What are you reading - now?

[Merry]

I've just read Don't Tell Mum I Work on the Rigs... by Paul Carter. I borrowed it and the sequel This is Not a Drill... from work colleagues and aren't the sort of thing I'd usually read, but since I work in a closely related industry, I thought they might be interesting.

Carter will certainly never win any awards for his writing but the first book is slightly amusing in a very blokey sort of way, I suppose. More of the same in the sequel, methinks.

[Prometheus]

The Shadow Voyage is the recounting of the German Luxury Liner Bremen's stealth voyage from NYC to Germany at the initiation of WWII. Due to her speed, the Bremen was a particularly attractive target for the allies as a converted troup ship if captured, and a morale booster if sunk. She and her crew were forced to slip out of NYC and run a gauntlet of subs and destroyers seeking her out.

Some of the more interesting aspects detail how, prior to the ascension of Hitler, the ship was a huge good-will booster between the US and Germany, and how after Hitler's rise, the ship became a lightning rod for many protests against Nazi Germany. This is despite the fact that the vast majority of the crew disdained the Nazis. It's a good reminder that not everyone in Nazi Germany was a Nazi.

It's a fast-paced read with just enough Naval history and architecture/WWII espionage and history to keep you interested.

[Merry]

For those of you so inclined. If so, the (long) article New Yorker review of the Kindle is worth a read, too.

The last time I checked, Amazon don't sell Kindles outside the US , so I can't comment on what they're like, but I think this is really scary:

And remember, you can never lend, resell or pass on an A or B e-book. You’re buying into proprietary, copy-protected formats — which can have its downsides. Last month, for example, Amazon erased “1984” and “Animal Farm” from its customers’ Kindles by remote control, having discovered a problem with the rights. Amazon refunded the price, but the sense of violation many customers felt was a disturbing wake-up call.

Anyone here have one, or something similar? Comments?


New Entry in E-Books Is a Paper Tiger

By DAVID POGUE

Suppose there are two rival companies — let’s call them A and B. Each wants to dominate the blossoming world of electronic books.

Company A (that’s A as in “Amazon”) began life selling physical books online. Its reading gadget, the Kindle, stores hundreds of books in a plastic slab that weighs only 10 ounces. To accompany the Kindle, Company A built an enormous electronic-book store, filled with 345,000 books that can be downloaded to the Kindle in 30 seconds (each).

Company B (that’s B as in “Barnes & Noble”) waited patiently. “Let’s let A get all the arrows in its back,” it said.

Then A released a free program that lets you read your A e-books on iPhones and iPod Touches. Now you don’t need a Kindle at all.

Last week, Company B finally struck back with its own e-book empire. It’s intended to be just like A’s — only better.

Instead of 345,000 books, B’s catalog has 700,000. Instead of just the iPhone and Touch, B’s free book-reading app is also available for the BlackBerry.

You get five free out-of-copyright books to start you off (“Dracula,” “Sense and Sensibility” and so on). Instead of one typeface, B’s book-reader programs give you a choice of many. Instead of just black, white or sepia, B’s software lets you choose any color scheme you like.

A slightly jerky Autoscroll option continuously rolls text up the screen, so you don’t have to turn pages at all. On the iPhone, there’s a bookshelf cover-flipping mode that’s modeled on Apple’s Cover Flow feature.

Above all, B lets you read your books on your Mac or Windows computer. That is a huge advantage; believe it or not, there are still some people who don’t have iPhones or Kindles.

The bottom line: At least on paper (does anyone still use that expression?), Barnes & Noble’s new e-empire seems to trump Amazon’s.

In practice, however, there’s more to the story.

First, there’s no Barnes & Noble equivalent of the Kindle yet. In “early 2010,” its books will be available on a new Kindle rival: a very thin, buttonless, touch-screen reader from a company called Plastic Logic.
Plastic Logic markets its machine as a business-document reader — but maybe it will be good for leisure-book reading, too.

Second, B’s claim to have the “world’s largest e-bookstore” is slightly suspect. It acknowledges that, of its 700,000 titles, 500,000 are ancient, public-domain texts that have been scanned by Google’s Books project.

Some of them have funny line breaks and weird typos like “vzen” instead of “when” and “i86f” instead of “1861.” There are other complications. You can’t search Google’s catalog explicitly when you’re in the mood for something free; on the other hand, those obscure Google texts clutter up your search results when you’re looking for a more current book.

Besides, if you want free, out-of-copyright books, you can get them on the Kindle, too. They await at Gutenberg.org and other free sites.

In fact, when it comes to books you might actually want to read, B’s bookstore seems smaller than A’s. Many recent (and not-so-recent) best sellers are sold by A but not by B: “Breakfast at Tiffany’s,” “Bonfire of the Vanities,” “Catcher in the Rye,” “What to Expect When You’re Expecting.”
Meanwhile, it’s hard to find popular books that are offered by B but not by A.

In other words, Barnes & Noble may have more books by pure quantity, but a lot of it is filler.

The real shocker, though, is how much more expensive B’s books are. Both companies offer free sample chapters and $10 pricing on current best sellers. But beyond that, check it out: “The Lovely Bones” (A charges $10, B charges $12). “The Kite Runner” ($10 versus $12). “Dune” ($8 versus $12.80). “Freakonomics” ($10 versus $16). “Lord of the Rings Trilogy” ($12.25 versus $30).

(B’s press officer countered with a list of 2009 books that cost $10 from B and more from A. But compare best-seller lists from past years, and it’s clear that A almost always underprices B.)

And remember, you can never lend, resell or pass on an A or B e-book. You’re buying into proprietary, copy-protected formats — which can have its downsides. Last month, for example, Amazon erased “1984” and “Animal Farm” from its customers’ Kindles by remote control, having discovered a problem with the rights. Amazon refunded the price, but the sense of violation many customers felt was a disturbing wake-up call.

Furthermore, a huge number of important books are still missing from both catalogs. A recent New Yorker review of the Kindle identified a huge list of them: “The Bourne Identity,” “Catch-22,” “Portnoy’s Complaint,” “A Clockwork Orange,” “The Jewel in the Crown,” “The World According to Garp,” “The Remains of the Day,” anything by Jean Stafford, Saul Bellow, Frederick Exley and Graham Greene and others. Nor will you find any “Harry Potter” novels, anything by John Grisham, “A Brief History of Time,” “Jaws,” “The Horse Whisperer” or “Who Moved My Cheese?”

These books are missing because the authors or publishers refuse to sell electronic editions, but it’s still a black eye for the e-book industry in general.
All right then. So B’s e-books may cost more. But at least you have the privilege of reading them on more screens, right?

Yes, but it’s not all sunshine and bunnies. For example, each version (Mac, PC, iPhone, BlackBerry) lets you annotate your e-books, highlight passages or copy bits of text. (The four eReader program versions are touched-up editions of software that Barnes & Noble acquired last spring.)

But none lets you shop for books; you have to do that on the Web. That’s especially confusing on the iPhone, where tapping Shop takes you out of the Reader app and into your Web browser. Once you’ve bought the book, you have to navigate back to your Home screen and reopen the reader app.

The stripped-down Mac version of the Reader is especially baffling; it doesn’t even list your books. Before you can start reading a book you’ve bought, you have to navigate away from the buying page to your online library, download the book, switch to the reader program, find and open the book on your hard drive, and type in your name and credit card number a second time.

More confusion: If, on the iPhone, you tap on a category (like Romance or Sci-Fi) and then Shop, you’re taken to the general store Search box in your Web browser. In other words, you chose a category for nothing.

Buying a “free” book entails a 1-cent charge on your credit card, which is refunded at checkout (huh?). And B doesn’t offer “page where I stopped” synching among different gadgets, as A does. If you read up to page 231 on your PC at work, you have to flip to that page manually on your iPhone for the ride home.

Barnes & Noble’s e-book initiative has some bright spots: the iPhone and Windows apps are mostly excellent, the concept of free access to public-domain books is sound and being able to read your e-books on your laptop is a no-brainer.

But over all, this is a 1.0 effort — which, incidentally, the company acknowledges. It vows to address the shortcomings.

Maybe then we can raise the company’s grade from a B to an A.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/06/te...WT.mc_ev=click

[crazzycat]

Beatle's biography
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In love with animated gifs!

[JCMAN320]

Joe Torre; The Yankee Years

[Gulcrapek]

Chomsky on Miseducation, for my Teaching Architecture class.

[BrooklynRider]

"Triangle: The Fire That Changed America" by Dave von Drehle

[Boredatwork]

The latest Dexter novel, Dexter by Design i think its called. Must be difficult for Lindsay to write now, given how different the Dexter on TV is to his original creation.

So far so good.

[BrooklynRider]

Now reading "The Lost Symbol" by Dan Brown.

I'm a hundred pages in and it is typical Dan Brown. When an author's writing gets to the point where it can be called "typical", it's a bad sign.

His conspiracy theories are interesting, but his storylines are really getting tiresome.

[CherryBlossom]

The Shack

[meesalikeu]

i just finished haruki murakami's 'dansu, dansu dansu' aka dance dance dance.

so now i've read everything he has written except for 'umbibe no kafuku' aka kafka on the shore...i guess that's next!

he also has a new novel, a two-parter, called 'ichi kyuu hatchi yon' aka 1Q84 (kyuu = 9 in japanese) that is still on the book charts in japan and has yet to be translated, so i'm looking forward to that one too.

he's sort of a japanese kurt vonegut. i like his stories because of the urban alienation themes and his japanese twist on magical realism.

more info on murakami-san:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haruki_Murakami

[BrooklynRider]

I'm reading "Three Cups of Tea" by By Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin

This book is now mandatory reading for certain divisions of the U.S. State Department. Many thought this guy was going to win a Nobel Peace Prize.

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. Some failures lead to phenomenal successes, and this American nurse's unsuccessful attempt to climb K2, the world's second tallest mountain, is one of them. Dangerously ill when he finished his climb in 1993, Mortenson was sheltered for seven weeks by the small Pakistani village of Korphe; in return, he promised to build the impoverished town's first school, a project that grew into the Central Asia Institute, which has since constructed more than 50 schools across rural Pakistan and Afghanistan. Coauthor Relin recounts Mortenson's efforts in fascinating detail, presenting compelling portraits of the village elders, con artists, philanthropists, mujahideen, Taliban officials, ambitious school girls and upright Muslims Mortenson met along the way. As the book moves into the post-9/11 world, Mortenson and Relin argue that the United States must fight Islamic extremism in the region through collaborative efforts to alleviate poverty and improve access to education, especially for girls. Captivating and suspenseful, with engrossing accounts of both hostilities and unlikely friendships, this book will win many readers' hearts.

From Bookmarks Magazine

While critics agree that Three Cups of Tea should be read for its inspirational value rather than for its literary merit, the book's central theme, derived from a Baltistan proverb, rings loud and clear. "The first time you share tea with a Balti, you are a stranger," a villager tells Greg Mortenson. "The second time, you are an honored guest. The third time you become family." An inspirational story of one man's efforts to address poverty, educate girls, and overcome cultural divides, Three Cups, which won the 2007 Kiriyama Prize for nonfiction,reveals the enormous obstacles inherent in becoming such "family." Despite the important message, critics quibbled over the awkward prose and some melodrama. After all, a story as dramatic and satisfying as this should tell itself.

[hbcat]

Mark Haddon, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (2003).






Highly-recommended.

[Merry]

Currently reading the first Harry Dresden book, Storm Front, by Jim Butcher.

I think I'm going to like Harry .

Not dissimilar in some ways to Simon R. Green's John Taylor character in the Nightside series, which I've thoroughly enjoyed.

In a similar vein and also recommended are authors Rob Thurman, John Levitt and Marc del Franco.