Summer Break

I unintentionally took a summer break from reading. It was nice. But summer's just about over, so now it's time to get back to it. Here are a few of the things I intend to check out tomorrow:

maybe not this exact book, but something very similar. I intend to do a few built-ins in the next house since it's a little smaller than the last.

I'm rather certain that the "in 24 hours" part is a farce, given what I know about Objective-C.

Saw this one in a book store a couple months ago but was too cheap to buy it.

Same story as above, but I might just get this one on Amazon.

Ruth Heller

Ruth Heller is an award winning designer and artist. I can't say I've read any of her books, but she had a series called "designs for coloring", and the two geometrics entries are favorites of mine. Essentially, they are grown-up coloring books. I first discovered them quite young, and bought a 50 pack of super tip crayola markers to color them. I have recently bought one of the geometric books again, to color again but also display in my house in some sort of artful way that has yet to be decided.

I found out today, after a quick Google search, that she was married and widowed twice, paid her way though college by being a secretary, and pursued art as a lifelong dream. Her first art job wasn't until she was close to her 40s, and her first book published a few years later. The ones I enjoy so much weren't published until she was in her late 60s.



Post originally published in a previous blog on 6/12/11

Re-entering the wizarding world

After reading The Hunger Games, I thought that maybe I was romanticizing how good Harry Potter was. Its been about a decade since I read the first couple books, so I decided to re-read them. Today while working out I read the first line of the first book:

"Mr. and Mrs. Dursley, of number four Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much."

The first line confirmed two things: its better than Hunger Games and I'm already excited.

HTML & CSS

A solid chunk of my library books have been from the 000 section. I learned basic Ruby last year, with the intent to learn Ruby on Rails. However, I had no knowledge of PHP or MySQL, and my HTML and CSS knowledge was rudimentary and outdated.
After a home remodeling intermission, I am back to programming. There is a better selection of HTML 5 and CSS 3 books now, which is a plus. I'm reading as I create my own site completely from scratch, written in jEdit.
The book pictured here isn't my favorite; a bit too wordy for me. The information within is very complete, and offers helpful bits of code (outside of HTML) that allow creation of more professional and complete websites.

Hunger Games Notes

There are few things I do because of peer pressure, but reading is one of them. A friend of mine read the first Hunger Games book and insisted that I read the trilogy along with her. I borrowed her book and blazed through in just a few hours. In fact, I think it took me about 12 hours to read the whole trilogy. I don't share this to brag, only to confess that I read them quick, and my impressions are reflective of that.

I will NOT mention any spoilers. Overall I felt that the basic framework of the story was great, but the execution fell short. It's not a bad trilogy, and it is for pre-teens after all. I will admit that I felt, while reading, that it was originally intended to be a trilogy for adults (especially considering the dark themes) and it was presented for teens because the writing was at more of a teen level. Maybe a comparison to another book would help me explain: The Harry Potter series is for kids but... it's not the quality of the writing that makes it so.

The books raises some questions about human rights, society, government, and love. I think that any authored story will have some statements that the literature makes, by virtue of how it is written. In the case of the Hunger Games, I found that some of the issues that drove action in the story were not brought to a meaningful or full conclusion. Some of the statements the books made, in my opinion, were inconclusive or lacking. Sometimes, there were elements of the story that were necessary for the reader's comprehension, but seemed out of place with the flow of the story. These tent pole moments were necessary to keep the story aloft, but were distracting.

I think that ends all the negative things I have to say about it. On the positive side, the framework of the story is interesting and thought provoking enough to be worth a read. Though some moments are truly tragic and heartbreaking, I think it is the situation that provokes these emotions. I'm not sure the writing was insightful and touching on its own accord. Even though the story is told in first person, I think the main character does not become as dynamic as I would have liked. Ok that was the last negative thing. But, these are impressions made during a quick read through. I may go back, read them more carefully, and write a real review.

Meta Review

These are the books I have read in roughly the last week:

Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell
Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter by Tom Bissell
Bossypants by Tina Fey
Super Mario: How Nintendo Conquered America by Jeff Ryan
The Sibling Effect by Jeffery Kluger

Having read them so closely together, I will pit them against one another in this meta-review. These books don't necessarily have anything to do with one another, though at times they do overlap. I often find that no matter what I read, if I read them in a short span of time I can't help to notice connections between them. The Outliers book was a grounding factor in explaining not only the success of an individual like Tina Fey, but also companies such as Nintendo. The Sibling Effect, which discusses how birth order and your siblings help shape your identity, is another unifying factor across the different books and the viewpoints of the people that wrote them.

Deepak Chopra

So, I've been reading quite a bit of Deepak Chopra, who is a spirituality enthusiast. As I read more, his books seem to be increasingly similar. I don't think that's a bad thing necessarily. They are easy reads and certainly urge you towards a place of peace. Here's my break down for each of the three books:

The Third Jesus:
I read this one first, after seeing it at the library. The subtitle seemed to hint at urgency ("the Christ we cannot ignore") and I was intrigued.

Why We Hate Us

The new rule for our book selection process is that we will pick each pick three books in turn and the other person will get to pick one of the three to read together. I think he just picked the shortest one, but that's ok.

The Elegance of The Hedgehog

My husband and I are trying to read books together. Let me first recap on our book reading history:
1. He picked first, we read The Hobbit. It was fine, but you know, it's the Hobbit. Having read it before, he read some of it and then stopped.
2. I picked Night, a short, true, and sad account of the holocaust by a survivor. Once he found out it was sad, he pretty much refused to read it. The books stayed checked out for over a year.
3. About two years later, we resumed with him picking The Elegance of the Hedgehog. It sucks.

 For the story that it ultimately aims to tell, The Elegance of The Hedgehog could have told better. With a little bit of editing, it could have told a slightly different story much better. The first half after the jump will remain spoiler free, the second half will not. Seeing as I don't advise you read the book, I think you should read the spoiler section too.

The Fight for English

Hey, remember this post? It was about Japan and English. Well, on the vein of explaining English, One fantastic book I have found is this: The Fight for English: How Pundits Ate, Shot, and Left by David Crystal. It gives a perfectly succinct history on English and how, in trying to make it a legitimate language, we borrowed from most everyone we thought was cool, only to eventually make it all hard to understand and random. For example, I didn't know that we just added in Latin type spellings for words to show origins as an afterthought. It's a quick read, good for short trips or a lazy afternoon. I'm somewhat surprised I didn't study some of this in college.

What is this?

I guess it takes an English Major to find three blogs completely necessary. I've fooled around with the idea of a book list, which would contain all the things I check out from the library as well as everything I read, as well as my thoughts and reviews about these books. I was originally going to limit it to a tumblr or twitter account, but both seemed limiting. That could be my major talking again.

These posts will mostly be in a casual, blog style. If I happen to write more complete reviews, I'll post them here and on the writing section of my website. I have some old reviews to move over, which will be the next few posts seen here. The formatting will be a little in flux until I get the style here firmed up, so please be tolerant of inconsistencies and mistakes.

I'll be pulling in odd bits of reviews and book related posts from the past first. The next few posts, for that reason, will be in no particular order and also somewhat old. 

That said, here comes a crap load of posts!