Not really books but meta-books: I was recently introduced to Calibre, which was a revelation for me and which I now use to organize all of my books. Previously it had been very hard for me to keep track of what books I had and what books I was reading and that sort of thing. Courtesy of Calibre, here is a list of fiction books I’ve read recently:
Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. Has some interesting social criticism.
Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age. I really like the idea of the Primer but the book also basically has as a theme that strong AI is impossible, which was less cool.
Diane Duane’s Young Wizards series #3 and #4. I read #1 and #2 as a kid and never got around to the rest of the series, so I wanted to fix that. They’re shorter than I remember and Duane bandies around terms like entropy without really understanding them, which always annoys me in an author.
Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book. This is probably one of the better children’s books in existence, but it may not hold an adult’s attention. If you haven’t read any Gaiman before, American Gods is probably a better introduction.
Jacqueline Carey’s Kushiel’s Legacy series #1, #2, and #3. I think I started reading these because Eliezer mentioned them here. I wasn’t really expecting all the sex and religion but I ended up finding it quite interesting. These books were hard to put down. They’re also quite long: I felt like in each book somewhere between two and three books’ worth of stuff happens.
Calibre is the most useful software with the worst interface ever. I use Sumatra PDF when on a Windows box or the epub reader addon for Firefox.
When I had a BlackBerry, though, I did find Calibre’s command-line interface stunningly useful, ’cos the only ebook reader for BB is old stray copies of MobiReader, and ebook-convert is just the thing to convert epub to mobi.
Calibre really annoyed me every time I tried it—it seemed intent on moving my whole collection to another folder and the interface was horribly unintuitive. I’d really like a better program with similar functionality, but alas, I haven’t been able to find anything so far.
Not really books but meta-books: I was recently introduced to Calibre, which was a revelation for me and which I now use to organize all of my books. Previously it had been very hard for me to keep track of what books I had and what books I was reading and that sort of thing. Courtesy of Calibre, here is a list of fiction books I’ve read recently:
Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. Has some interesting social criticism.
Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age. I really like the idea of the Primer but the book also basically has as a theme that strong AI is impossible, which was less cool.
Diane Duane’s Young Wizards series #3 and #4. I read #1 and #2 as a kid and never got around to the rest of the series, so I wanted to fix that. They’re shorter than I remember and Duane bandies around terms like entropy without really understanding them, which always annoys me in an author.
Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book. This is probably one of the better children’s books in existence, but it may not hold an adult’s attention. If you haven’t read any Gaiman before, American Gods is probably a better introduction.
Jacqueline Carey’s Kushiel’s Legacy series #1, #2, and #3. I think I started reading these because Eliezer mentioned them here. I wasn’t really expecting all the sex and religion but I ended up finding it quite interesting. These books were hard to put down. They’re also quite long: I felt like in each book somewhere between two and three books’ worth of stuff happens.
Calibre is the most useful software with the worst interface ever. I use Sumatra PDF when on a Windows box or the epub reader addon for Firefox.
When I had a BlackBerry, though, I did find Calibre’s command-line interface stunningly useful, ’cos the only ebook reader for BB is old stray copies of MobiReader, and ebook-convert is just the thing to convert epub to mobi.
Calibre really annoyed me every time I tried it—it seemed intent on moving my whole collection to another folder and the interface was horribly unintuitive. I’d really like a better program with similar functionality, but alas, I haven’t been able to find anything so far.
I felt that book was half “yep, I can see things going that way, interesting” and half “no, stop, things don’t work that way.”
Have you read The Jungle Books, which it was (in some ways) styled after? I found Kipling’s significantly better.