Books Blog: books.elliottback.com

I randomly came across Book Rental Fail on the Failblog, which struck me as hilarious and sad at the same time:

Name: Selekta
Posts: 913

Was just thinking. My sister does a lot of reading, and spends like $1000 a year just on books alone. Most of them she reads once then never looks at again. Is there any kind of like video rental store … but for books? Would make things a lot cheap, plus once one person has read one the next person can get enjoyment from it etc.

We do have such a thing; it’s called a Library!!

“This is America, and our only lanaguage is English,” says this van.

It’s come to my attention that “Canadian” is the new n-word, something that is both baffling and disturbing to me:

The bigger mystery is how “Canadian” came to be code for black. An online directory of racial slurs defines Canadian as a “masked replacement” for black.

Last August, a blogger in Cincinnati going by the name CincyBlurg reported that a black friend from the southeastern U.S. had recently discovered that she was being called a Canadian. “She told me a story of when she was working in a shop in the South and she overheard some of her customers complaining that they were always waited on by a Canadian at that place. She didn’t understand what they were talking about and assumed they must be talking about someone else,” the blogger wrote.

“After this happened several times with different patrons, she mentioned it to one of her co-workers. He told her that ‘Canadian’ was the new derogatory term that racist Southerners were using to describe persons they would have previously referred to nigger.”

A similar case in Kansas City was reported last year on a Listserv, or electronic mailing list, used by linguistics experts. A University of Kansas linguist said that a waitress friend reported that “fellow workers used to use a name for inner-city families that were known to not leave a tip: Canadians. ‘Hey, we have a table of Canadians…. They’re all yours.’”

The article concludes that the term “Canadian” is being used by racists to refer to black Americans because it affords a cultured sense of otherness, and because other immigrant nationalities, such as “Mexican,” would have been too obvious.

Urban Dictionary at least lends some credence to this alternate definition, odious as it is. Hopefully this is just a linguistic passing phase, limited only to a few select idiots in the Southern USA.

Update: There is an article in Passport Foreign Policy which says, “There is just so much wrong with this situation on so many levels that I don’t even know where to begin. So, you be the judge.”

Check out Books that make you dumb, a ranking and comparison of books by correlation with college average SAT scores. Virgil took the laborious time to grab the top 10 books from thousands of college networks on Facebook and the SAT scores from the Collegeboard, and produced this beautiful clustered graph (truncated to religion):

Yes, apparently fans of the Bible have pretty terrible SAT scores. Draw what conclusions you will about the role of religion in modernity. Personally, the data just confirms the old suspicion that reason flourishes in the absence of superstition. Nonetheless, growing up in a conservative American household, I read the Bible a dozen times through, and it didn’t hurt me. It’s all in how you approach it, I suppose.

The other interesting data is what books are positively correlated with high SAT scores, and therefore intelligence. The top books correlated to 1100/1600 SAT score or better are as follows:

• Lolita
• 100 Years Of Solitude
• Crime And Punishment
• Freakonomics
• Catch 22
• Atlas Shrugged
• The Alchemist
• Cats Cradle
• Enders Game
• Life Of Pi
• Pride And Prejudice
• East Of Eden
• Jane Eyre
• The Great Gatsby
• The Kite Runner
• 1984
• Anna Karenina
• The Catcher In The Rye
• The Lord Of The Rings
• Quiet On The Western Front
• Shakespeare
• A Wrinkle In Time
• Alice In Wonderland

I’m not sure that this project is statistically sound, but it’s interesting nonetheless. Other commenters have noted that in addition to religion, African-American literature gets a low ranking. This probably has more to do with SAT score biases than anything.

Here’s a quote Steve Jobs made during his keynote speech at the Macworld 2008 Expo about competitor Amazon’s Kindle ebook reading device:

“It doesn’t matter how good or bad the product is, the fact is that people don’t read anymore… The whole conception is flawed at the top because people don’t read anymore.”

According to the Daily Salty’s reading statistics, Jobs is correct:

* 58% of the US adult population never reads another book after high school
* 42% of college graduates never read another book
* 80% of US families did not buy or read a book last year.
* 70% of US adults have not been in a bookstore in the last five years
* 57% of new books are not read to completion.
* Most readers do not get past page 18 in a book they have purchased.

A little bit horrifying, isn’t it? Reading is critical for a well-formed mind in a way that iPods / iPhone / PCs / Wiis / PS1/2/3 / PSP / DS / TV / Cinema are not; to lose that is to lose entire generations in a media-induced dark age.