RIP Borders and Why I Feel Culpable

As discussed at length on this blog in the past, I am a recent Kindle convert.  I don’t know about the other Kindle converts out there, but I now have a difficult time reading an actual physical book.  I keep a “non-Kindle Wish List” in my Amazon account, and those titles are comprised mainly of books not offered on the Kindle.  That whole list is just gathering dust.

Despite my affection for online shopping (one of my wife’s pet peeves for sure), I still love going to bookstores.  I love paging through books, seeing what might interest me.  In the past, I often felt compelled to buy something.  Be it the mega-Barnes & Noble or neighborhood bookstore, I wanted to lend my support.

I still feel this way about the neighborhood bookstore.  I’ve blogged about one of my all-time favorites in Columbus, Ohio (The Book Loft) before.  I always buy something there—for myself or members of my family.

Of course, Amazon has led the charge in commoditizing books.  30% off?  How about 40%?  45%?  For a while there it was so ridiculous (and I was so ridiculous) that I’d shop Amazon, BN.com, Buy.com, Walmart.com, any-other-discount-book.com website looking to save 23 cents on a book.  Yes, it was a game.  And among those online retailers playing the discount game, I was ok.  Fact is, the quaint neighborhood bookstore had been dying a slow death since long before the evil empires of Walmart and Amazon achieved international prominence.

Well, the commoditizing has its price.  Yes, I still love browsing through bookstores, but as a Kindle guy now, I leave the bookstore empty handed except for the titles of books to be added to the reading list.  I’m not even buying the damn books any more.  And, unfortunately, the e-book industry can’t get its act together and allow (without, in some cases, some techno-mumbo-jumbo-unscrewthis-plugthatintocomputer nonsense) multiple venders to supply your e-reader.  So, you buy a Kindle and your only easy option is to download your books from Amazon—as much as you might feel compelled to “buy” from Barnes & Noble because, guess what?  That’s where you saw the book in the first place.

To Borders.  I went to college in Ann Arbor, Michigan.  In 1971 (long before I arrived), the first Borders Book Shop opened in Ann Arbor.  Borders was still there during my time 1985-1989.  It had begun to expand and open in new markets by that time as well.  It was a great bookstore.  It was nestled among all of the “college bookstores” selling text books (all at the same price, by the way), college apparel, etc.  Borders was the bookstore your parents wanted to browse through on visits.

Yeah, Borders was purchased and went corporate.  But I, and countless others like me, effectively abandoned brick and mortar bookstores.  So, does it come as any surprise that Borders is going through bankruptcy.  And it’s not like Barnes & Noble is a picture of economic health, though there’s hope that someone will step up and take it private.

Anyway, RIP Borders.  It’s possible that Borders could emerge following bankruptcy.  Nobody knows at this point.  My local Borders is having its “Store Closing” sale, however.  And I am not aware of any "neighborhood bookstore" in my neighborhood.  I find it a shame.

Live long, read and prosper.  We’ll leave the lights on for you.

Scorecasting by Tobias J. Moskowitz and L. Jon Wertheim - A-

This book is likely for a narrow audience.  Scorecasting was written by two boyhood friends--one is now a sports journalist for Sports Illustrated (Wertheim) and the other is now a finance professor at the University of Chicago and colleague of Stephen Levitt, co-author of Freakonomics and Superfreakonomics.

For a non-sports fan, the rest of this entry can be summarized thusly:  blah blah blah blah blahblah blah blah BLAH!  Those who continue on do so at their own risk.

Scorecasting is basically a Freakonomics of sports.  The authors select a number of accepted sports beliefs (home field advantage, there's no "I" in team and others) and attempt to prove or disprove them through statistical analysis.  Where they find truth to the beliefs, they further analyze the data to try to reach a conclusion about the underlying reasons.

For instance (and I have heard this discussed on radio interviews with the authors, so this, in my opinion--which is the only opinion that matters on my blog--does not violate my "no spoilers" rule), the authors show that home field advantage is a truism in all sports.  Larger in some than others, but applicable to all sports, from the US major sports to soccer (over the pond) to Japanese baseball.  After analyzing the data, however, they prove that performances of home team players vs. visiting team players do not vary.  Among other data used to prove the point, the authors looked at certain statistics where they could isolate a statistic and factor out all of the "noise."  For example, the home team in the NBA makes precisely the same percentage of free throws as the visitors.  Soccer penalty shots are identical as well.  And so on.

What does differ, however, is the way that the umpires or referees call the games.  This "referee bias" is surprisingly prevalent and noticeable in looking at the data.  Home teams are called for fewer fouls than visitors in the NBA.  The strike zone is bigger for the pitcher, and smaller for the hitter, with respect to the home team.  The basic conclusion (I'm being intentionally overly-simplistic) is that, well, if you were an umpire, and 30,000 fans cheered every time you called a strike and booed every time you called a ball, wouldn't you be predisposed to call borderline pitches a strike?

Freakonomics was, in many ways, revolutionary.  Whether you "buy" the authors' conclusions or not, their ability to turn conventional wisdom on its head was thought-provoking.

Scorecasting doesn't have as much impact.  For a sports fan, it is a fun, quick read.  Its conclusions aren't going to keep you up nights with your brain tied up in knots, though.

Live long, read and prosper.  We'll leave the lights on for you.

The Long Ships by Frans G. Benggston - A-

The Grandson: A book?

Grandpa: That's right. When I was your age, television was called books.  And this is a special book. It was the book my father used to read to me when I was sick, and I used to read it to your father. And today I'm
gonna read it to you.

The Grandson: Has it got any sports in it?

Grandpa: Are you kidding? Fencing, fighting, torture, revenge, giants, monsters, chases, escapes, true love, miracles...

The Grandson: Doesn't sound too bad. I'll try to stay awake.

Grandpa: Oh, well, thank you very much, very nice of you. Your vote of confidence is overwhelming.


Grandpa: Westley didn't reach his destination. His ship was attacked by the Dread Pirate Roberts, who never left captives alive. When Buttercup got the news that Westley was murdered...

The Grandson: -Murdered by pirates is good...


"The Long Ships" by Frans G. Benggston is a tremendously fun adventure.  Taking place at the turn of the first millennium, "The Long Ships" follows the life and adventures of Orm Tosteson, a Norseman from a long line of Vikings who was initially thrust into the Viking life after being captured.  Orm is not what you would  consider an ordinary Viking.  Sure, he plunders and fights.  He's immensely strong.  He's also a bit of a hypochondriac, more worried at one point in the book, for example, of fighting (to the death, I might add) outside in the cold where he might get a chill than he is about fighting at all.

Orm goes on many voyages and meets many great friends and characters along the way-Toke Gray-Gullsson, Father Willibald, Olof Sommerbird, and others, including Orm's wife, Ylva.  There's murder, revenge, plundering, quests, religious conflict, torture and general skullduggery.  I just wanted to use the word "skullduggery."

But this is much more than a story.  It can be read like a story, of course, but there are numerous themes to ponder as well, including ye olde standby, sin and redemption, religious themes, fate (including luck) vs. free will, many others.  Benggston also often leaves the reader hanging, and there are many questions that are left unanswered to be discussed and considered.

Benggston was a Swede who lived from 1894-1954.  "The Long Ships" is actually a combination of two books written by Benggston in 1941 and 1945.  For some reason, the book was recently republished (and Kindled).  One of my favorite authors, Michael Chabon, wrote the introduction to the most current version.

"The Long Ships" is a great book, recommended to anyone who enjoys a good adventure.

Live long, read and prosper.  We'll leave the lights on for you.

War and Peace - 2011's Failed Experiment

I may have mentioned that one of my “book resources” is a website and podcast called, “Books on the Nightstand.” I’m particularly drawn to this resource because, pre-Kindle, I kept dozens of books on or under my nightstand. These books were the bane of my wife’s existence (along with: failing to put dirty clothes in the hamper, putting shoes away, leaving plates/bowls/cups in the sink, failing to close bagged foods, toilet issues, hogging blankets, others).

Anyway, the site and podcast are hosted by two people who work for Random House. They are very up-front about their Random House connection. At times, it is a limiting factor to the breadth of a podcast as, for example, when they previewed upcoming books to be released but were obviously much more familiar with Random House releases (and informed listeners of the fact).

Anyway, they do some neat stuff. They have a retreat in Vermont this April. They also have book club read-alongs. One of them is coming up as some will read “The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay” by Michael Chabon with them. This is an excellent novel, and I’d read it again except so little time, so many books…

One of the two podcast hosts will also do a “War and Peace” read-along.

So, I start thinking, why not? I’ve never read “War and Peace.” That’s one you can cross off the bucket list, right? It’s a classic—some say the best novel ever written.

I try to get some of my reading friends to join me.

For the most part, the silence of the responses was deafening. However, one brave soul said he was in.

As luck would have it, we both started “War and Peace” earlier this week. We also both abandoned the project less than 24 hours after starting it.

I can’t speak for my reading buddy, but here were my initial problems:

(1) The book was written in the 1800s and, although translated, reads like, well, a 19th Century novel. Ok, I expected that.  But it still made for slow, rough reading.

(2) As the introduction to my edition told me, Tolstoy wove a bunch of French and German in the original Russian novel. Tolstoy, himself, translated the French and German in footnotes. Commentary indicates that Tolstoy’s translations were not necessarily 100% accurate—which was either intentional or not. I find that to be a fun fact. Anyway, the translators, correctly in my humble, small brained opinion, retained the original French and German and translated only the Russian. The French and German was, again, translated in footnotes. And there’s the rub. For those of you Kindle readers out there, navigating through footnotes is my hugest Kindle pet peeve. You have to click on the footnote number in the text and then jump to another location and then go back and find your former spot—it’s a huge headache. [As an aside, it’s also a big difficulty that I had in starting “Decoded” by Jay-Z. Not sure how to fix this in the Kindle, but footnotes are a stumbling block for me. Now, it’s entirely possible that I’m a moron and there’s an easier way to do this, but I don’t know].

So, anyway, my buddy and I chose to read another book together.

We went to college together, and the movie, “The Princess Bride” came out our senior year (I think??). Anyway, we often quote “The Princess Bride” to one another. (Wow. Is the previous sentence as geeky and loser-ish as I think it is. Yeah, it is.)

So, taking a quote from “The Princess Bride,” if “Murdered by pirates is good” then perhaps “Murdered by VIKINGS is better.” We’re reading Frans G. Bengtsson’s Viking novel, “The Long Ships.”

And who wrote the introduction to the edition of “The Long Ships” available on Kindle? Anyone? Anyone? Bueller? Bueller?

Michael Chabon, of course.

Live long, read and prosper. We'll leave the lights on for you.