On Book Reviewing and Control

My friend Geof wrote a good post yesterday about really taking time to digest and consider a book before publishing a review. He appreciates his friend Adam for taking 6 months before responding to Rachel Held Evans’ book. (I’m curious whether Adam’s really been chewing on it for a while or whether he just took a while to get to the book in the first place, but that’s only tangential to Geof’s point.)

When it comes to any book review, I simply question context: who is the reviewer, and does it seem that they’ve taken the time to read it well? Often the former is easily deduced—this is the Internet—but one never really knows if a book has been carefully considered or read simply to be discarded….

…I think you need to spend time thinking about a book if you are going to lend/demand authority to your response to the reading. I think that too many high-profile theology types rush through book reviews purely knowing that their authority rests in their brand. I think that’s a dangerous mistake.

Geof has a good point here, and I wonder how my own review of Rachel’s book would change if I read it again now that I’ve had time to think and interact with others about it.

Geof omitted, though, another critical aspect of why the big-name theo-review-bloggers rush through their reads and get their reviews out early: control. These theo-review-bloggers want to direct their readers’ purchases in ways that they think are “safe”. If a critical review will keep a “dangerous” book out of hundreds of hands, let’s get it published ASAP. Waiting for six months to publish a review might allow time for those folks to buy the book, read it, and *gasp* think about it for themselves.

Don’t get me wrong - I appreciate good book recommendations, and I appreciate folks telling me when a book might be a waste of my time. But Geof is right - there’s far more authority to be had when you’ve ruminated on a book over time before reviewing than when your release-day review is ***DO NOT WANT OMG HERESY STAY AWAY***.

A follow-up on our Verizon woes

A couple weeks ago I wrote about my frustrations with Verizon’s service when it came to the issues my wife was having with her new iPhone. At the time, they were shipping out a new SIM card, in hopes that would fix the issue.

That SIM card showed up on a Friday afternoon, and the rest of that Friday was rather frustrating. When I installed the SIM card, it wouldn’t activate. 10-minute call to customer support and that problem was fixed. So then I tried calling the phone, but had the same issue as before - most calls were going straight to voice mail.

So later on that evening I tried the chat route for customer support. I spent nearly an hour on chat support with a second-level tech named Sonia. She tried a bunch of things, including disabling voice mail, to see if any of them would allow calls to consistently ring through. No such luck. She said she’d file a help ticket with the network engineers and follow up with me in a couple of days.

No sooner did I get off of chat with her than I realized that my wife’s voice mail hadn’t been set back up correctly… which meant that then not only would her phone not ring, but it wouldn’t get the voice messages either. Not acceptable. So, I called in to Verizon tech support. (For those of you counting, that’s three separate sessions with tech support on the same day.)

This time I got a friendly guy from Arkansas who spent 10 minutes getting voice mail fixed, and then another 45 trying to figure out why calls weren’t going through. He found a few more settings on his end that were screwed up, but nothing seemed to fix the issue. Eventually he gave up, confirmed that the help ticket had been filed, texted me that ticket number, and said good night.

We didn’t hear anything over the weekend, but on the following Monday I got a phone call from Sonia (the tech I’d chatted with on Friday). She told me that the network guys had investigated and said the network was working perfectly, so that it must be the phone. Verizon overnighted a new iPhone 5 out via Fedex.

Once the new phone showed up that Tuesday, it was a pretty quick process to swap the SIM card and restore the phone from a backup. I held my breath and dialed her number… and it rang. I hung up and dialed again. It rang again. A half-dozen calls later, the phone rang every time. Success! As she started using the phone she also found that some other things that seemed weird with the old phone were fixed on the new one. (For instance: the volume buttons weren’t adjusting call volume during a call.)

My conclusion: find the right Verizon techs and they’ll get things done. And the iPhone 5 is amazing, but given that we’re each on our second phone within the first two months, maybe Apple has a few quality issues to work out.

Amazon AutoRip and Pricing Models

Last week Amazon introduced something called AutoRip. Basic premise: you buy a physical CD from Amazon, and if it’s AutoRip eligible, Amazon will give you a digital copy of the CD in your Amazon Cloud Drive, gratis. I presume this is Amazon’s way of trying to push some physical-only CD folks into the cloud, and hey, it doesn’t seem bad for any of us.

What I’m curious about, though, and haven’t seen addressed anywhere, is the impact this might have on the pricing models for digital-only purchases.

Last night my wife headed over to Amazon looking to purchase an older CD of Jim Brickman lullabies - something instrumental for a kid to listen to at night. The MP3 version of the album is currently offered on Amazon for $9.99.

But wait, what’s this?

That’s right, this album is also available with a physical CD and AutoRip. For $8.57. And that CD happens to have free shipping with our Amazon Prime membership.

Which means that it was $1.42 cheaper for my wife to get the MP3 downloads if she agreed to have Amazon ship her a physical copy of the disc as well. Something is wrong with that picture.

While this CD may be an unusual case, it’s by no means unique. The original cast recording of Les Miserables is currently featured on Amazon’s “recently released AutoRip CDs” page at $18.99 for MP3s or $16.99 for the physical CD + AutoRip.

Other CDs on that page have pricing that seems to be more the right way ‘round - a recent Susan Boyle CD is $10.99 Physical/$5.00 MP3, a Toby Keith CD at $11.88/$6.99 - but some are awfully close to parity, such as a Lady Antebellum CD at $10/$9.49 and a Jason Aldean CD for $9.99/$8.99.

Impacts to the pricing model may be one reason keeping Amazon from extending something useful like AutoRip to books as well. It sure doesn’t seem like offering physical + digital cheaper than digital only is a money-making proposition.

Be careful what you ask for...

So, that guy who complained earlier this week that he was getting a little bored or stale playing keys?

Well, he went to worship band practice this morning and found out that the drummer had called in sick. And while there are drum tracks that can be enabled for most of the songs, there’s one that conspicuously needs a live drummer.

Guess who’s going to be heading in to church extra-early in the morning to practice?

Here’s hoping he doesn’t end up sounding awful. The band deserves better.

My running record for this year...

…I think it’s gonna by Battle Born by The Killers.

Forget the violent sounding name. The album is chock full of easygoing rock that sometimes feels like Springsteen, other times like U2, and occasionally like old school Bon Jovi.

Here’s the track that’s been stuck in my head all week.

youtu.be/TMbyWSGYU…

Going after the dove sellers

The point being, while we know that Jesus was upset about economic exploitation going on in the temple, his focus on the dove sellers sharpens the message and priorities. Jesus doesn’t, for instance, go after the sellers of lambs. Jesus’s anger is stirred at the way the poor are being treated and economically exploited.

Interesting stuff from Richard Beck.

On Playing and Variety

My primary instrument has always been (and likely always will be) keys of some sort. I started piano lessons when I was 7. I started playing for church at age 14. I first started playing with a church worship band in college at age 19. I’ve led worship while playing the piano hundreds of times. Those fingers on the keys at the top of my blog are my fingers, playing piano at my sister’s wedding.

Back in high school I taught myself to play guitar, and I’m a reasonable hack there, though my fingerings are never very clean. From there I did a lot of playing bass lines on the guitar, though I’ve only played bass as part of a band a handful of times. Keys are where it’s at for me. And that’s worked to fill the need where I’ve been. After college there haven’t been an abundance of other keyboardists.

For the last year or so, though, while I love playing keys in the worship band, the instruments that are in my head all the time, the ones I dream about playing, are bass and drums. I’m not sure why. Maybe because so much of the music I listen to is guitar/bass/drums driven instead of piano-driven? Maybe I’m just getting bored with piano right now?

In reality, I’m a passable bass player. I can keep tempo on the drums, but one listen to a real drummer (of which we have several at church) quickly reminds me that I’m just a hack. (Of course, I have no practice… maybe I’d pick it up quickly?)

I don’t know where this leaves me or even really what my conclusion is. It’s just odd to observe that after having piano ingrained in my brain for almost 30 years, I’m now doing a lot of my primary thinking in terms of other instruments. (It’s suppose it’s also entirely possible that piano is just so ingrained that I don’t notice it any more.)

Verizon Wireless woes

Back around Thanksgiving my wife and I made the jump from US Cellular to Verizon, for the express purpose of getting iPhones. And I’ve gotta say, as a first-time iPhone owner: the iPhone 5 is fantastic. The hardware is exemplary. Everything happens quickly, the Apple software is (mostly) beautiful and (almost always) consistent, and the battery life… well, the battery life is almost unbelievable after my two years as a Galaxy S owner.

Over the past couple of weeks, though, we’ve noticed some issues with my wife’s telephone. Mine works just fine, but if you try to call her, about 90% of the time it’ll ring twice on your end and go straight to voice mail. She never even gets an indication that someone is trying to call. She can be in the same room as me, with good signal, etc, but while calls to me work just fine, calls to her get re-routed. (She gets texts just fine.)

So, I’ve entered the Verizon support hassle. First call to tech support started with 10 minutes on hold. After that a helpful support gal looked into some network settings, tried calling my wife’s phone, and after two consecutive calls got through, declared the phone fixed. Once we hung up I tried calling my wife from my phone and it went straight to VM. Then I tried calling her phone via Google Talk’s free calling service, and that, too, went straight to VM. Four times in a row.

My next attempt has been via @VZWSupport on Twitter. It took about two days to finally get some action from them, but after some short diagnostic questions they now have a new SIM card headed out to us via Fedex. Guess we’ll see if that solves the problem. A Google search for this issue leads me to believe that the new SIM card might just be step 1 in a longer tech-support dance, but seeing as it’s a new year I’ll try to hold out hope for a quicker solution.

My 2012 reading

Time for my annual roundup of what I read over the past year. While I’m often lousy at cataloging things, this list is easy enough thanks to Goodreads and their nice little iPhone app.

(If you just want to look at the list, go check it out over on Goodreads.)

I read 59 books this year. 36 were fiction, 23 were non-fiction. Most of that non-fiction was theology, with just a couple of biographies / histories thrown in. (I need to read some more history. I don’t read enough of it anymore.)

I rated far more things with five stars this year than I have in previous years. (15 books got 5 stars! That’s more than a quarter of everything I read!) I don’t know whether that means my rating standards are slipping or that my book selection standards are improving, but at least it means I have some good books to recommend.

There are five novels I gave five stars this year:

  • The Fiddler’s Gun by A. S. Peterson - a fun Revolutionary War novel focused on the adventures of a teenage girl. (I’ve got the sequel, The Fiddler’s Green, sitting in my to-read pile… should get it read in 2013 sometime.)
  • The Fault in Our Stars by John Green - a short Young Adult novel focused on two teenagers who are dying of cancer. It’s not as painful as it sounds, but it’s challenging and insightful.
  • Redshirts, by John Scalzi - an odd sort of meta sci-fi romp that otherwise defies comparison
  • The Book of the Dun Cow by Walter Wangerin, Jr. - a fascinating fantasy story which I’m indebted to the Rabbit Room folks for recommending.
  • Gathering String, by Mimi Johnson - a top-notch suspense/mystery novel whose author is a lovely lade I met once at a tweetup in Cedar Rapids.

On the non-fiction side, there were more 5-star books, but a few among those that particularly stood out:

I’m back at the reading for 2013, trying to finish up some Thomas Merton that I started back in December. If you’re so inclined, add me as a friend on Goodreads so we can interact about our reading throughout the year!

Carols for Christmas

For at least twenty years my mother has been requesting that I record some of my piano stylings. For one reason and another I’ve never gotten to it, until now. My mom got her copy last weekend when we celebrated Christmas with my side of the family, so now I’m free and clear to share it with you all. I’m calling it Carols for Christmas.

Carols for Christmas - photo credit to bterryhampton on Flickr.

It’s just over 30 minutes worth of music, all piano versions of traditional Christmas carols. There’s not a lot in the way of production - I recorded them using my Casio midi controller keyboard in single takes in GarageBand and did a minimal amount of editing to remove the clunky notes. The perfectionist part of me wishes I had another 80 hours to really refine and polish the arrangements and recordings; the engineer in me has declared “good enough”. The engineer won the debate this time.

So please enjoy Carols for Christmas as my gift to you this season. This download link will let you listen and/or download MP3s from Dropbox.

Merry Christmas!