Tag: Books

When I was in elementary school; I used to get in trouble for talking to the other kids during class. Eventually, this got bad enough that the teacher called my Mom in for a parent-teacher conference to discuss the problem…

Teacher: Mark keeps talking during class and it’s very disruptive.
Mom: When is he doing all this talking?
Teacher: After he finishes his assignment.
Mom: Did you give him something to read?
Teacher: Yes, but he finished that book.
Mom: Did you try giving him another one?
Teacher: Yes, but he finished that one too.
Mom: *glare*
Teacher: In fact, he’s already read all the books in the room.
Mom: Why don’t you get him another one from the library then?
Teacher: I did but he finished it already.
Mom: *glare* Then why don’t you let him go to the library and get another one?
Teacher: Wha…. I can’t do that!?! He could get into all sorts of trouble walking down the hallway.
Mom: *glare* If you let him go to the library; he’ll stop talking in class.

Eventually, I was allowed to walk those halls, wander the shelves of the library and seek out new books to read. As Mom predicted, once I had something to read; I was quiet in class. This is a habit that has stuck with me over the years and I ended up spending much of my youth in school & public libraries. I bring this up today because for the first time in a long time; I went down to CPL and checked out some books. This sudden trip to my local public library was prompted by their advertising of an adult summer reading program. The basic idea is you have to read 6 books, turn in a log and then you’ll be entered to win a gift certificate to a book store. I never could turn down free books; so I decided to go sign up2.

As I wandered around the library looking for some books to read; I felt a sense of nostalgia and loss. There were entire summers in my youth were I barely went anywhere else besides the library. These days, the rarity is when I do go. I miss those fabled days of yesteryear when life was simple and I could relax with a book in my hand all summer long. *sigh*

So why haven’t I been going? Partly because I’m an ornery cuss who doesn’t like having to wait and if the library doesn’t have the next book in a series I’m reading; it irks me. Partly because I can afford to buy more books for myself than I could when I was younger. Having my own copy of a book means I can read it whenever I like 24/7/3653 and the copy of the book I’m reading is likely to be in better condition (plus it’ll stay that way). *shrug* Not sure what else I have to say, except that I hope to be making visits to my public library more often. It’ll let me relive parts of my past (and beat some of this summer heat).

1 For some reason, employers don’t like it when you read books all day instead of testing their software.
2 Besides, money has been a bit tighter of late and borrowing books from the library is cheap entertainment. 😀
3 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year (366 in a leap year).

Product Image: TiBR Pro

My rating: 5 out of 5

I recently finished reading the last of my unread stack of books, took a look at my bank account and realized that continuing to buy more at the current time would be… unwise. So I started looking around the apartment for something else to read, but nothing really sparked my interest.

It probably wasn’t helping that a good friend of mine kept writing in her journal about how much she was enjoying rereading The Count of Monte Cristo. Then it occured to me that story is most likely in the public domain, so a quick jaunt over to Project Gutenberg and I’d confirmed that it was in fact in the public domain. Then I started downloading a copy of this and a few other stories when I realized that I didn’t have a book reader on my PDA any more. So I looked around at some review sites and ran across TiBR Pro by inDev Software. Niiiiiiiiice.

TiBR Pro supports reading eBooks off my PDA’s memory stick and even cooler; it allows me to rotate the screen sideways for a much more natural viewing area. They also had a free version, but the description didn’t mention reading from a memory stick and I’ve got enough stuff on my PDA that I really wanted that feature. So I coughed up the measly $9.951 and I’m most pleased with my purchase. So far I’ve worked my way through ~50% of The Count of Monte Cristo and I’ve already downloaded several other books that I look forward to reading using this great new tool!

As a side note while I was searching for eBook readers to load on my PDA; I ran across the ManyBooks website. ManyBooks takes etexts from places like Project Gutenberg and converts them into popular eBook formats. This makes it easier for lazy people like myself to quickly get the stories onto our PDAs for reading whenever we have a spare moment (e.g. during boring meetings).

1 I’ve seen other readers for my PDA costing twice that, which would definitly be out of my budget for the moment.

I’m probably just about the last person to mention this… but Darth Vader has a blog! It’s a well written blog taking an rather different sort of look inside the world of Vader. The references to other movies and books that the author works into the blog are rather funny and really, this quote just rocks:

Shape up or sputter to the floor unconscious — that’s my motto.

The Wheel of Time is a series of books by Robert Jordan. The series started out very promisingl, interesting characters, good descriptions, better dialog than I could ever come up with but the last couple of books, Crossroads of Twilight in particular, have failed to deliver on that early promise. The description has been focused more on how worried everybody in the story is without really giving a good sense for why they’re so worried. For all that Jordan has tried to make his villans, the Forsaken, seem to be horrendously powerful; the heros never seem to be truly overwhelmed by them. Rather the heros seem to simply lack the necessary self-confidence to deal with them. The other problem that the series is suffering from is “feature-creep”. First we had the Dark friends, then Padan Fain, then the Whitecloacks, then the Forsaken, then the Seachan. Is there going to be any end to the villians that are going to be thrown at the heros? Will we ever see a resolution to all the diverent plot threads that make up this series? From the way that last book read, I think Jordan has lost or forgotten whatever it was that he originally intended to do with the series and these days is more interested in turning just another book to continue the series because like George Lucas; he knows people might hate it but they’ll buy it anyway.