out of a family-sized home, have already foundered post the digitisation of music? How many more will break if apparently inseparable and immovable matrimonial libraries become something that anyone can walk out with in their pocket?

The last paragraph is particularly lovely, but I will let you read that for yourselves.

Vampires, teenage sex and reading

Watch the hits go through the roof ... and the 100% exit stats!

Interesting column by Jane Sullivan in The Age a few weeks back ostensibly about Stephenie Meyer's Twilight series, but what caught my eye was the following quote taken from a longer piece by Caitlin Flanagan in The Atlantic about adolescent girls:

She is a creature designed for reading in a way no boy or man, or even grown woman could ever be so exactly designed, because she is a creature whose most elemental psychological needs – to be undisturbed while she works out the big questions of her life, to be hidden from view while still in plain sight, to enter profoundly into the emotional lives of others – are met precisely by the act of reading.

I think this is a fantastic description of the importance of reading on the inner, secret emotional life of those inhabitants of the tricky interzone between child- and adulthood. I would disagree that this need is exclusively felt by female adolescents, but it is probably only teenage girls who would be able to meet these needs by stories about schoolgirls and a handsome envoy of the undead ...

Of course it is all a metaphor and a warning about the dangers of teenage sex or as the original article puts it – 'no writer, from Bram Stoker on, has captured so precisely what sex and longing really mean to a young girl'. Unless, of course, you discount Joss Whedon! But of course he was writing for TV and that doesn't count.

Liquid ether

Lovely piece of writing by Christos Tsiolkas, from The Age a few weeks ago, about the pleasures (and dangers) of the night, growing up in Melbourne and the transition from childhood to adult.

The print article is accompanied by one of my favourite Bill Henson photographs, which complements the writing beautifully.