jamie doom

“Life is short, but art is long, as the aphorism has it. Too bad about the life thing, but as for art, the longer the better. I look forward to the journeys that lie ahead of me, in the pages of books and on the road itself: times when I will settle happily with a book for a discrete period, in circumstances that may well prove ideal for a certain type of reading.”

I have been spending a good amount of time at Beantal. John Pasden introduced it to me a week or so ago, and then later he wrote a post about it found here. John is not really stupid, at the time of his post the website was actually called Douban. Now it is called Beantal. I like Beantal better for reasons I can’t explain.

Anyway, the website basically uses something like the Flikr interface. People are able to go online and post which books they have read, want to read, and are in the middle of reading. If you want you may post a review of a book you have read, like at Amazon. You can also do the same with music. I’m a geek. I read a lot, though not as much as I would like. But I do like this website. It was first a Chinese language website until the founder started it in English as well. There are a lot of people (expats and Chinese) on the website who live in China and are quite excited about English books and music. Anywho, I just wrote a review about Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose. Good book, twenty years old, recently made into a movie with Sean Connery and Christian Slater. Come over, check out my page, join my group, and find what I’ve found… new books to read.

I have enjoyed looking through what other people are reading. Books stay with you even though you might not remember you have read them, that is, until you see the cover again. Good books make an impression, and as I have have perused other peoples books it is exciting for me when I see a book that I had read a while ago and forgotten about. The story comes back to me. Even some noteworthy scenes appear on the screen of my often abused brain. Yes, books are personal more than any other medium. Music may be more universal, but books leave marks and smudges on the reader.

It also occured to me that most of the authors I have read write or create one of two ways…and only the very good do it both ways. Writers are either great because they paint with long broad strokes or they get in there with a little miniature brush and paint the details. Kerouac, I think, was more bluster, and attitude, and swagger than details. Thomas Wolfe is details upon details. I can remember whole phrases and descriptions in Wolfe’s writing. I have read On the Road three or four times and only remember one phrase…although I can tell you what the books is about and everybody who was in it. Dostoevsky painted both ways at once. That was his genius.

updated 12-23 Beantal has changed their name back to douban