Content tagged with “books”

“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…”

“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 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 is very short – it’s a glorified pamphlet, really. The best I can say is that it introduced me to George Perec, who is a French writer. He died in 1982, but he did a lot with something called constrained writing, which is where you put arbitrary constraints on your writing to do something…”

“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…”

“ This is a spellbook – a mythical textbook of magic. The etymology is not clear. ”

“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…”

“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 Latin for ‘let it be printed.’ After the printing press was created, it came to be printed on the inside cover of a book to show who had given approval for the book to be distributed. I found lots of pronunciations, mostly differing on the third syllabus: ‘im-prim-MAY-tor’ ‘im-prim-MAH-tor’…”

“This refers to printed material from Europe prior to the 1500s. (It’s the plural form; the singular is ‘incunabule.’) The etymology is from a Latin word meaning ‘swaddling clothes,’ which refers to the ‘infancy’ of printing during this period. (Gutenberg invented the printing press in the 1430s.)…”

“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…”

“This is a very (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,…”

“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 (a book I did not care for, incidentally):…”

“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…”

“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’m reading more now than at any time in my life. I set a 2014 goal of one book per week (52 in all), 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…”

“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…”

“My reading goal in 2014 was 52 books (one per week). I ended up reading 66 (and counting). 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…”

“I didn’t love this book. Note that the author is claiming the 100 ‘most influential’ books, not the best (which is subjective anyway). I got annoyed with the arrogance of the author. He writes with a palpable disdain for anything he doesn’t like, particularly religion. (I mean, we get it – you’re…”

“ 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 ”

“This is a small coffee table book, really. It’s mostly pictures, with a slight narrative running through it. It’s published by the Library of Congress directly, and has a foreword from Carla Hayden, the current director. There are a few chapters which talk about the history of trying to organize…”

“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 not a very good one), and covers all the religious and political conflict in Mainz, Germany that helped the printing revolution along….”

“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 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…”

“This was a fun novel I picked up at Costco. These days, I’m kind of a sucker for the ‘magic book’ genre (see Cloud Cuckoo Land or The Midnight Library ). It’s set in Ireland, and jumps around in time between two periods and three characters. Opaline is a woman on the run from her maniacal brother…”

“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….”