Content tagged with "books"
I didn’t love this book. Note that the author is claiming the 100 “most influential” books, not the best . I got annoyed with the arrogance of the author. He writes with a palpable disdain for anything he doesn’t like, particularly religion. Be prepared for a lot of very old books that you probably…
This book is a vague manifesto for change. The author is a lawyer that was appointed to some commission to study libraries, and this book feels like the result of his research. He’s essentially pushing for libraries to de-emphasize physical collections, and emphasize the role of librarians and…
i didn’t write a formal review of this, but i talk about the book quite a bit in this blog post: The Book Itself: Four Thoughts on the Enduring Value of the Printed Book
I really tried with this book, but I had to abandon it. This is one of those books that doesn’t really have a point. It’s just a meandering journey through one guy’s love of bookshops around the world. He apparently visited 1,000 of them. I read his Wikipedia page, where I found this: He uses to…
Lovely coffee table picture book of independent bookstores from around the world. The writer/photographer spent a lot of time in several major cities – San Francisco, NYC, London, Paris, Vienna, and some smaller cities in Germany, Portugal and The Netherlands. Each bookstore gets a small essay from…
This was written in 1994, just when the web and hypertext were showing up. The author is concerned about a diminishing ability of students to read long-form, static text. In addition to hypertext, he points to DVD and audiobooks. Clearly, his perspective would be wildly different now. ebooks didn’t…
I love the subject but just couldn’t connect with the writing style. I found it confusing. Not an entirely bad book – it presents Gutenberg as a businessman , and covers all the religious and political conflict in Mainz, Germany that helped the printing revolution along. After Gutenberg’s death, he…
This is kind of a depressing book. It’s about local bookstores and how they’re under incredible threat from Amazon and – the book claims – the Right wing of American politics. The author is the owner of a small bookstore in the college town of Lawrence, Kansas. Each chapter is a discussion with…
This is a history book that answers the question: what did librarians do to help the war effort during World War II? Well, a lot it turns out. They amassed foreign periodicals and scoured them for intelligence information They captured and cataloged information left behind in German facilities after…
This is a very big coffee table book of library photography. I’m not sure there’s much more to say than that. It’s enormous. It probably weighs 10 pounds. The photography is amazing. The pages are so big, it’s absorbing. However, it’s worth pointing out that a lot of libraries are very, very old –…
This is exactly what it promised – a long, detailed history of libraries, from scrolls in chests to books on the shelves. Libraries really started with the church. They were first repositories of books, and they grew from there. Back in the day, books were expensive because mass printing was in its…
I thought this was a novel. It’s not. But it’s wonderful. It’s the story of: The 1986 fire at the Los Angeles library and its subsequent investigation and aftermath The larger Los Angeles library system and its history The future of libraries in general The three topics interweave throughout the…
This is a very light, fun book that profiles 100 famous works from history and why they matter – what larger life lesson can we draw from them. Each work is given a quick summary of both the plot and the lesson. For example, here’s Crime and Punishment : Synopsis: A penniless former student plans…
This was a fun novel I picked up at Costco. These days, I’m kind of a sucker for the “magic book” genre . It’s set in Ireland, and jumps around in time between two periods and three characters. Martha and Henry meet each other, so their stories intertwine. The chapters are first-person and alternate…
This is an…eclectic history of paper. It starts where you would expect it to – somewhere in China, where paper was invented. The author traced the history while on a “paper history” tour. But then the book goes to some fascinating places as it investigates the role paper has played in our lives, in…
I don’t really know what to do with this one. It’s a pretty unique book, but I really liked it. It’s fiction, but not regular fiction. It’s like a series of blog posts written in the first person by a man who went to work at an old book shop in London. Each post is some aspect of what it’s like to…
Here are some notes I took on the acquisition of this book:
Bought at City Lights in San Francisco
