Sunny in New York

We had some snow this weekend but it has cleared up and despite a cold breeze it was a beautiful day yesterday. This is the location where a scene from On The Waterfront with Marlon Brando was filmed - just over by the green fence.

More about Jane Austen

Bill Grimes in the NYT took a look at annotated versions of some classic books including books by Austen and Nobokov. Reflecting back to your school days, when placing your novels in context was important to your participation in class will give you a good idea of how annotated books can add to your enjoyment and deeper understanding of the material. As Grimes says in refering to an annotated version of Pride and Prejudice,

Any reader who sticks with the program and absorbs the wealth of material that Mr. Shapard offers will, insofar as such a thing as possible, read “Pride and Prejudice” as it was read and understood at the time of its publication, with all the period details in place and correctly interpreted. But the novel, in most respects, remains the same. The reader who does not know a farthing from a guinea, it’s safe to say, will nonetheless grasp the great drama of attraction and repulsion that plays out between Darcy and Elizabeth. The cut and thrust of their conversation is timeless. Generations of young women who do not know the first thing about an entailed estate or a quadrille will recognize in Austen’s heroine a kindred spirit, a contemporary, a valued ally in the eternal war between the sexes.

These books fill an important need for some readers who really want to understand the world that the writer lived and the one that the characters inhabit. From the article,

That’s why there’s a niche market for annotated editions and period guides. A while back Daniel Pool responded to a crying need with “What Jane Austen Ate and What Charles Dickens Knew,” a whirlwind tour of day-to-day life in 19th-century England, with plentiful examples from Trollope, Thackeray, Eliot and Hardy. It tilts heavily toward the Victorians, whose world, with its railroads and factory towns and gaslighted streets Austen would not have recognized.

The next step would be to take this material to a more interactive level so that a reader could do their own research and navigate up and down and side to side in terms of contemporary history, politics, recreation, language, etc. Although admittedly that is going to be too much for the casual reader.

Unread But Popular Books

I am one of those people that gut it out and must finish a book once I have started it. Ulysses is the only book I have not completed but it is also the only book I have listened to on tape. (My most titanic battle to complete a book was waged with Dom Delillo over Underworld). This list identifies some titles unread that are surprizing particularly Harry Potter, but if you realize that many adults purchased the Potter books for themselves then this may not be too strange. Of interest too is the Bill Clinton book. I recall when it came out that there were grumbles about the lack of editing which would have reduced the length of the book and also resulted in more detail and reflection on the controversies. That is, it could have been more entertaining. Here is the list of unfinished fiction:

1 Vernon God Little, DBC Pierre
2 Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, JK Rowling
3 Ulysses, James Joyce
4 Captain Corelli's Mandolin, Louis De Bernieres
5 Cloud Atlas, David Mitchell
6 The Satanic Verses, Salman Rushdie
7 The Alchemist, Paulo Coelho
8 War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy
9 The God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy
10 Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoevsky

Clearly length of book has nothing to do with completion. In reading the comments, I was reminded that I also had the same experience having finished The Hobbit and attempting to read The Lord of The Rings. Regardless of my experience, one of those pointless best of lists places TLTR at number 2 in a most popular list. Here is the full list of fiction titles:

1. Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen (20%)
2. Lord of the Rings, JRR Tolkien (17%)
3. Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte (14%)
4. Harry Potter books, JK Rowling (12%)
5. To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee (9.5%)
6. The Bible (9%)
7. Wuthering Heights , Emily Bronte (8.5%)
8. Nineteen Eighty Four, George Orwell (6%)
8. His Dark Materials , Philip Pullman (6%)
10. Great Expectations , Charles Dickens (5.5%)

This is clearly as list conducted in Greater Britain since I am sure if this were done in the US that The Bible would be number one.

In a split second of inspiration (now I have a headache), I took a look at the top ten authors and titles at librarything and here is the list by number of copies:

1. J.K. Rowling (86,828)
2. Stephen King (67,781)
3. Terry Pratchett (67,253)
4. Neil Gaiman (55,061)
5. J.R.R. Tolkien (51,560)
6. C. S. Lewis (48,761)
7. William Shakespeare (35,905)
8. Isaac Asimov (29,170)
9. Jane Austen (28,822)
10. Douglas Adams (27,633),

And here is the list of the top 15 books held by librarything participants:

1. Harry Potter and the sorcerer's stone (13,366)
2. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (13,064)
3. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (12,259)
4. Harry Potter and the goblet of fire (11,792)
5. Harry Potter and the prisoner of Azkaban (11,678)
6. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (11,612)
7. The Da Vinci code (10,572)
8. The Hobbit (9,248)
9. 1984 (9,182)
10. The catcher in the rye (8,954)
11. Pride and prejudice (8,398)
12. To kill a mockingbird (7,715)
13. The great Gatsby (7,494)
14. The lord of the rings (6,660)
15. Jane Eyre (6,292),

St. Patrick's, Andrew, George, David, (and Ringo) Day

So when the news came out, I couldn't wait to tell Mrs PND who, while the family came over in 1820 or so, is still apparently Irish. Well perhaps not. Little did we know that those Spanish sailors marooned on the shores of Ireland in 1588 - thanks mainly to the weather - were actually about to be reacquainted with their long lost relatives. When I told her the Great in Great Britain is more a geographic reference (perhaps it should be 'Greater' Britain) and that we are all related I thought she was going to tear up. Not so fast, she has started to insist I am Irish... Still this bit of DNA revisionism is a story almost as strange as the one earlier in the year about co-joining France and England under the Queen.

To my mind what has been ignored through out the subsequent depressed drunken discussions about our heritage is why on earth our ancestors migrated from Northern Spain. What were they thinking? Why once they suffered through the first dank, dark and damp winter/spring/autumn didn't they high tail it back? We deserve ancestors so dumb. So anyway, in celebration of Sts Patrick, Andrew, George and David day, Mrs. PND dutifully got the corned beef, potatoes and leeks and made dinner. She did not however take my advice and deep fry the meat, boil the crap out of the potatoes and vegies, serve it lukewarm and knock it back with a few tumblers of Laphroaig. All for the best.

Nevertheless, this concatenation of nationalities has its benefits because it will give the English (who remember as a nation rarely win anything of note) that many more chances at glory. And as if to underline the potential rampant opportunities in store, the "Irish" Cricket Team beat Pakistan yesterday in perhaps one of the more noticeable victories ever in a World Cup. Go "Ireland" "Scotland" "Wales" and England!

Speculation about Pearson

Reuters is reporting increased speculation (again) about a potential PE bid for Pearson plc. This is surely getting a little old for these people. Speculation has been evident for months and since the middle of last year the company's market cap has increased by well over £1.1billion. Today the share price has been up as much as 8p but it has fallen back slightly.

Deals: Wolters Kluwer

Wednesday was the day that offers were due to be submitted for the Wolters Kluwer educational assets. According to Reuters, the interested parties include Pearson Education and Wendel Investissement (French Educational company) and a number of private equity firms. Reuters went on to suggest that the company could fetch close to a $Billion.

It is hard to see which way this one will go. My guess is on one of the operators rather than PE. The unit is small relative to the other companies on the market and has some fairly specialized publishing programs which could limit effective cost restructuring and limit the potential for closer integration with a second follow-on acquisition. The integration with an existing publisher, such as Pearson, could be similar to a list acquisition meaning they could effectively eliminate all expenses other than those directly attributable to content development.

Graf Spree and Gone with The Wind

I was in Orlando earlier this week for the Spring meeting of ASIDIC which was my first attendance at this event. It was a small meeting but it there were some high quality presentations and I will attempt to attend subsequent meetings. Among the speakers was Joe Wikert who wrote a post about the meeting. Dinner on the Monday evening was at the Orange County Regional History Center in downtown Orlando where most people wouldn't ordinarily go. The exhibits we actually quite interesting and they had an extensive civil war exhibit but the item that caught my eye was in the smaller exhibit celebrating Gone with The Wind. In this newspaper front page a significant amount of space is given over to the premier of the movie but in the lower left is a story about the Graf Spree, a German battle cruiser that had been chased around the Atlantic by the British and had holed up in Uruguay. The juxtaposition of these two events - the movie and the war - is very interesting. It shows that at the same time the war was a very real thing in Europe that perhaps it wasn't quite so important at the time in the US. The British were frustrated in their victory in this skurmish of course since the Graf Spree was scuttled. On the other hand Viv Leigh did get best actress. (Sorry for the bad photo).