I’ll use one of those canned memes to get this weblog going. Requested by Phil:

• You’re stuck inside Fahrenheit 451, which book do you want to be?
  Pass.
• Have you ever had a crush on a fictional character?
  Probably, though apparently it wasn’t a pervasive enough crush that I can recall it. Is Sarah Vowell a fictional character?
• The last book you bought is:
  The last book that I bought for myself was Contemporaries of Marco Polo (edited by Manuel Komroff), which I haven’t really had a chance to look at yet.
• The last book you read:
  The last book I read was The Character of John Adams by Peter Shaw. A couple of years ago, I had the idea that I could develop a better grasp of politics and history by reading biographies of all the U.S. Presidents. I read a Washington biography and then had a look at the recent bestselling Adams biography, but something about it put me off. I got the sense that the author was trying to frame Adams as a kin to contemporary conservatives, though that’s definitely an uninformed interpretation. That took me off track, and I only recently got around to finding another Adams biography to continue the Presidential biography program. This book was more of a character sketch than it was a history of Adams’ life. It was relatively balanced, though Adams came off as sort of a narcissist who made a point of being apolitical to such a degree that it really had a negative affect on his life and career. At this rate, if I continue to read these in the order that the presidents served, I’ll have only just passed Lincoln when I’m 60. If anyone can recommend an interesting Jefferson biography, let me know.
• What are you currently reading?
  I’ve been carrying Old Glory by Jonathan Raban with me, I’ve been reading it off-and-on for quite awhile. It’s Raban’s account of a 1979 trip he made down the Mississippi River. If graphic novels count, I’m partway through Epileptic by David B., and will probably start from the beginning again soon.
• Five books you would take to a deserted island:
  • The Travels of Marco Polo. Assuming I’m going to pass an extended stretch of years marooned on the island, I’d take any version but the annotated Yule/Cordier version. I’d want the luxury of being able to mull over the language and the descriptions without the scholarly research and interpretation explaining things for me. (Besides, the annotated version takes up two volumes, and that would leave me with only three more books.)
  • Something by Italo Calvino, probably Mr. Palomar or Difficult Loves.
  • A graphic novel or comic strip collection — I’ll say any of the Barnaby collections by Crockett Johnson
  • Graham Greene’s Complete Short Stories
  • some short story collection that I haven’t read before
• Who are you going to pass this stick to (3 persons) and why?
  I’ll tag my brother Justin, John to encourage him to post something, and Kat because she hasn’t posted in awhile (her RSS feed moved and I lost track of her site for awhile).

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All Consuming, a site that aggregates together weblog references to books and on-site reading journal entries, has been taken offline for some indefinite period of time. Availability of the site has been pretty spotty for a couple of years. But on the current “Out of Service” page, Erik Benson says that he plans on re-working the site after he gets back from vacation.

On another note, Alibris, one of The Big Three used book sites has been offline for much of the afternoon. [Update: Alibris is back up.]

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This is the first in a series of stories about my experiences at Amazon.com, where I worked from November 1996 through July 2000.

In October 1996, I was looking for a job. I’d finished an unsatisfying six month temp job at Microsoft in September and had been getting by on occasional short term temp assignments. I gave my resume to the manager of every bookstore within a thirty minute bus ride of my neighborhood. Each of them told me that they only hired people with previous bookstore experience. I didn’t have the charisma to talk any of them into a formal interview.

There were a couple of jobs for book warehouses advertised in the Stranger’s classifieds. Reasoning that experience in another area of the book industry might qualify me for a bookstore interview in six months or a year, I called one of the numbers. One ad was for a New Age book distributor. (They went out of business a year later). The other ad was for an internet bookseller. Hiring was being handled by a temp agency that I’d worked for in the past. I called and scheduled a time for an interview and written test for the next day.

To pass an interview at a temp agency an interviewee only has to demonstrate to the interviewer that he is lucid. I passed the interview with flying colors. The written test was a simple math quiz. Within half an hour, they’d scheduled me for an interview at the warehouse the next day.

It was Halloween. I wore my interview clothes. I arrived at the Second and Lander warehouse as close to fifteen minutes early as the bus schedule allowed.

My interviewer was Beth, and if I remember correctly, she had a purple streak in her hair. This interview was more comprehensive than the temp agency interview.

Other Amazon interviewees of the day report having been asked Microsoft-style “How Many gas stations are there in Texas?” brain teaser questions (and I may have asked some of those same questions in panel interviews a couple of years later). The closest Beth’s interview got to this line of questioning was when she asked, “What drives you?”

I asked for clarification, “‘What drives me’ in which part of my life?”

“This is sort of a Zen question,” she explained.

“I see… It doesn’t matter what I answer. It matters how I answer.”

I was hired and scheduled to begin working the next Tuesday — Election Day. I was given the address of the new warehouse — they were moving their entire inventory over the weekend — but failed to write down the company’s name. I forgot it immediately.

On Tuesday morning, I rode the 174 bus from downtown, past the Kingdome and into industrial Sodo. I looked over the other passengers and tried to identify one who might be a coworker, settling on a hippy-ish girl with close-cropped hair. She got off at my stop and I followed her for the one block to the warehouse. Another new hire followed me. The building had no sign showing the company’s name. I walked in through the door marked “Employees Only” and was careful to memorize the company’s name the first time it was mentioned.

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Gail Armstrong of Open Brackets posted a very funny and pointed post on Maugham, skipping chapters, and book reviewers today.

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The twice yearly Friends of The Seattle Public Library Book Sale is being held at Magnuson Park this weekend, April 16-17 with a members’ preview sale on April 15. Volunteers pack 100,000 donated and library-discarded books into an old hangar. With the exception of a “better books” section, all books are priced at $1 or less. The details can be found at The Friends of The Library website.

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BBC News reports that a mob of angry protestors in the Indian state of Manipur set fire to a library in a nationalistic fury of alphabet envy:

Officials of a prestigious library in India’s north-eastern state of Manipur say nearly 145,000 books have been destroyed in an arson attack….

Officials say many of Manipur’s most ancient texts were among the books destroyed by the fire.

The arsonists want the Mayek script to replace Bengali script in the state.

(via BF Insider List)

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Using Books begins it’s first big advertising push today. I’ve invested $10 in a small ad on The Comics Curmudgeon. Okay, it’s not exactly the Super Bowl ad, but at least it will run for longer than thirty seconds.

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Steve Himmer of onepotmeal has an interesting entry today about the reliability of Frankenstein’s narrator and the expectations of readers from different periods. His comment on the layers of narration in Frankenstein reminds me of Paul Auster’s City of Glass and the questions about the true author of Don Quixote raised there.

Speaking of unreliable narrators, as someone who switched to a junior adaptation of Frankenstein as the deadline of a high school book report on the book was approaching and as someone who hasn’t read beyond the first 100 pages of Don Quixote, I probably have less to say on the subject than I’ve already tried saying.

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A 48 hour relay reading of Don Quixote was held in Madrid over the weekend. It’s the 400th anniversary of the publication of Don Quixote. (link via Bookninja)

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This news is a couple of weeks old, but I only just noticed that All Consuming is back online. Erik Benson writes a little about the relaunch here.

All Consuming combines bibliographic data from Amazon Web Services with on-site reading journals and references to books drawn in weblogs. The site’s new incarnation is a work in progress and many of the old features are gone or on hold (weblog links and Trackback). But there are already some new features, including Flickr-style tags and support for movies and music products.

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This review of a Jonathan Safran Foer reading that was held at Chop Suey — which is usually a music venue — is worth reading for the first paragraph’s spot on description of canned bookstore-based readings.

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I notice that Amazon is jumping on the tagging bandwagon. They’re using word frequency statistics from books in their “Search Inside” program to auto-generate tags that they’re calling Statistically Improbable Phrases:

Amazon.com’s Statistically Improbable Phrases, or “SIPs”, are the most distinctive phrases in the text of books in the Search Inside! program. To identify SIPs, our computers scan the text of all books in Search Inside. If they find a phrase that occurs a large number of times in a particular book relative to all Search Inside books, that phrase is a SIP in that book.

The phrases are listed on a given book’s Amazon detail page, just below the “Product Details” area, and they’re linked to lists of other books that use the same phrase.

For example, “Productive writer” and “tormented writer” are both used three times in If on a winter’s night a traveler. Those phrases don’t appear together in any other books in Amazon’s sampling, but they’re each used once in a handful of titles. It’s sort of funny that “productive writer” largely appears in books about writing, while “tormented writer” appears mostly in books about writers.

Word frequency statistics are further broken down on a book’s Text Stats page, which includes a chart of the books 100 most frequently used words presented in a format that seems a little familiar.

Another way to get your word count kicks: Compare statistics from different translations of the same book.

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