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…
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…
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…
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 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 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…
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…
An unfinished ebook explaining relational databases as simply as possible.
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 , 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…
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 . 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…
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…