Gryffin-Gram 2010

Christmas Greetings from Gryffin, Julie and Steve!

This year, we sent out about 350 Christmas cards, before running out of time and budget. We apologize to all of the friends and family we missed sending greetings to by post this year, but good news! Gryffin has found a way to send his (and our) greetings to you nevertheless! (Ah, such a persistent and thoughtful terrier he is!)

As every year, Gryffin has written a fabulous newsletter for Christmas 2010. This year's highlights include photos from our travels, Gryffin's winning coffee label photo, and a recipe for Slow-Cooker Pickle Roast.

Check out the Gryffin-Gram by downloading it here: Gryffin-Gram 2010. For all you tech-savvy folks - it's a pdf. For all the rest of us - all you need to be able to view it is Adobe Reader, a free program which most people have these days.

Merry Christmas from Julie & Steve...with an enthusiastic wag and face-licking from Gryffin! :-)

What is a "Book"?

What is a "Book"?

You would think Julie and I could have figured this out by now - our shelves are filled, after all, with thousands of paper + cardboard + cloth + ink things that we call Books.

So many, in fact, that I wrote us a Home Library database program to keep track of them all - titles, authors, dates, subject keywords, loaned to whom, etc.

In a typical year, I read about 30 books. Like the list-keeper that I am, I record the ones that I read, and when, and what I thought of them. But since buying an iPad in the summer, I have started to wonder, well, what is a Book? Should the e-books I read on the iPad count in my 2010 list?

This latent question, percolating beneath the surface of my mind, came to the fore this morning, when I read The Idea of the Book, a review in the Books and Culture magazine.

I appreciated the author's teasing out of the differences between Book-as-Object, that physical thing that any toddler can identify, and Book-as-Concept, a "considerable length" textual document that "expresses a long story or complex sequence of thoughts," regardless of technology (scroll, codex, eBook, whatever)

I wonder: does The Cat in the Hat meet his Book-as-Concept definition?

So now I'm inclined to add those eBooks to my already-read list. Do I now need to go back and rethink some of the assumptions in my Home Library database program..?

-SP