Edge.org is an online community and independently organized think tank which keeps tabs on some of the more important intellectual issues of the day. Every year the organization poses a question to a some of the world's smartest individuals and publishes the responses. Since 2005, each question and answer series has led to a book. In 2010 it was "Is the Internet changing the way you think?" and, as expected, the results from the over 150 respondents, all of them qualified intellectuals mostly in the math and science fields, provided a sizable amount of philosophical and cognitively astute analysis.
Though each segment is obviously backed up by solidly well-concieved ideas, the contributions become redundant after the first few responses. The thinkers get kind of dense as they plow through lots of socratically-tinged postulations, going into elaborative explanations which neither give a direct answer or offer a concise analysis. In more than a few cases, they actually ask a new question ("the question we should be asking is . . .") and proceed to answer it in equally dense, rambling fashion. It's a book which is more amusing (at least at first) than informative though it will inevitably attract readers of a more philosophical bend to scrutinize some of the content. The most interesting response? Maybe the poetically inclined statement of Italian architect Stefano Boeri who begins with the words, "internet is wind", and rallies his abstract assessment in equally metaphorical fashion by stating that "this wind becomes precious occasions to understand what we cannot say, what we are not willing to deposit in the forum of planetary simultaneity." Uh huh? (004.678 IS)
Peter Mellor, a philosophy professor at a small Ohio college, suddenly dies in a car accident while driving home one night. Only he isn't really dead. He's been "reborn" as a zombie, an oddly intelligent one at that, in a world having undergone a zombie apocalypse. While this new world is firmly infested with the living dead roaming creation and eager to feed off those still yet undead, Peter is actually one of the few (maybe the only one) who can comingle with both the hoards of lurching ghouls and the enclaves of "normies" who are eager to protect their lives at any cost. Despite suffering from severe headaches and bouts with amnesia, what's clearly evident to Peter is the the rapidly devolution of society as a whole.
Both the undead and the yet undead share a common trait of decomposition and depravity--the zombies already the embodiment of mindless parasites and the increasingly violent humans, having adopted a bloodlust of their own in loosely organized cells of militia and para-military cloisters, largely unsympathetic as beings of mass paranoia with hair-trigger mentalities. Peter soon learns that though he can still reason coherently with his former colleagues and friends, he's nonetheless hunted and preyed upon as "one of them" and must hide out to protect himself. And even though he's immune to the ravenous insanity of his zombie brethren, he finds that he's constantly having to suppress a growing addiction to the increasingly more appetizing gooey stuff inside people's heads. As if that weren't enough, Peter's also come to the conclusion that his car accident death may not have been entirely accidental and his resulting strange "afterlife" may have more to it than just a zany twist.
In a coy and intriguing take on the zombie genre and a book which may soon be seen, in some form, on the big screen, author Scott Kenemore looks at more than just what makes us alive or dead, but what in fact makes us human and, moreover, to what capacity can supposed fully rational being become mindless beasts. What is first a very humorous take on the currently en vogue horror genre, maintaining a tongue-in-cheek comedic appeal throughout its narrative, Zombie, Ohio is an innovative look at the realm of existence and the nature of conscious reality. After all, it's not staying alive which is the thing at stake in the zombie mode, but staying dead as well. (FIC KENEMORE)
"If you don't read one book this year, make this be the one."
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Is reading books really so important? If the people who are supposed to read books--scholars, intellectuals and teachers of literature--can't even get around to reading all of the more important works from history, and can't keep up with the thousands more published each year, and can't retain all of what they read anyway, why should average individuals be encouraged to do the same? It probably doesn't matter, unless you're confronted with having to talk about the books in question which you haven't read but are expected to have read. There are a variety of methods to employ when considering this dilemna of which author Pierre Bayard humorously points out in this little book on books. It's chiefly more important to know a book's role than it's key plot points, sentence stylings or verbage. After all, why would you want to read a great book just for its content and not for its context.
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Using examples from such writers as Balzac, Dumas, Wilde, Montaigne, Umberto Eco, and even the late Graham Greene, Bayard describes the many varieties of "non-reading" and contextualizing the 'role' of a book that we haven't yet read but either vaguely pricks our memory or conjures up associations with certain themes and ideologies. It may not be the most ethical way of going about your reading list, but it's certainly one of the most pragmatic and admirably honest instruction manuals on how to casually sound like you know what you're talking about. Funny, provocative and most of all very practical, How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read is in the end a love letter to books, offering a whole new perspective on how we select, read and absorb the books which do or don't cross our paths. This book is one in which, like the books it exposes, doesn't need to be read to really be appreciated--but you may like reading it all the way through just the same if only for the humor. (809 BAYARD)
