Content tagged with “books”

“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’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 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…”

“ Dan Brown might have written a weird humor book, but no one knows for sure, and you can’t seem to buy it, no matter how hard you try. ”

“ The Trap is the third installment of the Emma Makepeace series. It was fun and lightweight, like the first two — here’s my review . I did notice that the author has since written a novel outside that series, which I hope doesn’t mean she’s abandoned it. ”

“ A retrospective and examination of the ground-breaking interactive fiction series from the 1980s. ”

“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…”

“ A Japanese craftsman restores a book. (Turn on the closed captions for an English translation.) ”

“ The director of The Godfather discusses the physical binder and notes he used to adapt the novel. ”

“ Wales has a library combined with a hotel, so you can sleep next to the books. ”

“ A beautiful contemplation of the physical book as art object, with pictures of people who collection for no other reason than that books make them happy. ”

“British author Jeffrey Archer supplied recommendations for ‘The Best Heist and Con Artist Books’ novels over on Five Books named Goldfinger as the best heist novel . I find this interesting because, while the film version is wildly popular, I thought the novel was weaker. (Speaking of Jeffrey…”

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

“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….”

“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…”

“ An annotated photo gallery showing the detailed process by which a physical book is produced. ”

“ A sobering look at how the publishing industry works, from the perspective of a promising author for whom things didn’t work out so well. ”

“ Lovely tribute to the first CD-ROM encyclopedia that many of us owned, and the sense of wonder that it brought us. Wikipedia killed it, but Encarta was a refuge for me for many years. ”

“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…”

“ The NYC libraries used to have live-in caretakers. Their abandoned apartments are still in many of the the buildings. ”

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

“ A very niche list of science fiction stories that were originally set in ‘the future,’ but that real time has now surpassed, meaning the stories are now set in the past. ”

“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…”

“ Very expensive self-published books on Amazon were likely used to launder money, purchased by people wanting to illicitly transfer funds to the seller. ”

“I was previously unaware of The Moneypenny Diaries which is a short book series that tells James Bond adventures from the perspective of Miss Moneypenny (did anyone know her first name is apparently ‘Jane’?). It doesn’t seem like the series got too far, but there some short stories published in…”

“ A son comes to terms with his late father’s secret career as a writer of pulp porn novels. He wrestles with the darkness that grew out it and that which it might have hidden from the world. ”

“ The NY Times released The Top 50 Thrillers of the 21st Century . Slow Horses is #9. I enjoyed that — here’s my review from a few years back. ”

“Linked below is a very sobering article about how the publishing industry works. The author read all the transcripts from the antitrust case stemming from Penguin Random House trying to buy Simon & Shuster (it was blocked). From the testimony, the author draws out some statistics: The industry is…”

“I enjoy business fiction, though so much of it is written badly. Below are some titles I’ve read (or am reading) that I enjoyed. The key for me is verisimilitude – it has to ‘feel’ right. We all know when a story feels contrived, and I’ve read more than a few of those too. But all four of these…”

“I’m old enough to remember when the technology book section at Barnes and Noble was almost overwhelming. It was both sides of a long aisle, just teeming with books. For a while, it would even spill over to another aisle. The other day, I took a picture of what’s left. At my local Barnes and Noble,…”

“I read a random exchange the other day between Kate Thomas and Margot Bloomstein about old tech books. I don’t even totally know what they were discussing, but it got me thinking about my weird penchant for buying or hanging onto industry books out of some kind of nostalgia. I grabbed a bunch from…”

“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…”

“ For various reasons, older books were created or bound with materials that are poisonous. There is a project to find and catalog them all, and research ways to safely store toxic books ”

“ An episode of a web series that focuses on hand-crafted goods. This one is about a dying breed of bookmaker. ”

“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 read the James Bond novel Seafire while on a business trip. This is from 1994, which is late in the John Gardner era — he only wrote one more original Bond novel after this one. It was…okay. I’ve never loved Gardner’s work. Here’s my review . ”

“ Someone is using all sorts of email tricks to get early access to novel manuscripts. No one knows who they are or what they want, but everyone in the industry is paranoid. ”

“ The story of the book which started the ‘heavenly tourism’ craze of a decade ago. The boy at the center of it eventually recanted the entire story, and his already-flawed family completely broke apart. ”

“ A man opened a bookstore in a downtown building and set off a multi-year conflict over a homeless encampment. ”

“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….”

“ A librarian in upstate New York was the first to bring the Internet into libraries and coined the term ‘surfing’ to describe browsing the internet. ”