Kerime B. Toksü's 2literal.com

A Greek comic book is taking the literary world by storm. It was a hit at last week’s London Book Fair and is already being touted by Publisher’s Weekly as the “most far-out and exciting” galley to get your hands on at Book Expo America, which begins May 28th.

I’ll let Alison Flood of The Guardian describe it:

“An unexpected kind of comic book hero is set to emerge this autumn: Bertrand Russell, the philosopher, logician, mathematician and Nobel prize for literature winner who wrote the seminal work on mathematical logic, the Principia Mathematica.

Russell, who died aged 97 in 1970, is starring in a graphic novel based on his life, Logicomix, which portrays the great pacifist’s quest to pin down the foundations of mathematics. First published in Greece last year, where it has become an unexpected bestseller, Logicomix, subtitled “An Epic Search for Truth,” is the brainchild of maths expert and novelist Apostolos Doxiadis, who was admitted to Columbia University at the tender age of 15.

Covering a span of 60 years, it tells the story of Russell’s life, taking in his childhood, brought up by his grandparents after he was orphaned aged four, his four marriages, the writing of his great work Principia Mathematica, his rivalry with Ludwig Wittgenstein, and his quest for nuclear disarmament in the last decades of his life.”

Logicomix will be available in the U.S. on September 28th. I can’t wait!

LINK:
- Logicomix

Google Lit Trips (see my last post) — a lovely integration of books and technology — is just the most recent effort I’ve seen concerning this topic. I’ve been thinking a lot about books and technology over the past couple of months, looking at presentations from O’Reilly Tools of Change for Publishing ‘09 and listening to podcasts from South by Southwest ‘09 (couldn’t afford to attend either one).

One interesting thing I’ve discovered is that I always end up thinking about the actual object: the book. Not the content, which can be displayed and dispersed in a myriad of ways, but the physical object consisting of print and paper.

So I was pleased to find this exhibit at the University of Central Florida Art Gallery which looks at books as dimensional objects with print, within which a narrative unfolds. “If reading can include visual and semantic aspects,” it asks, “then precisely what ratio determines when a sculpture becomes a book or when it functions as a sculpture alluding to books?”

I must admit that I find the physical presence of a book — its dust jacket, weight, dimensions, paper quality, font, margins — important and often extremely pleasing.  But then I am also quite partial to sculpture as an art form.  Are the two connected? Or is my pleasure merely due to the fact that I’m accustomed to the book’s physical form as a part of the reading experience? Is then reading as joyful if this aspect is stripped away?

Which sweeps me back around the circle to technology. Are electronic reading devices the wave of the future? Is it as delicious to read fiction on a screen rather than on paper? That’s hard to imagine.

LINKS:
- TypeBound

I recently heard about Google Lit Trips, so I went to take a look. Created by teacher Jerome Burg, it’s a way to combine the un-multimedia experience of reading with the uber-multimedia experience of Google Earth. For an excellent description of how Google Lit Trips works, see “Google Lit Trips: Bringing Travel Tales to Life.”

The first trip I “took” was Voltaire’s Candide, whose eponymous protagonist (that’s a mouthful) travels from Europe to South America to Turkey. It was fun to see the trajectory of his journey and there were many resources, such as ancient maps, that I could look at. But rather than poring over all this stuff online, what the lit trip really made me want to do was read Candide.

I bought the English-language Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition a couple of years ago because I loved the cover and hadn’t read the book. (I always feel as though I’m being lazy if I read a French book in English, especially when I need to keep up my French.) Despite the language un-barrier, as soon as I got off the computer, I pulled my Candide off the shelf and it’s now in the queue.

On the plus side, I’ll be reading Candide soon. On the minus side, I can’t help but have an uncomfortably Luddite reaction against the whole idea of Google Lit Trips because fiction is supposed to be internal not external. In very broad outlines, film is a visual medium, the beauty of drama is its spoken language, and fiction is just the reader and the words. Google Lit Trips takes the images the author is trying to paint in your head and replaces (augments?) them with real-life images.

Everyone is trying these days to attract the techy next generation to reading, or to lure those busy gaming and tweeting back to the fold. But is the beauty of fiction the fact that you don’t have to be bothered by the real world for a little while?

LINKS:
- Voltaire’s Candide (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)
- Google Lit Trips