December 26, 2013

"Amazon's Best-Selling Books of 2013, and What They Tell Us About America."

Interesting, but what it tells me is that it's time to make all those end-of-the-year lists, like Best Quote Quoted on This Blog for Each Month of the Year That's Now Ending, or whatever that annual nonsense I used to do was. I'm using the term "annual nonsense" because I have a tag for that.

When I click on that tag, I see that bellyaching about end-of-the-year fussing is an annual thing for me. Such as: "Blogging, paying attention to each day as it happens, makes it hard to assess a whole year." And: "Personally, I don't get too revved up about the shift from one year-number to the next one. I think we live in days, and when life is good, normal days are the best, and the truth is, we live in days."

Yeah, I love normal days. Nice to get past Christmas. I mean, nice to get past Christmas and not believe in Boxing Day.

Hey, actually those old quotes are quite fascinating to return to. From the second link, above, remember this oldie-but-goodie?
"In addition to keen intelligence, integrity and a rare authenticity, you exhibit something that has nothing to do with age, experience, race or gender and something I don't see in other candidates. That something is a creative imagination which coupled with brilliance equals wisdom. It is too bad if we associate it only with gray hair and old age. Or if we call searing vision naivete. Or if we believe cunning is insight. Or if we settle for finessing cures tailored for each ravaged tree in the forest while ignoring the poisonous landscape that feeds and surrounds it."
Oh, the shit that was shoveled in 2008!

As 2013 stumbles to a close, many of us wish the country had settled for finessing cures tailored for each ravaged tree and not acquired the grandiose notion that the forest was a poisonous landscape. Some of us liked our tree and wanted to keep it. 

13 comments:

MadisonMan said...

If you are daily or weekly looking back to see how things are going, then why is an annual look back necessary?

It's trite and lazy to do this now when everyone else does it.

Jason said...

The wren, the wren, the king of all birds
On St Stephens Day was caught in the firs.
Up with the kettle and down with the pan,
Give us a penny to bury the wren.

carrie said...

Someone should redo the meaning of the books on the list from a conservative point of view.

Unknown said...

Ann, the "oldie but goodie" post apparently contains a link to joanhedman.com, which is flagged by Chrome as a site that distributes malware. Before I click on it, can I ask if you know what's going on? I can't imagine you linking to malware, but clearly something is amiss.

Left Bank of the Charles said...

Ah, but does your tree want to keep you?

TosaGuy said...

Why buy a book when you can check it out from the library?

SGT Ted said...

Or if we call searing vision naivete.

That's was it turned out to be, didn't it?

Or if we believe cunning is insight.

The libs always tend to believe that.

You are spot on with the depiction of their grandiosity. Their entire political platform is grandiose utopianism, seeing unbroken things as needing to be replaced with their grandiose ideological solutions that never work as claimed.

Ann Althouse said...

"Ann, the "oldie but goodie" post apparently contains a link to joanhedman.com, which is flagged by Chrome as a site that distributes malware. Before I click on it, can I ask if you know what's going on? I can't imagine you linking to malware, but clearly something is amiss."

It's a link to my old post, which contains links to pretty ordinary things, and nothing with the URL you're seeing. Chrome is Google and my website, Blogger, is also Google, so I have no idea.

Ann Althouse said...

No one, I think, is in my tree.

Col. Milquetoast said...

Slate.com = hack writers, article trolling and emotional click bait headlines. The carefully crafted click bait headlines are such a consistent disappointment it will eventually train people not to click them.

1. We’re very confident that we’re good at a lot of things. We’re just not quite sure what they are.
2. We treat women so unequally in the workplace that they’re starting to form support groups.
3. We have wimpy kids.
4. We like history, as long as long as it deifies our forefathers and justifies American exceptionalism.
5. We’re desperate for guidance from Jesus, even if it’s just an author named Sarah Young pretending to be Jesus.
6. We prefer Dan Brown's Inferno to Dante’s Inferno.
7. We really miss Harry Potter.
8. We’ll tolerate the occasional work of actual literature as long as it’s super-short and there’s a movie.
9. We still like to be told what matters by very serious old white men in blazers.
10. We like science, as long as it proves that heaven is real.
11. We’re pretty sure Jesus was a Tea Partier.
12. We strongly suspect that something’s wrong with us. We’re just not quite sure what it is.

I didn't see #13 to 20 from the amazon list in the article. Nor a link to the amazon list. Does lazy need to be added to the list of Slate descriptors?

Pity poor, poor millionaire (billionaire?) Sheryl Sandberg.

George M. Spencer said...

"Proof of Heaven" is compelling.

An utterly rational Virginia neurosurgeon falls into a deep coma due to spinal meningitis which causes nearly all his brain functions to cease.

The result? A free pass to Heaven.

The Orb!

While there, he learned three lessons....

They were something like....

1) Love is all.
2) Fear not.
3) Eat more cheeseburgers, the big sloppy greasy kind.

Something like that.

William said...

One secret to writing a best selling book is to have a highly rated tv or radio show and then plug the book relentlessly.

Kirk Parker said...

Althouse,

"not believe in Boxing Day"

My dear woman, you are totally beyond the pale.

On the other hand:

"As 2013 stumbles to a close, many of us wish the country had settled for finessing cures tailored for each ravaged tree and not acquired the grandiose notion that the forest was a poisonous landscape. Some of us liked our tree and wanted to keep it."

That is a close to an apology as I've ever seen from you, so that's not exactly nothing!