A Synaesthesia Christmas

"No matter who you're buying for this holiday season — Secret Santa, work colleague, book club, family, children, host, neighbour, 'friend of a friend' — books truly are the gifts that keep on giving. [...] Christine Pountney — Sweet Jesus (McClelland & Stewart) — Skyped in with her Lit Wish List: 12 Books That Tell the Truth, and they don't lie! There's sure to be something on this list for the truth-seekers in your life, from current titles to some classics you may already own but might now read again once you've heard Christine's pitches. I particularly love how she talks about remembering the experience of reading a book through her senses, rather than intellect. It's one of the reasons she believes reading is a visual medium, something that inspires us to recall pieces of story as if something we once tasted."
— Julie Wilson, 49th Shelf
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Big Apple

From: Folded Sky

"The burgeoning trend of censorship in the cyber sphere has claimed another victim.
     Apple Inc., the digital-retailing leviathan, is refusing to market the Hippie 1 and 2 e-books and iPad apps by bestselling Danish author Peter Ovig Knudsen.
     The two-part retrospective of Denmark’s lively hippie culture in the late 1960s and early 1970s was rejected by Apple’s iBookstore sales platform last month because – with photographs of naked men and women – it violated the company’s policy guidelines, which stipulate no sexually explicit photos. [...]
     There are two principal issues here. The first is apparent hypocrisy. Apple deems a dozen, 40-year-old, black-and-white photographs of Danes frolicking au naturel morally offensive, but sells Dani Olivier’s Anthology of Nude Photography and Nude Inspiration in a Painter’s Studio by Kristofer Paetau and Ondrej Brody – both volumes filled with pictures of naked bodies. It also continues to sell apps for Playboy and Sports Illustrated, which feature partially naked women.
     The second is freedom of expression: Who appointed Apple the globe’s moral arbiter?"
— Michael Posner, The Globe and Mail
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Being Read To

"For most of human history, literature was transmitted orally from storyteller to listener. In theory, therefore, a book read by an actor or an author should feel like the most natural thing in the world.
     In reality, the book-length recitation turns out to be a very tricky medium. A good reader can lift a mediocre book above its station. A bad reader can ruin a masterpiece. And there are all kinds of variation in between: A so-so book rich with incident and characters can delight, while a good book can be good in the wrong ways, with sumptuous, tightly written sentences that make it almost impossible to stick with, especially for listeners who are driving, or making dinner — which is to say, most of the intended audience.
     A prime example of a good book defeated by the format is Telegraph Avenue (Harper Audio, $44.99), Michael Chabon’s teeming novel about race, human relations and a lot of other stuff swirling around a vintage record store in Oakland, Calif. The language is dense, allusive, hip and sharp, which is to say, very difficult to perform. [...] By the second disc in a marathon that goes on for more than 18 hours, the thought arises that some books simply need to be experienced in black type. "
— William Grimes, The New York Time
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Life Lessons

"No novel ever shared a point of view more effectively than Jane Eyre. From the minute the child Jane is unfairly locked in the Red Room by her vicious aunt, Charlotte Brontë gets us on her side. We see what she sees; we fall in love with ugly, rude Mr Rochester as she does. The voice of “Jane Eyre” has no distance. It is raw, persuasive, exhilarating, just as it was in 1847.
     Brontë had a short, hard life, dying at 38 of sickness in pregnancy, having already lost all five of her siblings, including the writers Anne and Emily. Her life was ruled by her father Patrick, vicar of Haworth. Her biographer, Mrs Gaskell, said he had a 'strong, passionate, Irish nature...compressed down with resolute stoicism.' The same could be said of his daughter’s writing. The substance of Jane Eyre is a gothic fairy tale: an orphan, a powerful man, his mad wife, all laced with reversals of fortune. Yet the tone is flattened with Yorkshire terseness. 'I have no wish,' Jane tells Rochester, 'to talk nonsense.'"
— Bee Wilson, Intellgent Life
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