Rich Reading

Book-Lovers’ Warning: Book Drum is a website where you may end up spending a lot of time. U.K.-based Book Drum’s slogan is “Beyond the Page” and that’s exactly where it takes you for the 176 books it includes far. Each volunteer-produced book profile includes multiple sources of enriching content:

  • Bookmarks: page-by-page commentary and illustration of the text
  • Summary: objective synopsis of the book
  • Setting: description and illustration of the main places or themes of the book
  • Glossary: foreign, invented and tricky words deciphered
  • Author: biographical information, interview videos, links and photos
  • Review: subjective analysis and evaluation of the book
  • Map: a world map pinned with descriptions of places significant in the book

The wide variety of books they’ve profiled—which feel like they’ve been taken apart and put together again—include many favorites, past and present. Classics from Dickens and Hardy and Austen up to and including Cormac McCarthy’s The Road and David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest. With Book Drum’s help, I may finally get past page 50 of Gravity’s Rainbow.

I took Book Drum for a test spin using one of my favorite books, Tess of the D’Urbervilles. I reviewed maps of Thomas Hardy’s Wessex. I read descriptions of the “life and times . . .” The bookmarks were fascinating—like the notes in a cleverly annotated classic, but with pictures! I know this book well, but I’d missed so much. I want to read it again, with Book Drum humming in the background. The volunteer contributor of content for Tess is novelist herself and freelance writer, as are many of the Book Drum contributors, while some are academics, recent graduate school spawn, and the like.

Book Drum sums up the diversity of its content in this way: “Whether it’s video of the Rockettes in The Catcher in the Rye, the Italian opera tracks that accompany Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, the historical context and maps of The Odyssey, stunning South American photography for In Patagonia, or video of Kabul kite fighting for Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner, we take readers beyond the page to enjoy interactive content alongside their favourite books.”

Book Drum also has begun publishing for e-readers, with two titles so far, Heart of Darkness and The Turn of the Screw. This link takes you to the Amazon page for the latter, where you can See Inside. It’s the same principle as the website, but feels pushy. I might get used to it, but my initial reaction is I’d rather seek out the enriched content than be distracted by its intrusive presence. Similarly, I usually read the notes of a traditionally annotated book a chapter at a time, rather than constantly break the tenuous thread of my thought.

The site uses the Wiki approach, so anyone can contribute. Last spring, the Book Drum editors sent out a call for content for a profile of A Tale of Two Cities. Now I find this out! I wrote something very similar a few years ago when I was trying to convince Audible.com to offer companion .pdfs to some of its books, like those with lots of characters or foreign-named ones (think Russians!). It’s hard to keep track of the players without a program. I proposed one-line chapter summaries for people whose listening gets interrupted for a few days or weeks– “Where was I?,” a glossary to cover old-fashioned terms, foreign phrases, and special uses–also harder to follow when you just hear, rather than see, them. I even included a link to the raucous song the citoyens danced to in the blood-soaked Paris streets. So Book Drum has found a happy reader with me!

Thanks to writing buddy David Ludlum for sharing this resource.