Un-ironic, old and smelly-looking. Look out! Here comes The Dangerous Book For Boys:

Exuding the brisk breeziness of Boy Scout manuals and Boy’s Own annuals, “The Dangerous Book” is a childhood how-to guide that covers everything from paper airplanes to go-carts, skipping stones to skinning a rabbit.

“I wanted to do the kind of book that we had lusted after when we were kids,” said Conn Iggulden, who co-wrote the book with his younger brother Hal.

“My dad was born in 1923 and his father was born in 1850, and we had some old books in the house with titles like ‘Chemical Amusements and Experiments’ and ‘Fun With Gunpowder.’ The thing we didn’t have was a single compendium of everything we wanted to do. I remember endlessly looking through these (books), generally to find things that I could make explode or set on fire.”

There’s an old-fashioned, improving tone to the book, with its chapters on famous battles and true tales of courage, its Latin phrases and rules of grammar, and “seven poems every boy should know.”

You know I’m going to buy this book, right?

Book teaches boys how to be ‘Dangerous’ – CNN.com

The Dangerous Book for Boys (Link to Amazon)

Another month means another top five. Here’s April’s best posts according to you. Thanks for all your continuing support.

Freezers – Not Just For Pizza Pops Anymore

I like to cook. I’m afraid of the seventies. I want this book.

How I Learned To read

My anxious kindergarten memories.

My Kind of Book Lover

Saying you hate the library shouldn’t make you popular, should it?

How To Rip a Phone Book In Half

You know you want to try it.

How To Take Care Of Books

It’s a list of how to take care of your books. It’s kinda funny.

There’s more somewhat amusing posts coming up but if you liked these ones you might want to add my blog to your Technorati favorites, join my MyBlogLog community, or bookmark this page on del.icio.us. Thanks!

If I can’t set you on the path to discovering amazing feats of bookish strength then, really, what good am I? I’ll go so far as to say you need to know how to rip a phone book in half. Think of the applications. The next time you’re fed up with your cell phone provider you could go down to their offices and tear their phone books in half in a fit of symbolic rage. Or at the next book club meeting you can simply dismiss the months reading with a highly charged physical gesture. The possibilities are almost endless.

Clay Edgin (#1 Certified Gripper King and Grip Monster) knows how to rip a phone book in half.

A pleasantly diverting photo set on flickr for the iconizer of books in all of us.

You’ve bought the book and – presuming you’ve avoided the worn Tom Clancy paperback – you want to keep it forever, right? I mean, future generations should know what to read and you’re just the person to tell them. At the very least you want those unread books on your shelf to still be there waiting for you when you retire – when you might have time to read them. Here’s how to take care of your books:

1. Don’t crack the back. Sorry, speed readers, but you should be gently pressing down those pages.
2. Avoid wrinkling the spine. Now that’s a tough one. My childhood friend solved this problem by barely opening his book and craning his eyeballs around the curve of the page to see the inmost characters. I think he either knew Kung-Fu or was just a good guesser.
3. Tape up those torn pages. There’s actually a product for this, archival repair tape. The cracking, yellow roll of packing tape at the back of your junk drawer with no discernible beginning may also work but I wouldn’t recommend it.
4. Cover up the cover with plastic. A doily might be nice too.
5. Keep your books out of extreme heat or cold and out of extreme dryness or moisture. Not so easy for me.
6. Clean your books regularly. You might want to read them too.

From LifeSpy via HelpThing.

Somehow I missed this one and it took an article from the other side of the continent to snap me to attention:

The Canadian author Yann Martel, who wrote the best-selling novel Life of Pi, wants the country’s prime minister, Stephen Harper, to pay more attention to the arts. So Mr. Martel is sending him some reading. Mr. Martel said he was upset that Mr. Harper had appeared to pay no attention during a recent ceremony honoring Canadian artists, Reuters reported. “But he must have moments of stillness,” Mr. Martel said. “For as long as Stephen Harper is prime minister of Canada, I vow to send him every two weeks, mailed on a Monday, a book that has been known to expand stillness.” First up: The Death of Ivan Ilyich by Leo Tolstoy. There was no immediate comment from Mr. Harper’s office. Mr. Martel said he would post all selections and other developments on the Internet at whatisstephenharperreading.ca.

Yann Martel, you crack me up but might I suggest an alternate URL? whatistheretodoinsaskatoon.ca. Everyone, watch Martel’s website and you will hopefully have a better and more clever book list to discuss.

I hope it’s a short list.

There are, it appears, two kinds of book lovers in this world: the folks who love the library and the folks who don’t. I’m in the latter camp.

Other book lovers seem to have a phobia of libraries. They want to own their own books. Besides, librarians are sadists who are just looking for an excuse to slap you with hundreds of dollars in fines! Who can keep track of when books have to be returned? Who can figure out all this online renewal and hold stuff? It’s frightening. Not to mention all that Dewey craziness. And the library doesn’t have Starbucks.

Am I afraid of Libraries? Probably not. I’m more disappointed in them. In my adult life I’ve only visited them for specialized information and left confused. Where were the greats in the field I was searching in? Granted, I have no idea how to properly search for books in the library, but still. Aren’t libraries supposed to to be a repository for the best of our civilization? It make me wonder: has God decided to flood the world again then? Only this time in worn Tom Clancy paperbacks? Perhaps, I’m just a low-rent elitist or, maybe, a sucker for nobility.

I used to hang out in the local library as a kid, though. On Saturday afternoons I would ride my bike down there, check out a stack of books, find a table, read them and then return them. I repeated this strange cycle for a few hours, then left with one or two books. Yes, the librarians laughed at me. Who wouldn’t? Check the books out then go home to read them, kid.

I’m sure I read a few hundred books that way but only two stick out in my mind: The novelization of Jaws 3 and a novelized sequel to E.T.. That and a short sci-fi story about a man who was cursed to remember everything, never forgetting a face or a moment, who, of course, winds up an amnesiac in the end, never realizing what he has to be grateful for. I have slightly better taste now.

I would just rather own my own books. I’m sure you would too. Think about how you feel when you lend out a book. It’s not the loss of an investment that pains you when it doesn’t come back. It’s the feeling you lost a friend. Even if you never read that book again you can still recall the time you had together when you pick the thing up off the shelf. You form an intimate association with it. Checking a book out of the library is more like a conjugal visit – it just gets the job done.

And I’m not sure about the appeal of Starbucks – the book stores I frequent usually have people outside looking for change for a coffee but never a coffee shop.

How do you feel about the library?

As you all know, I’m an anxious reader who worries about what he’s reading and what he hasn’t read yet. The thing is, I honestly believe that our best books can have a profound effect on our lives and on society. How profound? Somewhere between the quixotic enlightenment dreams of a perfect society and the corny water-lady dreams of M. Night Shyamalan – somewhere in the realm of “not-crazy” but not exactly normal either.

This anxiety leaves me with a long list of books that I have never read that I consider desperately important. Yet one thing I have never done is pretend I’ve read any of them if I haven’t. In fact, I will gleefully tell you I haven’t. I may even consider it a sign of respect towards the author that I’ve systematically ignored their work over the years. Toni Morrison, Charles Dickens, James Joyce, all of you have my deepest respect.

That’s why the fascination with Pierre Bayard’s How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read cracks me up. Bayard is a French literature professor who has admitted to lecturing on books he hasn’t read. Oh dear. Next we’ll have history professors lecturing on events they haven’t lived through.

I suppose, though, it’s brave, uneducated fools like myself who are the target market for this book. From The Harvard Crimson:

Bayard is attempting to alleviate their guilt and give them the tools to avoid feeling excluded from the book-reading community.

While I’m skeptical of the logic of a book that argues against reading, Bayard is onto something. Why do we feel the need to fake it in casual conversation? The idea that there is a canon of great literature that one must read in order to be cultured is daunting and unrealistic.

Bayard provides a number of tips for talking about the canon without reading it: generalize about the author, use the book to talk about your personal experiences, or (a devastatingly original move) try to change the subject. But I can’t escape the feeling that somewhere here is a “Curb Your Enthusiasm” episode waiting to happen.

Here’s how I talk about books I haven’t read: Is it a good read? Where can I get it?

Kurt Vonnegut, Writer of Classics of the American Counterculture, Dies at 84 – New York Times

I’ll miss knowing you’re around Mr. Vonnegut. I’ve always loved Slaughterhouse Five, thanks for writing that one. Maybe we can all try and be a little nicer, act more like cousins, in memory of you.

From The Tyee.ca, this is author Alberto Manguel, from the article Why We Still Bother to Read Novels:

“Our society,” he says, “accepts the book as a given, but the act of reading — once considered useful and important, as well as potentially dangerous and subversive — is now condescendingly accepted as a pastime, a slow pastime that lacks efficiency and does not contribute to the common good…. In our society, reading is nothing but an ancillary act, and the great repository of our memory and experience, the library, is considered less a living entity than an inconvenient storage room.” The shelves gather dust.

Read the whole article. It’s a love letter to Manguel’s book, The Library at Night, “a real book, masterfully written and actually about something.” If you don’t have time to read it do what I did and read the good stuff:

Beneath the astonishment conveyed in this brilliantly conceived, elegantly written, elegiac and celebratory meditation, there’s something philosophically deeper. The very big question that Alberto Manguel poses at the outset of The Library at Night sets the tone for the intellectual quest-story that follows. The question is about the meaning of the dynamic relationship between chaos and order that we find everywhere, from the greatest magnitudes — “the starry heavens,” as the philosopher Immanuel Kant called them — to the smallest particulars of our lives.

“Outside theology and fantastic literature,” Manguel says, “few can doubt that the main features of our universe are its dearth of meaning and lack of discernible purpose.” That is, unless you believe in God or Middle-Earth and Mordor, neither the universe nor the evolutionary process proposes an answer to the riddle of human life. “And yet, with bewildering optimism, we continue to assemble whatever scraps of information we can gather in scrolls and books and computer chips, on shelf after library shelf, whether material, virtual or otherwise, pathetically intent on lending the world a semblance of sense and order, while knowing perfectly well that, however much we’d like to believe the contrary, our pursuits are sadly doomed to failure. Why then do we do it?”

I never go to the Library. I buy, beg or borrow all my books. I think I might even hate the Library. But I also think I would love this sad, little, noble book.

Why We Still Bother To Read Novels

The Library at Night