Power Reading

I suppose it's inevitable that a blogger, especially a beginning blogger, would want to retract a post now and then. In fact, the very act of blogging about a book can make you more aware of your opinions & judgments, which usually leads me to question them. So ever since I complained that Jared Diamond's Collapse seemed too long, even redundant, I've been rethinking my position.

Now another book I'm reading is shaking my faith in my reaction and even approach to Collapse. My current book is Reading Like a Writer, by Francine Prose. The subtitle reveals the author's essential purpose: A Guide for People who Love Books and for Those who Want to
Write Them. Using a wealth of selections from master writers in various genres, Prose demonstrates techniques in reading necessary to appreciate (and possibly emulate) fine literary style.

I felt her hot breath of disapproval when I recalled how I sped through parts of Collapse. Prose says, "Skimming just won't suffice if we hope to extract one fraction . . . of what a a writer's words can teach us about how to use the language. And reading quickly--for plot, for ideas, even for psychological truths that a story reveals--can be a hindrance when the crucial revelations are in the spaces between words, in what has been left out."

I picked up Collapse because I wanted to learn how he supported his arguments that societies through history have, however unknowingly,chosen to deteriorate. By skimming and even skipping through Diamond's work, I may have been missing the very nuances of his work that would have left me more satisfied after reading it. Was I failing in my job as a reader to parse the author's sentences, paragraphs, and chapters more thoroughly? One of my mantras as a writer is that writing is a performance art. The reader brings meaning to the work, I believe, and, Prose would add, also an appreciation of process. To get the most out of a dense argument, the reader must be willing and able to seek out the best in a given volume.

Francine Prose helps me understand one way I may have gone wrong when she says, "Reading this way requires a certain amount of stamina, concentration, and patience." Of these key three, I seem particularly to lack reading stamina these days. It may be just having too many projects going at once, but I rarely read the same work for an hour at a time. I've seen plenty of advice on improving reading speed, but I'm not sure exactly how one builds stamina as a reader--longer books? more convoluted prose? reading marathons? But it's something I'll keep in mind now as a issue that can muddy my interpretation of a book & its value. Plus, it'll make a great excuse to lie in my favorite reading spot, pumping print to build my reading muscles instead of cleaning my house.

Starting on the Stack

Like most readers, I keep a stack of books (or more than one) waiting to be read. Now, I also have a stack for books to be blogged about. In fact I started the stack a long while before I started the blog, in the hopes that it might inspire (guilt?) me into starting. After all, I can't really clean up my space until the "to blog" stack disappears.

At the very bottom (really the beginning) of the blog stack is Jared Diamond's book, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. The author presents a breathtakingly-thorough comparative analysis of several societies that, for varied but related reasons, undermine the ecological basis for their survival. For 592 pages, Diamond examines the errors of ancient Easter Islanders, Mayans, the Greenland Norse, contemporary Montanans, and others to reveal tragic flaws in human culture--notably, societal hubris--that separate us from nature and may lead to our destruction. Each case studied was fascinating, nuanced and convincing, and the contrasts between failed civilizations and more sustainable ones offered some rays of hope. Critics showered it with praise and it's won scads of awards and speaking invitations for the author. The book and author are all over the web, including this excellent video lecture.

And while I hesitate to argue with any of the applauding critics or happy purchasers, I still think that like too many books these days, it was just too long. More case studies or more details do not necessarily mean a stronger argument. It's not just a matter of limited reading time, or short attention spans, or even limiting unnecessarily turning trees into pages. It's more about the old Mark Twain saying, "If I had more time I would write a shorter letter." I'm having a similar problem with a children's book about oceans I'm currently working on--how do you write a meaningful chapter on salt water invertebrates, for example, in 500 words? Somehow, I'll have to distill what I want to say down to a few paragraphs, and leave out lots and lots of details.

I'm not trying to talk anyone out of reading Collapse. Rather, I'm giving myself permission to stop reading it and other books that fail or cease to satisfy, for whatever reason. If you need to for some reason (academic, cultural, or personal), you can always go back and try again. In the meantime, there are plenty of other books in the stack.

Our Pines Now Paper

My love for Aldo Leopold's pine trees may seem absurd to some. After all, I've never seen them, and they are, some would say, just trees. The fact that Leopold and his family planted them as part of their personal campaign to rehabilitate a patch of farmed-out Wisconsin may not impress my detractors, either. But I like to think that any reader, tree-philic or not, would value those particular trees after reading Leopold's reflections in his essay, "Pines Above the Snow." Since reading those passages in A Sand County Almanac, I have known just what Leopold means when he says, "I love all trees, but I am in love with pines."

So it was with trepidation that I read the cover article in the latest newsletter of The Aldo Leopold Foundation, "Printed on Pine: A Special Edition of A Sand County Almanac." Managers of Leopold's land decided that the pine stand needed thinning "to promote the health and longevity of the strongest trees," and the felled trees have been crafted into beams for the new Aldo Leopold Legacy Center, opening April 22 in Baraboo. Wood pulp from the harvest has also been processed into paper to print a unique edition of Leopold's Almanac.

The paper was processed with an experimental technique without chlorine or sulfer treatments, then mixed with pulp from other types of trees to create archival quality paper. And money from the limited edition hardcover, priced tentatively at $750, will benefit the Foundation's educational and land stewardship efforts. I think that Leopold, who advocated sustained use, not naive preservation, would approve of this thoughtful step toward sustaining his land and legacy. And with his fine, philosphical mind, honed by many strokes of his ax, he could even have watched the careful harvest. But while I'd love to own one of those special books, I'm glad I was too far away to see those pine trees fall.

Climate Crisis Action Day

See my spiffy new button for GlobalWarming.org? I spent yesterday in Washington, D.C. for a rally against global warming, officially called, Climate Crisis Action Day. We heard John Kerry speak on the history of growing concern and legislative failures and a third grader talk about her concern for drowning polar bears. We also picked up some info on installing solar water heaters, plus a button from the Wilderness Society announcing, "I Like it Wild." Then we headed for our Congressional Rep's office to deliver my seven-year-old's drawing of a polar bear asking, "Save me!"

The rally was a little sparse, especially for such a beautiful day. The minimal gathering inspired my activist son to write a blog entry today, pondering the effectiveness of rallies in campaigns for social change. I'll leave that for his more social-theory oriented mind. My books-oriented mind started wondering how books can shape the campaign.

I've read only one, though: James Gustave Speth's Red Sky at Morning. It's a good place to start, written by a scholar (Speth's Dean of the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies) and supplemented by a website, complete with additional resources, updates, and a streaming video of the author discussing his work. I've also skimmed the companion book to Gore's movie, An Inconvenient Truth, and read laudatory reviews of Field Notes from a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change by Elizabeth Kolbert (Paperback,2006).

But there are so many other choices, some overtly hostile to climate change theories, others aimed at spoofing concerns rather than inspiring action. The field looks too big for one humble blogging over-reader to pick the best or most effective at helping the debate progress. So what books have you found useful? Did it inspire you to think better, talk better, act better? Or is there a book on climate change that still needs to be written? Well, then, stop rallying and start writing. . . .