FolioDeux Blog

FD is a few days into reading Montaigne’s essays via Daily Lit.  It’s not going completely well.  When the email with the daily portion arrives, it seems easy to skip over the text, to skim rather than actually read.  Perhaps the better approach to reading Montaigne would have been the way FD read Moby Dick and Crime and Punishment years ago.   As with Montaigne, those books seemed equally to be something any culturally literate person should read, and at the same time, impossibly boring!  So, FD got the most attractive edition possible (with illustrations, nice paper, good sized print etc) and made a firm rule:  read just one chapter a day.  Now, superficially, that’s similar to the routine that Daily Lit is providing.  The email that Daily Lit sends is of nice size type, well displayed and without (as far as FD’s seen so far) typographical mistakes.  But the experience isn’t the same.  FD thinks that on-line reading is abstract in a way that a book in the hand is not and perhaps that is why it is easier to read less closely and completely in the on-line format.

November 2 seemed to be this year’s opening day for the annual catalog mailing deluge — 15 different catalogs arrived at the FD post office box.  Several were duplicates of what FD received at home, and few if any will get any business from FD.  This year, especially, when so much is on sale in local shops, catalog shopping doesn’t seem to be the way to go.  And yet, there’s no doubt the catalogs will keep coming.  FD recycles them and sometimes even makes an envelope or two from interesting pages.  And, we don’t really mind getting the catalogs, since they help to support the post office and FD LOVES the US Postal Service!  There are many complaints about the postal service, but FD has not experienced major problems, and is still captivated by the idea of a single stamp taking postcards and letters anywhere in the country.  And FD uses the US Postal Service on-line postage calculator often.

Not that we’ve been that thrilled with stamp choices lately.  But we did buy several sheets of the Kelp Forest stamps, and Mr. FD likes the new secular holiday stamps (yes, we’re part of the “holiday,” not “Christmas” group).

FD recently gave Prairie Lights Bookstore (http://www.prairielights.com/) a collection of their bookmarks from almost the entire history of the store.  But that barely touched our own supply.  We have lots and lots:  Mr. FD’s mom may have kept every bookmark she ever acquired.

Similarly, internet bookmarks tend to accumulate, and it isn’t often that FD decides to eliminate one.  FD used to visit Boing Boing (http://boingboing.net/) every day, but at some point stopped being a happy mutant, or perhaps the huge popularity of BB changed what gets posted there? or, despite the “long tail” argument (http://www.thelongtail.com/), there’s more convergence on the web and a lot of what was appearing on BB was also available elsewhere.  Anyway, that book mark did get deleted, though the morning internet review did not get any shorter.  While the political review is shorter than before the election FD still spends time at Kevin Drum (http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum) (which does include the occasional non-political post, and who wants to miss Friday cat blogging?) and the Washington Monthly blog (http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/) but Josh Marshall, gone, and Huffington Post and Daily Beast, also off the bookmark list…

FD keeps a list of books to borrow from the library, and today  stopped by to get a couple.  One, Suspect, by Michael Robotham (from 2004), was found on a display of “staff favorites.” It’s always nice to have this kind of confirmation!  Another novel that FD has been meaning to read is New England White by Stephen Carter (from 2007).  It got good reviews, which led to its place on the “to read” list, even though Carter’s novels since have received mixed notices, particularly the most recent, Jericho’s Fall. Perhaps Carter has started writing too quickly — his first novel (The Emperor of Ocean Park — FD hasn’t read that one yet, either, though it was a best seller at the time…) came out in 2002 and then there was a five-year interval before NEW. His two most recent novels books came out in 2008 and 2009 — and who outside of Joyce Carol Oates can write in an interesting way at that pace?