How To Open A New Book: Image taken from Book Mania

Te Little Free Library

Check out the link to The Little Free Library under Hobo Tomes Resources. Just a great idea for building communities of readers. Let me know if decide to put one in your neighbourhood. Here it is. http://www.littlefreelibrary.org/

Globe and Mail Article

Here's a link to an article in the Globe and Mail Saturday March 31, 2012. "Every Scribble Tells A Story" by Ian Brown. Enjoy.


http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/arts/books/inside-old-school-books-every-scribble-tells-a-story/article2387802/

Book Mania

I added a new link tonight. Book Mania, have a look at it for some interesting quotes and great pictures.
Enjoy.

Starting of Year Two of the Project

Well here it is the beginning of another year of The Hobo Tomes Project. Actually it's already past the first month of the second year but who's counting. What is there to be learned from the first year of the project?  The popular media and the digital dingbat digerati continue to  forecast the end of real books, libraries, and bookstores. The facts don't bare out their prophesies.  Books continue to be bought from sellers and borrowed from libraries. Although big chains such as Borders continue to have problems all sorts of independent book sellers are starting up niche stores to fill the gap left by the closure of these chains. Libraries are reinventing themselves as nodes  of cultural and community gathering spaces centred around a commitment  to enhancing the reading experience. So, no the reading of books and deep thinking that goes with it is not passé  regardless of those twits who tweet on Twitter that  seem to think that communicating in half sentences mixed with silly symbols over the internet is somehow a movement up the intellectual food chain. Quaint they are but bereft of intellectual depth they have become while grasping on to the only tool that defines their reality they anxiously await the next digital "ding" that separates them from the world around them.
In the past year I'm happy to report that over 140 books have been left in public spaces in just about every continent on earth. I still have some 30 titles to up load to the "Where are they now" link which will bring the total to 170. I certainly would not have achieved this number without the help of friends and relatives who were kind enough to pack a few books into their luggage and deposit our wayward words in different places around the globe. I still do not receive many e-mails from those who find and adopt the books which is disappointing but at least the books are out there somewhere. It certainly would add to the project if I had more stories about the books travels to put into this blog. Frankly, I'm not that surprised by the lack of responses. One possible explanation is the degree of cynicism emerging about the consumerist world we have created. We are inundated by thousands of messages daily trying to influence our consumptive behaviour so when we come upon a book with a sticker implying that it's free just e-mail a response we naturally think of it as just another marketing gimmick by someone trying to get our e-mail address to sell us more stuff so we either walk away or take it home but don't respond. No one said this community building was going to be easy but we'll see what this next year brings us. Once I can establish a core group of readers and start generating dialogue around topics of mutual concern then I hope the community will begin to evolve.  Until then the travelling tomes will make their way out into the world at large to generate some deep thinking and pleasure as they go. Any comments or e-mails would be greatly appreciated. It's all about the sharing of ideas.

More On Books and Reading

From Lapham's Quarterly Blog Called Roundtable Written by Shaj Mathew Posted  Dec. 14, 2011

Predicting Their Own Demise

 

,

 

bookstores,

 

fire,

 

the future

Borders bookstores around the country have all but shuttered. Magazine newsstand sales have dropped. And Steve Jobs had put it bluntly: “people don’t read anymore.” The good news? The literary world has dealt with these worries long before. Novelists have been composing their elegies for the book since the middle of the nineteenth century. Concerned for the future of critical thought and skepticism, authors have been embedding their fears of a diminished literary culture into their dystopian works. As a result, the book itself has become an artifact, a chronicler of writerly anxiety about the future of reading.

Jules Verne, who inaugurated the tradition of science fiction with Around the World in 80 Days and 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, articulated perhaps the first of these concerns about the future of literature. In Paris in the Twentieth Century, a lost manuscript written in 1863 but published only in 1994, Verne feared that by next century, the poetry of his age would be forgotten, instead supplanted by the antiseptic jargon of science. As the book’s protagonist Michel navigates the year 1960, this becomes quite clear. Searching for the works of Hugo and Balzac to no avail at a bookstore, he bemoans how poorly his favorite authors have aged. “So all that fame had lasted less than a 100 years! Les Orientales, Les Méditations, La Comédie Humaine—forgotten, lost, unknown!” To Michel’s dismay, math and science have infected contemporary literature; popular titles include Decarbonated Odes, Poetic Parallelogram, and Electric Harmonies. Aghast, Michel decries the dominance of “science and industry here, just as at school, and nothing for art!” Representing an artless future in which none of the books dear to Verne have endured, Paris in the Twentieth Century evoked a writer’s trepidation with respect to longevity: Will future societies appreciate the value of the classics?

Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 made more grandiose claims about society’s hostility to literature. Books in this novel’s universe are illegal and burned on site. Why? “A book is a loaded gun,” explains Captain Beatty, overseer of government-sanctioned book burnings. Yet, as Bradbury would later add, “you don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.” Intellectual thought in this culture is anathema, prized only by a cadre of “book people” who memorize historic texts. A cursory glance at the authors that the book people preserve—Plato, Aristophanes, Gandhi, Gautama Buddha, Confucius—suggests that Bradbury agreed with Verne: he believed in the edifying power of the classics and feared for a society that fails to heed them.

Gary Shteyngart, author of last year’s Super Sad True Love Story, had a more fundamental worry: in the future, people will not be able to read, period. In the novel’s super sad universe, books are only glossed over and scanned for information—never savored during periods of extended concentration. Lenny Abramov, a crusty remnant of a literate era, is the only member of this society who can read and think critically. Yet one day, when Lenny realizes that Eunice, his much younger girlfriend, can’t understand anything he reads to her, he vows to stop reading. “We don’t have to read anymore. We don’t have to read ever again. I promise,” Lenny says. “It’s a luxury. A stupid luxury.” For Eunice and her peers, books are redolent of “wet socks” and nothing more. But for Shteyngart, books are our only hope against anti-intellectualism.


Writing in three different centuries, these authors, taken together, remind us that debates over the future of reading are nothing new. They remind us of the value of the liberal arts, the art of thinking deeply. Perhaps they may have indulged in some hyperbole—Verne’s scientific texts like Poetic Parallelogramhave not taken over the bestseller lists—but by documenting their fears, these writers capture the intellectual concerns of different eras. After all, as Bradbury once said, “I don't try to describe the future. I try to prevent it.”

The Tyranny of the Online Life or Welcome to Pavlov's Circus

The online world as we now know it has come to have a profound impact on how we lead our lives. Marshall McLuhan certainly was presient when he proclaimed the " medium as the message" not necessarily the content. What McLuhan was getting at was that the medium would become more important than the content when it comes to influencing how we may think and act. So with its ease of use and conveniences the computer and all its digital off spring supposed slaves to our wanton lust for more information, and connectivity has us twitching and salivating like Pavlov's dogs at the mere muffled personalized ring tone inside our jacket pocket. Grasping wildly at our clothes we must obey its command and retrieve that server of a digital feast that has now become the master of our domain. Our dependence on this medium has had its defenders as well as it detractors. In his book "The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing To Our Brains" Nicolas Carr raises a number of questions as to the impact this technology is having on culture. Mostly a critique of the consequences associated with online use his book presents an informative starting point for a debate on the future of reading and of books themselves. Carr's description of his experience with computers certainly resonated with my own history of computer usage. I used my first desk top in 1985 when the organization that I worked for at the time purchased a Sanyo MBC 555-2. It had two floppy drives and Wordstar 3.30 as its word processing program. I used it primarily for letters, developing agendas for meeting etc.. Oh yes I became infatuated with a text based game called Zork. Of course I only played it after hours and during lunch breaks. When I left the organization to pursue graduate studies I bought the system from the organization since they'd become enmeshed in the upgrading frenzy and it was no longer fast enough or have enough memory but I knew that it would come in handy for my academic work. It took me a few years to become fully immersed into the wily ways of the computer. I would write out most of my assignments in long hand-that's using a pen or pencil and writing on paper for those of you who have forgotten or never have used long hand- and my wife would transcribe my scribblings into nice readable text for professors to mark up with unreadable long hand comments usually in red pencil(that's a wooden stick hollowed out to contain a thin rod of lead with a nib at the end that makes marks when pressed down on paper some of the leads come in different colours. At the end lived a small piece rubber like material we called an eraser we used that to delete unwanted lead marks). I owe my successful completion of my Master Thesis to that Sanyo MBC 555-2 and more importantly to my wife who had to endure untold hours of deciphering my awful hand written notes and essays. So it was with some trepidation and an ultimatum from my dear wife that I plunged into the world of computer literacy. From then on it has been a whirlwind of technological improvements and costly upgrades while I fell increasingly under the spell of the online digerati. Like Carr I too sense that something has changed in my behaviour in the last few years. While it was easy for me to sit down and read a book for hours on end now I find that my concentration is of short duration. I become easily distracted often drifting off in mid conversation onto other topics before finishing the first or checking messages on my cell phone or iPad. What seems even more disturbing is that others around me are doing the same thing.  Clipped sentences with your coffee mates punctuated by text messages to your cyber space friends while downloading some songs from iTunes. Has this lead to less civility in our society is a question we need to deal with or is this just a new set of social interactions created by new technologies from which we humans continue to evolve? Have we become slaves of our own making? Perhaps a couple of re-worked quotes by Karl Marx are needed at this point. With my apologies to Marx. The web "is the opium of the masses". Users "of the world unite; you have nothing to lose but your" digital chains.
 Isn't it interesting to note that drug addicts and internet surfers are both called users. So let me finish off by referencing part of the introduction to an MC5 concert in 1969 " you have to decide whether you are going to be the problem or whether you are going to be the solution".  Perhaps we need a 12 step program for those addicted to the digital world. " Hi my name's Bob and I'm a webaholic". Well, I better go check my e-mail now.