One of our recent Netflix rentals was The End of Suburbia. I’ve been reading quite a bit on urban planning lately, especially New Urbanism, and somewhere along my journey I found a pointer to this movie. I’ll hopefully write about New Urbanism later, but for this post I want to focus on the movie and my family’s reaction to it.
I finally finished reading one of Charles Dickens’ masterpieces, Great Expectations. I loved Volume 1 (Pip’s childhood) — Dickens’ humor is prevalent, and Pip is a lovable character. I have to admit, I got bogged down in Volume 2. The pace felt slow to me, and I hated the progression of Pip’s character. Volume 3 was an excellent finish though! Lots of threads (which I didn’t even realize had been left dangling) were all collected together, and Pip was redeemed.
This is a great book, although I thought Our Mutual Friend was even better. If you haven’t read either of these books, they’re almost surely available from your local library. I know the Sacramento Library has copies of both books. Check them out and enjoy!
Some time ago I was waiting in line at the DMV, wishing that I had remembered to bring a book with me, when I realized that I always carried my PDA–why not just look for some free e-texts and slurp a few of them into my Handspring? This way I could always have a few books with me, without having to carry paperbacks in my back pockets.
My first stop was Project Gutenburg. They have a huge collection, but it’s limited to works whose copyright has expired. I wanted to read Dickens’ Great Expectations, so this was a worthwhile site. They have many other classics, and even some modern works whose authors have granted PG the rights to distribute their books. But the genre I’m most interested in reading for pleasure is science fiction, particularly contemporary SF, and there is a dearth of that on PG.
A web search for “free science fiction etext” brought me to the Baen Free Library, a site where authors give away some or all of their backlist in hopes of garnering readers’ interest (and money) for their in-print work. It’s also a demonstration against misguided attempts to combat online piracy by ever-tighter restrictions:
Any cure which relies on tighter regulation of the market — especially the kind of extreme measures being advocated by some people — is far worse than the disease. As a widespread phenomenon rather than a nuisance, piracy occurs when artificial restrictions in the market jack up prices beyond what people think are reasonable. The “regulation-enforcement-more regulation” strategy is a bottomless pit which continually recreates (on a larger scale) the problem it supposedly solves. And that commercial effect is often compounded by the more general damage done to social and political freedom. – from Introducing the Baen Free Library
Well, this was exactly what I was looking for, and the fact that I support the philosophy behind the site is a special bonus. I checked out a few titles and finally decided 1632 sounded interesting enough to download. I liked the story so much that I have now purchased hardcopies of all the books set in that universe. In fact, I’ve discovered about a half-dozen authors via the BFL, and several feet of my bookshelf are occupied by books whose authors “gave away” their work on the BFL, further vindicating the spirit of the project.
The BFL site is a great idea, but it could use a few technical improvements. It employs frames in such a way as to make it difficult to link into the site; for example, I can link to author Eric Flint’s page in the BFL, but the navigation frame will be missing. Another helpful thing the site could provide would be an RSS feed for new content. This would allow book junkiesavid readers to use their news aggregators to find out about newly available BFL “books” automatically.
If you’re looking for free etexts, both of these sites are well worth perusing.
Tonight I started reading James Carville’s Had Enough? A Handbook for Fighting Back, and just a few pages into it I found this bit of humor:
“You know, back in 2000 a Republican friend of mine warned me that if I voted for Al Gore and he won, the stock market would tank, we’d lose millions of jobs, and our military would be totally overstretched. You know what: I did vote for Al Gore, he did win, and I’ll be damned if all those things didn’t come true.”
This doesn’t seem to be out in paperback yet, but it is available at the Sacramento Public Library.
I’ve already written several posts on BookCrossing, my local library, some of the books I’ve read, etc. So I guess the next pastime that I’ll remark on is reading. This one will be a bit trickier because there are several related (but distinct) tags that I use for these topics.
BookCrossing is a very cool idea: You read a book, stick a seemingly random number on the flyleaf (along with the BX web address), and leave the book where somebody is liable to find (and read) it. They can then go to the BX web site, enter the number from the flyleaf, and write a journal entry about the book. Then they leave the book where somebody is liable to find (and read) it, et cetera, et cetera, and so forth. To see the books I’ve released or found or whatever, check out my BX bookshelf.
If you don’t want to leave a book “just lying around”, there are organized crossing zones set up especially to collect and disseminate BookCrossing books. In fact, one of my co-workers and I set up an OBCZ in the building where I work. I stop by every few days to see what people are dropping off or picking up, or maybe just to have a cup of coffee and chat. I also post news about the OBCZ here from time to time.
I’ve written several posts about the Sacramento Public Library, especially my neighborhood branch, the Arden-Dimick library at Watt & Northrop. Sometimes these are book-related, but I’ve also posted about the library’s web catalog, the community room, or non-book media such as DVD’s.
Finally, since I did use the “book” tag on this post, I should write about one of the books I’m currently reading: Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations. I’ve only finished Volume I so far, which covers Pip’s childhood and apprenticeship. When I last closed the book, Pip was in a carriage bound for London. I hope to finish this soon so I can discuss it with Joseph, before he forgets all the details!
I found The Green Mile on the bookshelf at work a few days ago, just finished reading it late last night. I’ve never considered myself a Stephan King fan before because I always perceived him as a horror writer, a genre which doesn’t interest me in the slightest. But after reading this book, I started thinking about some of his other stories that I’ve read–Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption (from Different Seasons), The Running Man (under the Richard Bachman psuedonym), and The Shining. Of these, only ‘The Shining’ really has much of a “horror” feel to it. I think I may have to pay a little more attention to this author, even if he is extremely popular–I hate following a fad, but in this case there may be a reason (other than marketing) for his wild popularity.
Books I’m going to look for by this author include The Dead Zone and The Stand, both of which are available from the Sacramento Public Library.
I’ve seen the movies based on all these books, except for ‘The Green Mile’. I read ‘Shawshank Redemption’ and ‘Running Man’ after seeing the movies, and liked both the movies and the books. I saw ‘The Shining’ after reading it, and was disappointed with the movie. This is almost always the case with me, regardless of author–as long as I haven’t read the books upon which they’re based, the movies stand well on their own, while the books add depth to the story once I get to read them. Because of this, I probably won’t see the movie rendition of ‘Green Mile’.
The Sacramento Boardgames, Cardgames, & Miniatures Meetup Group held their first Saturday game day yesterday at the Arden-Dimick library. I’m pretty sure we had 26 people playing at one point, but I was too busy playing to keep track of people entering and leaving.
Kevin has put a list of games that we played on the ‘Geek. This list allows comments, so if you were at this event be sure to jot down your thoughts on the games you played or the event in general.
The Sacramento Boardgames, Cardgames, & Miniatures Meetup Group held their second game night at the Arden-Dimick library last night. Turnout was a bit light, only eight people, probably because of the plethora of gaming opportunities available–four events in the past week plus three or four in the coming week. If only we had this “problem” more often!
Games played were Carcassonne: Hunters & Gatherers and Star Munchkin. I’ve been wanting to play the Munchkin card games for some time but had never had the opportunity before, so last night was my introduction to Steve Jackson’s silliness in the form of Star Munchkin. The game is almost absurdly simple–there is very little in the way of strategy, not a whole lot of thought required. Normally this would be the type of game I wouldn’t even think about playing. But the flavor text on the cards, and even some of the illustrations, are so hilarious that all the deficiencies of the game were summarily ignored. I don’t know what the “replay ability” of this game would be: the simplicity of the game would seem to detract from this, and the humor of the cards might eventually wear off, but there are a lot of cards in this game. Even the cards with duplicate text have unique and amusing illustrations, and it seemed to me that the players who were thoroughly familiar with the game got a kick out of all the new players’ reactions to the cards. I’ll have to play this a few times before I decide to buy it or not.
I didn’t play Carcassonne myself, but Kevin did. He posted a geeklist with a recap of the games, including details of the Carcassonne game.
I’ve got the community room at the Arden-Dimick branch of the Sacramento Library reserved for boardgaming this coming Wednesday, July 20th from 19:30 until 21:30 (7:30 pm to 9:30 pm for those stuck on 12-hour clocks). I’m posting this event on the Sacramento Boardgames Meetup, and I’ll also be putting up flyers at Viking Hobby and possibly other appropriate locations. (I should probably post something at the library itself!)
I don’t know what games I’ll be bringing yet. As soon as I know, I’ll post an update here.
This will probably become a regularly scheduled event for the 3rd Wednesday of each month. I hope to move the start time up to 19:00 for subsequent meetings.
Update: I spelled “Dimick” wrong–doh! (I doubled the M)
Update #2: This event is now posted on Sacramento Boardgames Meetup.
Update #3: Changed the end time to 9:30 pm.
