Book You Research Articles

Зрощення у збірці Івана Іова «Періодична система слів»

The article deals with the features of word-coalescences in the book of Ivan Iov «Periodic system of words», which is considered to be the most prominent in the author’s work. Ivan Iov belonged to the leading Ukrainian avant-garde poets to the 20th-21th centuries, leaving a significant trace both in syllabic tonic poetry and in experimental poetry (palindromes, graphic poems, acrostic, brachicolons, logogriphs, collage etc.). Ivan Iov was born in 1948 in the village of Kamianka, in the Apostolove District of the Dnipro region in a large family. He graduated from Kamianets-Podilskyi National Ivan Ohiienko University and then worked as a teacher and journalist. In 1997, he published his most famous and significant collection, «The Periodic system of words», where he continued the traditions of Ivan Velychkovskyi and which became the subject of our research. Particular attention deserves to occasionalisms by the author. In the research book you can identify several groups of coalescences-words, created lexico-syntactical method, on the basis of sued and subordinate phrases, residual phrases (most often prepositions). Also a feature of the creation of neologisms in Ivan Iov is the use of the names and surnames of famous people – friends of the poet, for example, Valerii Basyrov – the editor of this book; Hryhorii Huseinov – writer, laureate of the Taras Shevchenko National Prize; Mykola Zhulynskyi – Director of the Taras Shevchenko Institute of Literature of NAS of Ukraine. In the «Periodic system of words», the coalescences-palindromes (both commonly used and occasional) are also widely represented, which is a decisive feature of the creative manner of Ivan Iov compared with other avant-garde poets. The top of word-formation skill can be considered the poem that gave the collection its name; in it Ivan Iov showed the inexhaustible possibilities of word formation, which in combination with the original author’s style gave us a wonderful example of experimental literature.

The Effect of Social Network on Retail Buying Behaviour in Chennai City

Retail is one of the significant sectors in India seeking attention for the investment. It is also approaching a lot of foreign direct investment. A blast of societal mass media networks, in the last decade has erupted tradition information seeking in market. Online networking, for example, Face book twitter, you tube, and Google has added another social measurement to the web. This paper depends on impact of web based life on retail purchasing conduct.

When You Can't See What You're Looking For [Book/Software Reviews

Radar really started the microwave industry, but, as cellular communications and eventually Wi-Fi developed, the microwave industry became dominated by communications. Our computational ability is changing the face of radar. This book can be read by anyone; it starts with an overview of traditional radars and moves through the theory and application of NLOS radars, including the computing hardware to realize these radars. While the book contains enough equations to help readers understand the details of the analysis (and even ray tracing), it is not weighed down by derivations. After an overview of NLOS radar, the authors review moving-target-indicator radars, Kalman filters, and Bayesian particle detectors. This overview of traditional radar state of the art sets the stage for mutltipath radars. Also provides an overview of all the physics behind multipath radar. Everything from antennas to scattering, diffraction, ray tracing, and moving-target- indicator processing is discussed. The last three chapters cover terrain databases, modeling, and hardware for calculations. The database interest is clear; if you know your terrain, then it is much easier to compute the probability of a given path. In some parts of the world, laser-based radar has been used to compile 3D databases, which are very useful for NLOS radar. This book is fascinating and thought provoking about what can be done with ever-increasing computational resources. If you are involved with radar, this will be an enjoyable book for you. Watson and Guerci’s book is fascinating and thought provoking.

Many Wonderful Book Events to Announce

Greetings Everyone, 
 It has been a surprisingly rainy summer here in Edmonton and while gardens may be water-logged, many of us have taken the extra time indoors to read—I know I have. The news for this issue includes a few events and highlights some resources for teachers and parents making plans for the fall.
 Upcoming Events
 Thin Air: The Winnipeg International Writers Festival will be held September 22-30, 2019. The festival includes a school program to highlight writing for children. For more information see the website at https://thinairwinnipeg.ca/
 Kingston Writers Fest runs Sep 25-29, 2019. The program includes Youth Programming. See the website for details at: https://www.kingstonwritersfest.ca/kids-teens/festival-field-trips/
 The Festival of Literary Diversity (FOLD) Kids Book Fest will be held in Brampton, Ontario on Sep 27-29, 2019. Information is available on the festival website: http://thefoldcanada.org/kids/
 Canadian Children’s Book Centre to start a YouTube Channel
 According to the CCBC Website: “Plans are underway for a YouTube channel to showcase videos and links to resources about Canadian books for children and youth. Currently the CCBC is collecting videos for the channel. If you have ready-made videos that relate to Canadian children’s books you can email janis@bookcentre.ca with a title, video length and video description and she’ll include it in her database of prospective videos. The project is being funded by the Canadian Council for the Arts with an anticipated launch in 2020. 
 Book Banks for Teachers and Parents
 With the new school year underway, I thought it would be worthwhile to highlight a couple book banks offered by the CCBC. The History Book Bank highlights children’s books by subject, and is broken down by centuries. The Social Justice Book Bank enables searching titles by wide variety of categories that include Indigenous, me too, diaspora and immigration, physical handicaps, mental health, etc. Both these book banks offer great ideas for reading based on subject matter. 
 Some readers may enjoy this interesting article in The New Yorker about Margaret and Hans Rey, the creators of the Curious George series. 
 To conclude, this issue of Deakin will be my last issue as the Communications Editor. For the past several years it has been a pleasure to serve on the editorial team of this journal. I have learned a great deal and I believe this journal provides great information about current children’s books and literature within the Canadian context. I wanted to thank our managing editor Robert Desmarais for his guidance and patience over the past few years. I also want to thank all the other editors on our team: Kim, Debbie, Allison, and Janice, and our reviewers and readers. I look forward to submitting book reviews in the future as my time permits. 
 Best wishes, 
 Hanne

Interview with Celeste Watkins-Hayes

1) In the book you discuss how you arrived at this project back in 1999, after interviewing a black woman who was living with HIV while you were a research assistant for the Welfare, Children, and ...

Collecting Community Stories: Local Studies Collections and What They Can Tell You About the Community

Collecting Community Stories: Local Studies Collections and What They Can Tell You About the Community

Writing Resources—An Annotated List of Helpful Books

Writing Resources—An Annotated List of Helpful Books

Ian Freckleton, Scholarly Misconduct: Law, Regulation and Practice

There is a special kind of guilt when the book you promised to review months ago glowers down at you accusingly. I can attest that guilt is all the sharper when the book in question is entitled Scholarly Misconduct. But this book is about things far more serious than the late submission of a book review. The preface acknowledges that scholarly misconduct might be thought ‘relatively innocuous’,1 and it would not be difficult to express mock horror at a missed footnote or an inaccurate citation. Surely such things are best left to the most pedantically minded and certainly not worthy of a book that comes in at over 600 pages. But any sniggering is soon set aside once one starts reading this book. Ian Freckelton uses a broad definition of scholarship to include intellectual work well beyond traditional university work. The line between ‘academic research’ and publications by think tanks or journalism is becoming increasingly blurred. Indeed, that blurring, is one part of the explanation of the bad behaviour described in the book. One of Freckelton’s aims in writing this book is to look at the misconduct ‘en masse, from an international perspective and across disciplines’ (p 17). That way, he hopes to show the extent and underlying features of the problem and its extent. The forms of misconduct covered are broad. They include research misconduct (Chapters 2 and 3); conflict of interest (Chapter 4); expert evidence in court (Chapter 5); plagiarism (Chapter 6); ownership of work (Chapter 7); offensive utterances (Chapter 8); sexual relationships between staff and students/junior colleagues (Chapter 9); and the use of harmful substances within the scholarly workplace (Chapter 10).2 In the final two chapters, the book explores ways of challenging this. First by encouraging and enabling people to whistle blow (Chapter 11), and finally by creating disciplinary and regulatory oversight bodies (Chapter 12).3 Certainly, anyone who believed that academia was populated by otherworldly people with their minds preoccupied on the higher things of life,4 would be sadly disabused by the end of this book.

Book of Books: Doctrine vs. Dialogue in a Particularly Influential Anthology

Book of Books:Doctrine vs. Dialogue in a Particularly Influential Anthology Claire M. Waters (bio) John Barton, A History of the Bible: The Story of the World's Most Influential Book. New York: Viking, 2019. Xix + 613 pp. Maps, illustrations, notes, further reading, bibliography, and indexes. The United States may not have any special claim on the Bible, but it is fair to say that given the consistent importance of religious identity, both Christian and Jewish, in national cultural and political discourses—a more central importance, as we are often reminded, than confessional identities have in many other modern nations—the Bible does have a special claim on the United States. While John Barton's millennia-spanning account does not focus particularly on any given national context (though his home country, England, understandably receives a little extra attention), the central argument of his history is also of strong relevance for a country in which evangelical, fundamentalist, and biblical-literalist approaches to the Christian faith, in particular, remain a substantial factor, as a cluster of references in the Introduction makes clear. He demonstrates in a variety of contexts and from a number of angles the ways in which the Bible is many books to many people, and always has been. Attempts to force it into accord with any single "interpretative scheme" or, indeed, "belief system" (p. 326)—an impulse that Barton identifies as more characteristically Christian than Jewish (p. 4)—are, as he patiently and thoroughly argues, with only occasional hints of exasperation, misguided. The Bible does not determine what any given religion believes; it is a resource for believers, rather than a blueprint. As an Oxford professor of biblical studies, theologian, Anglican priest, and author of numerous works on the Hebrew as well as the Christian scriptures, Barton is notably well-equipped to survey his immense topic; he is also more than alert to the strong feelings that discussions of the Bible can raise among scholars, believers, and those who like himself are both.1 His even-tempered, lucid account of the Bible's content and formation, textual history, and interpretive receptions engages with an impressively thorough and up-to-date scholarly bibliography. Anyone looking for a general account of how the Bible [End Page 521] came and kept coming into being will find it here; those with expertise in particular areas of biblical studies will find their specialty set in context and perhaps discover new points of contact or resonance in different realms; and others who simply like striking details and historical tidbits will be rewarded. If you have always wanted to know more about scripture as that which defiles the hands, the shady history of the Johannine comma, or the Complutensian Polyglot's improbable layout, this is the book for you. Barton's argument that the Bible simply does not provide a road map for any specific, existing faith practice (nor, indeed, for any historical one) is grounded in an account of the multiplicity of "the Bible" in its creation, genres, textual presentations, and receptions. He spends a certain amount of time working against his own subtitle, given his consistent emphasis on the Bible as an immensely influential "collection of books of different sorts" (p. 414) rather than a single, monolithic, stable book. This is not startling news—the very word "Bible," after all, derives from the Greek plural biblia—but Barton's account of the historical contexts that shaped the biblical books' form and content (in the first two sections), their compilation, interpretation, and reception over many centuries (in the second two) brings the point home in a variety of ways. From the beginning, the case for the Bible as a many-splendored thing whose splendors do not include a single, fixed plan for either life or belief is made, for the most part, in a positive vein that emphasizes responsiveness and mutuality. The early part of the book sets the stage by consistently imagining the formation and content of both Hebrew scriptures and the New Testament, as well as their reception, in terms of conversation. Not only does a certain amount of the Bible take place in explicitly dialogic form—as we see, for example, in...

Other People's Money: How Banking Worked in the Early American Republic by Sharon Ann Murphy

Reviewed by: Other People's Money: How Banking Worked in the Early American Republic by Sharon Ann Murphy David Anthony (bio) Other People's Money: How Banking Worked in the Early American Republic sharon ann murphy Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017 208 pp. Sharon Ann Murphy's Other People's Money: How Banking Worked in the Early American Republic begins exactly where a scholar of the ante-bellum economy might expect—with a prologue that addresses the oft-documented Jacksonian Bank Wars of the 1830s. But as Murphy goes on to observe, most such discussions tend to be limited to the Jackson v. Biddle storyline. Moreover, they tend to focus primarily on the political dimensions of this drama, and leave out the broader economic issues that drove this famous showdown. "For most students of American history," she says, the Bank War is the main—if not the only—encounter with the history of money and banking from the Revolution through the Civil War. … Yet this political fight had economic causes and consequences that are often lost in the telling of that tale. It is difficult to understand the true extent of the passions behind the Bank War without first understanding how the financial system worked during the first century of the nation's existence. (7) Other People's Money provides a clear, accessible, and well-organized breakdown of exactly this broader context—how money was imagined, what forms it took, how it was made available, and the many ways it was manipulated in early America. In this it is a valuable—one might even say invaluable—overview of this often confusing, and sometimes overlooked, field of American history. Unclear about the fractional reserve system and bank discounting? [End Page 821] Or perhaps you're a bit fuzzy about corporate banking charters, paper money, tariffs, or investment banking. Maybe you just want to know how the Civil War was financed in the North or the South. Then this is the book for you (or your students). Which is to say that this book is a primer, and aimed primarily at nonexperts: advanced undergrads or graduate students interested in economic history, professors in related fields (literature, American studies, art history), and so on. Absent of confusing jargon, this book is structured with the aim of distilling complex concepts, rather than positioning itself in relation to differing arguments in the field. Moving from early chapters that outline how money and banks worked in the precolonial, colonial, and Revolutionary periods (we see an engraving of Columbus bartering with the natives of the Caribbean, and images of early banknotes) to a discussion of economic panics (more popular lithographs regarding the Panics of 1819, 1837, 1857, etc.), to the midcentury experiments in money and finance, to (finally) the way in which the Civil War was financed, Murphy is at pains to provide us with a clear overview of the way in which the financial world was developing from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth century. At the same time, she is equally concerned to show us how developments in the economy tended to emerge as the result of dramatic upheaval—wars, economic panics, social conflicts. In doing so, she shows us how these broad crises both shape and are shaped by the tidal force we know as capitalism. I should perhaps mention my own position vis-a-vis the field of economic history. I am a scholar of antebellum American literary history. For the past twenty years or so, I have analyzed authors such as Washington Irving, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Herman Melville in the context of the financial climate Murphy describes. In my first book, for example, I discussed the ways in which this literature both reflected and commented upon the shift from a gold standard to a credit economy. In more recent work, I have looked at the role of the slave economy in the development of national and even global capitalism. And let me say that my work to date would have benefited greatly from Murphy's book—less because of her brief discussion of books like Melville's 1857 novel The Confidence Man (105–06), and more because this is the...

Respected Madam/Sir As per your prompt reply. Book publication related information is given below: 1. We are not taking any charges for publish your book. 2. If your manuscript is ready for publishing then we will take publish a book in 3-5 months including all process like designing, proof reading, and final approval ¬¬¬to your end. 3. Books should be

Respected Madam/Sir As per your prompt reply. Book publication related information is given below: 1. We are not taking any charges for publish your book. 2. If your manuscript is ready for publishing then we will take publish a book in 3-5 months including all process like designing, proof reading, and final approval ¬¬¬to your end. 3. Books should be

From a Woman Who Wants to Be Objectified in the Ways She Wants to Be, and: Every Time It Rains, a Requiem

From a Woman Who Wants to Be Objectified in the Ways She Wants to Be, and: Every Time It Rains, a Requiem Hannah Baker Saltmarsh (bio) From a Woman Who Wants to Be Objectified in the Ways She Wants to Be When I talk to you in my head, Maestro, ask you to inhabit myediting voice, I know I've gone too far. Or use yourgranddaughter's name to order coffee, it's all too much.But then so are you. Why do all your students want first dibs oncat-sitting rights while you're abroad, annoyed to take turns in the apartment,with the cat Boo dipping a paw into the tub, then a touchon my soapy bare shoulder just the few days of my turn in it?I read one of your three book proposals Boo thinks she too has discovered,plowing her face against the page corners, intern shadowingin the Acquisitions Department. This book's from another century almost, How We GotEyes, on botanists who painted flora with the hairs of squirrel tailsfanning out of a quill, dyes of tree gum, a poisonous, deep redforged of mercury combustions, or of smeared dead female insects for lighter shades.You write about botanists mixing colors in mussels, even painting six-hours straightin the fields, in the heath, because there were no touristy snapshots with digitalerasure, no clever Instagram captions, no one Internet-famous. Betteryet to memorize a line than write it down, the prayer in the cathedral that summed upParadise Lost in a fragment: And though we were born into a holy world, it is one [End Page 43] that is tissued and structured with sin . . . I can't remember the rest, only thatwe looked up—as if Evensong could botanize tourists—made eye contact at that moment. 2. Adjectives for Everyone (Like Beautiful)I stopped by your apartment for a letter of recommendationand saw you even have an annotated scrapbook of clippings,drawings, articles—which you call a commonplace book—on ginger. Why?In Italy, a woman told us that all foreigners use the same three or four adjectives;now you're adding to a small book you call Adjectives for Everyone.What I want when you die? The belief that you only told me, Keats meant youwhen he said ''beauty is truth.'' That it wasn't a line because no one everheard it, no students, wives, animals, specimens, inanimate objects you addressin the dark or write to, the pen strung to your towel rack in the powder room.When will you finish the one that has Darwin's dog Piper,Samuel Johnson's feline Hodge, and other pets of greatsin some delicious, existential conversationwe would feed upon, like orphans of Dickens-emaciation on treacle syrup? 3. NotesAnd I want that leaf: I know you keep a specimen inside your folioof Paradise Lost, a leaf so old that it makes you think it's from the goddamn treeof good and evil; finding it again's easy. See the writing's in two ways, with four pagesto an open page. See the word Notes, one's upside down. An upside-downword's not mirror image. It's not backward either. What is it?The time you were writing a chapter on Milton's teeth, you must have strokedthat leaf how many times? I know this much from touching the leaf:you don't want to turn a specimen over—the envelopes are for particlesand seeds you lose. This plant isn't mountedto a large sheet; if it were, you'd want to keep it in a natural position.How to arrange all these elegies for my mentors, even the Death Poet,without procrastination. Write the elegy, you ordered in an email.Which one? They are all dead or likely to be before I can talk. [End Page 44] I would sit in the office, offering nothing. One said about me,Teaching got her talking, her head out from under that pink Maryland hat.My high-pitched voice was a scattered bright Zip...

Please, Encourage Kids to Write!

Dear Readers,
 I recently browsed through numerous web pages for kids on cbc.ca and much to my delight I came across an article titled “5 Books You Probably Didn’t Know Were Written by Kids.” I discovered that Alec Greven published a successful book called How to Talk to Girls when he was only nine years old. The book was published back in 2008, so Graven would be close to twenty today, but the lessons on the back cover remain relevant for today: “Comb your hair and don’t wear sweats / Control your hyperness (cut down on the sugar if you have to) / Don’t act desperate.” Graven was interviewed on several popular television shows soon after the book was published, including The Ellen DeGeneres Show, the Today show, and Good Morning America, among others, and his publication became a media sensation.
 Graven’s accomplishment is certainly very impressive, but I was even more astounded to read about a four-year-old named Dorothy Straight, who, according to CBC, “holds the world record for being the youngest published author.” Her book titled Who Made the World? was published in 1964 and it included her own illustrations to depict her ideas about the possibility of Creation. These extraordinary stories of kids who write and publish books make inspiring reading, which is why I mention them here in my editorial, with the hope that you will encourage the children in your life to write, not necessarily for publication, but to help them read and understand stories written by other writers. There are lots of resources available to encourage children to write, including apps, websites, writers’ groups, blogs, magazines, books, and courses, so please consider doing an online search for writing materials or visit your local library to ask for help finding free writing resources for kids.
 Happy reading!
 Robert Desmarais, Managing Editor

Thinking Through Signs: The Ayah Zeitgeist

Imagine you are living in a seventh-century desert town and a new book, which is not even a book yet, is being recited in scattered verses, urging ordinary people to look around for signs. What would one see in that sky-is-blue earth-is-flat age if one had attentively and eagerly looked around? Then, do they not look at what is before them and what is behind them of the heaven and earth?... Indeed in that is a sign… (Q.34:9). How to respond to this invitation to probe for signs when there are no telescopes or microscopes available? You would have looked up at the stars unaware that many of them were galaxies. You would have looked at your hands, observed their skin, but without a way to know that it is made up of highly-specialised cells composed of extraordinarily complex and coordinated sub-cellar organelles. To discern signs in your selves (Q.51:21) you would have tried to become introspective and look within your mind, but without the slightest chance of fathoming the dynamic nature of your brains neurochemical underpinnings. You might have thought for a moment of the languages and dialects heard around you, or of the differing facial features, skin colours or cultural habits of other tribes and nations-all of which the book you have heard recited claims are signs of the greatness of God.

Il teatro postdrammatico e i suoi ampi dintorni

The post-dramatic by Hans-Thies Lehmann is available in the Italian bookstores thanks to Cue Press Editors (Bologna 2017) that published it along with the translation written by Sonia Antinori and the afterword by Gerardo Guccini. In a brief anthology of observations, at the end of the book you can find the comments by Giorgio Degasperi (A post-epic theatre), Marco De Marinis (Post-dramatic theatre – overcoming of the representation and the staging), Lorenzo Mango (Crisis of signs and drama of vision), Antonio Attisani (An actually neo-Aristotelian and neo-dramatic overview), Cristina Valenti (Crisis of the dramatic personalization and crisis of the individual as agent of the social conflict), Marco Martinelli (The future of theatre will be small groups).The book names cultural movements, historical periods, theatre companies and artists along a vast timeframe. Lehmann is not the inventor of post-dramatic theatre, but of the definition that titles the book that we consider a precious instrument of study and work.

Do House-Elves Clean Your Brain While You Sleep?

Sleep will consume one-third of your life. You can’t avoid it, nor should you. Sound slumber can make you feel wonderful. But there’s more to it. Sleep is also essential for learning. Much of who you are—your memories and your habits—may depend on what your brain does while you sleep. This article covers some new experiments on this topic, and some unexpected findings. Each day, you acquire all sorts of new knowledge. That includes things you read, things you learn in school, news about friends, and your own creative thoughts or pictures. And maybe where you put down that book you were reading. Later, many of these memories can be difficult to remember. Recent scientific findings are helping us understand how brain activity during sleep aids remembering.

Prof. Vishnumoorthy Prabhu

If stories are read for their obvious meaning, this is not the book you should go for. Most of the stories written aren't that simple either. One might be reminded of Joseph Conrad's view that the meaning of the stories of seafarers doesn't lie in the kernel. Likewise, the book at review in the present edition doesn't offer a straight forward meaning. Well, the book that I am speaking about is Jonathan Livingston Seagull by Richard Bach.

Science Pathways in Education

Curators: Behind the Scenes of Natural History Museums . By Lance Grande. 2017. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL. (ISBN: 978-0-226-19275). Hardcover $35.00. Have you ever wondered how museum curators get into the business, what they do day to day, and how they manage such great collections of materials? If you answered yes to any of these questions, then this is the book for you. Lance Grande takes us on his journey from humble beginnings to that fateful day when a friend gave him a preserved fish fossil that began his love of collections. That gift set him on a path even he likely could not have anticipated. Suddenly the curiosity that had been in him as a child was reawakened, and he shifted majors to Geology. From that day forward he was hooked (so to speak) and began working at the Natural History …

Preface to enhanced recovery after surgery

Often prefaces make you want to continue reading the book you would like to introduce as a mitral rite, but this does not depend (fortunately) on the preface. To avoid such unpleasant problems, in the dialogues with Leucos, Cesare Pavese himself wrote the preface expressing himself in a third person. Moreover, even when he came to Eugenio Montale to write a preface to Italo Svevo, his reading caused yawning.

"So Many Books, So Little Time"

"So Many Books, So Little Time" Sara Dreyfuss (bio) Do you give up on a book after a few dozen pages if you are not enjoying it? Or do you always finish what you start? Most avid readers fall into one of those two groups. Goodreads, an Amazon website that specializes in book reviews and recommendations, polled its users on that issue in 2013. About 44 percent of respondents admitted that they stopped reading before the 100-page mark if a book bored them. Another 38 percent said they always finish their books, no matter what.1 To Finish or Not to Finish? To finish or not to finish? There are good arguments on both sides. The ancient Roman author Pliny the Younger wrote, "No book is so bad as to not have something of use in some part of it."2 Juliet Lapidos, an opinion editor at the Los Angeles Times, declares, "Once you start a book, you should finish it." She explains, "I can't count how many novels have bored me for a hundred pages only to later amaze me with their brilliance . . . With the exception of Portrait of a Lady, every Henry James novel I've read has tested my patience. Yet in each case I've hit a transcendentally good scene that makes up for all the preceding irritation."3 Alex Clark, a British writer and literary critic, agrees: "Seriously good books are immersive experiences, demanding of time and patience. Respect them." He adds, "In a long and complex novel . . . there are bound to be longueurs and bafflements, moments when you think, can I? You know what? You can. And you should."4 On the other side of the argument, many people think you should drop any book that fails to engage you, and the sooner the better. Katy Guest, the literary editor of the British newspaper The Independent, advises, "If you're really not getting on with a book, please put it down before you really grow to resent it."5 Iain Broome, a British novelist and editor, says, "It's always okay to stop reading a book. For some reason, we often feel obliged to carry on, even when we're not enjoying it, but there really is no obligation."6 Unless you must read a book for a class or a job, you may be better off abandoning it. Set it aside and move on to something more rewarding. Perhaps the most compelling reason to ditch a book you do not enjoy is that there are thousands of good books to read and a limited time in which to read them. Guest urges people "never to struggle on with a book that you hate. Life is too short for ironing [End Page 231] and bad books . . . the next book you read could be the one that changes your life."7 This argument can be summarized as "So many books, so little time," a slogan that appears on many T-shirts and other merchandise, often attributed to the rock musician Frank Zappa. A similar T-shirt saying, ascribed to the author Joy Daniels, is "Life is too short to read bad books or drink bad wine."8 People have many reasons for jumping ship on a book. The Booklist Reader, the official blog of the American Library Association magazine Booklist, took what it describes as a "random poll" of readers, editors, and librarians asking why they give up on a book. Kaite Stover, director of readers' services at the Kansas City Public Library in Kansas City, Missouri, listed the top five offenses that make her stop reading: One: cliches. Two: grammatical errors. Three: lazy descriptions. Four: unbelievable dialogue. And five: unrealistic situations and characters. Typically I'll give a book about 50 to 100 pages to hook me and then I'll toss it back.9 Robin Bradford, collection development librarian at Timberland Regional Library in Tumwater, Washington, said: I can't handle badly done dialect. That will make me drop a book. If I'm constantly correcting the author's grammar in my head, I will stop reading. That, and misspellings or using the wrong form of a word. (Their...