Category: books

Harry Potter withdrawal

Steven Levitt has a short bit up on the Freakonomics blog mentioning that he’s just finished the last Harry Potter book, and now has been “left aimless in Harry’s absence” and would like to know what he can read to “restore meaning to his life.” There are a lot of great suggestions in the comments, including not just books, but some comics too.

It’s interesting to see what people think of when they’re asked to suggest new material to a Harry Potter fan. The Potter books have a certain ineffable quality to them that has made them popular far beyond the audience that would usually be attracted to a “young adult” fantasy series. Mr. Levitt certainly doesn’t seem like the kind of guy who reads a lot of Piers Anthony, for instance. (Not that there’s anything wrong with Piers Anthony.) I do think that any open-minded, intelligent reader could find some great underrated stuff in the SF & Fantasy aisle in Borders, given a little direction, though.

Pullman’s “His Dark Materials” trilogy is mentioned by several commenters. That’s certainly a work that has some superficial similarities to the Potter books — it’s a fantasy series featuring a couple of young kids as protagonists. And it’s a great work. I think somebody could probably get a great term paper out of comparing and contrasting the themes in Potter vs HDM. (And, come to think of it, I’d bet a good number of high school students probably already *have* written that paper.)

There are several recommendations for the Discworld books by Terry Pratchett. Also great books, but different in tone from Harry Potter. Come to think of it, I’ve only read one Discworld book (Mort). I think I have another one around here somewhere waiting to be read. I should really dig that out and read it.

On the comics front, there are a few recommendations for Fables, which I blogged about recently. (I now have the first six volumes waiting to be read.) And Neil Gaiman’s Sandman (and some other Gaiman stuff) gets mentioned. (I’ve read all of Sandman, and I’d certainly second the recommendation on that.)

Stephen King’s Dark Tower series gets a couple of mentions. I haven’t read any of that, but I’m getting curious about it. Maybe after I get through some of the other stuff in my pile, I’ll pick up a couple of Dark Tower books and give them a try.

Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell gets a couple of nods. I read that a couple of years ago, and it’s great. Definitely a good book to read after the Potter series, if you’re interested in seeing how another great author handles magic.

There are a couple of recommendations for Orson Scott Card’s Ender books. I’ve read the first, Ender’s Game, and have the next few in a pile waiting to be read. Good stuff, but I don’t really see any relation to Potter, other than (again) a young protagonist.

And Jasper Fforde’s Thursday Next novels get mentioned too. I’ve now read through all but the most recent Thursday Next book, and I’m definitely worried about withdrawal after I finally finish that one! (Hopefully, Fforde hasn’t finished with Thursday books yet, though.)

So, in a nutshell, there’s lots of great stuff to read out there, both books and comics! I’m curious as to whether Mr. Levitt would consider picking up any of the comics work mentioned in the comments. Would a serious economist like him consider picking up a Sandman or Fables graphic novel? Would your average businessman want to be seen reading a comic in public? I don’t know. It’s never been a concern for me, but then again, I’m a nerd, and proud of it.

more Kindle stuff

I just noticed a post by Tim O’Reilly on the Kindle over at Radar. He talks a bit about the possibility of getting O’Reilly books out on the Kindle. In one of the comments, something interesting is mentioned: The Kindle has no monospaced font! That’s really a big problem, when you start getting into code samples in programming books. Oh well, yet another obstacle keeping me from the Holy Grail of tossing all my 1500-page programming books and replacing them with e-book equivalents.

books about Paris

A friend’s niece is going on a class trip to Paris soon. That made me think of my trip to Paris back in high school. I’m not going to write a long post reminiscing about that, but I thought I’d just post links to a couple of books on Amazon about Paris, mostly just because I wanted to play around with the function that allows you to do that from the Amazon Media Library.

The two books above were reviewed in The Economist a few years back, and I got interested in them based on that review. I had meant to buy them for myself at some point, but someone bought them for me as a gift before I’d gotten around to doing that.

(Edit, 02/14/2021: The Amazon iframe thing above stopped working at some point, so here are plain links to the books:
Paris: The Biography of a City
Paris Tales
More than ten years after I posted this, and I still haven’t finished reading the first one, or started reading the second. Sigh.)

Cataloging Books

I just entered a bunch of books into Delicious Library on my Mac. I hadn’t bothered entering anything into there since I got my new MacBook. Since the new MacBook has an iSight camera built in, I was kind of curious to see how the scanning function would work. Well, it scanned the bar codes OK, and came up with the correct UPCs, but it didn’t once pull the correct item for the UPC. I tried it on about ten books, and it didn’t work on any of them. I gave up, and went back to just typing in the ISBNs.

I then tried exporting from DL and importing to Amazon’s Media Library. I cut the ISBNs from DL’s export file, and pasted them into a separate text file, since Amazon seems to just want one ISBN per line, and nothing else. Amazon read in the file, and recognized about 20 items out of 80. Not a great success rate. I didn’t really try to troubleshoot that import at all, though, so maybe I messed something up. Amazon also has a scanning function similar to DL’s. I gave that a try, but I couldn’t get it to recognize my bar codes at all.

The thing that got me started on this was an attempt to figure out exactly which William Marshall books I own. Last night, I noticed one on Amazon (The Far Away Man) that didn’t sound familiar, so I ordered it. I guess there are a few others I haven’t read yet either, based on the list at Overbooked.

Amazon – used books

Just for yuks, I put a couple of old books up for sale on Amazon today. Apparently, this is my storefront. (Impressive, huh?)

Looking at the way they handle used book sales, and looking at all the folks selling their books for a penny, there’s really no way for an individual small-time seller to make any money selling readily-available books.

I put my books up at $1. Amazon apparently takes a minimum $2.50 commission, but they credit you $4 for shipping. So, the end result is that I would get $2.50 total, which would have to cover my shipping costs. It looks like a one-pound media mail shipment costs $2.13 now, so that doesn’t leave much room for profit. Since they don’t charge for listing stuff, though, I guess it doesn’t hurt to list some stuff and see if anybody bites.

more Kindle thoughts

I’ve been thinking about the Kindle again. I still haven’t quite decided to buy one, but I’m getting closer.

Here’s a scenario that’s got me thinking:
(It’s kind of a long story, so bear with me.)
I bought the audiobook version of Brad Meltzer’s “Zero Game” from iTunes awhile ago. I’ve been listening to it in the car, and enjoying it quite a bit. I hit a point, though, where the audio just cut out and skipped ahead about five chapters. I went back and forth with Apple about it, and eventually got a refund. (They tell me that they’ve now posted a corrected version, so if you’re interested in the book, don’t let this glitch stop you from buying it!)

While I was going back and forth with support, though, I really wanted to just continue reading the book. If I’d had a Kindle, I could have just bought it from Amazon, and picked up reading the missing parts the same day I hit the glitch.

I did wind up buying a used hardcover copy of the book from Amazon so I could read the missing part. Now, while that obviously took longer to get to me than the Kindle version would have, it was a bit cheaper, and I can (theoretically) resell it, or just give it away, when I’m done reading it.

However, I’m sitting here right now looking at the book, and thinking that I’m probably going to just toss it on the floor in a pile of other old books when I’m done with it. The used book system on Amazon is great for buyers, but they’ve driven down prices on used books so much that there’s not much point trying to sell it after I’m done with it. And I don’t know anybody who’d really be interested in reading it who I could hand it off to. And I know I’ll never talk myself into just throwing it out.

I’ve got a whole bunch of books that fall into this category. Basically, books that I’m probably never going to want to re-read, and have almost no resale value, but I can’t bring myself to throw them out.

In some ways, the economics of this seem almost perverse, but I think I might be willing to pay a little extra to buy a book that doesn’t leave any physical footprint in my tiny little apartment. Something I can keep on a device, or my computer’s hard drive, or wherever, for however long I want. It’s annoying that the DRM scheme on any e-book reader (Sony or Amazon) will prevent me from loaning or giving away my old “books.” And it’s a little galling that the e-books generally cost more than a used copy in hardcover or paperback. But I’m looking at this apartment full of old books, and thinking that I could really reclaim a lot of space if I could just get rid of some of them!

Having said that, though, there are certainly still a lot of books I’d like to keep in hard copy form. Jasper Fforde’s books, for instance, wouldn’t work well on a Kindle, since he plays with fonts, footnotes, and other odd stuff that wouldn’t translate well into the single-typeface Kindle. In fact, Fforde’s concept of the “UltraWord” system, introduced in “Well of Lost Plots”, is, in some ways, a parody of DRM’d e-book systems. One of the characteristics of UltraWord was that you could only read any given book three times, then it would just refuse to open.

I’m aware that buying DRM’d e-books right now, for any platform, will probably leave me with books that I won’t be able to read again past, say, five or ten years, since whatever platform I buy now will probably be gone by then. I bought Philip Pullman’s “His Dark Materials” trilogy in Microsoft Reader format several years back, and read them on my old Toshiba Pocket PC. While I still have those files around somewhere, I don’t have the Pocket PC anymore. If I want to read those books again on the Kindle, I’d have to repurchase them. (And, hey, I see that I can get them for the Kindle, for $3.19 each. That’s actually not a bad price. Cheaper than the average used copy, even.)

e-book readers and related topics

I blogged about the Sony Reader a couple of months back. The Amazon Kindle is out now too. One of the things I didn’t like about the Sony Reader was the lack of technical books. I did a little searching on Amazon, and they definitely seem to have a better supply of programming books available than Sony. The pricing on them isn’t great though. For instance, ASP.NET 2.0 Unleashed is $36 on Amazon for the dead tree version, and $32 for the Kindle version. That book is almost 2000 pages, and weighs 6 pounds, so I can understand why the physical version costs so much, but I think they should really be able to deliver the electronic version at a significantly lower price. Leaving that aside for now, it’s still pretty compelling to switch from having a big pile of 2000 page, 6 pound books to having a single device weighing less than one pound holding multiple books. And I still think the idea of a partnership with Safari would be great, but I guess that’s too much to ask for at this point.

There have been some interesting reactions to the Kindle, from people like Scoble and Mossberg. One thing that concerns me is that both of those guys have pointed out some interface problems that make the device a little frustrating to use.

Cory Doctorow pointed out a few negatives on a post on BoingBoing, and talked about it a bit during an episode of TWiT from a few weeks back. His big problem is basically the DRM and TOS stuff. I don’t necessarily mind DRM, if it’s done well, and if I can trust that the company behind it will be supporting the system for a while. In other words, I don’t have a big problem with iTunes DRM, but I don’t really trust that anyone else’s DRM is going to be around long enough to make it worth my while to invest any money in it. Of course, I’d rather just not have *any* DRM, but that just doesn’t seem feasible right now. I know we’re getting there on music, but it doesn’t look like we’re anywhere near there on books yet.

I really like the wireless purchase and delivery system on the Kindle. That seems much better than the Sony system. I think that if they can get some of the interface kinks ironed out in the next iteration of the hardware, bring down book prices a bit, and maybe bring the price of the device itself down, then I’ll be ready to take the plunge and get one.

Happy New Year

I didn’t do much today, aside from watching football. I’m not making any major resolutions this year either. I did make all the arrangements to go to WonderCon today though. As usual, I wasn’t really sure I wanted to go this year, but a few things convinced me to go again. Basically, a good guest lineup, plus a general desire to get out of New Jersey for a few days. And a chance to see the Chinese New Year Parade again!

I haven’t really done much reflection on 2007. Normally, I would get kind of reflective on New Year’s Day, but I haven’t really been in that frame of mind. Well, just for the heck of it, here are some things I’ve done in 2007:

Books and comics I’ve read and liked:

  • Absolute Watchmen
  • Nextwave
  • David Allen’s Getting Things Done and Ready for Anything (though I haven’t finished RFA yet)
  • the first two Jasper Fforde “Thursday Next” novels
  • a couple of Jim Butcher “Harry Dresden” novels

Movies & TV shows I’ve enjoyed:

  • Paprika (my favorite movie of the year, for whatever that’s worth)
  • Once
  • Ratatouille
  • The Simpsons Movie
  • Rise: Blood Hunter (okay, not exactly high-brow, but fun)
  • Torchwood
  • Life on Mars
  • Heroes

Music I’ve liked:

  • Wilco – Sky Blue Sky
  • Ryan Adams – Easy Tiger
  • Paul McCartney – Memory Almost Full
  • Pizzicato Five – Made in USA (from 1994, but I’d never heard it until this year)
  • Derek and the Dominoes – Layla (I only just got around to buying this CD in 2007)

Pointless stuff I’ve spent money on:

  • new couch
  • iPod Touch
  • TomTom One LE GPS
  • Dell Inspiron laptop
  • MacBook
  • Microsoft Office 2007
  • Motorola SLVR
  • 19″ widescreen LG monitor
  • Toshiba HD-DVD player

Things I didn’t get around to doing:

  • buying a new car (the old one’s still working, but maybe not for much longer)
  • checking out the new Greek and Roman galleries at the Met
  • visiting the new Morimoto restaurant in NYC

Well, that’s just a bunch of random lists off the top of my head. I guess the two big things that happened in 2007 for me were the office move my company did (from Edison to Somerset), and my mostly successful implementation of GTD.

random stuff

I haven’t gotten around to blogging in the last couple of weeks. Things have been pretty hectic. I’m trying to relax right now, so I thought I’d just write up a few random bits.

I picked up a TomTom One LE GPS unit at Best Buy last week. I don’t really need a GPS often. Most of my driving is just back and forth to work. But, it will definitely come in handy once in a while. I used it today to help me find my way to my friend Paul’s house in New York. I’ve been there before, but not recently. The GPS was definitely a help. In particular, there’s one point where I need to make a turn onto a side street that’s pretty well hidden, until you’re right on top of it. The GPS takes care of that nicely by announcing the turn in advance, then again when you’re right there. It really makes things easier.

I’ve been working my way through the Thursday Next novels by Jasper Fforde. I’m on the third book now, Well of Lost Plots. It’s starting out quite nicely. I’m really enjoying these books. Lots of fun, weird, stuff.

I installed the trial version of VMware Fusion on my MacBook yesterday, and installed Windows XP into a virtual machine. It works pretty well. It’s a little slow, but a lot better than previous virtual machine products that I’ve used on the Mac. (Of course, this is the first time I’ve used an Intel Mac, so right there you’ve got a major advantage.) Oh, and I’ve got to say, I think it’s time for Windows XP SP3. I installed XP with SP2, and had 90 patches to install from Windows Update. Hey Microsoft, isn’t that enough patches to warrant a service pack? That’s one of the nice things about Apple that we maybe take for granted. OS X 10.4 went from 10.4.0 to 10.4.10, and each of those point releases is cumulative, so you never have too many individual patches to install on a Mac.

nine books

I started reading this post on the NY Times site earlier this evening. I had to stop and bookmark it for later, since there were so many interesting lists in the comments. If you’re looking for a good book to read, just run though the comments and pick one out! So many good books, so little time. I’d second the many recommendations for 100 Years of Solitude. Ditto for the Harry Potter books, the Dark Materials trilogy, Hitchhiker’s Guide, Shakespeare, Vonnegut, Borges, Bradbury, Flannery O’Connor, and a bunch of others.

And there are some interesting recommendations for books I haven’t read, but that might be worth adding to my Amazon wish list: Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami, for instance. I ran across a reference to one of his other books recently, but, prior to last week, I’d never heard of him.

The Road got a few mentions, and that’s another one I haven’t read. Looking at the description now, though, I see that there are cannibals in the book. I generally find that I’m disappointed by any book with cannibals in it, so maybe I’ll avoid that. And it’s got the Oprah stamp on it too, which is kind of scary.

And this list reminds me, again, that I still haven’t gotten around to reading Animal Farm. Sigh.