Book Marks: News From India, Goodreads, Djuna's New Book

Quite a few interesting bits coming out of India last week. First, I love this story about the rise of the housewife author in India, especially how it starts...

It was while drying fresh chillies in the sun that Theertha Shivu thought of plotting an abduction. But it was past midnight by the time the 30-year-old homemaker from a village near Kushalnagar in Coorg got down to writing the next episode of her serialised serial killer story on Pratilipi, a digital storytelling platform.

First, she had to get all the house and farm work done, make sure the in-laws were asleep, the five goats and four dogs were fed before turning her attention to ‘Murder: A Police Love Story’ about a killer who preys on women with cat eyes but then falls in love with the police officer investigating his case.

The kicker is when the husband pooh-pooh's the wife's writing "until the money started rolling in". Writer's block? Muse on holiday? Dry some fresh chillies in the sun! Who knew it would be so effective?

The report goes on to profile several other such writers, who published on digital e-book platforms such as Pratilipi and Amazon India's Kindle Direct publishing. "Of Pratilipi's 9.5 lakh (950,000) writers in 12 languages, about 70% are women and almost all the top writers are housewives, followed by teachers, self-employed professionals and IT employees."

One could argue that the housewife author has already made waves long before this piece was written. I hate bringing up EL James, but ... well, many, many more like her have written books and stories that have their own audiences and fan bases on digital platforms, waiting for a journalist, blogger or TikToker to bring them under the spotlight. The next big thing might not be too far off.

Also making their mark are several South Asian novelists in this article on Homegrown, most of whom are women. The article seems to be making the case for a growing South Asian influence on the global literary scene, citing the inclusion of three South Asian writers in the 2022 Booker longlist.

Owing to a renewed surge in funding, forward looking publishers and mentorship programs, it seems like our homegrown authors are finally prodding at the Jenga tower of literary culture, causing it to wobble and upend the warped power dynamics of how the world perceives South Asian writing.

Will it? Regardless, more is better than less, in terms of volume and variety of reading material. South Asia has a long and huge literary tradition, and its contribution to world literary canon is more than welcome. The featured titles look interesting too.

While Americans are at odds over drag queens reading stories to children, in Mumbai, a drag artist cosplaying as a librarian hosted a children's tea part and read to them The Many Colours of Anshu, part of a growing canon of LGBTQ+ fiction coming out from India. The article is heartening because...

Instead of straightforward tales with a moral ending, these stories have gay couples, non-binary people, and transgender persons as their main characters. Many authors are also questioning the “elitist and Western” language of homosexuality like ‘coming out of the closet’, ‘queer’ and ‘pride’, which they argue has little resonance with a majority of Indians. And in doing so, they are gently nudging young minds while helping parents broach seemingly daunting topics.

While there are some commonalities, the LGBTQ+ experience is different from one country to another, and having local authors tackle and write about LGBTQ+ lives and issues in the local context is important in terms of representation, raising awareness and nurturing understanding.

And in this Q&A with Rahul Soni, associate publisher at HarperCollins India, translator, and co-founder of a bilingual literary journal, also called Pratilipi. It's Sanskrit for "you become what you read" and I'm guessing it strikes a chord with readers in the subcontinent. The interview is insightful and it's nice to hear from professionals in publishing, editing and translating from time to time.

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Irish writer Megan Nolan decries the weaponisation of Goodreads' "hugely reductive ratings process" and noted its role in fostering "a number of sinister controversies in recent years." She also brings up another question: should one need to have written a book to criticise one?

When told I reviewed food but didn't cook it, a former colleague felt it was ... hypocritical? Not right, in essence. I've since fixed that to a degree, though I've long stopped reviewing food even before the pandemic lockdowns began and dining in was prohibited.

Does the same apply to books? Nolan doesn't seem to think so. Having been a books editor for about a decade and written over a hundred reviews, I think I'm qualified to be a book critic, despite occasional attacks of impostor syndrome.

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Kate Knibbs at Wired manages to snag an e-mail interview with mysterious South Korean sci-fi legend Djuna (with the author's translator as the go-between) after reading the English edition of their newest book, Counterweight.

I have no idea how much artistic licence the translator took with the replies, but it's surprisingly interesting and provides a glimpse into the sci-fi writing scene in South Korea, also talking about films and manhwa.

And if you think going by pseudonyms is strange, Djuna reveals that "Last year, the nominees for the Korean Sci-Fi Awards’ webnovel category included CatG, ISteppedOnLego [SNRK], Hongbi, Neon Sign (Nehreuk), Shipstick, Yeonsanho, 2-ga 0, Songeum, Sanhocho, and Choongek. Only the winner, Yeon Sanho, had a normal-sounding Korean name." Very K-pop-esque.

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A new Mississippi book-banning law may cut off minors' access to e-books or audiobooks through public libraries.

"Many libraries utilize resources like OverDrive and Hoopla to allow library cardholders instant access to a wide array of e-books and audiobooks," the report goes. "This means that libraries can’t offer these resources unless they can verify that all the content on these platforms complies with Mississippi’s bill or have a system in place to prevent minors from accessing content that isn’t in compliance with the bill."

Ultimately, a ban is less of a hassle than any attempt to monitor what minors read or categorise material according to age.


Elsewhere...

• In Afghanistan, Taliban rule is stifling the book industry, and Kabul-based journalist Hujjatullah Zia is concerned: "Overnight, Afghan book publishing has gone from being a flourishing sector ... to a struggling and risky business venture. Afghans have gone from being avid readers to not being able to afford books. I have gone from being a proud author and book owner to a despaired man who has tried and failed to hold on to an intellectual life in Afghanistan."
• Zimbabwean playwright, filmmaker and award-winning novelist Tsitsi Dangarembga speaks with New Zimbabwe about her new non-fiction book, AI, activism, the International Images Film Festival for Women, and more.
• A long-forgotten 1930s novel acclaimed by George Orwell and W.H. Auden will be republished after a Manchester bartender rediscovered it and solved the mystery about the author's last wishes, succeeding where academics failed. The bartender managed to get the book republished too. Never underestimate bartenders and the social networks around the local watering hole.
• Not long after a foundation linked to Hungarian president Viktor Orbán took over the country's largest bookstore chain and publisher, Libri, certain books sold by the chain are now being wrapped in plastic. To no one's surprise, these include books with LGBTQ+ characters, such as Micol Ostow’s Riverdale series and Alice Oseman’s graphic novel Heartstopper.
• Molly Templeton waxes lyrical over "books that no one else knows about". The term is used loosely because there is always the chance that someone else knows about "that book no one else knows about but me" – and if those people meet there will be lots to talk about, mostly about the book.
• Here's an argument against posthumous editing of books for today's sensibilities, which adds that the practice could lead to call to remove anything labelled "offensive" from existing books, like what the US book bans are trying to accomplish. At any rate, "We don’t need to update authors’ books to reflect contemporary values because our contemporary values are reflected by authors writing books right now."
• Authors Sarah Silverman, Richard Kadrey and Christopher Golden have filed two lawsuits against OpenAI and Meta, the creators of AI language models ChatGPT and LLaMA, respectively. The lawsuits allege that the language models were trained on the authors' books without permission, pointing to summaries of the books produced by ChatGPT that I assume were so damn good, they could've only have come from "reading" the source material. This bunch joins authors Mona Awad and Paul Tremblay, who sued OpenAI for the same reason.
• It happens: you're reading books in a series and you eventually end up hating the whole bunch. Is there any reason to continue reading the series once the interest wanes? Over at Tor.com, James Davis Nicoll gives five reasons to finish a book (or a series) you don't love.

Book Marks: Fixing Goodreads, Jarhead Ban

Has Goodreads "poisoned literature", as this article in The Telegraph claims? Using the case of Elizabeth Gilbert's latest book as a springboard, the writer dives into the reliability of Goodreads' rating system, which has been weaponised by blackmailers and review-bombers, most of whom may have never read the books they target.

How can the website remedy this? The writer suggests that "Goodreads and other online review sites could surely vet more carefully the reviews they host, or at least nip in the bud campaigns launched against a book before it’s even been published – after all, few authors can afford simply to chuck a book in the bin as blithely as Elizabeth Gilbert has. As a gatekeeper, Goodreads, as it stands, hardly seems fit for purpose."

The New York Times highlights some cases of review-bombing, and while it argues that, "As a social platform, part of what Goodreads is offering is conversation and user engagement, and controversies and debate can drive more comments and time spent on the platform," there's room for improvement.

However, author Gretchen Felker-Martin, speaking to the NYT, does not think "Goodreads has an economic incentive to be any better. It would be just a gargantuan job to significantly monitor the kinds of abuse that’s being heaped onto people every single day, but there’s certainly some middle ground between breaking your back trying to deal with all of it, and dealing with none of it.”

Kara Alaimo, an associate professor of communication at Fairleigh Dickinson University who writes about issues affecting women and social media, is optimistic that Goodreads can fix itself, even as its reviews "are quickly becoming unreliable." Good for authors, "but it would be all the more so for readers, because it would ensure we keep some of the power to determine which books break out."

The Washington Post, however, wonders if Goodreads will be able to fix itself, calling it a site "built on outdated technological infrastructure" that isn't worth the money and effort to overhaul by its owner, online retail giant Amazon, which seems to have other priorities. "Former employees said Amazon seemed happy to mine Goodreads for its user-generated data and otherwise let it limp along with limited resources."

Nor does Amazon seem keen on radically revamping the site, to avoid driving away Goodreads diehards. "One former employee compared Goodreads to Reddit, an 18-year-old internet forum where users are revolting because of modifications to the site," goes the WaPo report.

The outlook is kind of bleak, and I'm reminded of what is happening to Twitter. Goodreads is a great resource for books and opinions on books and at this stage, a stable, functioning online portal gives many comfort. If it ain't broke...

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In Ottawa County, Michigan, the Board of Education for Hudsonville Public Schools voted to ban Jarhead from a high school library. The 2003 memoir of a marine during the First Gulf War was branded an “extremely violent, vulgar, pornographic diatribe”.

Considering the types of books subjected to such scrutiny and restriction, the author never thought that his book would be targeted. And now that the U.S. is in a proxy war with Russia, "it seems like a good time to ensure student access to all points of view concerning warfare," the author writes in The Daily Beast.

His closing remarks is an echo of what critics of the bans have been trying to get across: "Make no mistake, they are banning books, but really they are restricting access to ideas. And when one small group of people ban a larger group of people access to ideas, we are in for a closing of the American mind."

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ByteDance, TikTok's parent company, is launching a publishing company to take advantage of TikTok's ability to make books viral. But will 8th Note Press end up marginalising other authors, favouring only those it wants to promote? Some authors are enthusiastic about the new imprint, because #BookTok is one hell of a soapbox right now. However, as The New York Times notes: "...ByteDance will likely face the same challenges as traditional publishers: Readers are fickle, and ultimately, viral videos won’t automatically create a blockbuster if the books themselves aren’t appealing."

And should a video platform be publishing books just because it helps to sell books? There are few doubts about the latter, as in the case of Shawn M. Warner, whose poorly attended book-signing event was spotted and later posted onto the platform by a TikToker. The video went viral and sent Warner's novel, Leigh Howard and the Ghosts of Simmons-Pierce Manor, up the charts on Amazon.


Other news:

• Novelist Ken Liu responds to a short story by Jeff Hewitt about a court case involving publishers and an AI author. There's a fair bit to unpack: can AI reach a stage where a machine can out-write humans in terms of output AND quality? Are human writers and LLMs more similar than different?
• The Libri Group, home of Hungary’s largest publishing house and bookstore chain, have been taken over by a private foundation closely associated with the country’s far-right prime minister, Viktor Orbán. The Mathias Corvinus Collegium (MCC), "has been likened to a training ground for future cadres of Orbán’s hard-right, populist Fidesz party," the Guardian reports. As a result, some of the writers published under Libri have bailed, while others have voiced concerns that this move is another step in the government's bid to exert more control over speech in Hungary. Eszter Kováts, an assistant professor in the Institute of Political Science at the University of Vienna, looks into this in detail.
• ELLE profiles several women in publishing, from authors to literary agents, who are taking the industry "in new and compelling directions.
• Richard Charkin asks ChatGPT what are the principal megatrends affecting the publishing world, and then sets it straight.
• While a librarian was away from a school library in New Zealand, a couple of books by a controversial publisher said to contain racist propaganda found their way onto the shelves. According to Stuff, "The books in question were printed by ... a Kiwi company that has produced three books on New Zealand history in the past year. None of the authors appear to have relevant qualifications as historians."
• Here it comes: Bloomberg reports that ChatGPT creator OpenAI is being sued for violating privacy laws by scraping material from the Internet, including books, articles, websites and posts. Another suit against OpenAI by two authors, Mona Awad and Paul Tremblay, alleges that their books were used to train ChatGPT because of the chatbot's "very accurate summaries" of the works. Will more suits follow?
• Want to read reviews of a book? Do it after you've read the book: "Reviews are not recommendations (or anti-recommendations) so let’s stop treating them that way. Let’s take the pressure off and stop expecting to love or hate a book because of what someone else says about it."
• Book cover model Fabio dismissed the emergence of the "cinnamon roll" male lead in romance novels as a "trend" and called the idea of male characters showing their sensitive sides "hogwash." The Messenger shoots back: "The genre now better reflects the diverse range of men who exist in the real world — men who exceed traditional gender roles by broadening the behaviors that define masculinity. There's nothing hogwash about that."

Surviving Workplace Jerks

Three years after the first COVID-19 lockdowns, almost every business is fully opened up and getting its workforce back into the office. Many have surely bid farewell to their sweet, sweet work-from-home days with a little sadness as they ironed their work clothes, even if WFH is still allowed in a limited capacity.

For some, however, "returning to work" may feel daunting at most if theirs is a toxic work environment. With more and more eyes opened to the benefits of a better work-life balance and other possibilities beyond the office, the urge to leave such an environment is great.

Not to say workplace toxicity in your neck of the woods is bad, but in many countries it has become a source of concern. Revelatory articles and thinkpieces about toxic work environments and the need for work-life balance have emerged in the wake of the push for "business as usual". More and more self-help books are sporting in-your-face titles, not a few with harsh language, perhaps to emphasise the urgency of doing something NOW.

One of those books is The A**hole Survival Guide by Robert I. Sutton, an organisational psychologist and Professor of Management Science and Engineering at Stanford University who studies leadership, innovation, organisational change, and workplace dynamics.

Sutton had written two other books. The No Asshole Rule is touted as a guide for working with and surviving all manner of assholes out to make your life at work a nightmare. The follow-up, Good Boss, Bad Boss, highlights actions by the best bosses and the mistakes of the worst to guide readers to become "the great boss most people dream of having." This book completes what could be called Sutton's a**hole triptych.

After writing The No A**hole Rule, Sutton was apparently inundated by thousands of requests for tips to survive a**holes from a range of people: from professionals, members of the clergy, students, and CEOs to "my barber Woody, and even my mother."

Rough language in a title is not for mere shock value. That so many, by his account, reached out to him in the wake of the book's release, is telling. Though one can look up reports of awful workplace hijinks, the litany of bad behaviours Sutton presents on one page is gasp-inducing.

Ear flicking.

...Smiling warmly as she whispers in his ear, "You are a loser. I am going to bring you down."

...Writes an employee up for arriving to work fifteen minutes EARLY.

...Flies into a rage over a late water delivery for the office cooler.

...Tosses a lit cigarette at him.

...Grabs her and bites her on the arm "leaving a bruise."

Makes you wonder whether some of the emails Sutton received are made up. Then again, we now know practices such as bullying, sexual harassment, and discriminatory practices against women and minorities are rife in some businesses, to the extent where it's considered part of the corporate culture internally – until the backlash that inevitably ensues after such practices are uncovered.

Sutton builds a good case for why workplace toxicity is bad, and offers some insight into why some at work are such jerks. Machiavellian maneouvres in some workplaces are perhaps inevitable when one climbs to the top, but at some point people's perceptions of what powerful people should be like are warped, and toxic behaviours are seen as hallmarks of a survivor or "player" in office politics.

He cites an article in The Atlantic that lays out why one should be a jerk at work. He then cautions against such a culture, writing that "my reading of that big pile of research indicates that pundits and professors who celebrate bullies, takers, and narcissists are exaggerating the spoils and downplaying the harm that assholes inflict upon themselves (especially in the long run)."

...treating others like dirt is contagious—so if you work with a jerk (or, worse, a bunch of them), you are likely to become one too. A 2012 study documented how such shit rolled downhill: abusive senior leaders were prone to selecting or breeding abusive team leaders, who in turn, ignited destructive conflict in their teams, which stifled team members' creativity.

After walking you through some diagnostics (how serious is your a**hole problem?) Sutton volunteers "field-tested, evidence-based, and sometimes surprising strategies for dealing with a**holes" – ways to help you avoid, outwit, disarm, and develop psychological defences against jerks who endeavour to make life hell for you at work.

When one can't evade, outmaneouvre, befriend or reform one's workplace tormentors, there's a chapter on "fighting back": confront the jerks, or find ways to expel them from the company – risky last-ditch steps when things have gone too far. Mental reframing of one's situation can also end up encouraging one's tormentors or lull one into complacency.

While Sutton draws on research, his experience, and the correspondence he receives from people about the subject, he's not touting The A**hole Survival Guide as the definitive guide on surviving toxic people. "A**hole survival remains more of a craft or skill than a science," he writes. From some of the examples he gives about confronting a**holes, readers should consider themselves cautioned.

Airport staff, for one, shouldn't retaliate against a rude client by sending his baggage to a faraway location, and one should be careful when retorting against and then slamming the door in the face of a CEO's right-hand man. With people, everything is situational, and test cases will not predict what happens in real life.

If you think of yourself as a civilized person but seem to run into assholes everywhere you go, look in the mirror—you could be staring at the culprit. Remember, treating others like dirt goads people to bully you back.

Another thing to note about Sutton's book is how US-centric the examples, test cases and research are. Self-help books from abroad, particularly the United States, don't juxtapose their theories and arguments against scenarios in other non-Anglo cultures (here's one such book, which, incidentally, was blurbed by Sutton). Talking back to your superiors is even more of a career-killer around these parts, even if one is right.

Some of Sutton's strategies, especially those on "fighting back" against one's tormentors, may not yield the desired results in environments where some toxicity in workplaces is accepted as the norm. And good luck fighting sexual harassment and gender discrimination in extremely patriarchal societies.

Nevertheless, workplace toxicity and how to deal with it is a universal problem, and this guide is anything but useless. At the very least, audiences outside the US and the white Anglosphere in general can gain some insight into how things are in Sutton's neck of the woods. And the research he quotes legit warns of the hazards of a toxic workplace culture.

...although we humans sometimes express it in strange ways, we all want a life where we encounter and are damaged by as few assholes as possible, we want the same thing for those we care about, and we don't want to behave like or be known as assholes.

He does address the possibility that the reader's environment and situation would make some of his advice ineffective or redundant: "The studies, stories, and techniques here provide fodder for crafting your custom survival strategy (after all, there are no surefire, one-size-fits-all solutions)." So it's up to the reader's to create, implement, and refine their a**hole survival plan, taking into account the limits imposed by the laws, the culture, and societal norms in where they are.

We are all responsible for taking care of ourselves, Sutton adds, but we also rely on others for physical and emotional sustenance. In the process, he appears to argue, we end up expecting too much from the other person and offence is caused. Hence, the a**hole problem.

So it falls upon us to manage those expectations while being mindful of others and, where possible, being kind while staving off attempts to fight negativity with more of the same. If everyone strives to do that, perhaps the a**hole problem will finally go away.

Until workplaces the world over wakes up to the fact that a toxic work environment does more harm than good, we'll have to do what we can.

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The Asshole Survival Guide
How to Deal with People Who Treat You Like Dirt

Robert I. Sutton
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
214 pages
Non-fiction
ISBN: 978-1-328-69591-8

Book Marks: More Book Ban News, And A Thriller Trial

While the state of Illinois in the United States has barred the banning of books, the Governor of Texas has signed a bill that bans "sexually explicit" books from schools and "mandates that book vendors rate the content of the books they sell and compile it into a document for review by the Texas Education Agency (TEA)."

The now-codified READER Act — Restricting Explicit and Adult-Designated Educational Resources Act — the law means that school librarians have to follow new standards when it comes to purchasing materials for their library.

The writer of the article argues that this bill empowers the Texas governor to determine what gets read in schools, according to what he deems fit. "Let’s not mince words here: this is about Greg Abbott, Jared Patterson, Matt Krause, and other right-wing conservatives determining the lessons allowed in public education and pulling anything that does not align with their repressive, cishet, white male worldview."

And it seems such a worldview has no room for acceptance of diversity. For reading Australian author Scott Stuart's My Shadow is Purple to her class of elementary schoolchildren, schoolteacher Katie Rinderle was terminated by the Cobb County School District in Georgia. Someone complained about the book she had read and though the censorship laws passed last year in the state restricts material deemed harmful to children, nobody seems to be sure what's harmful about the book.

Meanwhile, the Dayton Metro Library is making itself a sanctuary for endangered books "joining more than 2,400 libraries across the United States that seek out books that have been subject to bans or attempted bans, making them available for patrons to check out," according to Dayton Daily News, which also reported that the library's Executive Director Jeffrey Trzeciak said, among other things, "If you don’t like a book, don't read it. It doesn't give you the right to tell others what to read."

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I had opined on Richard North Patterson's problem getting New York publishers to take on his legal thriller The Trial. While an author's race or should not disqualify him from writing about certain topics, Laura Miller over at Slate, who has read the book, thinks race might be less of a factor than the possibility that the book ... might not be great.

Edward Segal over at Forbes sees the controversy over Patterson's book as an opportunity to learn some crisis-management lessons. While I wouldn't call it a controversy, the tips Segal shares would be a good starting point for crafting one's own strategy to deal with being unfairly cancelled.


Elsewhere:

• Children's books featuring neurodiverse protagonists seem to be the latest publishing trend, the Guardian reports. "Publishers, which were previously reluctant to approach the subject, are increasingly seeking out realistic and explicitly neurodiverse protagonists, often by authors who are themselves neurodivergent." One such work might be Free Verse by Sarah Dooley, whose protagonist also has a penchant for poetry.
• Tracy Buchanan at The Bookseller tells people to stop being scared of AI and embrace it, saying that AI can, among other things, help free up time for writers, improve their writing, and aid in the fight against book piracy. Buchanan, like many who believe that the use of AI in writing and publishing is an eventuality, thinks all the negativity in the AI debate is keeping people from writing "bloody good books."
• Some might remember Judy Garland for her role in The Wizard of Oz, but that she published a book of her own poems? "It was 10 pages long and contained eight poems. It first published in 1940 with only a select few copies given out to close friends. Jack Chitgian Bookbinding Service in Beverly Hills, who manufactured the book, reprinted an unknown amount of copies in the early 1970s after Garland’s death."
• A curriculum rationalisation exercise, which also involved edits to school textbooks in India is stirring a pot because of deletions of chapters that make the current Indian government ... uncomfortable. "Among dropped topics are paragraphs on attempts by extreme Hindu nationalists to assassinate Mahatma Gandhi and chapters on federalism and diversity," the BBC reports. Some of the academics who helped develop the existing textbooks are objecting to the changes and want nothing to do with the new curriculum.
• My Kolkata speaks with publisher, poet, photographer and author Naveen Kishore about his book, Mother Muse Quintet, his photography exhibition, and more. "Writing is an independent exercise from publishing. I have been writing for the past 12 years — every day. So, it is a practice, like we do riyaz (systematic practice of an art form, usually under a teacher's guidance) for music."
• The translation of North Korean author Paek Nam Ryong's award-winning novel, Friend, was published in the United States in 2020 by Columbia University Press. But it seems the author was unaware of this, nor did he receive any royalties from sales of this edition.
• The Other Black Girl and the erasure of Black women in publishing: even as publishers ramp up the hiring of BIPOC personnel to boost diversity in the industry, this Electric Literature article argues that such initiatives don't mean that things will get better for BIPOC authors and employees in publishing, not when the same old prejudices persist.
• Out in Kampung Pulau Duyung in Terengganu is a small public library run by 80-year-old Frenchwoman Christine Rohani Longuet, converted from an abandoned village house. Seems running a library has been a dream "of having a cultural centre for young children and explorers". Sounds cool. Wonder if the state government might help out with maintenance and promotion.
• This glimpse into what's going on with the book culture in Uzbekistan suggests things are loooking up after a change of government. But can the momentum be sustained? Can the country shrug off the baggage of its past to allow its reading culture to blossom and thrive?
• A survey of about 2,200 adults in the United Kingdom by the Publishers Association, a UK trade association of publishers, "showed that a third (33%) of people think that books offer them the best form of escapism when they’re having a bad day, coming second only to watching television (54%)." The poll also found that "found that 41% of people keep books for themselves, while 34% pass them on to friends and family members."
• Here's a review of God the Bestseller by Stephen Prothero, a biography of Eugene Exman, an editor of a publishing company that would later be known as HarperCollins. The reviewer calls the book "engrossing", painting a picture of a man who knew that "the dual identities of religious books—as commodities in the market and conduits of the Spirit—are less oppositional than purists of either commerce or ministry might guess."

Holding Onto Hope For Books And Bookselling

I didn't set out to follow the development of AI in publishing, but I seemed to have fallen into a rabbit hole while researching for a couple of AI-related pieces. And it seems the debate is still raging and developments in the field keep coming in.

This article highlights the changes AI will cause to parts of the publishing sector. Expect AI to take over a lot of human involvement in marketing, promotions and publicity; translation; and audiobook narration in particular. More and more writers are using large-language models to draft books, with some employing AI to conceptualise and create book covers.

And check this blast from the past about a guy who used tech to harvest bits from the web to write tons of books and publish them on Amazon. This reminded me of "blogs" made with content reaped from other websites by bots; at least one of my posts was harvested this way. Was this the precursor of the large-language models behind the likes of ChatGPT? Who'd have thought.

Will AI eventually replace humans entirely? A lot of doomsaying is clouding the fact that the technology isn't perfect, and that it is only as good as the material it is being trained with. Visual artists have more to fear than writers, perhaps, but the article offers some hope...

Ebooks did not kill print. Audiobooks are not destroying print, either. Amazon may have forever changed the industry, but the format that makes publishing truly publishing is not going away anytime soon. Perhaps the industry will weather the AI storm as well.

What might not "weather the storm" is the physical bookselling industry. Borders Malaysia is shutting down operations and will fully exit on, of all days, this Merdeka Day. Once considered MPH's rival, apart from Popular, Borders Malaysia was an offshoot of the now-defunct Borders Group Inc. in the United States, which shuttered in 2011. Prices of books have shot up along with costs within the book supply chain, and print appears to be increasingly unsustainable.

In the US, bookstores are still around, though they're apparently not the place to work if you want a living wage. The piece about independent bookstores goes on to disabuse readers of the long-held romantic notions about working at such places: "Much as the fringe benefit of access to review copies might be nice, it does not pay the bills, whether you’re in New York City, Seattle, or a smaller community in the Midwest."

Numbers are tossed, figures are bandied about. Sobering numbers that underscore a fact that having a bookstore or library, or being able to run or work in either, is a privilege...

These jobs, so often seen as dreamy or as a calling, are coded in language that undermines their reality: you need to have another job, several other jobs, no debt, no bills, and no other obligations to survive in any place in the country to take one.

Indeed, in times of peace and plenty, such institutions can exist and even thrive as long as all the basics are taken care of and the boat is sailing smoothly. However, economic wobbles wrought by climate change, COVID-19, and conflicts in several fronts worldwide have shorn our spending power, forcing us to prioritise other things. Some TBR piles have started growing slowly or not at all.

Books have always been luxuries in the past, democratised by the printing press and later, digital technology. Good books take a lot of resources to make, especially limited-edition hardcopies with fancy covers and special paper. For those simply looking for a read or a dozen, going digital would be the way.

Like books, timepieces too were a luxury, only affordable by the rich and powerful, because of their intricate engineering. At some point the wristwatch industry re-embraced its gilded past after it was almost wiped out by the proliferation of digital watches, touting a return to tradition and craftsmanship.

Books might take a similar path, though masterpieces like Dave Eggers' artsy edition of The Eyes & The Impossible may never leave the house with their masters for a long flight with nothing to read. That's one possible path, though one also has hopes that paper books will remain viable within one's lifetime. And diehard bookworms can find succour in that, among other benefits, one retains more reading from physical books rather than digital copies on screen.

I can't bring myself to bid adieu to physical books and bookstores within my lifetime. They've been part of my life for so long, even as I have and will say goodbye to other things and people. I feel somehow, like in the US, indie bookstores that are small, cosy and offer more personalised service, will become more the norm than emporium-sized mega bookstores that have diluted their brands by offering more non-book items. Air-fryers in a Popular outlet? Alamak! And not a recipe book to go with them.

The meditative experience of walking along and perusing shelf after shelf of books will probably overcome our attachment to digital media, likewise the lure of finding the unexpected among rows and rows of tomes. Each book is like a treasure chest of words, forming images, vistas, and lived experiences – and one is never sure whether it's a keeper until it is read, cover to cover. And one eventually has to venture beyond the four walls of one's room, cosy as it may be.

So yes, I believe that books and bookstores have a future, even as machines evolve – or are made to – become closer to us. Even if books eventually retreat into private spaces beyond public reach, as in days of old, at least they will be there, waiting for their day in the sun again.

Romantic, much? Perhaps. Some bookworms tend to be hopelessly so.

Fundamentally Frightening

What is the link between the docuseries Shiny Happy People and the book-banning movement in the United States?

The series is about the Duggar family, the star of a TLC channel reality-TV series 19 Kids and Counting (19 being the latest count before the show's cancellation; the number changed as a new child is born). They're devout Independent Baptists, and have links to the Institute in Basic Life Principles (IBLP) and the Advanced Training Institute (ATI), both founded by American Christian minister, speaker, and writer Bill Gothard.

Writing in Book Riot, Kelly Jensen describes the IBLP as "one of the most dangerous Christian fundamentalist movements" in the United States, and that the homeschool curriculum the IBLP developed via the ATI "showcases the talking points being spewed by right-wing bigots bent on banning books." Also...

[Bill] Gothard’s teachings note that women remain subservient to men, that children be subservient to their parents, and that physical punishment is not only acceptable but expected in order to train obedience. These are but the tip of the iceberg.

I was reminded of this article after reading about some politician reportedly stating that "Western understanding on human rights concepts should not be accepted in Malaysia as its proponents are believers in Darwin’s theory of evolution, which goes against Islamic theories on creationism."

Local religious fundamentalists share a fair bit with their counterparts in the West. Like the Duggars, not a few parents also eschew family planning and believe that G*d alone dictates how many children they'll have. So one shouldn't be surprised that they don't subscribe to Darwin's theory of evolution. The Malay edition of The Origin of Species is banned here.

Perhaps suspicious of the curriculum in US schools, some Christian fundamentalist parents homeschool their offspring, often using curricula fashioned by organisations such as Gothard's ATI. Jensen highlights an example of what it contains...

...Take for example the “Christian Mom” who decided that her kids could no longer watch Ms. Rachel, a YouTube star whose show for toddlers teaches music, colors, shapes, and more. Why did she have a problem with such a straightforward show?

She and her family do not believe in dinosaurs and they do not believe in pronouns (Ms. Rachel has a regularly appearing and deeply beloved guest on the show, Jules, who uses they/them pronouns).

Jensen goes on to state that "Homeschool programs like these promote isolation, promote dependence on white male authority figures, and create such a culture of fear that indoctrinates do not speak up for fear of retaliation and excommunication." Who the heck benefits from the creation of such a society?

Eventually, this sort of fundametalism will bleed into other aspects of people's lives. The US abortion fight is the result of this encroachment, as is the ban on alcohol sales in coffee shops, supermarkets and convenience stores here, plus the imposition of a "modest" dress code in some public places.

Not only are book bans here "archaic", as reportedly described by the Penang Institute, but ineffective and seemingly arbitrary. Ban something and everyone rushes out to get a copy to see what the fuss is about. There is no deep, honest, mature and meaningful engagement with or discussion of the material.

We're losing the ability to think for ourselves because people in power cannot trust us to come to proper conclusions – or conclusions they want us to reach? – about what we see, hear, or encounter, so they're deciding that for us. Could there be something else other than an authoritarian bent behind this impulse?

Are some of the ways we react to things also to blame, especially with how we consume media like fast food and junk food: obsessively, with little pause and little heed for our health? Or how we argue the talking points about certain topics?

Regardless, trust is a two-way street, and there can be no way to move forward if bad-faith actors dictate what or who we should and should not read, listen to, watch, consume, or be offended by.

Book Marks: Hold That Ban, Cancelling Cancel Culture

As the book-banning movement marches on in the United States, the state of Illinois is putting a stop to such efforts. In a press release, Governor J.B. Pritzker said, "Young people shouldn’t be kept from learning about the realities of our world; I want them to become critical thinkers, exposed to ideas that they disagree with, proud of what our nation has overcome, and thoughtful about what comes next. Everyone deserves to see themselves reflected in the books they read, the art they see, the history they learn."

So far, it's only one state, but I hope more will follow suit. The movement to control what gets read in schools, libraries and everywhere else is dangerous overreaching by elements out to impose a "cruel, rigid, unforgiving and smugly self-righteous" (David Eddings was on the money about religious demagogues) doctrine everywhere, not just the US. If people stopped thinking for themselves, some smart alecks will step in and do our thinking for us, and that's the last thing we need.

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Has cancel culture gone too far?

Elizabeth Gilbert was forced to shelve her new novel, set in Russia, after it was review-bombed by people protesting Russia's invasion of Ukraine. There has been some pushback to this, in favour of Gilbert; her book does not appear to be pro-Russian propaganda, and I personally deplore the tactic employed against it because most review-bombers never read the book they attack.

Some may feel the urge to strike back at an oppressor, but projecting all that is bad about a rogue nation onto a piece of literature and then smashing it is pointless. Have review-bombs ever stopped a war, ended oppression? The power and reach seemingly granted by social media has made us lose all sense of proportion. And equating writing about Russia to tacit support for its policies is a bit of a stretch.

Bestselling author Richard North Patterson, meanwhile, can't get New York publishers to take on Trial, a legal thriller focusing on racism, Black voter suppression, and an interracial love affair in America set in 2022. If I read correctly, he was told that as a white male author, the story was probably not his to write.

While there has been debate over whether white authors should even attempt writing the stuff Patterson did in Trial when BIPOC voices are being suppressed, is it fair to excessively gatekeep or pigeonhole authors by race and what they should and should not write about? And even if there have been white authors who fumbled when writing about other cultures and lives, surely some of them do get it (mostly) right.

If an author is found to have not treated their subjects well in their book, then let the piling-on begin. Otherwise, why kill a book before it even has a chance to be read and judged?