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What are we reading? 2/12/2024
Mod
Yes, indeed. I wonder if anyone else remembers when The Observer was an essential purchase in the 1970s – to read Clive James’ laugh-out-loud TV reviews if nothing else. A bunch are collected in The Crystal Bucket.
Logger24 wrote: "AB76 wrote: "its a sad day when good journalism gets paywalled"Yes, indeed. I wonder if anyone else remembers when The Observer was an essential purchase in the 1970s – to read Clive James’ laugh..."
i used to buy it at uni....mid 90s, always a good read, that and the Indy with the G, not all at same time ofc. i think i stopped reading the G in print about 2016-17, as i noticed every part of the G shrink and then moved to the sub model paying a small contribution a month in 2018 and reading online only
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The Independent was a must-read in its day too. At the outset, in 1986, they had an amazing series of articles, almost daily, on the Guinness/Distillers investigation, the biggest City scandal of the time. They seemed to have a source leaking info almost daily – corporate executives, investment bankers etc giving confidential evidence to the DTI Inspectors one day, and the next day it would all be on the front page of the Indy – made Jeremy Warner’s name. Also in those early days it was a must-see as well: they made a speciality of stunning, very large, b+w photo journalism, which was not seen anywhere else, but soon copied.
Logger24 wrote: "AB76 wrote: "...i used to buy it at uni....mid 90s, always a good read, that and the Indy with the G, not all at same time ofc...."The Independent was a must-read in its day too. At the outset, i..."
i remember my grandfather embracing the Indy on its creation and that probably influenced me reading it on family visits. I miss the old Indy, its now a cheap mess for 5 yr olds
i dont buy any reasons the G are putting foward for what it has done to the Observer and as usual, no comments sections are open for readers to say what they think about losing it to a paywall
Hope everyone and their property is safe during this wild weather. I am still slowly reading The Eagle and the Hart mentioned in the last thread. At 600 pages long ( around 150 of notes, indexing etc.) it is too heavy for me to read in bed! I am enjoying it very much. This afternoon has been taken up with writing Christmas cards.
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Logger24 wrote: "Sitting late in front of a fire here in snowy Vermont, I couldn't go up to bed until I'd finished An English Murder, where Christmas guests find themselves snow-bound at Warbeck Hall. What a treat...."Keep warm and safe Logger. I have this book on my digital to read pile. Perhaps Christmas week would be a good time for me to read it!
Logger24 wrote: "Sitting late in front of a fire here in snowy Vermont, I couldn't go up to bed until I'd finished An English Murder, where Christmas guests find themselves snow-bound at Warbeck Hall. What a treat...."i do love snow themed novels in December, though snow in the shires is rarely seen in this month , the last time any proper snow fell was 2010 and 2011. Though snow does fall every winter but only for 2-3 days. Though 40 years ago i remember regular good snowfall as a kid
It would seem as i slowly reach closer to 49, that in the last 3-4 years i am finding more of the books i read satisfying, though approaching them with different reasons and expectations than i did at 28 or 38Of course a random 70 odd reads across a year cannot be accurately classified and filed away, a lot of subjective elements impose themselves. The weather, moods, the state of the nation, family but i would say 2024 has been even richer than 2023 or 2022 as a reading experience
Doldrums may now haunt me through 2025(lol or not lol), this could be the high point of my reading. Whats also strange is when i was high on classics in my 20s, reading books of which all were exalted(though maybe only reading 30-40 a year), i found more reads that left me cold or dissapointed
Mod
Gpfr wrote: "I feel there's an overdose of "best books" in The Guardian at the moment: best books of the year, best books to give for Xmas, best books in different categories (some limited to 5, some open) ..."i HATE lists and this time of year is where everybody starts filling review space with boring lists
Mod
i HATE lists..."
For me it depends — I enjoy The G's lists of the 5 or 10 books on a theme (depending on the theme, of course) because there are often good suggestions in the comments.
With the current crop of lists, I've just seen that there are double helpings Guardian / Observer, e.g. 2 lists of best fiction.
Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather is a really great read so far.In simple and precise language she brings the wild first years of American New Mexico to life. This territory, with barely 61,000 people of which almost all are Spanish or American Indian, had been seperated from Mexico after the Mexican-American War in the mid 1840s
Cather follows a french priest, based on the real life Bishop Lamy, as he travels among the isolated pueblo's and towns spreading the gospel. The descriptions are important part of american west nature writing and the cultural aspects of the inhabitants lives are vitally captured too. Even within 40 years and the turn of the century, it was still dominated by the original spanish and indian population.
One confusing bit of data is the 1790 Spanish census of Neuvo Mexico, which lists a population of either mixed or native indians, no whites at all. Clearly by 1850, 61,000 were recorded by the americans as white, not indian in the 1850 US census, which makes me wonder if these were almost all meztico(mistaken by the US census as spanish), formed from the 1790 census Most sources list barely 3,000 whites, inc spanish ones up into the 1830s
Mod
Me too. It's exhausting! I’ve also got a bit tired of the annual selections by professional authors – a bit too invariably literary. The round-up I now look forward to each year is the one in the WSJ, where they ask a bunch of 40+ “friends” (a good number of writers but also business executives, musicians, sportsmen, scientists, politicians, soldiers) not what they think is the best book of the year but what they’ve been enjoying and found most rewarding during the year, which could be anything at all, from any period. They give them plenty of space as well to say what they admire about the books.
They had Mike Tyson a couple of times. I kept one of the clippings. It's eye-popping. His books were The Quotable Kierkegaard, a biography of Alexander (who "was really a runt"), and Napoleon's love letters to Josephine. He finished with Virginia Woolf, her last letter to her husband before drowning herself.
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Logger24 wrote: "AB/giveus – The winter here seems to be reverting to norm, after last year which was unusually light on snow. Part of the morning was spent hauling in logs from the stacks out back. That in itself ..."good to see the normal seasons up where you are Logger, the creeping lack of snow in most northern hemisphere winters is always a bad sign
FT Weekend had a short review of a study of writing bY Edwin Frank, the editorial director of NYRB classics. I feel ignorant of the fact i had never heard of him despite greatly enjoying the NYRB classic seriesI have been a subscriber to the NYRB since 2007 and my first NYRB classic read was Moravia's Boredom, the same year
AB76 wrote: "the creeping lack of snow in most northern hemisphere winters is always a bad sign"Oh no, it isn't!🤣
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It seems that way, doesn't it, but where we are in VT is in fact far to the south of the Home Counties, around the latitude of Siena. I for one tend to think of London and NY as being on a parallel, so up there from NY is up there from London as well.
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https://www.theguardian.com/media/202...
Logger24 wrote: "AB76 wrote: "...up where you are Logger..."It seems that way, doesn't it, but where we are in VT is in fact far to the south of the Home Counties, around the latitude of Siena. I for one tend to ..."
good point, i guess the contintental climate affects VT more than Siena, with the influence of the sea and the narrow neck of Italy.
i'm on 51N, nowhere in the USA is on that line, its all Canada, i would say Vancouver Island is probably the closest in climate, deffo not Newfoundland and Labrador!
Gpfr wrote: "Good letter from Observer & Guardian journalists about the sale of The Observer.https://www.theguardian.com/media/202..."
it remains a shocking decision which goes against all the values of the Guardian and remains an example really of who on the Scott Board is chums with Harding and his Tortoise Media crew.
a paywall enthusiast and ex Murdoch goon should not be a bedfellow for the left wing press. Harding has written of preserving liberal media but when that audience will shrink from maybe 300,000 to 3,000*, who will be reading it? Not me!
* correction it seems the Observer had an 80,000 circulation
Academic Publishing - recent pitfalls 'Some thoughts on the current state of Academic Publishing Issues. This is my own, partial account. There are a few academics on here I think, that might be interested in the issue, and many of us read academic books as well, and have probably far greater knowledge than I have of the whole field so any thoughts would be welcome.'
If you wanted to present some research, or informed opinion in the past there were a wide selection of reputable journals that might be willing to publish your paper, for free, if you had the right qualifying status, or sufficient acknowledged creative, clever ideas, or insight. This is no longer true, at least not for free-to-reader ‘open access’ web-based journals. Unless authors go for non open access options (which fewer people will read), they have to pay a fee, with the asking price, across a range of publications with diverse status, being between £1,000 and £4,000 for the top-flight journals, although concessions are offered in some cases, of say a discount of 20-30%, or possibly more for authors in poor developing countries.
However, in most cases, the author pays and it is free for the readers, so it is an alternative to ‘paywalls’. But this model means that refereed journals are charging ambitious researchers for the publicity, and sharing of their academic work. Basically, you have to pay them, to get seen. If you are sheltered within a university setting then the university may pay (for staff but not necessarily research students), but those in the independent sector, entrepreneurs, engineers & researchers world, can face a heavy cost. Unless they can claim a discount.
The risk with this model is that, although the students get the info for free, which is great for them, unless they stay (as full-time staff) in academia or something similar, they will have to pay, further down the line, for the ability to get any of the results of their own research or thinking to be read by the rest of the ‘interested’ world. There are many people, totally independent of universities, who are engaged in innovative technology practises, who want to read about what others are doing and also pass on ideas.
My main point is that, in addition to the cost of student loans, this open access publishing surcharge makes working in a knowledge-based economy increasingly unattractive for many young people and also hard for independent researchers. It may make me seem a bit old-fashioned, but I always thought that free, or easy-access to knowledge, was a ‘good thing’ for all of a society, and the internet made this easier.
This monetising of everything seems to be a relentless force at loose in the world. Now I do have sympathy for the publishers, to an extent. Seeking to differentiate themselves by faster turn-around time and a higher number of citations is not easy. Neither is finding enough good reviewers, who aren’t usually paid. The quality of refereeing may get worse as the volume of papers increase- with international publishing being increasingly dependent on global markets where competition for academic recognition is high, especially from Asia & China. This is leading to the global monetisation of the ‘knowledge economy’- it’s highly lucrative for the publishers to get the academics to pay.
However, this may block access to potential sources of innovation & creativity, limiting access to those that can afford it. Though some journals allow authors to put non-open access no-fee papers on their own web sites, that won’t ensure as wide a readership as with open access publication. Overall, I worry that access to potential sources of innovation & creativity will be blocked, or at least limited to those that can afford it, or are in a poor developed country & have fees waived.
So, I worry about the cost of ‘market economics’ being applied to every element of the knowledge, and publishing chain, and if it could end up doing untold damage to a future healthy, vibrant, and more equal society. If knowledge only thrives for those who can afford to pay for it, we, and our descendants, will all be impoverished by the process of the ‘dumbing down’ of the whole of our society. This is not only to our expectations, but also our hopes and dreams as well. A little dent in a part of a chain can seem inconsequential, and so is often ignored, but a chain is only as strong as its weakest link.
Tam Dougan
Tam wrote: "Academic Publishing - recent pitfalls 'Some thoughts on the current state of Academic Publishing Issues. This is my own, partial account. There are a few academics on here I think, that might be ..."
worrying to read, i turn more and more to academic university press studies as i feel they are more interesting and make you think harder than the most recent Mcintyre-Hastings-Holland popular history books. i am not denigrating those 3 authors, all have written good stuff but they are not at the academic end of the publishing world
Tam wrote: "Academic Publishing - recent pitfalls 'Some thoughts on the current state of Academic Publishing Issues. This is my own, partial account. There are a few academics on here I think, that might be ..."
Good points all. I would say that academic publishing has never been free, in my field (Biomedical sciences), in the 25 years that I've been doing it, but the prices steadily have risen through the years and the premium charges for open access publication (as mandated by many funding sources) become onerous.
The academic publishing industry as succubus has been an open discussion for nearly as long as I have been in the sciences. The ethics of charging researchers to publish fundings, which are largely funded by public grants, in a for-profit industry which itself entirely upon the unpaid labor of academic reviewers are clearly a difficult conundrum to resolve, Academic pre-print servers (such as BioRXIV), which are the deposition of findings and papers prior to peer-review and copyright are good options and are open to all publically. There is some danger inherent to the public deposition of unverified and uncriticized findings (see: Chloroquine and ivermectin utter bullshit in covid treatment).
It's a similar conundrum underlying the funding for clinical trials which often funnel publically developed drugs into the hands of relativewly few Pharma companies. Barring a massive decrease in clinical trial costs (I've gotten 2 million euros and I haven't even gotten into a Phase 1 yet) or a massive increase of public funding for clinical trials it's not an easy solution.
I do believe that the for-profit publishing industry is fading away, but I'm not sure that there is a strong alternative waiting in the wings.
I don't think that this makes any difference in the attractability factor for research positions. It comes down simply to economics. Much like lawyers, if you can make more money in private practice, why would you stay a public defender? My salary would increase 3-fold if I jumped to industry, and I could very well do it. So, I can't fault people not wanting to invest 12+ years in schooling, or in jumping ship into the private sector.
Paul wrote: "Tam wrote: "Academic Publishing - recent pitfalls 'Some thoughts on the current state of Academic Publishing Issues. This is my own, partial account. There are a few academics on here I think, th..."
i wonder how much damage the covid era bullshit has done to the world of medical publications and even public common sense? its like the populism that infected politics hit the world of public health and medecine, with all kinds of utter bilge being sprayed about
i saw a letter in the TLS that decried injecting millions of "healthy" people with the covid vaccine. it made me think..err...hang on..when i was given my polio vaccine aged 2 mths...i was healthy, in fact most mass vaccines are for the "healthy". It led me onto the nonsense that some sports people gave for natural covid immunity"being fit and healthy", like some new body fascism where just beinghealthy as a kind of faith meant you were immune and vaccines were dangerous,....gone a bit off topic...appoligies!
AB76 wrote: "Paul wrote: "Tam wrote: "Academic Publishing - recent pitfalls 'Some thoughts on the current state of Academic Publishing Issues. This is my own, partial account. There are a few academics on her..."
I think there is a real danger here, both culturally with 'fake news' promoting algorithms increasingly being taken up by the social media giants, but it is also happening within academia, with the increasingly compromised ability to reliably employ a robust system for the 'weeding-out' of poor research. The current model of academic validity is being undermined by the rapid expansion of ambitious academic refereeing options, globally, in that peer group assessment is mostly unpaid, and relies on, quite frankly, to me, a rather unprofessional historical system, where often retired academics will do this work, for free, just to keep their hand in. Some will be great, but many will not. It is a bit of a lottery, at least to me... and undermines the supposed rigour of what academic assessment should be...
Distinctly unimpressed that the G are attaching begging requests to every article i read despite being logged in and giving money alreadyWikipedia have been chasing me too and even Macmillan Cancer were at in 2021. I usually donate around Xmas, with my finances for the year balanced up as much as possible and in one lump sum. For most of the spring of 2022, random chuggers from macmillan rang me asking for a regular sum, not listening to my reasons for a one off sum
Mod
Oh, me too! And then they say, "Well, OK, go on reading for free", while at the top pf the page it's "thank you" for contributing. I turned off the article count.
Tam wrote: "AB76 wrote: "Paul wrote: "Tam wrote: "Academic Publishing - recent pitfalls 'Some thoughts on the current state of Academic Publishing Issues. This is my own, partial account. There are a few aca..."
Yes, I agree. But, on the whole, it's a problem almost unique to Asian nations. Predatory journals are based predominantly in Asian countries and papers written without scientific merit are published predominantly in Asian countries. That's not to say that overt academic fraud doesn't happen in European or North American countries, but rather the abuse of publishing scientific results is a result that weighs heavily in India and China. When I was a PhD student, we just generally ignored papers that originated from Russia (but not from Russians abroad) because we knew that a large chunk were simply fallacies. Nowadays, papers originating from India are taken with an enormous grain of salt, and results until recentl results from China were assiduously repeated internally prior to proceeding on grant proposals.
To a certain extent, this has arisen from the metricization of the academic tenure and grant winning process. The only things that count towards those goals are the number of papers you publish and, additionally, the number of citations your papers receive.
So, this has led to "H-index mining" with artificial citations, or massive outputs of papers. In the USA, if you publish 400 papers a year, you're going to be under investigation. In other, less attentive countries you get tenure. Similar things happen with predatory scientific conferences, fake meetings organized by no one that invite the unlucky to attend while giving false speaker roles to the unskilled.
In England and the USA, and parts of Europe, this strict statistical stratification is starting to wane, thankfully. In my case, I generate patents, and I sell them, but until now that has counted for nothing in the tenure or funding process. Likewise, in biotechnological development, the most important papers are rarely the ones that recieve the most immediate citations. The most important cancer immunotherapy papers, whose discoveries have gone on to save millions of lives, were unceremoniously dumped in small journals and almost entirely ignored for years. By design, so that their discoveries could fly under the radar, sneak past potential industry competitors with billions of dollars, all while meeting the obligation to publish.
The Covid crisis only hastened the coming of the impending tidal wave of anti-expertise. The mistrust of science, something I see equally here in Italy and in the USA, has been long growing,. It will cost lives. Millions. But not of anyone I love, so fuck the rest quite frankly.
Tam wrote: "It may make me seem a bit old-fashioned, but I always thought that free, or easy-access to knowledge, was a ‘good thing’ for all of a society, and the internet made this easier..."This is leading to the global monetisation of the ‘knowledge economy’- it’s highly lucrative for the publishers to get the academics to pay.
An interesting argument.. I see others have responded and haven't had time to look at those replies yet...
FWIW, I agree with the first point about 'free or easy-access knowledge', but am not sure if that ideal ever existed. My father edited a journal for a well regarded publisher (Elsevier) and in those days it was definitely a money-making business... the journals and books - given their very limited readership - were expensive to buy and, indeed, I assume that only universities and specialist libraries bought them - as well as, perhaps, companies who thought the research might have commercial value.
So back then the universities paid; it seems from what you say that now it is the researchers who pay. I'll say no more until I've had time to read the other responses.
scarletnoir wrote: "Tam wrote: "It may make me seem a bit old-fashioned, but I always thought that free, or easy-access to knowledge, was a ‘good thing’ for all of a society, and the internet made this easier..."This..."
You are right, it has never been free before. Before 2000, and the rise of internet publishing, a researcher still needed access to behind a paywall, usually through the university library, who paid the subscriptions. There was some sort of outcry and campaigning around then, that internet access should be free, as there were no printing costs to pay for, and so the academic publishing industry largely complied by changing the system so that the researcher paid the costs and to the reader it is free. There are other models though, I agree that there is no such thing as a free lunch. Our model for our newsletter is this one though which is free to outsider readers, but a shortened version than the institutionally paid for one, for students.
NATTA’s approach
NATTA’s newsletter Renew, over the years, has covered news, policy and articles on renewable energy. It was initially run from an Open University research group and was offered to the public, on subscription, in printed paper format, but now is run independently of the OU and only online. However, it is offered in two different versions, a short one that is free to anyone interested, and a longer one, with more reviews and features, password protected, for the benefit of OU renewable technology students, for which the OU pays the NATTA team a fee. That seems to work quite well - it’s a cross-subsidy. And when it comes to publishing new papers NATTA can do that for free for both readers and authors- but they are not externally refereed. https://renewnatta.wordpress.com/wp-c...
As always there are caveats! We can't account for the refereeing bit, which is the bit that would make it, properly, academic...
Gpfr wrote: "AB76 wrote: "Distinctly unimpressed that the G are attaching begging requests to every article i read despite being logged in and giving money already..."Oh, me too! And then they say, "Well, OK,..."
i did too!
Paul wrote: "Tam wrote: "AB76 wrote: "Paul wrote: "Tam wrote: "Academic Publishing - recent pitfalls 'Some thoughts on the current state of Academic Publishing Issues. This is my own, partial account. There a..."
Covid reminded of the dangers of mis-information, idiot speak, the fragility of the human pysche, people trying to wish themselves a way out of inconvenient truths by embracing groups of doctors and supposed academics who decried every governental intervention. The UK was part of this from top to bottom, the fact the house of commons had whole debates on mask wearing made me despair, it doesnt augur well for the next pandemic at all. People just want to forget and return to pre 2020-
I know some here aren't keen on lists but I have to post it, as I have actually read some of them:https://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/198...
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https://www.theguardian.com/media/202...
Mod
It's barely credible that the Trust would decline to hear from the immediate past editor.
Logger24 wrote: "Gpfr wrote: "Another letter protesting the sale of The Observer, this time from international correspondents..."It's barely credible that the Trust would decline to hear from the immediate past e..."
what a mess this has been, from start to finish and it probably leaves the Observer dead in the water. i still cant work out whey did it, and their explanations make no sense. On the buyers side, of course Tortoise Media think its all good but they now will slap a paywall on Observer content, which should have been a first condition of no sale.
I see Time magazine has made Trump Man of the Year, very odd and short sighted, he spent much of 2024 in court or being convicted which i think would jeopardise his status as man or person of the yearI see Zuckerberg is now giving him money too, Silicon Valley knows one thing and one thing only: power is key
AB76 wrote: "I see Time magazine has made Trump Man of the Year, very odd and short sighted, he spent much of 2024 in court or being convicted which i think would jeopardise his status as man or person of the y..."Follow the money as ever.
I have finally come across Colum McCann's 'Apeirogon' in the library so this will be my new reading material for the next few weeks. I seem to remember Lisa, once of these parts, was a fan. It has much more appeal than my last attempt at a novel, that was 'Night Boat To Tangier', by Kevin Barry, retrieved from Tesco's charity book exchange. I lasted about twenty pages, and couldn't take any more of stereotypes of Irish 'scallywags' purporting to be parodies of themselves. What is it about national 'tropes' that are played up to the nth, not very recognisable level?I still intend to finish Richard Wright's 'Pagan Spain' which I put down somewhere, just over half-read, in the house, and can't find it, not least because the sprog has asked for its return over Christmas when we will be in Spain. Hats off to Logger, I think, for reading 'Native Son' I read a few reviews and was not able to grapple with the idea of a character that was reduced to brutal stereotyping in order to make a larger point, but I would still be interested in other's, those who have actually read it, views...
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Lisa was indeed a fan of Apeirogon, as am I. I found it remarkable.
Over the past year's events, I've been wondering about the two men, Palestinian and Israeli ...
Gpfr wrote: "Tam wrote: "I have finally come across Colum McCann's 'Apeirogon' in the library so this will be my new reading material for the next few weeks. I seem to remember Lisa, once of these parts, was a ..."Thats a great idea Gp, I hope a journalist, or maybe even two, one from either side, takes the time to visit both the dads, and their families, and find out what their thoughts are on Oct. 7th, and the current situation in Gaza, and indeed the whole surrounding area of the Middle East, especially Lebanon and Syria...
Mod
Not me actually. I did read Invisible Man, which belongs to the same era. I will give Native Son a try at some point.
Currenty I’m reading and enjoying something very different, The Small House at Allington, penultimate chronicle of Barset. Trollope’s humour is present on every page. It is so soothing, even when his characters are heading for trouble. I think this is the third time in a row I've turned to Trollope in the run-up to Christmas
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Snap! I've just finished re-reading it. I'm reading all the Barsetshire books again — just one more to go 😊
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=izhqm...
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Ersatz TLS
Books mentioned in this topic
Babylon Berlin (other topics)Apeirogon (other topics)
Death Comes for the Archbishop (other topics)
Confronting Dostoevsky's "Demons": Anarchism and the Specter of Bakunin in Twentieth-Century Russia (other topics)
Childhood, Youth and Exile (other topics)
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Authors mentioned in this topic
Peter Tremayne (other topics)Peter Tremayne (other topics)
That's always what I thought, and I never saw anything to suggest otherwise - never an Ob..."
its a sad day when good journalism gets paywalled