Upper Fort Stewart is on vacation for the next little bit so Ian can relax and read (of course). Posting will be slight (if any) unless something momentous happens, like Salinger publishing Hapworth 26, 1924 and the rest of his Glass family stories or something. In the meantime, if you’re new here why not check out some of some of my more popular posts. You may find it somewhat amusing. Plus, now would be a good time to subscribe — if you haven’t done so already. Check the links under “RSS updates” in the sidebar.

Embarrassing Aside: For a week I’ll be on an island in the (relative, for me) wilds of Manitoba-Ontario and I am very much a “city-kid”. Wish me luck.

The Telegraph is still talking about Pierre Bayard and his How to Talk About Books you Haven’t Read (a book I , incidentally, haven’t read) this time in the context of undue reverence for books. We hoard them and fetishize them. We punish ourselves with them. Maybe we should, you know, not do that and just read the things. And failing that, just not read them.

Do you ever start talking to an incredibly boring person at a party and say to yourself, after five minutes: “Well, he’s incredibly boring, but I’ll talk to him for another 30 hours. He’s bound to get better.” Or, when you’ve finished with a newspaper you’ve enjoyed, do you ever put it on a shelf on prominent display so that you can admire it from a distance and never read it again?

No? Well, why do so many people do the same with books? I’ve lost count of the number of people I’ve met on holiday who are 100 pages into a book, still hoping it’ll warm up.

Some of these same people are then amazed when they see me dog-earing a book, writing in it or, with a really big one, tearing it up into chunks to read on the beach. They’re bored to death by their own reading, but they still think all books should be treated as precious relics.

I’m as guilty as the next guy — OK, far guiltier — when it comes to treating books as precious relics. Surprisingly, though, I’m not afraid to just toss a stinker. I turn into a pragmatic priest when I approach the literary altar — I want results. The good books, now those are worth being precious about.

The Guardian Unlimited Arts Blog is sort of hurting for page views, I guess. Please do visit their rather interesting site more often so they don’t have to publish ridiculous works like Sam Jordison’s review of the Bible. I think it’s safe to say he’s unimpressed.

The literary quality of the Bible is an issue that I think is worth addressing. Firstly, there’s the simple point that if the Bible really were the word of God, you’d think that He would be able to make it more interesting. Secondly, there’s a war being waged against reason at the moment and it’s gone time that reason started landing a few punches of its own. Why not freely state the obvious, but hitherto rarely mentioned, truth? The Good Book is not, as is so often suggested, a damn good read. It’s crap. If the two Testaments tell the greatest story ever told, I am a monkey (and not just the distant descendant of one).

Now, Jordison does make one decent critical observation in his otherwise junior-high-school-ish essay. He points out, in reminder, that the Bible is a work of translation. With any great non-English work of literature I often wonder what I’ve fallen in love with, the work, or the translation. Jordison suggests that, in this case, us lovers of the Bible have fallen in love with the translation. Our otherwise keen critical senses, so sharp when reading Dostoevsky or Chekov, have left us too dull-witted to see past the translators gloss.

Or if not gloss, careful shine. The Bible has had a sort of checkered history when it comes to translation but it’s been a long one. I’m not sure if any other collection of ancient documents has been under such intense scrutiny, much of it under people who would like to see the object of study destroyed. Regardless of your opinion of the truth of the thing (which itself involves sensitivity to literary style often missing in these sort of arguments) suggesting that one of the most carefully translated foreign works on the planet, editions existing both gussied-up and dressed-down, is hiding behind overly-benign translation sounds, well, ridiculous.

Of course, I don’t really know, do I? I don’t read Hebrew or Greek. I have to take this sort of thing on authority — and you know me, I love checking with the authorities. For an interesting experiment in Biblical translation with important literary connections I’d recommend The Book of J by Harold Bloom and David Rosenberg. The bulk of the book is pretty much an introduction by the always entertaining Bloom to the last chapter, Rosenberg’s attempt at a very literal translation of the hypothesized J Document, the earliest textual strand in the first six books of the Bible. Rosenberg’s translation tries to tease this strand, the J Document, out of the hands of it’s later editors. His translation leaves it very ironic and very rough — often ignoring English grammar for a presumed foreign sound — and contains no gloss whatsoever. And there’s no denying it’s literary qualities.

I met the woman who would later become my wife when I was seventeen. Anyone remember what they were like when they were seventeen? When we started dating just over half a year later I had a strange request: “read these four books.” Teenagers, right? I felt like these four books had helped make me who I was at that time.

As you all know I have a habit of engaging in public embarrassment so here’s my list of books. Teenage earnestness is almost always amusing. I’m not sure I would still list these as essential books — people change — but I wouldn’t go back and change this list if I were to make it again.

• Have Spacesuit Will Travel by Robert Heinlein
• I, Robot by Isaac Asimov
• Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
• Nine Stories by J.D. Salinger

There may have been a fifth book, Douglas Coupland’s Generation X, helping to offset the juvenile science-fiction — I really can’t recall, though. But my wife, she read them all. Even the Heinlein. That same summer we went on a road-trip to some of her essential places. People have to do stuff like that.

Anyway, essential books, we all have them. We buy them for others at Christmas, make sure they’re listed in our Blogger profiles — I know someone who wanted his tattooed in a stack on his left bicep — they make an impression.

With a little help from the kind folks that comment here I’m going to try and outline my thoughts on the wrong sort of books. Don’t think there are wrong sorts of books? Wonder how a grown man that reads Superman books can claim a literary high ground? Read on.

Previously, discussing my reading anxiety over reading the wrong sort of books, I outlined my ideas on the right sort of books.

Each one tells us a little bit more about how to be a good human and, surprisingly, isn’t afraid to make you laugh at some point in the process (although, on reflection, this is realized to be a necessary part of some process). “Important” books, might be a good standard label, or rule of thumb. The ones that feel like they mean something.

Never one to be too afraid of abhorrent subjectiveness (only slightly worried) a feeling of meaning something works very well for me. But what about the wrong sort of books?

Brad wonders: Is a book that strives purely for entertainment the wrong sort? And what about purported classics like The Great Gatsby? “The characters are all despicable, murder is covered up, and the innocent allowed to be slandered and slain. Yuck. ” And Clemens offers up his thoughts:

The only books not worth reading are the ones you regret every second you spent with it in your hands. And there are very few of those if you think about it

Good advice and somewhat close, I think, to my rule of thumb. But what kind of books are you going to regret reading? Beware, metaphysics ahead.

The wrong sort of book does nothing to prepare you for remembering your death. It does nothing to awaken you to human vanity. Oh, the wrong sort of book may attempt to do this but usually it’s dreadfully dull. The right sort of book does this by making you laugh at least once, laughter being a sort of key, for me at least, that cheerfully unlocks the dreadful cabinet we sit ourselves in. Laughter is important when talking about vanity. So sorry, Camus, you’ve written the wrong sort of book. Nice try, don’t be a stranger.

The wrong sort of book leads you on. It promises something and delivers hours gone, dissatisfaction, emptiness and overall bleaughy feelings. More good advice from a friend of S.O.S.:

… if she’s reading a book and she isn’t completely drawn in by a certain place (I forget whether it was within the first few chapters or first few pages), she puts the book down and moves on. She’s realized she has a finite amount of time and wants to read the books that draw her in, whether “classics” or contemporary.

I haven’t really accomplished anything here, have I? This is more about recognizing the right book for you. Parting thoughts: embrace subjectivity when it comes to reading and trust your reading conscience.

I’m the first runner-up in The Sandbox Designs Competition with my entry, Essay! Two judges even had me pegged for first place! Wow! As you may recall, part of my impetus for blogging was to learn something about web design (I’m a graphic artist in the real world) so I’m just absolutely thrilled. There were a lot of original and creative submissions and I’m honored just to be included among them. Many thanks to the judges — all of whom I have a ton of respect for — and the awesome Scott Wallick, co-designer of the Sandbox theme and organizer of the competition.

If you think I’m anxious about reading, just imagine me for a moment logged-in to the sndbx.org site continually pressing F5 in one browser tab and pressing F5 in another tab that shows the current UTC time, desperately waiting for the results to come in, hoping my heart doesn’t crawl up my throat and fall out my mouth. I think it’ll take me a little time to calm down.

But what did you win, Ian? Well, the big immaterial thing was encouragement — but as for actual physical goods? Fifty dollars US and a copy of Blogging Tips: What Bloggers Won’t Tell You About Blogging by Lorelle VanFossen (that’s the lorelle.wordpress.com Lorelle). Feel free to enjoy the hilarious irony of the book-blogger winning a book on blogging for his blog design.

At my wife’s clever suggestion I’m going to blow the money on books at Amazon. Anxiety: what should I get? Should I get a million Dover Thrift Editions or throw it away on some hard-backed new release? Will you all be upset with me if I surf the dollar specials? Or would you expect anything less? Just what can I get for $50?

I think my strange reading anxiety has been well-documented on this weblog. If you’re new here this is the gist of it: I worry about reading the wrong sort of books. I don’t always read the right sort of books, nor would I suggest one do so religiously, nor do I even consistently agree with myself on what the “right sort” means — regardless I’m always worrying about it. So it was with some surprise mixed with telling obviousness that I finally realized where this anxiety comes from, a place I’ve never been, University.

First, though, the right sort of books, what are they? You’d find them in the curriculum of any gold-standard humanities program of the future. They range from those seminal desert epics and the Greek Classics all the way up to post-modern experiments and even graphic novels. Each one tells us a little bit more about how to be a good human and, surprisingly, isn’t afraid to make you laugh at some point in the process (although, on reflection, this is realized to be a necessary part of some process). “Important” books, might be a good standard label, or rule of thumb. The ones that feel like they mean something.

Of course, the paragraph above reveals the problem. Who thinks like that? In my early twenties, as I went to work on a bus packed with University students and later watched my high-school peers one by one graduate, I began to think, “Everybody thinks like that!” I was wrong, obviously, but that was the start of my intentional personal education in the liberal arts. And, even though I was always a little weird about reading (recall my high school ban on pre-twentieth century authors), this is probably where I started to go a little south. An unguided regret-fueled tour through the literary fruits of six-thousand years of civilization is going to make anyone a little funny.

But that was then, this is now. The regret is gone and my reading  passions, which were there before, remain. The anxiety, the I-haven’t-read-the-right-things feeling, remains but who cares? I kind of like being the weird anxious guy anyway.