Category: books

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.

Cyber Monday

I couldn’t quite talk myself into signing up for a Pluralsight subscription today, even at the $200 Black Friday rate, but I did convince myself to plunk down $15 for the Humble / O’Reilly Unix bundle that’s running right now. (Not technically a Black Friday or Cyber Monday deal, but it’s in the right date range.)

Over a dozen classic O’Reilly books for $15: not a bad deal. Most of the books are pretty old, but many of them are still useful. I’m not sure if the sed & awk book or the lex & yacc book are of any use at this point, but the vi/Vim and Emacs books could be. And bash is still useful. I have a few of these in hard copy form, but it’ll be nice to have PDF copies of them. I imagine I could actually throw out some of my older O’Reilly books at this point. I think I have a first edition of the Unix Power Tools book floating around here somewhere, for instance. That’s a pretty thick book, and there’s really no reason I need it anymore, except maybe as a doorstop. (Thinking about it a bit more, I guess most of these books are available through the Safari subscription I get through ACM, but it can’t hurt to have offline, DRM-free, copies.)

I also convinced myself to buy a few comics from Dark Horse, from their Black Friday sale (most books for 99 cents), and a few collections from Comixology (from DC’s buy one get one free sale). In both cases, I was buying stuff that I missed from the period where I’d pretty much stopped buying comics (2009-2015, roughly).

I should probably be slightly embarrassed that I only bought stuff for myself this weekend, but I don’t really have any need to do any significant Christmas shopping for anyone else. And that can all get done online, whenever.

Bananapocalypse

Here’s a good article on the possibility of a coming bananapocalypse. It sounds kind of funny, but it’s a real problem.

The world’s most popular fruit, the Cavendish banana, is also one of the least genetically diverse. These seedless bananas destined for the $11 billion export market are, essentially, clones. That leaves the humble Cavendish vulnerable to diseases that can take advantage of its limited genetic diversity.

I eat a banana almost every day, so it would really bother me if they disappeared, but of course that’s a “first-world problem.” I’d just eat more of something else, and get on with my life. In some parts of the world, bananas are a staple and an important source of nutrition.

All of this seems to be leading up to a world much like the one presented in Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl. Let’s hope we don’t actually let it go that far. (Which reminds me: I need to read more Paolo Bacigalupi.)

Amazon Prime Reading

Amazon seems to be rolling out a bunch of random stuff to Prime members lately. I blogged about Audible Channels last week. Now, they’ve started up something called Amazon Prime Reading. This is a service that lets Prime members read a variety of books, comics, and magazines for free.

This is distinct from the Kindle Owners Lending Library, which is available only to Kindle owners, and doesn’t require Prime membership. And from Kindle Unlimited, which lets you read an unlimited number of books (from a broad but still somewhat limited selection) for $10 per month (including audiobooks). And also from Kindle First, which lets Prime members “buy” one book per month for free from a selection of six or so new releases. It’s all very confusing.

I’ve used the Kindle “lending library” once or twice. It’s not easy to find books that are part of that program, and there’s not really much of a selection. I’ve been getting a book from Kindle First every month since the program launched, but, until recently, had just been letting them pile up. I decided to read a few recently, and I was pleasantly surprised. There are some pretty good books in there. (There’s probably a lot of dreck too, but I haven’t hit any yet.) I’ve never been tempted to sign up for Kindle Unlimited. I already “own” plenty of ebooks that I haven’t gotten around to reading yet, so there’s no reason to pay a subscription fee to get access to more.

So I guess it’s a good thing that there are more and more ways to get access to free reading material. But I’ve got plenty to read, regardless. Looking at Goodreads, I see that I’ve got 179 books currently tagged as “to read.” That ought to be enough to keep me busy for quite a while.

Audible Channels

I’ve never had a subscription to Audible, but I have a few books in my Audible account that I’ve gotten for free over the years. I saw that the audiobook for Mike Carey’s The Girl with All the Gifts was on sale for $3.95 yesterday, and it looked interesting, so I went ahead and bought it. I’ve read and enjoyed other stuff by Mike Carey, and this book seems to be well-reviewed, so I’m hoping it will be good. I usually try to buy audiobooks only if I can get them in DRM-free format, either on CD or as MP3s, but I’ll buy a DRM’d audiobook if it’s cheap enough.

After buying it, I opened up the Audible app on my iPhone, with the idea that maybe I’d go ahead and download it. It wasn’t logged in to my account, and I get the feeling that I hadn’t actually launched Audible since getting my iPhone SE earlier this year. That’s not surprising, since I haven’t been listening to any audiobooks lately.

After I logged in, I got a popup screen, letting me know about Audible Channels for Prime, a free service from Audible that lets Amazon Prime members stream and download a bunch of podcast-like material. There are some original series on there that look interesting (including stuff from Jon Ronson and Eugene Mirman), along with some stuff that’s already available elsewhere (including most of the podcasts from WNYC). I don’t think I’d want to use the Audible app to listen to podcasts that I can get elsewhere; as an app, it’s not going to be nearly as good as Overcast. But the original content looks like it’ll be worth delving into.

They’re also making a limited number of audiobooks free for Prime members, but they’re streaming-only and can’t be downloaded. There’s not much there, but there are a few interesting books that I wouldn’t mind listening to.

Poking around in my Audible account reminded me that I never finished listening to Metatropolis, which I got for free from Audible back in 2010. I remember that I’d listened to the first two of the five stories in that book, so I started in on the third last night.

I may start listening to more audiobooks and audio dramas again. It’s a good change of pace from reading regular books (both print and ebooks), and it’s much easier on the eyes.

Harry Potter and the Cursed Child

Harry Potter and the Cursed ChildHarry Potter and the Cursed Child by J.K. Rowling
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I was cautiously optimistic about this book. It’s a script to a play, not a novel, and it’s not solely written by Rowling, so it could have been a flop. Or it could have been a good play that doesn’t read well independent of the stage production. Or it could have taken the characters off in a direction that I didn’t like.

But it is actually quite a good story, and it holds up well as a book. I found it easy to read, and didn’t find the format distracting at all. Lots of familiar characters appear, some briefly and some in major roles. The 40-year-old versions of Harry, Ron, Hermione, and Ginny are all believable and recognizable.

I read through the whole book today. I found myself quite absorbed in it. And I find myself wanting to read more about the adventures of Albus and Scorpius.

View all my reviews

F# for C# Developers

I finished reading F# for C# Developers today. I just checked, and I started reading it almost exactly two years ago. (I didn’t really read all the way through to the end today, admittedly; I skimmed some parts that weren’t that interesting to me. But I read most of it.) One part that was of interest was a section on WebSharper, which looks like a pretty nifty way to create web apps in F#. I’d like to play around with that some more.

I also made some more progress on Real-World Functional Programming, reading the chapter on testing, which used xUnit.net for unit testing in F#. I’d never tried xUnit.net before; I’ve previously used NUnit a bit, for C# unit testing, and I’ve also used the unit testing functionality built into recent versions of Visual Studio. So xUnit.net is another thing I’d like to play with some more.

I’m probably going to get side-tracked from this F# stuff again pretty soon, but hopefully I’ll have time this week to make some more progress.

Evernote Essentials

I just finished rereading Brett Kelly’s Evernote Essentials. I first bought it and read it in 2014. He released an updated version recently, so I thought I’d download it and give it a quick reread. It does have some updates since the last version I read, but nothing that I wasn’t already aware of. If you’re new to Evernote, and want to get up to speed quickly, it’s a good book to read. He’s now selling it in three versions; one is just the book, then there are “plus” and “premium” versions with extra content, including video and audio content. I can’t really imagine needing the extra content, though I’m sure it’s good, if you’re really into Evernote, and don’t mind paying for it.

I’m still getting a lot of use out of Evernote. They’ve updated the Mac and Windows clients recently, with some interesting new features. In the recent past, updates to the desktop software were sometimes more annoying than useful. They’d add non-removable buttons for features I don’t use, like “Work Chat”. But lately, they’ve actually been adding useful features and capabilities, such as the new Cmd-J feature on the Mac.

John Ashbery

I’ve been reading old issues of the New Yorker at lunch time recently. (I’m still working through the backlog of issues from the last time I had a subscription.) Earlier this week, I came across a poem by John Ashbery. I first read his poetry back when I was in college, for a class, and remember enjoying it. I don’t usually like most of the poetry in the New Yorker, but once in a while something clicks. So it got me thinking about Ashbery and maybe picking up a book of his work. I checked Amazon, and was surprised to see that the first few I looked at weren’t available for the Kindle.

I didn’t think too much about it, but I stumbled across this old article from the NY Times today, which explains a few things. It makes sense, and it’s good to know that I can pick up a number of his books in ebook format, though they’re kind of expensive. The 100-page Three Poems is $15 on Kindle, while the 1000-page hardcover Collected Poems is just under $30. So you can get the complete text of his first dozen books in a nice hardcover for $30, or an ebook of just one for $15. That doesn’t make much sense to me, but I guess I shouldn’t look for sense in the pricing of poetry books and ebooks.

I don’t understand nearly enough about poetry to tell you why John Ashbery is good, and why I like his work. But I’ve been thinking lately that poetry acts on the brain in a way that’s different from other prose, and perhaps it’s beneficial to read some, now and then.