Living Outside The Box And Within My New Categories
Happy Friday! Back when I was in the eight grade one of our teachers made our course grade dependent upon a special project in which we would strictly limit the amount of television we watched and keep a journal and report on what things we did when not watching television.
I’m pleased to say that this junior high school experiment largely saved me from being a slave to the boob tube the way so many of my generation are. So I was initially quite sympathetic in my approach to Living Outside The Box—TV-Free Families Share Their Secrets. Surprisingly author Barbara Brock managed to quite lose me, in spite of my general and long time support of turn off the tv and DO SOMETHING with your life initatives.
After first couple of pages I found myself very turned off by the oh so self-congratulatory tone of Brock’s reports of families who eschew television altogether and the amazing things they manage to do in the time thus gained. Brock makes the all too common mistake of writers who are passionate about their topic in allowing their copy to take on a tone of prescriptive advocacy in place of objective reporting, which is so much more persuasive to readers who are not themselves already zealots of the cause. Unless you already believe passionately in a television free lifestyle this one is Not Recommended.
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You may have noticed some changes to my sidebar over the past week or so. I have been very pleased that I am getting increasing numbers of visitors to this site and even more pleased that many of these folks seem genuinely intrested in the book reviews. So I felt it was important to press on with a long planned initiative to make the site more browse-able and the hundreds of book reviews available here more accessible to new visitors. I have begun long delayed work in applying appropriate tags and categories to older posts and have revamped the category selections to facilitate easy browsing on posts in a given area of interest. You may already have noticed that the monthly archive links disappeared and the Category Structure is continuing to evolve and the number of posts in each category expand as I complete back end work on the archives.
I hope you will enjoy discovering books with me. Just in case you don’t already know, you can click on any book cover to obtain the book from YOUR local library or click on any book title to purchase the book at a competitive price from Powell’s book store in Portland Oregon. They ship everywhere and have an exceptional reputation as an ethical and responsible bookseller committed to treating both authors and readers fairly. I am proud to be a Powell;s associate. Title links on some older posts may link to a non-affiliate Amazon sales page. I will be updating these links as time permits but they are a low priority.
Thank you for your visit today to The Thin Red Line. Please come back again soon to discover more books with me.
Alan
Margaret,
Thanks for stopping by and for sharing your perspective.
Will,
I have zillions of tags since I always include the author and title of any book mentioned in the tags and this helps me to receive search visitors, but with all the books I cover and the many of them which have multiple authors my complete tag list is way to huge to be put in a side bar and due to space limitations the tag cloud I have at the bottom of my home page shows only a fraction of these. I am already seeing in my stats that visitors are using the new categories to visit older content and traffic is up, even though I have slacked off on my Entrecard dropping and worse slipped out of the top three in my category so my traffic from Entrecard is way down.
Hi Alan! Thanks for pointing that out about clicking on the book covers. It really works well. These days it seems I have so little time for books and fortunately TV watching is almost non-existent. I can’t imagine how most people find the time to watch all the TV that they do?
For this site, I think you are dead on correct about the importance of your category list. I bet visitors will make good use of any of the improvements you are making. For many sites, mine included, the categories are more cumbersome than anything else. I have even considered not including them in my sidebar. Tags were supposed to be the solution to category problems, but even tags have not lived up to their billing.
I’ve never been a big t.v. watcher. I would much rather read a book, but I would not say that I’m passionately against anyone who does watch a fair amount of t.v. I do think children should be limited in how much they are allowed to watch.
Judge,
I agree that there certainly can be value in some television programming, though I do believe that many people waste too much time on it.
Jennifer,
Thanks so much for your kind words. I hope that you will visist again.
Susan,
Click the book cover to get it from the library! This works in the UK. (The book covers are linked to Worldcat, which is an International meta search engine for public libraries. I know for certain from other readers that it does work for the UK and my understanding is that it also works for any country which has public libraries with books in English,)
I just wanted to say, what is so special about not watching TV? I did not watch TV from Friday till today (and it is still shut down) so what it is all about? Or I’m just an exception? Maybe, because I’m more addicted to PC 😀
By the way, great site, I just hope, that we have in our stores the same books, so I can buy a book which you recommend 🙂
I love having someplace like this to come for book reviews. I did not know about clicking on the covers for library requests. Awesome! Keep up the good work.
Edward R. Murrow said it best: “This instrument can teach, it can illuminate; yes, and it can even inspire, but it can do so only to the extent that humans are determined to use it to those ends. Otherwise it is merely wires and lights in a box.”
There is so much potential in television besides brainless reality shows and sit-coms. To completely ignore all of the positive benefits is really pathetic.