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Headlines

Tuesday, August 24th, 2010

Headlines is a new segment on the Book Show where we look at the latest news in publishing, writing and reading. Sally Warhaft and Jeff Sparrow, editor of Overland, contemplate the meaning of these Headlines. Listen to the audio here.

Recently author Jonathan Franzen was featured on the cover of Time Magazine. This is meant to be a big deal. Since the late 70s there have been 15 other authors. Franzen is the first living author in 10 years. The last was Stephen King when he published his story digitally. But there’s something strange and unsettling about the cover of Time that Franzen adorns: the background is quite drab and Franzen himself is looking distracted and glum. Why isn’t he smiling?Jeff Sparrow thinks it’s because literary fiction is no longer considered the preeminent form of cultural expression. It’s been taken over by genre fiction and bizarro fiction and has shifted to new media forms like video games. There’s now video games of The Great Gatsby and Dante’s Inferno.

Sally doesn’t read bizarro fiction. She says life’s too short. But she is interested in the program for prison offenders in the US who can choose between going to jail or joining a book club, the program’s called Changing Lives Through Literature. Is the idea behind this that reading makes you a better person? Sally says yes. Ramona interviewed Jay Parini about teaching Robert Frost to young people who had trashed Frost’s house in a party. He said Many people have asked how the classes I taught to these vandals were different from my normal university classes. I said, ‘Most of my kids at Middlebury College don’t come to class in handcuffs.’ So it was a challenge.

It’s not clear whether the prison offenders are taught to read slowly either. You’ve heard of slow food, slow travel, even slow photography and now there’s slow reading. It’s an acknowledgement that life in our hyper-connected times doesn’t allow for deep reading. We’re more likely to flick from page to page. Sally doesn’t get time for slow reading as much as she’d like and Jeff is dubious about it as a movement. It has something of the middle class nostalgia for better, less hectic days.

Tags: bizarro fiction, Book Show, Jeff Sparrow, prison reading, Sally Warhaft, slow reading, Time Magazine
Posted in Headlines | 1 Comment »

Top 5 books for business leaders

Thursday, July 1st, 2010

Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People is not in the top 5 book lists of The Book Show’s Reading on Vocation guests. Evan Thornley CEO Better Place Australia, Andrew Penn CEO AXA Asia Pacific and Simon McKeon, Executive Chairman of Macquarie Group’s Melbourne office shared their lists at the Wheeler Centre in Melbourne with guest presenter Peter Mares .

Here’s Simon McKeon’s top 5 books:
Sea Of Dangers: Captain Cook And His Rivals by Geoffrey Blainey
The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins
Fromelles: The Story Of Australia’s Darkest Day – The Search For Our Fallen Heroes Of World War One by Patrick Lindsay
Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert
Mao’s Last Dancer by Li Cunxin

Andrew Penn’s:
Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand
Bonfire fo the Vanities by Tom Wolfe
1984 by George Orwell
Animal Farm by George Orwell
Doctor Fischer of Geneva by Graham Greene

Evan Thornley:
Architecture of Happiness by Alain de Botton
The Turning by Tim Winton
Nickel and Dimed by Barbara Ehrenreich
Everyday Zen by Charlotte Joko Beck

Tags: ABC, Book Show, business, economics, finance, Reading on Vocation, Wheeler Centre
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Reading to make money

Wednesday, June 23rd, 2010

There’s so much conflicting advice on how to make money. Number 1 on this list of top 25 business books is In Search of Excellence: Lessons from America’s Best-Run Companies by Thomas J. Peters and Robert H. Waterman, Jr. But head to another site and all this advice is debunked. Geoffrey James on Bnet says these ‘excellent” companies mostly went smack down the toilet and instead suggests reading The Dilbert Principle by Scott Adams. Do you read Dale Carnegie’s 1937 smash hit How to Win Friends and Influence People or the me generation’s 1989 guide the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People? Of course, you could just write your own money-making self-help hit and become a rich capitalist guru writer. Do you rely on the wonderful world of the web and have your own blog and earn from the ads? On this list there’s a book with a Homer Simpson-esque inspired title Blog Schmog: The Truth About What Blogs Can (and Can’t) Do For Your Business. The most obscure business title I came across in these lists is A Whack on the Side of the Head by Roger Von Oech. Hopefully you’re not advised to whack your competitors on the noggin to get ahead. To avoid all the confusion caused by this advice, on Wednesday 30th June at 6.15pm come to the Book Show’s free event, Reading on Vocation, at the Wheeler Centre in Melbourne and find out what books are in the top 10 of Australian business leaders. Book here to find out what our business gurus read to make the wheels of capitalism spin.

Sarah L’Estrange

Tags: ABC Radio National, Book Show, business books, business leaders, Reading, Wheeler Centre
Posted in Reading | No Comments »

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