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Through reading, then, a young person can try out the prospect of illicit freedom—disobedience, overindulgence, parentlessness—but can ultimately make a willing return to home sweet home.
When fairy tales flirt with trouble, but avoid real consequences, they really work. And yet the possibility of straying too far—the Lindbergh scenario—haunts Sendak's work. "Certainly," Sendak told the Caldecott audience, "we want to protect our children from new and painful experiences that are beyond their emotional comprehension and intensify anxiety." The child must return home safely for the story to have ameliorative power; Sendak criticized Roald Dahl and Hans Christian Andersen for veering into unnecessary cruelty. Still, he insisted that children are more complicated, tolerant readers than we think, and that they will surprise us in their ability to respond to difficult literature.
Eventually, we all endure a startling transformation, if we are lucky—the transformation from child to adult, or from child to parent. We can lose touch, along the way, with the people we once were. In this light, we should be grateful to Maurice Sendak: His work reminds us that we contain many selves, and that there can be fluidity among them. He was dark and light, innocent and experienced, playful and morose. He opened a roiling window into childhood, he cast the shadow augury of growing old.

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Being bored is a kind of diagnostic for the gap between what you might be interested in and your current environment. But now it is an act of significant discipline to say, “I’m going to stare out the window. I’m going to schedule some time to stare out the window.” The endless gratification offered up by our devices means that the experience of reading in particular now becomes something we have to choose to do.

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When and where do you like to read?
When I can. I read less fiction these days, and it worries me, although my recent discovery that wearing reading glasses makes the action of reading more pleasurable is, I think, up there with discovering how to split the atom or America. Neither of which I did. (I clarify this for readers in a hurry.)...

If I started it, I’d read it to the end: until I found myself a judge of the Arthur C. Clarke Awards in the U.K., and obliged to read every science-fiction book published in the U.K. in the year of eligibility. I was a judge for two years. The first year, I read everything. The second year, I read a lot of first chapters and took delight in hurling books across the room if I knew I would not be reading the second chapter.
Then I’d go and pick them up again, because they are books, after all, and we are not savages.

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I think the models of protection, be it law or technology, are fast dying and we need to move from protection to sharing. That solitary consumption of content will move to group and shared experiences. And what's tremendously powerful there is that you then have the ability to influence not only what other people will watch and hear and listen to, but also the kinds of content that are being created. That the content industry needs to move from being gatekeepers of content to curators of content, and that top-down models of content creation will go the way of the dinosaur very soon because (a) we have the Internet to distribute content and (b) tools are available to everyone. So the high priest model of content creation will very soon be challenged, as we saw in the case of Encyclopaedia Britannica, by the community models of content creation.

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I've long been curious about why so many people are frightened of a potential future Amazon monopoly while simultaneously so sanguine about the real existing monopoly run by New York's so-called Big Six. And it's been interesting for me to see people try to explain away the evidence of collusion between the CEOs of the major publishers as set forth in the US Justice Department's suit against these publishers and in the equivalent suit brought by 16 states...
I wasn't around for previous technology-driven disruptions of industries, but I'm confident that as cars displaced horse-drawn carriages, electric lights displaced candles, and digitally distributed music displaced CDs, to name just a few, the establishments of the day decried the newcomers' methods and aims and predicted that the new way would inevitably cause The Destruction of Civilisation and the End of All That Is Good. And yet the doomsayers' predictions have never come true. In all these transitions, something was lost, but more was gained. The same dynamic is now playing itself out as a hidebound and moribund publishing industry, notable chiefly for its decades-long failure to involve itself in even a single innovation, is displaced by something more efficient and effective. And the dynamic will go on repeating itself, again and again, long after the legacy publishing industry has gone the way of the icebox, the telegraph, and the Vulgate Bible. As internet guru Clay Shirky recently put it, "Institutions will try to preserve the problem for which they are the solution," and in this regard legacy publishing is in no way unique.
Though I'm certainly rooting for legacy publishers to successfully adapt (and why wouldn't I? When someone is sick, you don't want him to die; you want him to get well), I also think Amazon has been an enormous boon to readers and authors. Does anyone really believe that, without Amazon's innovations, readers would be paying less, or authors making more? Or that there would be remotely as big and vibrant a digital and self-publishing market for books if Amazon hadn't blazed the trail with the Kindle, the Kindle Store, and digital self-publishing?...
In the meantime, the publishing establishment wants you to believe that in order to prevent Amazon from possibly one day charging higher book prices, the establishment has to charge you higher prices today. Or, to put it another way, "Hey, you might get robbed if you carry all that cash around, so I'll just save you the trouble by taking your wallet right here." This isn't an argument; it's a con job. Consumers ought to recognise it as such.

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But I thought I was! :)

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We like to think that books line our shelves because we ask them inside, but the simple truth is that they cross our thresholds whether we invite them or not. Books alight under the Christmas tree or beside a birthday cake as presents from people we love. Like a thistle hitching a ride on the household dog, books attach themselves to our palms as we walk through bookshops or rummage sales...
But any book weeder, no matter how lenient, inevitably wonders if he’s weeding too much. Like many readers, I’ve often confronted the basic dilemma of culling one’s shelves, which is that the book one gives away today is the very title that will be needed — or fervently desired — tomorrow. I feel a tinge of grievance each time I’m required to visit my public library and borrow reference books that, in some previous clean-out, I donated to the collection. As if plotting to spring them from jail, I sometimes wonder if I can secretly steal them back...

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This suggests to me that the pursuit of happiness, which we may as well call life, is full of surprising temporary elements—we get somewhere we couldn’t go otherwise and we profit from the trip, but we can’t stay there. It isn’t our world, and we shouldn’t let that world come crashing down into the one we can inhabit. The beanstalk has to be chopped down. But the large-scale riches from the ‘other world’ can be brought into ours, just as Jack makes off with the singing harp and the golden hen. Whatever we ‘win’ will accommodate itself to our size and form—just as the miniature princesses and the frog princes all assume the true form necessary for their coming life, and ours...
I was very quiet for a while, but I had realised something important: whatever is on the outside can be taken away at any time. Only what is inside you is safe...

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The reason children’s books endure seems clear enough: The books that toddlers read are determined entirely by adults, and when adults select books for kids they naturally gravitate towards the books they loved as kids. As a result, the market for children’s books is probably more resistant to cultural churn than just about any other slice of the consumer economy; it’s a closed circuit that reproduces itself one generation after another.
There are benefits to this system. For one, it helps to ensure that passing fads doesn’t wash quality books away. It’s doubtful, for example, that toddlers would opt for Goodnight Moon as often as their parents do, so maybe it’s just as well that they don’t have a say. For two, the persistence of children’s books yields a kind of experience we don’t get so often in a culture that has relatively few traditions: the chance to revisit childhood experiences through an older set of eyes.

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To summarize, a true classic:
(1.) Addresses universal and permanent human concerns.
(2.) Is a game-changer.
(3.) Influences other great works.
(4.) Is respected by experts. Tastes change, but over decades and centuries readers and critics tend to refine the canon down to what is truly worthwhile.
(5.) Challenges as it rewards.

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What is clear from these incidents is the role of the state: it has been glaringly absent or regrettably passive. The government has abandoned the people. Give up the idea that the state will protect you when some thugs say they are offended because you buy a book they don’t like. If you persist in reading it, they will threaten to turn violent. And instead of preventing them, the state asks you to restrain yourself...
So afraid have we become of the mob, and so attuned do we have to be of others’ sensitivities, that virtually no topic is safe any more...
There is peace in the graveyard, but there is no life. When they chill speech, they kill creativity, leaving an acquiescent state, an aggressive mob, and abandoned writers. Where is the poet who will “name the unnamable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world and stop it from going to sleep”?
Not in India, which they won’t let him visit, where they won’t let him speak, even via a video-link, and where you won’t find the book in which that line appears.

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But a third, more insidious kind of muzzle on the genuinely free expression of ideas in India is what one might call a soft opposition, or self-censorship. This is a section of well-meaning Indian opinion that honestly doesn't understand what individuals have to gain by rocking the boat of a particular religious order, and believes that "religious sentiments should always be respected" and art has no business to question or mock what is held by some to be sacred. As its representative, one might take the bestselling novelist Chetan Bhagat, who said about the controversy, "[Rushdie] is a hero as far as his others writings are concerned, but writing something that attacks somebody's god is not the right thing to do....I'll not make somebody who attacks my god a hero. This is India, you cannot hurt feelings here."
It is true that freedom of speech, as Rushdie observed in a long interview with Barkha Dutt, is the source of all other freedoms. But, as the number of hostile responses to Kunzru's arguments on his website demonstrate, this idea is bound to be interpreted only in the context of the overall climate of freedom in the society in which its value is asserted. India is actually unfree in so many ways, ranging from the casual harassment of women on streets to the persistence of caste hierarchies in social life to the entrenched patriarchy and deference of family life to the persistent tendency to explain all events as manifestations of the divine will. It is a country where young people are brought up to "always respect their elders" and to think twice before speaking their mind -- basically, to be conformist, to value the old or accepted answer over the subversion of the new idea or question.
It isn't especially surprising, then, that the notion of dissent and skepticism of absolute truths enshrined in the idea of freedom of speech has a limited appeal in India. Tolerance may be an idea with a long history here, but not freedom of speech.

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"I was reminded of all this by a friend's tweet from Jaipur: "Audience member has said that 'as a person from literature' she disapproves of adaptations." Not being there myself, I have no idea who this lady from literature was. Perhaps it was Virginia Woolf. Perhaps it was Salman Rushdie in drag, getting his revenge on Rajasthan Police. Perhaps she was a character from a Jane Austen novel come to life. Her identity will most likely forever remain a secret. But if that is how she described herself, not to mention her casual dismissal of a genre of infinite variation and possibility, I'm just glad I wasn't at the session today. Otherwise, just like last year, I'd have been begging Mother Earth to come claim her recalcitrant son."

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5. If someone comes in and asks for a recommendation and you ask for the name of a book that they liked and they can't think of one, the person is not really a reader. Recommend Nicholas Sparks...
25. No matter how many books you've read in the past, you will feel woefully un-well read within a week of opening the store. You will also feel wise at having found such a good way to spend your days.

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Intolerance has grown exponentially in India. Words like “blasphemy” are tossed around as though they were part of Indian culture, tradition and discourse: Most recently, cabinet minister Kapil Sibal called Web pages about his party leader Sonia Gandhi that he found insulting, blasphemous, unconsciously giving her the halo of divinity. India’s greatest painter, Maqbool Fida Husain, had to die in exile, because the state refused to protect his right of free expression when vigilantes threatened him and cases continued to be filed against him even after courts had ruled in his favour, dismissing similar cases. Earlier this month in Delhi, another artist, Balbir Krishan, who happens to be gay, and whose art deals with homosexuality, was attacked. The impulse to take offence runs everywhere...
Delivering the keynote address at the India Today Conclave in 2010, Rushdie noted with alarm the “culture of complaint” that had come to dominate the Indian discourse. He chided India for not defending Husain: “He is even being jeered at for being old. This is the proud face of a philistine India. There is nothing wrong in not liking his art. You can easily opt out. A painting is a finite space of art. If it offends, don’t enter that space. The best way to avoid getting offended is to shut a book… The worst thing is that artists are soft targets… We do not have armies protecting us.”
Writers should not need armies to protect them in a free society. That Rushdie might need protection in India reflects poorly—not on him, but on India.

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Faith provides simplicity and certainty; reason questions those certainties. Rushdie wants to imagine that which has not yet been imagined, even if it is that which should not be imagined. Shoulds and oughts limit an artist’s freedom to take wing. And Rushdie wants to fly.
With The Satanic Verses, he soars, and offers a glimpse of a universe that’s bewildering and ennobling; and as we go on that journey, we learn more about ourselves.

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A lesson in negotiation:
"We seem to have gotten to a place where the problems appear to loom larger than the opportunities. I don't know if I'm right in thinking this, but I only have silence to go on, which is always a poor source of information. It seems to me that we can either slip into the traditional stereotypes — you're the studio executive who has a million real-world problems to worry about, and I'm the writer who only cares about seeing his vision realised and hang the cost and consequences — or we can recognise that we both share the same goal, which is to make the most successful movie we possibly can. The fact that we may have different perspectives on how this can best be achieved should be a fertile source of debate and iterative problem solving. It's not clear to me that a one-way traffic of written "notes" interspersed with long, dreadful silences is a good substitute for this."

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Sanjay sipahimalani's literary predictions for 2012 (so funny, it's not!)
3 The spate of books and articles on Steve Jobs will cease once people realise that many of those writing about him were simply repeating the same thing. Matters will come to a head once it is discovered that a much-linked-to blog post titled "My Recollections of Jobs" simply consists of the words "Stay hungry, stay foolish" typed over and over again.
4 After the furore over the proscribing of A.K. Ramanujan's essay on the Ramayana by Delhi University, members of the varsity's Physics Department will seek to stop the study of quantum physics, claiming that "some German fellow called Heisenberg" was out to promote uncertainty across the nation. "

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"Another year — and a spectacular journey coming to an end. We’ve had some very good books, films and music albums making 2011 special. From experimental to populist to downright intriguing — they have kept us entertained through many evenings. Let’s take a walk down recap lane with Jai Arjun Singh as he talks about the books and films that he personally loved this year. And Avirook Sen gives his take on the music albums of 2011 that, he feels, rocked. We wish you a very Happy New Year!"

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" Create a service experience around what you publish and sell. Whatever “customer service” means when it comes to books and authors, figure it out and do it. Do it in partnership with your readers. Turn your readers into members. Not visitors, not subscribers; you want members. And then don't just consult them, but give them tools to consult amongst themselves. These things are cheap and easy now if you hire one or two smart people instead of a large consultancy. Define what the boundaries are in your community and punish transgressors without fear of losing a sale. Then, if your product is good, you'll sell things. (Don't count on your fellow Gutenbourgeois to buy things. They're clicking the little thumb icon on YouTube like everyone else.) If you don't want to do that then just find niche communities who might conceivably care about your products and buy great ad placements. It's a better online spend. "

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