The Next Best Book Club discussion

Welcome to your January group read! Discussion for the book will be led by Dionisia, and be sure to mark all spoilers with the spoiler html tag that is located in the (some html is ok) link at the top of your comment box.

Happy discussion!

Happy New Year TNBBC! I am delighted (and a bit nervous) to be kicking off this new year of reading with all of you.

I've just snagged a copy of our group read from my local library. This is a book I've never read by an author I'm unfamiliar with, but the subject of The Library at Night is dear to me. Excuse me as I dig in. Looking forward to engaging with my fellow readers!

As an author, and a grateful member of this group, I hope to get back to reading. The Library at Night sounds like a great start. Most authors will tell you that making time to read is tough, and flies right in the face of the very reason we started writing in the first place--we love to read! Wish me luck. The Middle Eye

I've been a lurker for a long time but in the spirit of new beginnings with the new year I hope to start participating more in these groups. I just downloaded the book for this month and it looks like a fantastic choice!

Colin wrote: "I've been a lurker for a long time but in the spirit of new beginnings with the new year I hope to start participating more in these groups. I just downloaded the book for this month and it looks ..."

Sometimes all it takes is the right book to tempt us out of the shadows.

I'm a bit envious of this author and his ability to go out and build a new home for his books. My own books are currently strewn about the house willy nilly. For a while I only had one bookcase so books would find themselves stacked on a table or the floor or a chair.

What about you? Do you have a special space set aside just for your books? Are they organized in any particular way?

What do you do with your books when they outgrow their space? Donate? Surrender and add more books on top of those books?

my copy of this just came in at the library - i'm looking forward to starting it tonight

i have 4 bookshelves in my bedroom/study - my books are haphazardly piled on them, often double and triple stacked and when i run out of room there, they get piled up on the desk or the floor...I have this serious inability to get rid of books

I only read most books as e-books and our library does not have this book, so I'll have to pass this month.

I have 2 book cases. Much smaller than I would like them to be. I go through bouts of having stacks of books everywhere then I hit a cleaning cycle and decide what I really want to keep. I'm moving more to an e-book world for fiction while maintaining physical books for ones that I want to pull back out and reflect on later. For this, the Ebooks offered through my library have proven both good and bad - good from a cost perspective but I find too often I'm busy and get halfway into a book when it expires.

We have a store called "Book Mark" that accepts used books and magazines, which are, in turn, sold to benefit the city library. So when my bookshelf overflows, I cull and donate them. I believe that readers who patronize the Book Mark are serious about books, and committed to giving back to their community. That way I feel somewhat better about parting with my books.

Rebecca wrote: "We have a store called "Book Mark" that accepts used books and magazines, which are, in turn, sold to benefit the city library. So when my bookshelf overflows, I cull and donate them. I believe tha..."

Very true. I try to support the local small used bookstores (well what's left of them). They typically don't want the books I read but occasionally they'll take one. I've tried our local library system but they seem to have some strict guidelines about what they want which seems odd since I'm not looking for money just to recycle them for other people. I probably need to visit them in person - they only take books at a couple of sites in the city.

there are also things like bookmooch and paperbackswap - I think BM they pay for shipping 9maybe) - but its not expensive and you know its going to someone who wants the book (since it is coming off their booklist)

"Every library is exclusionary, since its selection, however vast, leaves outside its walls endless shelves of writing that, for reasons of taste, knowledge, space, and time, have not been included. Every library conjures up its own dark ghost; every ordering sets up, in its wake, a shadow library of absences."

-from page 107 of The Library at Night

The library as shadow. Wow.

Dionisia wrote: ""Every library is exclusionary, since its selection, however vast, leaves outside its walls endless shelves of writing that, for reasons of taste, knowledge, space, and time, have not been included..."

I loved that line. So, it's possible to define the library by what it's missing rather than what's actually in it. It is a shadow; the missing parts. Why someone at some moment picked this book over another. I come originally from a very small town school and our library didn't have a lot in it; I think that's what drives my reading now - I read everything in our library before I hit grade 10 (and some were books I shouldn't have read since they conjured nightmares). But there is a particular example of the shadow also. This one particular series always stuck with me as an example: they stocked God Emperor of Dune but none of the other novels. So, I read it without realizing that there's 3 before and later more after. It's a strange way to read when you're never sure if you're in the middle of a series! The story is actually much different if it's read out of order like that.

Dionisia wrote: ""Every library is exclusionary, since its selection, however vast, leaves outside its walls endless shelves of writing that, for reasons of taste, knowledge, space, and time, have not been included..."

I was struck also by the line following: "Of Aeschylus's 90 plays only 7 have reached us; of the 80-odd dramas of Euripides, only 18; of the 120 plays of Sophocles, a mere 7". I drew out a bookcase of Euripides showing his plays followed by a bunch of blanks to show the shadows (there's no way to post jpegs I think?). It gave me a different perspective since most of the bookcase is empty - how much has been lost over the ages.

Colin wrote: "Dionisia wrote: ""Every library is exclusionary, since its selection, however vast, leaves outside its walls endless shelves of writing that, for reasons of taste, knowledge, space, and time, have ..."

Your story brings another line from this book to mind: Books are transformed by the sequence in which they are read.

Have you ever tried to go back and read a book you loved when you were younger? It can be a surprising reading experience. My feelings were drastically different upon revisiting Where the Red Fern Grows. I couldn't connect with the characters in the same way and I spent most of the book feeling haunted by Bambi.

Colin wrote: "Dionisia wrote: ""Every library is exclusionary, since its selection, however vast, leaves outside its walls endless shelves of writing that, for reasons of taste, knowledge, space, and time, have ..."

I would love to see this! Can you upload it to Goodreads?

i just finished chapter 3, but I found the quote about gaining knowledge, doesn't make one knowledgable to be interesting

Dionisia wrote: "Colin wrote: "Dionisia wrote: ""Every library is exclusionary, since its selection, however vast, leaves outside its walls endless shelves of writing that, for reasons of taste, knowledge, space, a..."

I've uploaded it to my profile. I don't know if I can put a link here but it's also on my update feed. My artistic are very apparent in the sketch (lol, or the lack thereof).

Dee wrote: "i just finished chapter 3, but I found the quote about gaining knowledge, doesn't make one knowledgable to be interesting"

I found that an interesting comment which can also reflect on the huge amounts of online course materials in the world (I'm a big time Coursera, EdX user) so I see what he means by it and to a certain extent I agree.

What I'm not as sure about is how do you take knowledge and create yourself as a knowledgeable person??? I've lamented many times the state of the world where you need to be an expert in a field there seems to be a lack of generalization which did characterization the old education system (you needed your Latin to read your classics, etc). As someone who is a techie by trade, I see it in my profession where you can't keep with everything even in your own profession so how do you become generalized.

And that leads to is generalization a good thing? I would say yes, in that progress as a society can come from many different areas and being too exclusionary about what knowledge you're gaining leads to such a narrow view of the world that the big picture doesn't exist anymore.

For example, I would love to read the entire collection of books that Brittanica printed as the so called western canon but my personal library space would not fit all those and 995 dollars is a bit much :)

Here's a comment from the book that I don't completely agree with (standard disclaimer: I'm a comp sci guy and that definitely influences my opinion)
"In spite of ambitious programs as the Google project and the earlier Project Gutenberg, which has since 1971 placed some ten thousand texts on the web - many of which are duplicates and many more unreliable ..." (page 144-145 in my ebook edition).

The critique in the book is that the web and things like PG are not preservation methods for books. The implicit side of it is that books on their own are the best preservation method. First, there is a valid point here - CD/DVD/ebook encryption methods may not be readable in the future or the physical media will deteriorate to such an extent that it's not usable. My VHS tapes will disintegrate and had I gone the Betamax route, even worse (the analog today is the 'war' between blueray and HDDVD; I can remember the $5 HD-DVD movies that were on clearance when they lost the standards battle). But, these are more format problems not problems with the general concept of preservation.
And in regards to project Gutenberg, I wonder about that comment. Yes, there are problems with it. But on the other hand, is it better to have some type of mechanism to save books that may end up disappearing in the obscurity of time (try finding popular novels from the 1800's that while they were extremely popular; they weren't of a caliber of Dickens etc so many have simply vanished). That's very true of the popular authors of today - what happens when their popularity wanes. I have books that I read as a kid and early adult that are very hard to find today even on ebay or amazon unless you want to pay a fortune (once the author passes away; his shelf space in the book store slowly vanishes). To me, that's what PG is for - especially if it's done in simple text format and not in the more device dependent formats.
I think we need to fix what's wrong the storage methods rather than throw them out and decide that it doesn't work. Saving our written heritage and who we are as a people is a great endeavor and we are to a large extent defined by what we read and write.

The very day I finished reading this book, my newspaper ran a story about libraries as a decor element. I read it with interest, but was turned off when one of the suggestions was for turning the books spine-side in, and have the shelves show only the pages side. The story said that way it gave a "structural" component to the room. Ugh! Overall, reading the book made me want to get into my library and organize it better! Although I prefer to read in bed at night, not in my library.