Lesson for the Digital Future

My review in The Star today :

Two renowned authors share insights into the future of the book.

This Is Not The End Of The Book

Authors: Jean-Claude Carrière & Umberto Eco

Publisher: Harvill Secker, 336 pages

THESE are anxious times for book lovers. New digital technologies mean that we find ourselves on the edge of a literary revolution of a magnitude that hasn’t been seen since the invention of the printing press in the 15th century. Industry insiders predict that the traditional, printed book will disappear completely within the next 25 years in the face of competition from e-books and the easy availability of plentiful information at the click of a mouse on the Internet.

Last year, Amazon.com, as good a barometer of changes in book-buying habits as any, announced that for the first time sales of digital books have outstripped US sales of hardbacks on its website. American bookstore chain Barnes and Noble claim that they are selling three times as many digital books as all formats of physical books combined. We are witnessing an increasing number of libraries ditching physical books in favour of digital content. There are huge shakeouts in the publishing industry, and book retailers are also under threat.

No wonder so many of us worry that the book as we know it, the artifact that we have grown up with, and which has delivered to us so much knowledge and personal pleasure, will be lost to us.

This Is Not The End Of The Book delivers some much needed hope and reassurance. Jean-Philippe de Tonnac brings together, in a series of conversations, novelist and critic Umberto Eco (best known for his novels The Name Of The Rose and Foucault’s Pendulum), and playwright and screenwriter Jean-Claude Carrière to debate the place of the book in the digital age. Both are bibliophiles of the most devoted kind and have a deep understanding of the history of the book.

On the question of whether or not the book will survive, Eco sets our mind at rest within the first few pages. The book, he points out, is already an entirely effective piece of technology and “like the spoon, scissors, the hammer, the wheel. Once invented, it cannot be improved.”

But so far most of the innovations in storing data (including floppy discs, videotapes, and CD-ROMs) in recent decades have become obsolete incredibly quickly, with the resultant loss of important cultural heritage. Printed books have proved more durable, so that “we can still read a text printed five centuries ago”.

As well as contemplating the present and future of reading, this book takes us on a tour of the past. De Tonnac tosses into the ring the questions that spark the discussion, and what ensues is a delightfully meandering conversation, full of fascinating asides and anecdotes.

Eco and Carrière look at the way that words have been stored over time, and how ideas have been communicated down the ages. They give us insights into how the book lovers of the past got their fix; they talk about libraries, editors, Shakespeare, the holy books of Islam and Christianity; and about the books that are lost to us through accidental fire, negligence and stupidity. Indeed, one interesting question that is raised is whether the books that have survived from ancient times actually are the greatest works of their time, and what might we have actually lost along the way?

In previous centuries you didn’t need to have read a great deal to be considered well-educated: in the 18th century, for example, the upper classes would be able to carry their whole libraries with them in trunks when they travelled as just 30-40 books contained all the learning of the decent individual. Today, of course, much more is published and considered important than it is possible to read. Eco and Carrière talk about how we are deeply influenced even by the books we have not read.

No discussion of books and reading down the ages would be complete without a discussion of censorship. Book burning is seen as a symbolic act of “purification” after a culture has been “poisoned by certain books”. “You have to respect a book’s power to want to destroy it,” says Carrière – Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses being a case in point.

Perhaps the most enjoyable aspect of the conversation is the personal insights into the relationship that the two have with books. Carrière’s first contact with books was with the Bible in the church in the French village where he grew up; and also with George Sand’s Valentine, a book that his father read over and over because he was fond of it. Eco recounts how he fell in love with reading, poring over the eclectic stack of unbound volumes his book-binder grandfather left behind.

They go on to discuss their personal libraries, how they gathered the books they have, how they display them, and to whom they plan to bequeath them eventually. Eco has 50,000 books in his various homes, 1,200 of which are rare titles, among them books on “human error, bad faith and idiocy” – subjects that, he says, fascinate him. Carrière says that he owns 30,000-40,000 books, 2,000 of them ancient.

Have they read all the books in their vast libraries, though? Carrière replies that “a library is not necessarily made up of books that we’ve read, or even that we will eventually read. They should be books that we can read. Or that we may read. Even if we never do.” Eco agrees with him. “A library is an assurance of learning,” he says.

That’s a lesson one hopes will be remembered in our headlong rush towards the digital future.

Burgess' 99 Novels

Usually the buah tangan you take along to a party is something edible or drinkable, or maybe some flowers.  All such niceys are gratefully received.  But the friend I like best is the one who always brings me the gift of some second-hand books, things he's picked up a various flea-markets. 

On Saturday night we had a little get-together for friends, and he turned up with his customary bag of books that he felt sure I'd like, and one of the books he brought was a total winner as far as I was concerned -  99 novels : The Best in English since 1939 by Anthony Burgess, written in 1984.  I love books about books, full of  reading suggestions, and Burgess, of course, feels like an old friend.

You can find the whole list here. And the fascinating introduction to the book is here.  Here's what Burgess says about what the novel should be :

I believe that the primary substance I have considered in making my selection is human character. It is the godlike task of the novelist to create human beings whom we accept as living creatures filled with complexities and armed with free will. This free will causes trouble for the novelist who sees himself as a kind of small God of the Calvinists, able to predict what is going to happen on the final page. No novelist who has created a credible personage can ever be quite sure what that personage will do. Create your characters, give them a time and place to exist in, and leave the plot to them; the imposing of action on them is very difficult, since action must spring out of the temperament with which you have endowed them. At best there will be a compromise between the narrative line you have dreamed up and the course of action preferred by the characters. Finally, though, it must seem that action is there to illustrate character; it is character that counts.

The time and space a fictional character inhabits ought to be exactly realized. This does not mean that an art novelist need, in the manner of the pop novelist, get all his details right. Frederick Forsyth would not dream of making the Milan Airport out of his skull, but Brian Moore, in his recent ''Cold Heaven,'' equips Nice Airport with a security check system that it does not possess. This is not a grave fault, since the rest of the C^ote d'Azur is realized aromatically enough. Many novelists rightly consider human probability more important than background exactitude. It often happens that a created background, like Graham Greene's West Africa in ''The Heart of the Matter,'' is more magical than the real thing. It is the spatio-temporal extension of character that is more important than public time and location - the hair on the legs, the aching eyetooth, the phlegm in the voice. It is not enough for a novelist to fabricate a human soul: There must be a body as well, and an immediate space-time continuum for that body to rest or move in.

The management of dialogue is important. There is a certain skill in making speech lifelike without its being a mere transcription from a tape recorder. Such a transcription never reads like fictional speech, which is artful and more economical than it appears. One could forgive Dennis Wheatley, who wrote well-researched novels of the occult, a good deal if only his characters sounded like people. There is too much, in the novels of Arthur Hailey and Irving Wallace, of the pouring out of information cribbed directly from an encyclopedia as a substitute for real speech. The better novelists write with their ears.

A good novel ought to have a shape. Pop novelists never fail to gather their strands of action into a climax: They are helped in this by the comparative inertness of their characters. The characters of an art novel resist the structure which their creators try to impose on them; they want to go their own way. They do not even want the book to come to an end and so they have, sometimes arbitrarily, as in E. M. Forster, to be killed off. A good novel contrives, nevertheless, somehow to trace a parabola. It is not merely a slice of life. It is life delicately molded into a shape. A picture has a frame and a novel ends where it has to - in some kind of resolution of thought or action which satisfies as the end of a symphony satisfies.

I now tread dangerous ground. A novel ought to leave in the reader's mind a sort of philosophical residue. A view of life has been indirectly propounded that seems new, even surprising. The novelist has not preached. The didactic has no place in good fiction. But he has clarified some aspect of private or public morality that was never so clear before. As novels are about the ways in which human beings behave, they tend to imply a judgment of behavior, which means that the novel is what the symphony or painting or sculpture is not - namely, a form steeped in morality.

Because one always measures oneself against lists : I've read and enjoyed just 22 of the titles Burgess suggests, so there are still big gaps to fill.

In the Mood for Love

Are you in the mood for love?

The Times has six very good short short stories on the theme written by Matt Thorne, Lionel Shriver, James Meek, Jilly Cooper, Adele Parks and Tim Lott. Best of all there's the invitation for you to write your own love story in 300 words.

If you want something a bit more substantial, over at the Boston Globe there's a list of ten great novels to read when you feel like some literary romance - prepare to be surprised! The list is drawn from Haille Ephron's 1001 Books for every Mood which sound like another book about books I must add to my collection.

BiblioIncendiary!

Burning books is the most extreme expression of censorship, isn't it? The book pyre an extremely emotive image. We think of the Nazi's burning works of philosophy and literature in 1933 (below), of the burning of Rushdie's The Satanic Verses in Bradford in 1989. (Wikipedia has a very detailed list of book burning incidents through history.)



So emotive and potent is the image in fact that here Sisters in Islam recently protesting censorship of books had images of books being burned on posters and postcards ... even though books have never been physically burned by the authorities here!

Australian antiquarian bookseller Matthew Fishburn was so fascinated by the fiery subject as his topic for his PhD thesis, which has now been published as Burning Books, and he says in an interview with The Australian that there are many other reasons beside censorship why books get burned.

Simply getting around the problem of disposal for unwanted books, is one example. Or folks making a symbolic gesture that they have moved on with their lives, as these lads are doing :



We have also met on this blog the bookseller who is burning his own books as a cultural protest:



and the author who tried to burn his own novel (and who asked for another of his works to be burned posthumously.)

John Sutherland who reviews Fishburne's book in the Times and calls it a fascinating chronicle wonders whether book burning might be about to come to an end with the intervention of technology? :

In modern times, as Fishburn notes, book burning has faded from the scene. Partly it's the improved technology of pulping. Partly it's that Goebbels has given the practice a bad name. Partly it's obsolescence: how do you burn an e-text? How will some future Caliph Omar be able to destroy the great Google Library (some five million texts), available to us (at a price) later this year?

If you want a taste of Burning Books do check out Fishburne's blog of the same name, there's some fascinating stuff here including illustrations that didn't make it into the book.

Lonesome Bookseller

How did one of the pillars of civilization come, in only 50 years, to be mostly unwanted?”

writes Lonesome Dove author Larry McMurtry about used-bookstores.

McMurtry is so passionate about collecting books that he decided to create "a book town" in Archer City, Texas (modeled on the Welsh village of Hay-on-Wye) and opened a used-bookstore called Booked Up which now fills nine buildings. But the business is struggling and this year almost had to close down.

As Diana Lynn Ossana notes in her New York Times piece about his latest work Books : A Memoir :

... the colorful characters and frontiers Mr. McMurtry has encountered during his four decades in the antiquarian book trade are disappearing from the American landscape just as much as the vernacular cultures that have occupied his 28 novels. ... he notes that his trade has become a fringe one that makes his neighbors uneasy. Many of the booksellers and scouts he wrangled with and admired are now dead, out of business or marginalized. Their collections now fill Booked Up. The habit they served, reading, is no longer a driving passion for many Americans.

The book though is largely about McMurtry's experiences in the business, and Ossana says is full of "fishing stories" of the rare books caught and those that got away.

I liked this :

Toward the end of the book Mr. McMurtry describes finding a rare copy of “The Whale,” as “Moby-Dick” was called in England, apparently the working copy given to a writer named Charles Reade to abridge to a more manageable length. Reade, a contemporary of Melville’s, “was not a man to be intimidated by a mere American classic.” His first stroke is through the opening line: “Call me Ishmael.”

Damn! I've just gone and Amazon 1-clicked it!

Postscript :

See also this USA Today interview with McMurtry [found via] in which he explains why he doesn't sell his own books in the store. (He sounds a bit of a grouch! Does that naturally go with the territory of being a second-hand bookstore owner I wonder?)

Manguel's Library

My library is not a single beast but a composite of many others, a fantastic animal made up of the several libraries built and then abandoned, over and over again, throughout my life. I can’t remember a time in which I didn’t have a library of some sort. The present one is a sort of multilayered autobiography, each book holding the moment in which I opened it for the first time. The scribbles on the margins, the occasional date on the flyleaf, the faded bus ticket marking a page for a reason today mysterious, all try to remind me of who I was then. For the most part, they fail. My memory is less interested in me than in my books, and I find it easier to remember the story read once than the young man who then read it.Here's another truly amazing personal library to wander around.

Albert Manguel, writer, translator and editor, explains in The New York Times the origins and organisation of his library of some 30,000 books in an old stone presbytery in France.


There's more about his collection in The Library at Night, and you can read an extract here. James McConnochie reviews it in The Times today.

Happy Bookish Valentine

I learned very early that when you were infatuated with someone, you read the same books the other person read or you read the books that had shaped the other person or you committed an infidelity and read for yourself and it was the beginning of trouble.

From Harold Brodkey Reading: The Most Dangerous Game (1985) and found in a delightful book called The Book Addict's Treasury by Julie Rugg and Lynda Murphy which my friend Diane gave me as a belated Christmas present and which I am reading in bed.

The Stories Behind the Titles

Why is Joseph Heller's classic novel of World War II called Catch-22 (an expression which has now entered the English language) and not Catch-11 or Catch-21? Why is James M. Cain's novel called The Postman Always Ring Twice when it does not feature a single postman? Why is P.G. Wodehouse's man-servant called Jeeves? Why was Melville's whale Moby-Dick? Did Nabokov nick the title Lolita from another writer?

Telegraph columnist Gary Dexter sets out to uncover the stories behind the titles of 50 famous classics and comes up with some intriguing literary trivia. Extracts from the book appear in the Telegraph and the Independent.

One of the most intriguing questions (for us, anyway) is whether the orange in the title Anthony Burgess' famous dsytopian novel A Clockwork Orange was actually a play on the Malay word orang meaning man:

Anthony Burgess gave at least three possible origins for the title A Clockwork Orange, none convincing. The first was that he had overheard the phrase "as queer as a clockwork orange" in a London pub. He wrote in the introduction to the 1987 US edition: "The image was a bizarre one, always used for a bizarre thing."

Then, in an essay, "Clockwork Marmalade", published in 1972, he claimed he had heard the phrase several times, usually in the mouths of aged cockneys. But no other record of the expression in use before 1962 has surfaced. Several commentators have doubted it ever existed. Why an orange, in particular? Why not a clockwork apple? The phrase does not seem to have much wit or accuracy when describing something queer, odd or strange.

The second explanation was that the title was a pun on the Malay word orang, meaning man. Burgess taught in Malaya from 1954 to 1959. He wrote in Joysprick, his study of Joyce: "I myself was, for nearly six years, in such close touch with the Malay language that it affected my English and still affects my thinking. When I wrote A Clockwork Orange, no European reader saw that the Malay word for 'man' – orang – was contained in the title..." This conjuring of a clockwork man, central to the book's ideas, is clever, but sounds like an afterthought. Burgess wrote elsewhere that the orang echo was a "secondary" meaning – probably shorthand for a happy accident.

This leads to the third possibility, which is, as he wrote in a prefatory note, that the title is a metaphor for an organic entity, full of juice and sweetness, being turned into an automaton. This idea is built into the book. The story of Alex is one in which two unpleasant alternatives for future societies are contrasted. The first is one in which malefactors are allowed to exercise free will to torture and murder, and are, if caught, punished; the second is one in which they have their freedom of choice cauterised, resulting in a safe society populated by automata.

Burgess intended to contrast two ways of looking at the world, the Augustinian and the Pelagian. The Augustinian is that man's freedom is guaranteed, but original sin makes suffering inevitable. The Pelagian (heretical) view is that mankind is perfectible and original sin can be overridden. Burgess leant heavily towards the Augustinian side. The phrase "a clockwork orange", as representative of the Pelagian nightmare, appears in the book itself, in fact as the title of a book.

There is one other possibility. Did Burgess mishear that phrase in the pub? Terry's began making Chocolate Oranges in 1931. "Chocolate" and "clockwork" aren't homophones, but they might sound alike in a noisy pub. Perhaps Burgess misheard. Perhaps he knew it but liked what he had misheard. Perhaps – I speculate – he did not want to admit to the drab origins of his title.

I'm very tempted to buy this Dexter's book! (And I blame Aswan because he sent me a link to it.) As Marcus Berkmann in the Spectator points out:

No literary lavatory will be complete without a copy.

Top Tens

So have you sent your list of top ten favourite reads in to the Star? You only have a couple more days to go, y'know.

I've tossed and turned at night over my choices ... many of them read so long ago that I wonder if I would still love the titles as much as I did back then. What did I choose? I'll tell you in another post after the results of the StarMag poll are out. (Mel posted her list on her blog.)

Lists of best reads make compulsive reading. Critic Robert McCrum puts it nicely:

Obviously, in the whirling blizzard of new prose and amid the disorienting static of mass communications, a list provides a signpost, a welcome simplification of confusing data and, perhaps, a still small voice of clarity. Next, especially for bookish blokes whose reading must be susceptible to notions of rank and consequence, a list posts a valuation on a vivid but meaningless literary Footsie. Finally, a list is simultaneously an aide-memoire, a reproach and a provocation.

Last month I impulse bought The Top Ten: Writers Pick Their Favourite Books edited by J. Peder Zane from Kinokuniya. (I'm a sucker for books about books and naughty Kino had a whole table covered in them!)

You pretty much know the contents of the book from the title alone. In fact Zane asked 125 top British and American authors of various fiction genres for their lists, among them, Stephen King, Alice Hoffman, (my patron saint) Annie Proulx, Alexander McCall Smith, Ann Patchett, Sue Monk Kidd, Michael Cunningham ... (Scott Esposito of the Conversational Reading blog delights in the quirkinesses of the lists.)

The writers between them nominate 544 titles, which Zane then provides a guide to in the second part of the book. This is a formidable master reading list and perhaps a great place for the reader who wants to go straight for the best or the wannabe writer setting out to fill gaps in their reading education.

And then Zane then correlates all the lists to draw out with a single Top 10 of all time according to authors. And this, my dears, is it:

1. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy

2. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert

3. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy

4. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov

5. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain

6. Hamlet by William Shakespeare

7. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

8. In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust

9. The Stories of Anton Chekhov

10. Middlemarch by George Eliot

Guilt-Free Low-Lit

This is for Lydia who confessed the other day that she suffers from a disease called 'Low-Lit'. It comes from the foreword of Nick Hornby's The Complete Polysyllabic Spree , a collection of his very enjoyable columns on books and readings for The Believer (the latest column is here).

One of the problems, it seems to me, is that we've got it into our heads that books should be hard work, and that unless they're hard work, they're not doing us any good.

... If reading books is to survive as a leisure activity - and there are statistics which show that this is by no means assured - then we have to promote the joys of reading, rather than the (dubious) benefits. I would never attempt to dissuade anyone from reading a book. but please, if you're reading a book that's killing you, put it down and read something else, just as you would reach for the remote if you weren't enjoying a TV programme. Your failure to enjoy a highly rated novel doesn't mean you're dim. ... All I know is that you can get very little from a book that is making you weep with the effort of reading it.

... reading for enjoyment is what we all should be doing. I don't mean we should all be reading chick lit or thrillers (although if that's what you want to read, it's fine by me, because here's something no one will ever tell you: if you don't read the classics or the novel that won this year's Booker Prize, then nothing bad will happen to you; more importantly, nothing good will happen to you if you do); I simply mean that turning pages should not be like walking through thick mud. the whole purpose of books is that we read them, and ifyou find you can't, it might not be your inadequacy that's to blame. 'Good' books can be pretty awful sometimes.

In each column Hornby lists his books read and books bought and discusses his reading, so I'll do the same:

My books most recently bought:

Silverfish New Writing 6 - ed. Dipika Mukherjee
The Complete Polysyllabic Spree - Nick Hornby
The Book of Lost Books - Stuart Kelly
The New York Trilogy, Oracle Nights - Paul Auster

Books Read:

None finished this week. Book hopping. Am reading simulataneously Auster's New York Trilogy, Silverfish New Writing 6, Filipino writer Jessica Zafra's collection of short fiction Manananggal Terrorizes Manila (many thanks, Sky) and Ziauddin Sardar's Desperately Seeking Paradise: Journeys of a Sceptical Muslim (thanks Zia).

So ... how about you?

Postscript:

Lydia's right (in the comments) ... I really should have linked Daphne Lee's very nice piece on much the same topic in Starmag yesterday: she talks about Daniel Pennac's The Rights of the Reader, and provides a link to a lovely downloadable poster with illustrations by Quentin Blake (right). And this she says to parents:

... don’t even think in terms of knowledge-gained, increased-vocabulary or improved reading-skills. All that will come, I assure you, but don’t make it the reason you buy your kids books or encourage them to read. You don’t want your children to view books with apprehension, but with joy. You want them to see reading as an enjoyable activity. ... The list of rights says that the reader is the only one who has a say in what, where, when and how he reads. It says it’s OK to relax with a book; it’s OK to be lazy with a book; it’s OK to escape into a book; be loud with a book; and be silent with a book. It’s all good so long as you’re having a good time.

Postscript 2:

cw posted an interesting response to this post.

Prose ... On Prose to Emulate

Can creative writing be taught?

It's a reasonable question, but no matter how often I've been asked, I never know quite what to say. Because if what people mean is: Can the love of language be taught? Can a gift for storytelling be taught? then the answer is no. Which may be why the question is so often asked in a skeptical tone implying that, unlike the multiplication tables or the principles of auto mechanics, creativity can't be transmitted from teacher to student. Imagine Milton enrolling in a graduate program for help with Paradise Lost, or Kafka enduring the seminar in which his classmates inform him that, frankly, they just don't believe the part about the guy waking up one morning to find he's a giant bug.

Thus begins Francine Prose's new book, Reading like a Writer. So if Prose is cynical about the value of writing workshops, how are writers expected to learn their craft?

Prose believes that the best way to learn to write well is to read extensively, especially the good stuff.

Ah yes, that's what everyone tells you, isn't it? But how far is the advice heeded by most wannabe writers?

Not very far, declares novelist and creative writing teacher Emily Barton reviewing Prose's book in the New York Times. It's not just a lack of interest in reading that bothers her, but that:

those who do read often lack the training to observe subtle writerly clues ...

She praises Prose's Reading Like a Writer, and recommends it both for aspiring writers and for readers who’d like to increase their sensitivity to the elements of the writer’s craft.

Prose points out that writers were learning from the best their predecessors long before writing courses were dreamt up. She also recommends savouring books rather than racing through them, which I think many of us tend to do. (I'm guilty of this. Ah, the pressure of all the books on my to-be-read shelf, all screaming at me in unison every time I pass by.) And she emphasises the delight that reading brings us. (Probably the very reason why we want to write.)

Prose's book sounds like a very useful guide and I Amazon "one-clicked" it as soon as I'd read the review. Read more on the Harper Collins website.

1001 Books You Must read

This is the book I picked up in Borders on Saturday. (The one with a dollop of something sticky on the back cover. But never mind that.)

1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die edited by Peter Boxall is a book all bibliophiles and bookaholics will adore. And less experienced readers who'd appreciate a guide to what's well worth spending their precious reading time on, will find it here.

There are excellent short reviews of each of the books, all of which tell stories, most of them novels. (The novel as we know it originated in the early C18th, but Boxall includes the best of what went before. )The list starts with Aessop's Fables and ends with books which made it to last year's Booker shortlist.

Of course "best" must always be subjective, but I was so delighted to find most of the fiction I would have included if I'd been compiling such a list, I can forgive the omissions. (Hey, this is an impossible task Boxall has set himself anyway!)

And it isn't a stuffy list only embracing boring "classics" either, - there's plenty of lighter fare (though no less deserving of a place) and the best genre fiction is also included. Steven King, Douglas Adams, John Le Carre, Anne Rice and Patricia Highsmith all make it in.

Some novels I greeted like old friends:

Underworld by Don de Lillo
The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen
Contact by Carl Sagan
Cancer Ward and A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
The Good Soldier by Ford Maddox Ford
Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie
On a Black Hill by Bruce Chatwin
Waterland by Graham Swift
The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera
A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry
The Reader by Bernhard Sclink
The Poisonwood Bible by Barabar Kingsolver
Captain Corelli's Mandolin by Louis de Bernieres

... and many, many more!

For those too mean or too broke to buy the book, you can access Boxall's complete list here.

But then you'd be missing out out the wonderful illustrations - author photos, book covers, movie posters. The cover illustration brings back happy memories of reading yet another favourite novel: A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess.

The Guardian reviews the book here.