I have no personal stories or anecdotes to share about David Foster Wallace. All I have is the appreciation of his work, of his mastery with words, his storytelling genius.

I can not say that I will miss Wallace — I have no personal connection to the man himself. I do, however, have a deep connection to his work, and I can say that I will miss future manifestations of mastery and genius. It is always sad when someone so talented leaves us; what would be even sadder is if his passing does nothing but paralyze us in our own creative pursuits.

I really shouldn’t, but it takes a lot of patience and maturity to respond to (mostly irrational) comments, actions, and decisions. Which is why I’m extremely impressed by the way that librarian Jamie Larue dealt with a recent library patron who challenged the inclusion of a book in the library because it dealt with gay marriage.

Instead of dismissing the patron, or even being taken aback by what seems (to me at least) a particularly ridiculous challenge, Larue wrote a letter that dealt directly with the patron’s issues. From his letter:

I think a lot of adults imagine that what defines a children’s book is the subject. But that’s not the case. Children’s books deal with anything and everything. There are children’s books about death (even suicide), adult alcoholism, family violence, and more. Even the most common fairy tales have their grim side: the father and stepmother of Hansel and Gretel, facing hunger and poverty, take the children into the woods, and abandon them to die! Little Red Riding Hood (in the original version, anyhow) was eaten by the wolf along with granny. There’s a fascinating book about this, by the bye, called “The Uses of Enchantment: the Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales,” by psychologist Bruno Bettelheim. His thesis is that both the purpose and power of children’s literature is to help young people begin to make sense of the world. There is a lot out there that is confusing, or faintly threatening, and even dangerous in the world. Stories help children name their fears, understand them, work out strategies for dealing with life.

Next time someone disagrees with me or challenges my decisions and actions, I’m going to definitely try and address that challenge with the grace, poise, and poesy that Jamie Larue demonstrated in his own response.

Do you have any other examples of this kind of poise in the face of challenge?

I’m saying that Jez Burrows was robbed because this is one of the sexiest book covers I’ve seen all year:

That being said, this post is not about Jez Burrows or the fact that he was robbed. (After all, Jenna Jones’ submission was also great, as were most of the submissions that made the shortlist.) Instead, I want to congratulate Penguin for continuously pushing the envelope when it comes to cover design.

In my previous ruminations on book cover design, I gushed about Penguin’s Great Ideas series and the remarkable work they have done in fostering excellent cover art. The Great Ideas series and the Penguin Design Award are just two manifestations of the importance the publisher places on the design of their work.

What Penguin seems to understand more than many other publishers is that stories are not just told in the text of their books; cover art, typography, and even the shape and size of the published work are integral to enhancing the overall story.

Storytelling through design

A good storyteller doesn’t just tell you a tale. Instead, he or she creates an environment where you can be immersed, enraptured, and enthralled by the contents of the story. For a good storyteller, it’s not enough that you hear the story: you have to believe it, feel it, and live it.

As a publisher, Penguin Books is a phenomenal storyteller. They know that the power of the story is not in its content, but in its experience, and subsequently make all the right design choices to make that experience come alive.

You know all those predictions that say that the “book” as a format for consuming text is going to disappear? What they forget is that the book is not just a format for consuming text; instead, it is a physical artifact that serves as a reminder of a personal experience, a story lived. The book isn’t going to die anytime soon.

And I thank Penguin and their design team for helping to ensure the medium’s longevity.

On a total side note, the website for the Penguin Design Awards is gorgeous. Yet another example of great Penguin design.

I only have one core message today, so I’ll keep today’s post short.

The library needs to go from a place where you access collections to a place where you access connections.

Sure, there is immense value in housing books and videos in one big building, and then letting people browse that physical media when they are in the building. There is, however, more value in letting those buildings be places where people connect with people, rather than simply the books and other titles.

The library should be a place where I can have a coffee and conversation with people who are engaging with the same ideas — and subsequently, same titles from the collection — as me. It should be a place where conversation is encouraged and not shushed, where debate flourishes, where innovation happens.

Having a meeting for a small community group? Have it at the library. Looking for someone that knows something about cooking Thai food? Meet them at the kitchen in the library. Having a wine and cheese reception for your local design awards? Have it in the foyer at the library.

Once the library opens up and starts allowing people to use it in multiple ways rather than just being a repository of information, it becomes a focal point of your community. So push the shelves aside, and start creating spaces for collaboration and creativity.

These days, that same information is on my screen, available at the click of a mouse button. And Brenda is nowhere to be seen.

The librarian is dead.

(For the record, I’m mainly referring to public libraries here, but these thoughts also apply to academic libraries to a certain extent. I’m not sure how it applies to private and corporate libraries, as I’m not too familiar with that area.)

It’s easy to call out the death of the librarian. Google makes searching for information simple, Wikipedia provides an excellent starting point — and I emphasize starting point, because too many people use it as an authoritative source rather than a place to begin inquiry — for research, and getting an answer to a question is as easy as writing 140 characters on Twitter.

If I can get good, extensive, and personalized information in a few seconds using the internet, what good is the librarian?

Aside from being the keeper of the physical institution of the library (more on that later this week), the librarian’s other roles of conducting reference interviews (to help navigate information) and sorting through collections (to help manage information) seem to be waning. Collaborative tools on the web are taking their place, with social recommendation engines and direct access to a large group of people doing most of the work that was formerly in the domain of the librarian.

So why, in my eyes, is the librarian still one of the most important players in society? The answer is simple: capacity.

Long live the librarian.

If the in-person reference interview is losing relevance because of the ubiquity of online resources, it is the librarian — a person uniquely trained in sifting through data deluge — that is best poised to be at the center of the online recommendation resources.

Librarians, after all, have a lot going for them:

• They are trained in critical analysis of good information.
• They have experience in filtering and searching information.
• They are employed (read: paid) to work with information.
• They have access to more information than simply what’s online.
• They know how to work with people and ideas at the same time.

If anyone is ready to embrace the online world and use social tools to help others access information, it’s librarians. A librarian, by tagging and annotating online, print, and other resources, can create a massive wealth of information that can then be sorted dynamically for many uses. The reference interview, which used to benefit one person, can now be reshifted to be a reference repository where data can easily be sorted, sifted, filtered, and used for anyone’s benefit.

Ascending the throne.

What libraries need to do now is make it easier for librarians to share their work on the wider web and not just hide them behind a library login. Instead of publishing bookmarks with “cool reading lists for this month” or putting big signs on their shelves indicating good reads, libraries should instead feature librarian online resource lists as their primary offering.

One day, when people are looking for help finding and filtering information, they will turn to a librarian — whether that librarian is using Twitter or Yahoo! Answers or the library website — because of the breadth of the resources at their disposal and the depth of their experience in processing those resources.

After all, everyone needs their own personal Brenda to help you navigate the content-rich and information-dense world. The only difference is that now she’s on your screen and available at the click of a mouse.

That’s probably why I found this article in the New York Times so fascinating: earlier this month, the Book Review asked a handful of writers to recommend books for the presidential candidates. Their recommendations are varied and extensive, but provide a much deeper insight into the writer’s mind rather than the politician’s sensitivities.

I decided to take a stab at making some recommendations myself, but instead of targeting my suggestions to presidential candidates, I thought it might be more fun to try and recommend books for the current leaders of the major Canadian political parties.

(Apologies to my international readers, but hopefully you’ll still learn something about me through this exercise, if not about the political scene in Canada.)

Stephen Harper

Leader of the Conservative party and current Prime Minister of Canada, Harper is a right-wing politician and avid hockey fan, but hasn’t really been known to be very progressive on environmental issues. My first recommendation for him would be Alan Weisman’s The World Without Us, which is a book that demonstrates our impact on the world through captivating scenarios.

Harper’s government also seems to be very scared of sexuality, trying to restrict rights for same-sex relationships and raising the age of consent in the country. My second recommendation for him would be Judith Levine’s Harmful to Minors: The Perils of Protecting Children from Sex, a book that explores how the best way of raising a generation of sexually-responsible young people is by giving them education.

Stéphane Dion

Dion is an unlikely leader of the Liberal party, particularly since he was competing against heavyweights like Ignatieff, Rae, and Kennedy for the position. Even now, as leader of the opposition, Dion does not seem to be at ease in his role.

Because of his seeming apprehensiveness and because of his inability to portray himself as a great leader even within his party, I have a recommendation for Stéphane Dion that is not my own. A coworker of mine has done a lot of reading about leadership and management, and one of the books he recommends is Shackleton’s Way. The book details how Ernest Shackleton’s leadership saved the lives of twenty-seven men stranded with him in the Antarctic for almost two years.

Jack Layton

Of all the party leaders, I know Jack the best. After all, he has been living in Toronto for over 30 years and he is definitely a pro-big-city kind of politician. When I reflect on reading I would recommend for Jack, the first thing that comes to mind is Jane Jacob’s The Death and Life of Great American Cities, but I know he’s read that already. He’s a fan of cycling, so Paul Kimmage’s Rough Ride makes sense to recommend, but I have a feeling he’s already got through that too.

Time to start thinking out of the box.

Jack’s always playing second-best when it comes to Canadian politics. The Liberals and Conservatives have turned the political scene into essentially a two-party contest, so the NDP — despite holding the balance of power — always looks like the little kid trying to play with the big boys. Jack’s a perennial underdog, so for him, I recommend Joshua Davis’ The Underdog, where the author participates in competitions that are way over his head — and thrives.

Added Recommendations

I have one strong recommendation to make for all three political leaders — and, in fact, to everyone that reads this blog at all — and that is Where Hope Takes Root: Democracy and Pluralism in an Interdependent World by His Highness the Aga Khan. This collection of talks (with a forward by Adrienne Clarkson) is the perfect starting point for any discussion on civil society and democracy and their roles in shaping a better future.

I threw the question out on Twitter earlier today. Thomas Purves came back with some great suggestions for all three:

Code and laws of cyberspase by Lessig. Herodotus for the long perspective. Harrison Bergeron by vonnegut. and dawkins just in case

Mike Rotenberg made a simple but very apt suggestion:

“The Internet for Dummies” http://tinyurl.com/yx8qyw

Ryan LaFlamme brought a recommendation that is extremely pertinent to our country:

Why I hate Canadians or How to be a Canadian by Will Ferguson

So what about you? If you could build the reading lists for Stephen Harper, Stéphane Dion, and Jack Layton, what would you include?

These days, I don’t read as many books as I did back then — partly because of the fact that I’m a big magazine and periodical reader now. I certainly don’t read as much fiction, as my literary diet now consists of almost solely non-fiction works.

So when Jason Kottke posted a link to this list of 1001 fiction books everyone must read before they die, I was a bit nervous to take a poll of how many on that list I had already consumed.

Turns out, I wasn’t doing too badly. Out of the 1001, I have already read 204 and have added quite a few of the rest to my library hold list.

I’ve posted a list of all the 204 I have read below and highlighted my favorites with an (*) asterisk. I’d definitely love your input on what I should read next if you have some tips and suggestions.

• Never Let Me Go — Kazuo Ishiguro
• Saturday — Ian McEwan (*)
• Slow Man — J.M. Coetzee
• The Plot Against America — Philip Roth
• The Light of Day — Graham Swift
• The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time — Mark Haddon (*)
• Family Matters — Rohinton Mistry
• The Double — José Saramago
• Everything is Illuminated — Jonathan Safran Foer
• Kafka on the Shore — Haruki Murakami
• Middlesex — Jeffrey Eugenides
• Youth — J.M. Coetzee (*)
• Gabriel’s Gift — Hanif Kureishi
• Atonement — Ian McEwan
• Fury — Salman Rushdie (*)
• Choke — Chuck Palahniuk
• Life of Pi — Yann Martel (*)
• The Feast of the Goat — Mario Vargos Llosa
• White Teeth — Zadie Smith
• City of God — E.L. Doctorow
• The Human Stain — Philip Roth
• The Blind Assassin — Margaret Atwood
• Timbuktu — Paul Auster
• The Ground Beneath Her Feet — Salman Rushdie
• Disgrace — J.M. Coetzee (*)
• Intimacy — Hanif Kureishi
• Amsterdam — Ian McEwan
• The Hours — Michael Cunningham
• The God of Small Things — Arundhati Roy (*)
• Memoirs of a Geisha — Arthur Golden
• Enduring Love — Ian McEwan
• Underworld — Don DeLillo
• Jack Maggs — Peter Carey
• Fugitive Pieces — Anne Michaels
• Infinite Jest — David Foster Wallace
• The Moor’s Last Sigh — Salman Rushdie
• A Fine Balance — Rohinton Mistry (*)
• Captain Corelli’s Mandolin — Louis de Bernieres
• The Shipping News — E. Annie Proulx
• Trainspotting — Irvine Welsh
• On Love — Alain de Botton (*)
• The Virgin Suicides — Jeffrey Eugenides
• The English Patient — Michael Ondaatje
• Black Dogs — Ian McEwan
• American Psycho — Bret Easton Ellis
• Vertigo — W.G. Sebald
• The Buddha of Suburbia — Hanif Kureishi
• Remains of the Day — Kazuo Ishiguro (*)
• Catâ’s Eye — Margaret Atwood
• Foucault’s Pendulum — Umberto Eco
• The Satanic Verses — Salman Rushdie
• Oscar and Lucinda — Peter Carey
• The Black Dahlia — James Ellroy
• Beloved — Toni Morrison
• Watchmen — Alan Moore & David Gibbons
• Love in the Time of Cholera — Gabriel Garci­a Marquez
• The Cider House Rules — John Irving
• Contact — Carl Sagan
• The Handmaid’s Tale — Margaret Atwood
• Neuromancer — William Gibson
• Shame — Salman Rushdie
• The Life and Times of Michael K — J.M. Coetzee
• The Color Purple — Alice Walker
• Broken April — Ismail Kadare
• The Name of the Rose — Umberto Eco
• A Bend in the River — V.S. Naipaul
• The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy — Douglas Adams (*)
• The Sea, The Sea — Iris Murdoch
• In the Heart of the Country — J.M. Coetzee
• The Shining — Stephen King
• Song of Solomon — Toni Morrison
• Interview With the Vampire — Anne Rice
• Ragtime — E.L. Doctorow
• Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas — Hunter S. Thompson (*)
• The Wild Boys — William Burroughs
• I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings — Maya Angelou
• Slaughterhouse-five — Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
• The Godfather — Mario Puzo
• Ada — Vladimir Nabokov
• 2001: A Space Odyssey — Arthur C. Clarke
• Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? — Philip K. Dick (*)
• One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garci­a Marquez
• In Cold Blood — Truman Capote
• The Magus — John Fowles
• Catâ’s Cradle — Kurt Vonnegut
• The Graduate — Charles Webb
• The Bell Jar — Sylvia Plath
• One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest — Ken Kesey
• A Clockwork Orange — Anthony Burgess
• Franny and Zooey — J.D. Salinger (*)
• To Kill a Mockingbird — Harper Lee
• Naked Lunch — William Burroughs
• Breakfast at Tiffany’s — Truman Capote
• Things Fall Apart — Chinua Achebe
• The Midwich Cuckoos — John Wyndham (*)
• On the Road — Jack Kerouac
• Doctor Zhivago — Boris Pasternak
• The Lord of the Rings — J.R.R. Tolkien
• The Talented Mr. Ripley — Patricia Highsmith
• Lolita — Vladimir Nabokov (*)
• The Quiet American — Graham Greene
• The Last Temptation of Christ — Nikos Kazantzákis
• Bonjour Tristesse — Francoise Sagan
• Lord of the Flies — William Golding
• Casino Royale — Ian Fleming
• The Old Man and the Sea — Ernest Hemingway (*)
• Day of the Triffids — John Wyndham
• The Catcher in the Rye — J.D. Salinger (*)
• The End of the Affair — Graham Greene
• I, Robot — Isaac Asimov
• Nineteen Eighty-Four — George Orwell (*)
• Doctor Faustus — Thomas Mann
• The Plague — Albert Camus
• Animal Farm — George Orwell
• The Razor’s Edge — William Somerset Maugham
• The Little Prince — Antoine de Saint-Exupery (*)
• The Outsider — Albert Camus
• For Whom the Bell Tolls — Ernest Hemingway
• The Power and the Glory — Graham Greene
• The Grapes of Wrath — John Steinbeck
• Finnegans Wake — James Joyce
• Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day — Winifred Watson
• Nausea — Jean-Paul Sartre
• Of Mice and Men — John Steinbeck
• The Hobbit — J.R.R. Tolkien
• Out of Africa — Isak Dineson
• Gone With the Wind — Margaret Mitchell
• Burmese Days — George Orwell
• Brave New World — Aldous Huxley (*)
• The Maltese Falcon — Dashiell Hammett
• A Farewell to Arms — Ernest Hemingway
• The Sound and the Fury — William Faulkner
• Les Enfants Terribles — Jean Cocteau
• Lady Chatterley’s Lover — D.H. Lawrence
• The Sun Also Rises — Ernest Hemingway (*)
• The Great Gatsby — F. Scott Fitzgerald
• The Trial — Franz Kafka
• A Passage to India — E.M. Forster
• Siddhartha — Herman Hesse
• Ulysses — James Joyce
• The Age of Innocence — Edith Wharton
• A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man — James Joyce (*)
• Rashomon — Akutagawa Ryunosuke
• Tarzan of the Apes — Edgar Rice Burroughs
• Sons and Lovers — D.H. Lawrence
• Ethan Frome — Edith Wharton
• A Room With a View — E.M. Forster
• Heart of Darkness — Joseph Conrad (*)
• The Hound of the Baskervilles — Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
• Kim — Rudyard Kipling
• The Turn of the Screw — Henry James
• The War of the Worlds — H.G. Wells
• The Invisible Man — H.G. Wells
• Dracula — Bram Stoker
• The Time Machine — H.G. Wells
• Tess of the D’Urbervilles — Thomas Hardy
• The Picture of Dorian Gray — Oscar Wilde
• La Bete Humaine — Emile Zola
• The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde — Robert Louis Stevenson
• Germinal — Emile Zola
• Treasure Island — Robert Louis Stevenson
• Nana — Emile Zola
• The Brothers Karamazov — Fyodor Dostoevsky
• Anna Karenina — Leo Tolstoy
• Ben-Hur — Lew Wallace
• Around the World in Eighty Days — Jules Verne
• Through the Looking Glass, and What Alice Found There — Lewis Carroll
• War and Peace — Leo Tolstoy
• The Idiot — Fyodor Dostoevsky
• Little Women — Louisa May Alcott
• Journey to the Centre of the Earth — Jules Verne
• Les Miserables — Victor Hugo (*)
• A Tale of Two Cities — Charles Dickens
• Madame Bovary — Gustave Flaubert
• Walden — Henry David Thoreau
• The Scarlet Letter — Nathaniel Hawthorne
• David Copperfield — Charles Dickens
• Wuthering Heights — Emily Brontë
• Jane Eyre — Charlotte Bronte
• Vanity Fair — William Makepeace Thackeray
• The Count of Monte-Cristo — Alexandre Dum
• The Three Musketeers — Alexandre Dumas
• The Pit and the Pendulum — Edgar Allan Poe
• A Christmas Carol — Charles Dickens
• The Fall of the House of Usher — Edgar Allan Poe (*)
• The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby — Charles Dickens
• Oliver Twist — Charles Dickens
• The Hunchback of Notre Dame — Victor Hugo
• Ivanhoe — Sir Walter Scott
• Frankenstein — Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
• Pride and Prejudice — Jane Austen
• Sense and Sensibility — Jane Austen
• Justine — Marquis de Sade
• Confessions — Jean-Jacques Rousseau
• Dangerous Liaisons — Pierre Choderlos de Laclos
• Tristram Shandy — Laurence Sterne
• Candide — Voltaire (*)
• A Modest Proposal — Jonathan Swift
• Gulliver’s Travels — Jonathan Swift
• Robinson Crusoe — Daniel Defoe
• Don Quixote — Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
• The Thousand and One Nights — Anonymous (*)
• Metamorphoses — Ovid
• Aesop’s Fables — Aesopus

Not as extensive as I would like, so it looks like I have a whole lot more reading to go before I die.

How many of the 1001 have you read? Are there any I missed that you consider a must-read? Let me know.

Inspired by Leo Babauta’s post on Zen Habits, I’ve decided to share a short list of 7 writers that entertain, captivate, and inspire me. As per Leo’s guidelines, this is only a list of writers that are still currently writing, so don’t blame me for the omission of Salinger and Rimbaud. I’ve also made a conscious effort to populate this list predominantly with fiction writers: I have a tendency to only read non-fiction and ignore some of the fantastic novelists and short story writers out there.

So here’s a list of 7 current writers I’m in love with. My apologies if I’ve missed anyone, these are the first seven that popped into my head:

• David Foster Wallace: After the publication of Infinite Jest, it was hard to argue that Wallace wasn’t one of the best American novelists of his generation. It was, however, the publication of Oblivion that sold me on his story-telling talent, making every fiction feel like a reality.
• Jhumpa Lahiri: She may be best-known for The Namesake, a novel that was recently adapted for the big screen, but Lahiri’s genius was evident in The Interpreter of Maladies, where every character’s little actions caused immense emotional reactions.
• J.M. Coetzee: There are few novels that I can so closely relate to as Coetzee’s Youth, and Coetzee is a master of making the reader feel immersed in the political and geographic context of his stories. His writing is terse but evocative.
• J.K. Rowling: Laugh if you want, but this woman revolutionized the publishing and reading landscape over the past decade. Not only is the Harry Potter franchise pervasive, but it’s also quite entertaining.
• Ian McEwan: You know the clichéd phrase ‘emotional rollercoaster’? McEwan’s novels are probably as close as you can get to the cliché without falling into an abyss of despair. His works are remarkably sensuous and evocative, crafted with incredible precision.
• Cory Doctorow: I’m not a fan of science fiction. At all. Unless it is sci-fi written by Cory Doctorow, everyone’s favorite blogger. His worlds of the future are surprisingly realistic and believable, and provide particularly astute observations on our world of the present.
• John Updike: There isn’t much I can say about Updike that hasn’t already been said: he is one of the most prolific and respected writers of his generation, and is a master of both poetry and prose. And his writing always captivates.

Upon further reflection, it seems as though many of the writers on my list are renown essayists and short story authors as well as novelists. Which makes sense, seeing as how short fiction is still my favorite type of literature.

I’ve had the chance to play with the Amazon Kindle, and while I do like many aspects of Amazon’s reading device, I still think that it would benefit from the Apple design touch.

Sadly, it looks like Steve Jobs has no intention, whatsoever, to capitalize on the reader market:

“It doesn’t matter how good or bad the product is, the fact is that people donâ’t read anymore,” he said. “Forty percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year. The whole conception is flawed at the top because people donâ’t read anymore.”

As much as I consider Steve Jobs a visionary — and even somewhat of a demi-god — I think he’s really missing something here, and that he’s wrong about the popularity of reading in contemporary society. Or at least I hope he is.

Why reading is not dead

Traveling in Europe gives me faith in the power of books. In a commuter culture that is still heavily tied to rail travel rather than driving, I’m almost guaranteed to see at least 50% of travelers engaged in reading of some kind. Sure, iPods and other media players may be gaining ground, but reading is still a basic and easy form of entertainment for most commuters.

It is exactly this ease that has ensured that reading has not died with the rise in ubiquity of video and audio. After all, if you were to compare the number of blogs to the number of podcasts on the internet, you’ll see that the difference in number is quite striking. With the barrier for entry for blogging being so low, reading and writing is still the bedrock of the world wide web, despite the appeal and gloss of other kinds of media.

The web isn’t the only place where ease of entry is crucial to the survival of reading: it’s still rare to see your furniture bundled with an assembly video. Paper is cheap, easy to bundle, and — in places with good levels of literacy — still remains the best way to convey information to a large number of consumers.

Why reading should not die

I’m going to save you from the rhetoric that you usually get from book-enthusiasts: sure, reading is good for your intellectual growth and educational pursuits, but that’s not the reason it needs to be saved from extinction.

For me, however, the importance of reading lies not in its intellectual merits, but in the maintenance of diversity.

It’s clear that video and audio are compelling mediums for sharing information and ideas — after all, television is still one of the most dominant forms of media in the world. What makes media like the world wide web more absorbing than television, however, is the integration of various ways of delivering messages: podcasts, blogs, streaming video, and images all get their equal due on the web, and this makes the web more accessible to different types of people looking to consume different kinds of media.

This diversity is key outside the framework of the web as well: having a variance in the types of information and entertainment available to the general public makes that same information more easily accessible and more likely to be consumed by a larger audience. By eliminating reading and only relying on other forms of media such as video and audio, we not only eliminate a valid entry-point into information, but we eliminate a compelling form of reaction and response as well.

Text may seem like a less interesting format than video or even audio, but it is still integral — and will be for several years to come — to the effective dissemination of knowledge and entertainment.

Your parents may have told you reading was important because it exercised your imagination, but these days, text is important because it is another way for your imagination to react and respond to the stimuli it experiences.

All that to say: Will Pate, if you do decide to forgo the book deal and instead create a video, call me and let me write the accompanying text for your video. I’ll even do it for free.

Not only is this is a wonderful exercise to discover the personalities of famous writers, but also an interesting look at the significance of literature in shaping the memories of our Christmases over the years. I really enjoyed this nugget from Anne Enright:

“When I was still at school, a boyfriend gave me Wuthering Heights and The Complete English Poems of John Donne for Christmas. What a fabulous double blow that was to a young girl’s heart. Who knew? Up to this point he had merely been good at rugby. I read them over the holiday, thinking that he had, somehow, written them himself — and not only that, but he had done so with me in mind. It made me feel a bit peculiar, this discovery that men have souls, too. Of course, I realised, when we met again, that he had not written them himself, so that was a bit of a letdown. It was not because he had soul, it was because he had such impeccable manners. I had no manners at all, but I was suddenly loopers about Donne. And the moral of the story is: kick it high, but not out of the park.”

In the spirit of the Guardian feature, I’ve decided to share with you all a few of my own thoughts on Christmas books: past, present, and future.

Christmas Past

My family has never celebrated Christmas, so while I received many books for birthdays and other occasions, I never really did receive any books during the holiday season. five years ago, however, I went to a girlfriend’s place for Christmas dinner and was given a copy of Mitch Albom’s Tuesdays With Morrie by her brother, and it turned out to be the best Christmas present I have ever received (and subsequently given to others as well).

Albom’s book was a reminder that our memories and learnings are often tied to important people in our lives: a message that resonated strongly within the 20-year-old me that had spent the early part of the holiday season trying to figure out the purpose and meaning of his life. It was the Christmas gift that not only brought some clarity, but brought some perspective—truly a gift that still keeps on giving.

Christmas Present

It’s true, even I often get caught up in the commercialism of the holiday season. Which is why I’m giving a few of my friends a copy of Alan Weisman’s The World Without Us—one of my favorite books I have read in all of 2007—as a Christmas gift this year.

Weisman’s book, though it may seem at first like a doomsday novel, is full of expressions of gratitude and appreciation, two sentiments that are particularly relevant during the Christmas season. Not only does its premise (of humanity being wiped off the face of the earth) make the reader give thanks for their current existence, but it also provides reason for hope that there is possibility for a more beautiful and sustainable future. Looking past the horror of human extinction, the reader of The World Without Us can truly come to look at the beauty of human existence.

Christmas Future

Unlike many of the authors in the Guardian article, I don’t have access to manuscripts of books that are yet to be released, so speculating on future Christmas books may be a bit difficult. I am, however, excited about the prospect that two people I really admire—Khoi Vinh and Tara Hunt—are currently writing books themselves. It’s always nice to know that friends are exercising their creativity and making their thoughts heard in the print world.

And in the end, isn’t that what Christmas is all about: celebrating in the achievements of friends and family?