In the World

If I had a dollar for every time I’ve heard “this book will be a best seller!” I would probably be able to call up the folks at Orange County Choppers and commission them to build me a Fenrir.

The hard truth, though, is that not every book will be a best seller. Very few will.

Readers are very, very fickle. And the best sales tool, even in the internet age, is word of mouth.

Take the recent Twilight book series, for example. All four books have been on the New York Times best seller list. The first movie was one of the highest-grossing movies of 2008. The DVD release of the same movie is among the best selling DVDs ever. Yet until 2 months ago there were only two people at Destiny Image to have ever read the book. (And yes, one of them was me. I’m a sucker for YA fiction, and I let my wife talk me into reading the books last year.)

I know at least 5 people who only picked up the books because of what other people said about them. And you know what? This is exactly how books become best sellers.

Marketing plays a role. Art design and titling play a role. Placement in stores plays a role. Author involvement is a big part. But the thing that really makes books move is friend-to-friend recommendations.

At DI, Don Milam and I often trade book recommendations. We both like some of  the same kinds of books, and passing books back and forth lets us discover new books and sparks interesting conversations. I liked Memnoch the Devil, which Don is now reading. He loved Between Noon and Three, which I also appreciated. Don recently suggested Sauron Defeated, which I have on order in dead-tree edition, and will likely devour as soon as it arrives.

Now, other aspects of books are important: Titles, subtitles, and covers initially attract people to a book. But don’t underestimate the importance and power of word-of-mouth.

And to do my part for the word-of-mouth:
Errant Story
Myst: The Book of Atrus
The Alchemist
Dear Dumb Diary 1: Let’s Pretend This Never Happened

I’ve added a new semi-static page to my profile. You can find it by clicking “Anime” above (or by clicking here).

I’ll update the page as I watch other stuff, or remember something that I’ve forgotten I’ve seen.

And eventually I want to rate and classify stuff, because I certainly don’t want people using my viewing list as any sort of “recommended watching” authorization. That would be hilarious.

Also, note that it’s in alphabetical order. Figuring our the order I watched some of this stuff in would be too difficult, except for some of my very early viewings and the most recent items.

But, to give a bit of history, my first exposure to anime was many, many years ago. The 6:00am Saturday morning time slot was a win for Robotech, and I fell in love with the series. Some time later, my mom rented the horrible translated and edited “Warriors of the Wind”, which I became obsessed with (and my parents promptly pulled out of the VCR and returned to the store about the time that the God Warrior started melting).

Thus began my fandom of Japanese animation. I’m not really an outright otaku, but I am a bit of an anime geek, and can discuss the finer points of modern Japanese animation the way that movie buffs can discuss films (which I also do, incidentally).

Anyway, have fun reading my silly list, and if you have any recommendations let me know!

P.S. I’m particularly partial to Ghibli productions, and own almost every film they’ve ever produced.

If you’ve never heard of Freeman Dyson, I don’t blame you.

He is probably one of the smartest guys on the planet right now. He has an incredible grasp of the infinitely complex, and an amazing ability to break it down into the simplest components to explain it to non-scientists.

I recently read an amazing essay by Dyson here.

He’s been throwing water on the global climate change fanatics for some time now, and his ideas are pretty revolutionary (or not quite so much if you know anything about recent scientific progress).

In a nutshell, Dyson believes that we don’t actually know if humans have anything to do with climate change (warming OR cooling). The planet is complex; so much so that we don’t even have the beginnings of the accurate computer models to predict the state of the planet.

Among his well-researched claims is one that the Earth has been going through a series of warming/cooling cycles for the past million years or so, with ice ages occurring pretty regularly, and that we are currently overdue for the start of the next one.

He also addresses some things that I’ve wondered about for a long time. Things like the fact that the Middle East used to be heavily forested, not the arid desert it is now. The fact that the Sahara used to be full of life, trees, plains of grass, and civilization. Dyson brings it all together in a striking portrayal of what the Earth could look like, and questions whether Man has (or should) have anything to do with it.

The world is more complex–and less certain–than we think.

Maybe the Mayans were right about 2012. Maybe I should start stocking up on canned foods.