Leaving a Trace by Alexandra Johnson

Title: Leaving a Trace: On Keepinga Journal

Author: Alexandra Johnson

Publisher: Back Bay Books 2002

Genre: Nonficiton - Writing

Pages: 272

Rating:  4/5 stars

Reading Challenges: Nonfiction Adventure (perpetual); Dewey Decimal - 800s; OLW Home

Highly personal (in fact, almost intimate), Johnson's long essay centers on the discipline of keeping a journal and the effect reading other journals has on a creative life. The essay is broken into chapters that provide some organizational structure; threaded throughout are exercises and activities to motivate, encourage, and inspire. Further, each chapter features stories and journal entries from well-known writers as well as everyday people.

I really enjoyed this slim volume. I've been thinking about starting (or really restarting) daily journaling for awhile now and this book helped to kickstart that idea. The first half focuses on journaling, types of journals, what journals can tell us, how journals help our everyday lives. I would give the first half of the book 5 stars. I read and read some of the passages. I haven't tried the writing exercises, but they are perfectly paired with each chapter. The second half of the books wasn't as successful for me. The chapters focused on turning your journal entries into published works. I am focusing on writing a journal just for me. I have no intention of publishing anything or using it for fiction ideas. I just want to use the journal as a cathartic exercise. But I will say that the second half is nicely written with more great writing exercises. I just didn't connect to the second half like I did to the first half.

Words Words Words by David Crystal

Title: Words Words Words

Author: David Crystal

Publisher: Oxford University 2006

Genre: Nonfiction -- Language

Pages: 216

Rating:  5 / 5 stars

Reading Challenges: Dewey -- 400s; Fall into Reading

How I Got It: Library loan

"Lexicography is not just an exercise in linguistic accounting," writes preeminent English language scholar David Crystal in this exceptionally lively and erudite little book. "It is a voyage of lexical exploration and discovery." In Words, Words, Words, Crystal takes readers on a fascinating linguistic adventure, exploring the English language in all its oddity, complexity, and ever-changing beauty. Traveling from word origins and word evolution to wordgangs, wordrisks, wordplay, wordgames and beyond, Crystal shares his immense knowledge of, and equally immense delight in, language. He celebrates new words, old words, words that "snarl" and words that "purr," elegant words and taboo words, plain English words and convoluted gobbledegook, eponyms and antonyms, spoonerisms and malapropisms, and a host of other written and spoken forms and variations.

I grabbed this book for my Dewey challenge simply because the 400s selection at my library is slim.  This was just about the only book not foreign language learning.  But I was pleasantly surprised by how much I enjoyed this book.  Crystal obviously has a love of language and wants to make language accessible to others.  I learned some many interesting tidbits about language.  I also enjoyed the review of language construction.  This was such a fun book to read in an afternoon.  Now I want to rush out and learn more about language.  I think I will start with a word-a-day service.

Some interesting tidbits of information:

• The origin of 404 messages comes from the room number of the researchers at CERN
• We all have wordhoards (the collection of words in our heads)
• A new word, debagonization (the cessation of anxiety when our luggage eventually emerges from the black hole of an airport carousel)
• Latin evolved from a prehistoric tongue called Indo-European
• Did you know that kingly is Germanic, royal is French, and regal is Latin?  Now you do
• 98 of the top 100 English words (in terms of frequency) are Anglo-Saxon in origin
• British accent is called Received Pronunciation while the US one General American

Non-Review Reads - Week of June 13, 2011

While traveling to and from Disney World, I read or skimmed some books.  Thought I would do another Non-review reads to wrap up my reads of the past week.

Juicy Writing by Brigid Lowry

Full of some great advice for young writers (I'm including myself as I am just starting to write seriously).  I loved all the of the writing exercises highlighted.  Hopefully you'll be seeing some of them on my blog in the future.

The Writer's Idea Book by Jack Heffron

Another how-to/advice guide to writing.  Definitely didn't find this one as engaging or helpful as Lowry's book.

Buffy Omnibus Vol. 5

This volume covers some fun side stories plus Oz's travels.  I'm moving through the Buffy comics!

Google and Fair Use

The other day I came across this article on my tech blogs: The Book Dead May Be Dead, But Google Is Still Right by Matthew Ingram.  It got me thinking about censorship, fair use, and information on the internet in general. For those that need a little background info:

Google also started scanning and indexing books that were under copyright, then offered authors and publishers the ability to “opt out” of the program and have their books removed... Others, however, said that scanning and indexing their books without explicit permission was wrong, and filed the lawsuits in 2005 that led to the agreement.

The crux of this argument is that scanning a book makes a copy of that book, and that copying is not permitted unless a copyright holder specifically agrees. The authors and publishers made this argument despite the fact that Google only ever shows a small fraction of a text when they display a book online.

Okay, so Google was supposedly "copying" the book in violation of copyright.  But was this really a violation of copyright?

This is a ridiculous position, and always has been. Scanning something makes a copy of it in the same way that my viewing a web page makes a copy of it in the RAM of my computer — I’m surprised that authors and publishers haven’t tried to argue that this is secondary copyright infringement as well.

Keep in mind that Google did not "publish" the entirety of the copyrighted books anywhere.  In most cases they had a preview or excerpt used in search capabilities.

I agree with Ingram that Google was in the right.  Google did not violate copyright laws and was in accordance with fair use regulations.

All of this brings up some interesting questions.  Who owns my blog?  What about the writing in my blog?  Could I sue someone for plagiarizing or borrowing from my blog?  What about if they attribute a quote to me?  Really it comes down to: who owns information and creativity?  I think the big legal questions for the 21st century are going to be issues of intellectual property.  With the expansion of the internet and the cloud, we have to redefine things like copyrights.  Do they make sense for certain types of information, such as blogs?  Do we all give up personal ownership for collective use?  How does all this work.  Am I violated some copyright issue by reprinting part of Ingram's article?  Does it matter if I attributed the words to him?  Where are the lines?   All of things need to be discussed.  I don't think any of us are going to progress by avoiding the questions or even going by the 20th century definitions.  We are in a new world and need to discuss the new questions.

New Resolutions...

The last couple of days have seen a few changes with my blog...  I've decided to make a few blogging resolutions (Yes, I know, late, but I've never believed in New Year's Resolutions anyway.  So blog resolutions in February aren't weird or late to me).

1. Set up a more definite schedule - I have Music Mondays and Quote Wednesdays, but need to either commit to or drop Weekly Highlights, Booking Through Thursdays, and Top Ten Tuesdays.  I really like the idea of the Wordless Wednesday (pictures instead of writing) and the Mailbox Mondays, but don't know if I want to commit yet.  I'll get back to you on that.  Plus, I want to start writing (fiction pieces) more and feel like I need to commit it day or a day every other week to that.
2. Connect with other bloggers - In the past week, I've had 10 people I don't know comment on my blog.  Very excited about this turn of events.  But I need to do better at commenting on and supporting other bloggers.  So every day I'm going to focus on one of those commentors by reading their blogs, commenting, and adding them to my GoogleReader.  One down, nine to go!
3. Get my reading list set for the end of the month - Too many library books (~60) sitting on my closet floor and too many new purchases (~30 since beginning of year) sitting under the window.  I want to create a TBR list to carry me through the next two weeks.  Next up...?
4. Take more pictures to add - I feel very pictureless on my blog.  I need to add pics of me and my family, activities throughout the week, book purchases, and just pretty pics.  So far, the only picture taken by me is my gravatar photo.  The others are all from freedigitalphoto.net.  Great pictures, but I need ownership here.
5. Get my boys involved - They wrote a Thanksgiving post, but that's it.  They really need to work on their writing anyway and little blog entry every once in a while would be awesome.  C's daughter has her own blog now and my boys are really interested in reading it.  Hopefully I can get them interested in writing their own.
6. Encourage my friends and families to read - I think the only person that I actually know know that reads my blog is C.  (Thanks for the support!)  It really would be awesome to have more support from friends and family.  I'll try to talk it up.

Over the next week, I'm really going to focus on these resolutions.  I'll probably add an update entry soon.  Wish me luck!