Category Archives: Reading

Kindle Books at Local Libraries

Kindle Post US: Kindle Books Now Available at Local Libraries.  This is both very cool, and very smart business.

The checkout process is surprisingly easy.  Click a button and you’re sent to Amazon, where you can click another button to send the book to your Kindle.  You can also download the book to transfer via USB, but otherwise it’ll come through via WiFi.

Amazon will back up all your notes and highlights for a book, so if you check the book out again they’ll come back as if the book never left your device.  Perhaps more interesting is that there’s a very quick “buy” link for all the books that you borrowed, which is sure to drive sales.

Freedom Next Time

Freedom Next Time is fucking incredible.  John Pilger is an amazing person, and his work never fails to set my blood on fire.

Five chapters follow five different struggles: Diego Garcia, the Israel/Palestinian conflict, India, Apartheid, and Afghanistan. It’s important that we all know more about each of these areas, and Pilger dives deeply into the situations and the people involved.

There are a number of segments from interviews interwoven into the text, and in each case it makes me proud that he asked the questions that he did.  There’s also a lot of gruesome detail about a number of nightmarish situations, all the more terrifying with the understanding that they all happened to fellow human beings.

Pilger is in a constant fight for people’s rights, and for making public the stories of those who have suffered at the hands of others. He’s fearless, and his work is gut-wrenching and illuminating.  We all need to look to his writing, and to creating better lives for all the people of this world.

Blood Meridian: half way there

I am living on a prayer.  My prayer is that I can get through to the end of this book.  I bought a copy of Blood Meridian a few months ago, after re-reading Neuromancer and hearing that Gibson really enjoyed this particular book.

I can understand why people like Blood Meridian. There’s a certain amount of beauty in the way that the author seems to constantly be looking off into the horizon, beautiful dusty and dirty landscapes ahead of the main characters.  There’s a lot of earth and mud and structure to an otherwise bland stretch of Texas landscape.  With that said, it’s also a truly brutal tale with an unbelievable amount of violence, brought forth with the same effort as its descriptions of nature.

In certain ways the relationship between this book and Gibson’s writing is apparent: there’s a distance and a certain amount of space around each character, each environment, and each paragraph.  With McCarthy, the easiest way to picture it, in my mind, is the static, killer expression on Javier Bardem‘s face in No Country for Old Men.

If you can deal with blood and murder and long sentences with strange, arcane words, it’s a hell of a trip.

Sigil

Sigil is an EPUB book editor.  I’ve used it for a while now, and my micro review is that it is freakin’ awesome.  While it is a WYSIWYG editor, it importantly has a raw HTML editor and support for regex across all the internal HTML files.  I personally have been using it to manage a list of recipes, so everything is in one spot.  For the Kindle users out there, it’s then possible to use calibre to convert the EPUB to MOBI.

Sigil won’t work on DRM-protected EPUB files, which is the only drag.  It’s not a problem with Sigil, but rather the Adobe DRM mechanism which infects just about any book that you buy from Kobo or similar EPUB stores.  Sans that, download the app and give it a whirl!

Story of Stuff

Annie Leonard is an interesting character, the type of person who at first identifies herself as one who hugs trees and then goes further in her environmental activities.  I picked up the book a year or so after watching the video.  If you’ve not seen it, it’s well worth the 20 minutes:

If you don’t like that video, chances are you won’t find the book all that lovable.  With that said, I’m hugely on the “liking” side.  The book goes into a lot of detail, and includes tons of research, reference, and personal experience.

The Story of Stuff is both inspiring and infuriating; the latter because of how backwards certain parts of our society are today, and the former because of Leonard’s dedication to helping solve these problems.  Personally, I know it has taught me a number of things, made me look at the world slightly differently, and provided me with a wealth of valuable information.

Getting Things Done

This is an absolutely wonderful book, just finished it today.  As I previously wrote about his interview on Triangulation, one of the key parts of his system is that it really isn’t much of a system: it’s more a guide to how to structure your own.  I feel that if it were advertised as such, I would have gotten on board years before I did.

The GTD book reminded me a lot of Flow at certain points.  I could skim through certain sections rather quickly, since I already had a reasonable understanding of what was being described.  I’d say that’s a benefit, though I can see where people would think both authors are a bit too wordy or repetitive.  Like most Zen-type studies, the importance is in embedding simple ideas into different contexts, so that they can follow you through many parts of your life.

If you’ve ever felt overwhelmed, or if you’ve had too much to do in a short period of time, check it out.  It’s worth the investment, even if it may seem like there’s no time left to slow down.

The Fall (Strain #2/3)

Just finished The Fall, the second book in the Strain trilogy from Chuck Hogan and Guillermo Del Toro.  I read the first one from the library and enjoyed it well enough; though I think this one was better.

It also helped that I listened to the audio book, read by Daniel Oreskes.  It was a dark book, and he didn’t manage to do anything goofy with his voice.

Is the Strain trilogy truly epic literature?  Probably not, but it sure as hell was fun and entertaining.  I’m looking forward to the final chapter, and to whatever movies or TV comes out of the series.