OK, this is sort of in response to Mom’s post about how we don’t post much. She’s painting, I’m reading. I did make a new category, though, with the thought that as I finish a book I’ll put something up in this category saying that I’d done so.
Just finished “Hiding the Elephant: How Magicians Invented the Imossible and Learned to Disappear”
Thought it was going to be a history of magic book, and it sort of was. It was the history of magic leading to the trick of hiding an elephant. Imagine that you just saw a historical special on this trick, and you turn to your friend, the expert magician and magic historian, and say ‘how did they come up with that trick?’ And then he answers you. Exhaustively.
Of course, the author knows what he’s doing, so he picked the right trick to explain. Explaining it takes you through 100 years – mid 1800s through mid 1900s – I’d say the full era, though not the full history of magic. And also of course, the author knows what he’s doing, so he doesn’t actually explain much of the details of the trick (or any of the other tricks leading to the elephant). But that’s ok, as he points out that the story and the magic is in the performance, not the mechanics. Many of the tricks premiered in science lecture halls on the interesting properties of optics – the same mechanism was either scientific lecture or magic, depending on whether the presenter was a scientific lecturer or a magician. And besides, as he points out and the extensive notes show, if I’m interested in how it was done I can find that out.
So, 300 pages and 100 years of interesting people. A cultural biography from a new perspective (new to me, anyway). It might have been better if I’d been a little more familiar, with the time, the topic, or the characters. But it is a well written book, easy to follow and be interested in even when you’re not all that familiar with the topic.
I think your book report category is a good one to add. You read so many obscure and interesting books… Actually you could make a cluster of reports right now on books you remember, Sometimes you tell me about a book and i remember the book but not the title. If you make book reports here i could go back and find a book that lingered in my mind. What was the title of the one on Mary Queen of Scots? And what was that one that delt with or mentioned the mixing of the Anglo and Saxon languages?
I like that you like my books 🙂
The Anglo/Saxon language thing is from lots of books read at many different times ago. I can’t think of which one I might use as a good source for that. Hmm.
The Elizabeth/Mary one is Elizabeth and Mary: Cousins, Rivals, Queens. It was sooo good. It’s on Amazon, too.
Sigh. I really need to organize my books. Thinking of reviewing them makes me think of how much I need to catalog them. There are some interesting software packages out there – need to really test them.
Might I suggest LibraryThing
While I don’t use it myself (I would love to use it, if there was a version that I could either run on my own computer or host on my own), but I know people that do. Nothing but good reviews. One person commented that after entering the free 200 books, they found the system was recommending many good books they didn’t enter… but did already own. They thought it was kinda funny that the system was already predicting what their library had.
As for organizing books… after this last move, our organizational structure is “Books go over there, sorta”.
The one I’m lusting after is Booxter. Oh, for a Macintosh!
The ones I was looking at for PC land were Book Organizer and Readerware. There are others that cost more. Not listing them…
I had not seen LibraryThing before, though. It does look quite intersting. I’d probably go ahead and get the lifetime membership for unlimited books, if I went that way.
The nifty feature of Booxter is the ability to use a webcam to scan the barcode, at which point all the book info appears directly in your book index. The other two will let you use a barcode scanner to do something similar, but unfortunately I don’t have one of those. And since I’m looking at something nearer to 2000 than 200, scanning is a lot more attractive than typing in isbns, authors, titles, or any of that.
But – here’s the thought currently being percolated – If I could use something like Barcopedia, and then import that output into one of these less-enabled but pc-compatible cataloging thingies … well, that might work.
I’d have to get a webcam. But I want one of those anyway. But on the other side, typing in the barcode number for a couple of books (newer and more ‘popular interest’ titles) – to see what the output looks like – didn’t return any matches. So Barcopedia probably doesn’t have access to book databases … and that puts me right back at square one – lusting after Booxter.
Those programs look interesting for keeping tabs on the collected books around the house.
I think my preference goes to Readerware. Development is ongoing (based on last release done this year; Book Organizer doesn’t look like it has been updated since 2005), it does data export/import (backups!), and you might be able to get a free CueCat scanner when ordering.
Still, I think that the LibraryThing would be more interesting in that it does book recommendations and such.
I’m beginning to think that I’d actually do both Readerware and LibraryThing. Readerware for most usage, but I’d import stuff to LibraryThing to get recommendations and to make sharing libraries with other people easier.
And heck, a lifetime subscription to LibraryThing is pretty cheap, so why not?
I’d also like to note that I’ve thought about getting a Mac Mini. I’d get the base $799 model, and buy upgrade ram elsewhere to install myself. $100 + my time to install 2gig of RAM vs paying apple $250… yeah, I’d do it myself.
But that still means I’d be dropping nearly $1000 on a machine that I’m not even sure if I’d like. Another ~$400 – $600 dollars on a monitor.
I dunno. Maybe I’d like it. Maybe I’d love it so much I wouldn’t want a Windows machine around anymore.
Next step would be an apple laptop (MacBook Pro starts at 2k) or the full out Mac Pro desktop (starts at 2.5k). That’s a lot of money to me.
I went ahead and registered with LibraryThing. Seemed like a fairly low risk start up.
Entered ~20 books from memory and from what’s behind me on the shelf. Maybe if I just tackle it little bits at a time, the 2000 wouldn’t be that terrible. It was pretty easy, though I don’t think I have the correct edition for the ones I entered. But I guess that’s not really critical.
ooo… what do you think of it? can you do a quick mini-review?
Sure… mini-review: so far so good.
A lot of the seeming attraction of the software is in the social networking capabilities, and I haven’t used it long enough or extensively enough to know anything about that – I mean, I have 25 books in my ‘collection’. It’s not enough to highlight shared interests with others.
Signing up and getting started was easy – just start typing. The process of entering books into your collection is pretty intuitive. However, there are a couple of weaknesses…
Picking the right edition from the list they give you is a bit tricky. They’re pulling book and edition information from several different sources, so looking for something with lots of editions – like, say, Fellowship of the Ring – can be a bit frustrating. From the first menu, you really have to just pick one and fine tune it later (maybe entering the ISBN would give you better results). You can go in later and edit information, but that process is not quite as intuitive – and besides, it’s time consuming.
Same for cover graphics – I’m not sure I really understand all the rules on cover graphics yet, and it seems to take 4-5 clicks to change one … it’s an OK system.
There seems to be more to it than I’ve gotten into thus far – some options for improving their master catalog, stuff like that. And I haven’t made any use of the tagging or ranking options.
I did look briefly in their recommended sections – not really a fair test at the moment since it has few books to base recommendations on. But they were decent recommendations.
ummm … can’t think of many other categories for comment. My username is ‘Majella’ if you want to go look up my library.
looking around their site I noticed they sell some of the CueCat things for pretty cheap (especially compared to a regular scanner bought from amazon; they start around $60)
I’ve thought of joining just for fun and getting the CueCat to make entering books easy (and more likely to be done)
You can get a CueCat on e-bay for $10. My problem is that I had one, and then when we started unpacking we went on this ‘get rid of stuff’ flurry (remember that?) and I threw it away.
So I’m not about to spend $10 on something that I threw away just a few months ago. It would irritate me.
More than it already does.