Content tagged with "books"

The 100 Most Influential Books Ever Written
Book Review
April 8, 2021
223

“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…”

Anecdotes vs. Principles
Blog Post
March 25, 2019
598

“I’m reading The Secret World: A History of Intelligence, which is the history of espionage around the world. It’s a magisterial work – some 800 pages. I’m struggling with it, and here’s why: it’s basically a collection of episodes and anecdotes. Each chapter is about some country or intelligence…”

The Bible: A Word Count Analysis
1221

An analysis of the word counts of every book of the Bible.

BiblioTech: Why Libraries Matter More Than Ever in the Age of Google
Deane’s Library
Book Review
November 10, 2015
123

“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…”

The Book
Deane’s Library
Book
6
The Book: A Cover-to-Cover Exploration of the Most Powerful Object of Our Time
Deane’s Library
Book Review
October 20, 2016
59

“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”

Bookshops: A Reader’s History
Deane’s Library
Book Review
April 21, 2023
348

“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…”

Bookstores: a Celebration of Independent Booksellers
Deane’s Library
Book Review
May 23, 2021
114

“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…”

Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper
Deane’s Library
Book Review
October 17, 2016
21
EPUB 3 Best Practices
Deane’s Library
Book Review
December 4, 2016
17
Excerpts from “Casino Royale”
Personal Blog
Blog Post
November 17, 2009
902

“I just got done reading ‘Casino Royale’ for the third or fourth time. This is the original novel, from 1953. It was the first James Bond novel, written by Ian Fleming from his estate in Jamaica. There are four excerpts I always remember about the book. I often page through to find them, so I figured…”

The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age
Deane’s Library
Book Review
November 3, 2019
138

“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…”

The Gutenberg Revolution
Deane’s Library
Book Review
April 30, 2017
87

“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…”

Hard Science Fiction
Stuff I Looked Up
Explanation
December 23, 2022
124

“This is genre of science fiction that’s concerned with scientific accuracy, with explaining how something might actually work in the real world. For example, The Martian was hard science fiction. It presented an example of what an astronaut might actually do if stranded on Mars. A lot of Daniel…”

How to Protect Bookstores and Why: The Present and Future of Bookselling
Deane’s Library
Book Review
August 8, 2024
290

“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…”

Information Hunters: When Librarians, Soldiers, and Spies Banded Together in World War II Europe
Deane’s Library
Book Review
October 25, 2023
261

“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…”

Libraries
Deane’s Library
Book Review
May 27, 2024
171

“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 –…”

The Library: A Fragile History
Deane’s Library
Book Review
April 8, 2023
249

“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…”

The Library Book
Deane’s Library
Book Review
December 30, 2019
166

“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…”

Life Lessons from Literature: Wisdom from 100 Classic Works
Deane’s Library
Book Review
December 7, 2023
300

“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…”

The Lost Bookshop
Deane’s Library
Book Review
April 8, 2024
280

“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…”

Memoir vs. Autobiography
Stuff I Looked Up
Explanation
June 26, 2023
392

“I consulted quite a few opinions, and the difference is pretty subjective. An autobiography is a factual account of someone’s life, whereas as a memoir is…murkier. Here’s one opinion: The difference between a memoir vs. an autobiography is that a memoir focuses on reflection and establishing an…”

A Non-Developer’s Guide to Relational Databases
12738

An unfinished ebook explaining relational databases as simply as possible.

On Paper: The Everything of Its Two-Thousand-Year History
Deane’s Library
Book Review
May 2, 2024
372

“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…”

On the Interestingness and Usefulness of Books
Personal Blog
Blog Post
November 12, 2014
931

“I’m reading more now than at any time in my life. I set a 2014 goal of one book per week , and as of the second week in November, I’m at 58. Additionally, I’ve been keeping track of my reading at Goodreads, and I try to write a short review of each book when I finish it. This has the effect of…”

Once Upon a Tome: The Misadventures of a Rare Bookseller
Deane’s Library
Book Review
April 5, 2024
268

“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…”

Reading Shakespeare
Personal Blog
Blog Post
December 25, 2014
684

“My reading goal in 2014 was 52 books . I ended up reading 66 . My tentative goal for 2015 is to read all of Shakespeare’s 38 plays. I started early with The Merchant of Venice. I read the text first – it’s quite short, but slow, slow going. Shakespeare being Shakespeare, the writing is…”

Stalin’s Library: A Dictator and His Books
Deane’s Library
Book Review
January 17, 2024
39

“Here are some notes I took on the acquisition of this book:

Bought at City Lights in San Francisco”

Where is your Iceland?
Personal Blog
Blog Post
December 6, 2014
505

“I just finished ‘Brave New World,’ a novel written in 1932 that describes the ‘perfection’ of society through science. Parallel to the advancement of science, ‘Brave New World’ deals with the retardation of creativity and individuality. Humans in a civilized society are expected to fit in. ‘Everyone…”