Does Your Book Have Enough Motion?

I was struck by this GalleyCat report on a web service called BookLamp that tries to do for reading what Pandora does for music: suggest what else you’d like based on what you’ve chosen in the past.

Pandora analyzes music according to what it calls “genes,” about 400 of them. What variables does BookLamp look at? According to GalleyCat, they’re:

1. Motion: “Motion refers to the level of physical motion in a scene or book”.
2. Description: “Description refers to the level of descriptive language that the author uses in his or her writing.”
3. Pacing: “Pacing refers to the layout of the text on the page. A scene with high Pacing will have characteristics that quickly move the reader’s eye down the page.”
4. Density: “Density refers to the complexity of the text. Text with high Density will take longer to read than a text of equal length with low density.”
5. Dialog: “Dialog refers to the amount of spoken text between two or more characters in a scene.”

This reminds me of the old joke about the man looking for his keys under a lamppost not because he dropped them there but because the light was better. Are these really the metrics we use to choose books? Or are they just what a computer can easily measure?

When I checked out the BookLamp site and its underlying Book Genome project, I realized that there are a lot more variables involved. The five above seem to be part of what the creators call LanguageDNA. So the system seemed more promising.

I tried typing in Billy Bathgate as a novel I’ve liked. BookLamp suggested…another historical novel by E. L. Doctorow. I don’t think I needed software for that suggestion.

Jules Feiffer’s Secret Origin

My favorite detail of GraphicNYC's interview with author, playwright, and cartoonist Jules Feiffer is the revelation of who was responsible for his pioneering history of superhero comics: future National Book Award-winning novelist E. L. Doctorow.

“Doctorow was the senior editor at Dial Press, and we were friends,” Jules remembers. “He called me up one day and said ‘I want to do a book called The Great Comic Book Heroes, and I can’t think of anyone else but you to write it. Are you interested?’

“I said ‘Where do I sign?’

“We worked it out, and I told him from the beginning that I didn’t want to make it a work of scholarship, because I didn’t do homework. I didn’t do it in school, so why should I do it as a grown-up? I wanted it to be my reminiscences of comic books, and since I was there from the beginning in 1938, I was nine when Superman came out.”

The interview also spends significant time on Feiffer's "semiautobiographical novel" for young readers, The Man in the Ceiling. Feiffer is now working on an unabashed memoir of growing up, so he really warmed up to that theme:

“School [was] impossibly difficult on every level, and expectations from grown-ups were beyond what I could meet, but something I could fake and faked all the time,” Jules says. “I faked my way through school and the approval of family. Childhood was the act of being a CIA agent in enemy territory, waiting to get back home. Getting back home was where I could run my own life, and my own life was represented by what I read in newspaper strips and particularly comic books, which were home turf to me. . . .

“I was just doing time. The sense was that I was the prisoner of these grown-ups and other peoples’ opinions and priorities. Through some miracle, I had a mother who allowed me to act out my ambition and dreams and that was my out. That was the straw [with] which I breathed through underwater.”

The man has a way with metaphors, doesn't he?