Category: books

Subscription software, books, and comics

I found out this week that Day One is switching over to a paid subscription model, much like other Mac software has done over the last few years. (TextExpander and 1Password come to mind.)

Day One has said that they’ll continue to support users who have previously purchased the software, and not require that anyone switch over to a subscription, so that’s cool. (1Password did much the same thing. So did TextExpander, though they kind of stumbled into it after some backlash.)

I gave up on TextExpander, for various reasons, not long after they introduced subscriptions. I’m still using the non-subscription 1Password, and I’m pretty happy with it, though I’m thinking about switching over to a subscription. As to Day One, I guess I’ll keep using it for now. I definitely don’t get enough use out of it to justify a subscription. At some point, I may give up on it and just add a “journal” notebook to my Evernote account. I’m already paying for Evernote Premium, so that’s probably a good idea.

Meanwhile, it seems like subscription-based software and services are really getting pushed by a variety of companies. I got an email from O’Reilly today, saying that they’ll no longer be selling books directly, and pushing their Safari subscription instead. It’s still possible to buy their books from Amazon, so that’s good, but their own site was a pretty good place to buy ebooks, since they offered DRM-free ebooks in multiple formats (PDF, Mobi, and ePub). Oh well. It’s not clear from their FAQ if the ebooks you’d get from Amazon are DRM-free or not. Kindle books usually aren’t, but they can be. And I guess there’s no way to buy a DRM-free PDF of an O’Reilly book now. PDF is really the best format to have, if you’re using a book for reference.

Packt still sells DRM-free ebooks, but they also push their Mapt subscription service. The same goes for Apress: they still sell directly, but also push Apress Access, their subscription service.

On a semi-related subject, I think I may have accidentally signed up for a trial of Comixology Unlimited. I was trying to use the Comixology iOS app this weekend, and it was acting a bit funny. At some point, I briefly saw a screen saying that I’d activated a 7-day trial. I hadn’t purposely clicked on anything that should have done that, and I think the app crashed right afterwards. My account page says I don’t have a subscription, but I’ve noticed that eligible titles now have a “borrow” button underneath them, instead of an “add to cart” button. So, who knows? I have enough unread purchased comics in my Comixology account that I can’t really see myself ever needing Comixology Unlimited. I’ll just have to keep an eye on my account and make sure that, if I do actually have a trial, it doesn’t convert to paid.

Speaking of borrowing comics, I’m currently reading a well-worn copy of The Return of Bruce Wayne, borrowed from my local library. They have a pretty nice selection of graphic novels. And the Bridgewater Library (not far from here, and in the same library system) has an even better selection. So I could probably give up on buying comics altogether and just rely on the Somerset County Library System, if I wanted to.

Warren Ellis – a useful quote

I find myself collecting little quotes from Warren Ellis’ Orbital Operations newsletter, as I read through the backlog that I’ve allowed to pile up in my email. Here’s a good one, from July 2016:

Remember – your internet has an off button, and so does your news.  It’s okay to turn the volume down, and even to turn it off. There’s no shame in self care and pausing to take a breath before you re-immerse yourself in the world and its velocity.

…Which isn’t to say that you shouldn’t skip work to watch the James Comey testimony today, if you want to.

The Laundry Files, the Library, and Modesty Blaise

After taking a fairly long break from reading Charles Stross’ Laundry Files series, I picked up The Apocalypse Codex a few weeks ago. I just finished reading it this week. It’s not quite as funny as I remember the earlier books being, but it’s still very good. It includes two characters who are based on Modesty Blaise and Willie Garvin. Modesty Blaise was a British comic strip that ran for many years, starting in the sixties. I became familiar with it through reprints published in a magazine called Comics Revue, which I used to read regularly.

Here’s an article about the strip’s creator, Peter O’Donnell, from The Comics Journal, published just after he died. And here’s a more recent article, also from TCJ. Both are written by R. C. Harvey, who knows a lot about comics and who I should really read more often. (In fact, I haven’t actually read these articles yet, just bookmarked them to read later. I’ve been doing that a lot lately…) I stopped buying Comics Revue back in 2008 or so, when I stopped buying comics altogether. (Or at least mostly stopped buying them.) Now that I’ve started up again, I’ve been thinking about picking up on Comics Revue again too. But I still have a couple of unread Modesty Blaise books from the Titan Books reprint series, so I should probably read those before I start buying more issues of Comics Revue.

On a somewhat related subject, I did some spring cleaning last weekend, throwing out some old computer books and getting together some old novels to donate to an upcoming library book sale. I dropped the novels off today, and decided to have a look around the library while I was there. This book sale is not for my local library, rather for the neighboring town of Bridgewater. I’ve always known that Bridgewater’s library was bigger than ours, but I’d never really had any reason to go over there and visit it. Well, I was pretty impressed. It’s much larger than Somerville’s library, and they have quite a lot of books. I browsed through the comics section and the SF section, and found a few things there that I’d like to read. Bringing this back around to the original subject, they have most of the Laundry Files books, in hardcover. So I checked out the next one in the series, The Rhesus Chart. Now I have three weeks to read it. (I’ll have to check and see if I can renew it online, if I don’t get it finished on time. I don’t really know how all this modern library stuff works…)

programming books and videos

We’re snowed in today here in my part of NJ, so today’s probably a good day to review and clean up some of the “independent study” stuff I’ve been working on over the last several months.

First, I decided to finally finish up a book that I started reading about a year ago, Real-World Functional Programming. I’d been reading it a little bit at a time for quite a while. I started in on a program to learn F# back in 2014. I read a few books, and learned a bit, but I never really got a chance to apply any of that knowledge on a practical project. So I skimmed through the last couple of chapters of that book today, marked it as “read” in Goodreads, and decided that my F# experiment is over for now.

I started (and finished) reading a book on JavaScript this week, Object-Oriented JavaScript. I’m doing a bit of JavaScript programming at work right now, but I’m rusty, since I haven’t used it much lately. I got this book for free at some point from Packt, so I thought maybe it would be a good way to brush up and refresh my memory. It was a good refresher, and even had some stuff in it that I hadn’t stumbled across before.

On the video front, I’m still working my way through SharePoint videos on Pluralsight. I’ve completed Andrew Connell’s “SharePoint 2013 Developer Ramp-Up” series, and Sahil Malik’s “Understanding SharePoint 2013” series. Now I’m working on David Mann’s “Developing SharePoint 2013 Solutions with JavaScript,” which is helping me out with the SharePoint/JavaScript stuff that I’m currently working on. When I paid for a year’s worth of Pluralsight, I wasn’t sure if I’d get my money’s worth out of it, but I think I’ve been making good use of it so far this year.

I’ve also now been sidetracked into messing around with TypeScript. I read a book on CoffeeScript a few years back, but CoffeeScript never really took off (at least in the .NET community), while TypeScript seems to be very popular right now. (Take a look at this Google Trends graph.) So I’ve been experimenting with using TypeScript and JSOM together in a SharePoint project. I’m not sure if it’s worth the effort, but it’s interesting. I haven’t devoted too much time to TypeScript yet, but I’ll probably watch a Pluralsight video or two on it and see if I can persuade myself into using it.

Finally, I feel like I should get back to Ruby on Rails at some point. I started learning Ruby back in 2015, and learned the basics (of both the Ruby language and the Rails framework) but really didn’t get as far as I wanted. I got partway through Michael Hartl’s book/tutorial, but I guess I got off track at some point, since I haven’t touched it since June 2015. As with F#, I never had any real project in mind, or work-related reason to learn Ruby, so I probably abandoned it in favor of something else I needed to learn.

So I guess I’ve got some goals for the rest of 2017: keep working on SharePoint, brush up on my JavaScript some more, look into TypeScript more deeply, and maybe get back to Ruby on Rails, if I have time.

The Book of Dust

I was pretty excited to find out this week that Philip Pullman will be releasing the first volume of his new trilogy in October of this year. The trilogy isn’t exactly a sequel to His Dark Materials, but it’s in the same universe, and features some of the same characters. More details can be found at NPR and The Guardian.

I read His Dark Materials back in 2004, starting in January and finishing in June. I remember it well, since I was reading it when my brother passed away, in February 2004, so those memories are linked together in my head. It was also the first time I read anything substantial in ebook form. (I was reading it with Microsoft Reader on a Toshiba Pocket PC. It wasn’t a horrible experience, but neither was it a good one, and I never did buy anything else to read on that device.)

At some point in 2010, I think, I bought a trade paperback of the trilogy, with the idea that I’d reread it eventually. (Of course, the Pocket PC was long gone by then, along with the DRM’d ebooks that were tied to it.) I still haven’t gotten around to rereading it, but I’m thinking about it again.

I could just go ahead and start into the trade paperback, or I could listen to the audio version of Golden Compass, which I seem to have bought via iTunes in 2007 and forgotten about. Or I could buy the graphic novel version of Golden Compass, which I didn’t know about until I started poking around on Amazon tonight. So, plenty of options.

I’m kind of curious as to how I’d process the books right now. I think I’m a different person than I was in 2004. Am I capable of enjoying them as much as I did the first time through? Would I find new things in them that went over my head the first time? Would reading certain sections trigger specific memories? I don’t know. I’m usually not big on rereading books. There are just so many that I haven’t read yet, and I’m such a slow reader these days. But rereading these books would probably be worth my time.

Art and Literature for Troubled Times

OK, that post title might be a little pretentious. But I’ve been seeing a lot of stuff on the internet over the last month about art and literature, with relation to “our current political/cultural situation,” and enough of it is interesting to me that I thought I’d toss together a post.

I’ve previously mentioned Philip Roth’s “The Plot Against America.” And of course 1984 has gotten a lot of attention. (And, speaking of Orwell, a school in Connecticut has removed Animal Farm from their curriculum, right when we need it the most.)

WNYC this week has been asking people to post about their current reading & watching habits on Twitter, using the hashtag #CulturePack. That’s gotten some interesting responses, in the areas of relevant non-fiction, relevant fiction, and pure escapism. (One popular answer is Harry Potter books and movies, which I think falls into both the relevant and escapism categories, if you think about it.)

The New Yorker just published an article called The Books We’re Turning to Now, which I haven’t read yet, but should be interesting.

Going a little further down the road of dystopian fiction, William Gibson’s The Peripheral has been mentioned a lot lately. Gibson himself has compared the current administration to the concept of the klept from his book. The Peripheral is actually the only Gibson novel I haven’t read yet. (I should fix that soon.)

And to work a little black humor into all of this, here’s a comic strip about how 2017 is looking a lot like a 1990’s cyberpunk dystopia. Speaking as someone who read a fair amount of cyberpunk in the 90s, this is pretty accurate.

Meanwhile, on the art front, MoMA is hanging some works by Muslim artists to protest Trump’s entry ban. This seems like a pretty minor thing to do, but it’s important, in a way, and it’s appropriate, for a museum. MoMA’s exhibit Insecurities: Tracing Displacement and Shelter is relevant too, but just closed. Maybe they should have kept that going for a few more months.

As for me, I’ve been reading The New York Times and The New Yorker a lot lately. Though I’m not just reading the “current events” stuff: I’ve also been reading long-form stuff, digging into older articles on art, literature, and what-not. (And, yeah, I know that makes me sound like a typical East Coast liberal. Guilty as charged, I guess.)

For escapism, I’m still reading a lot of the DC Rebirth comics. I keep trying to talk myself into dropping one or more of the ones I’m buying regularly, but I haven’t managed to do that yet. They’re all still pretty good and worth reading.

Philip Roth on Trump

Coincidentally, after reading a fairly old New Yorker article about Philip Roth over the weekend, and blogging about it, I saw today that the New Yorker reached out to Roth for comment on Trump, and any similarity between the Trump administration and the fictional Lindbergh administration from his novel “The Plot Against America.” He has a few interesting things to say, though nothing particularly unexpected.

I’m still curious about “The Plot Against America.” I’m going to have to pick it up and read it at some point.

Almost Enough Art

I was reading this article about Philip Roth this morning, and a couple of lines jumped out at me.

First, this one from a letter from Saul Bellow:

There’s almost enough art to cover the deadly griefs with. Not quite, though. There are always gaps.

And the other, from Roth’s character Zuckerman, in his novel Exit Ghost:

It’s a flexible instrument that we’ve inherited. It’s amazing how much punishment we can take.

(I found this line also quoted in a short essay by Greil Marcus from 2007, which is a good read today, for perspective.)

I’m presenting these lines without much context, but hopefully, you get the idea. (And not the wrong idea. I’m not currently experiencing any “deadly griefs.”) Anyway, It occurs to me that I should really give Philip Roth a try. I’ve never quite gotten up the energy to choose one of his novels over, say, a nice Star Trek novel or Batman comic. Maybe I should start with something like The Plot Against America. I do generally like alternate history novels, though I’d imagine there’s going to be some difference between Harry Turtledove and Philip Roth.

Goodreads reading challenge

I set a goal of 50 books in my Goodreads reading challenge last year, and read 79 total. A lot of them were comics, and some of the non-comics stuff wasn’t exactly novel-length though. But it’s still a good amount of reading.

I set this year’s goal at 50 books again. My main purpose in reading this year will, I think, be “brief distraction from feelings of impending doom.”

I actually haven’t read a regular old novel in a while, possibly since October. I’ve been reading a lot of comics over the past few months. I’m not quite sure what I want to read next. One of my friends has recommended Ready Player One, by Ernest Cline, which I’d heard about before and have been meaning to pick up. So that’s a possibility. I also have three unread Star Trek novels on my Kindle, though, so maybe that would make a good start for 2017.