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Posts Tagged ‘books’

I have been obsessed with Kindles lately, and it doesn’t help that every time I go to Amazon.com, Kindle promos are front and center right above the fold on the homepage. I have thirty gazillion physical books in my to-be-read bookcase, I do not need to be purchasing digital books too! And yet, I drool over the Kindle Fire every day. Is it the tech of it? The instant gratification of being able to buy a book from anywhere at any time? Knowing I can get to my book from any computer?

I’ve been borrowing my department’s Kindle to try to get the temptation out of my system, and so far I’ve finished one book on it (Scepter of the Ancients (Skulduggery Pleasant)) and am about a quarter into my second (Unholy Ghosts (Downside Ghosts, Book 1)). I’ve also purchased several ebooks from Amazon, when they’ve been cheap enough that I couldn’t resist.

So far, it’s cool. I’m reading just fine on it. Any more than with physical books? Maybe not so much, but it does help curtail spending in physical bookstores (not necessarily a good thing, though, since I don’t want physical bookstores to go *poof* like Borders *sniff*). But in 2011, my reading volume went down significantly from previous years, and I believe part if it can be attributed to me trying not to buy new books, yet not being particularly interested in the books I’d already bought.

This post is all over the place, isn’t it? What is it even about? Not sure. Let’s try to break it down to bullet points:
1. I’m not buying a Kindle yet because I can’t afford it.
2. I’m borrowing a Kindle, so I can buy books by new to me authors without spending too much or taking up space on my already crowded bookshelves.
3. I’m newly inspired to find new authors.

i.e., I’m trying harder to spend more time reading, whether it’s an ebook or a physical book. (Finished three physical books this year already.) So, there’s that.

Whatever, I think I’ll just go read something now.

I’ve been wanting to buy a Kindle since Christmas, but have been holding off since I still have so many page-and-spine books on my TBR shelf to get through. I can’t use the Kindle to read them, so I’d just have to buy more books to get any use out of it, and let’s face it, I really don’t need to be buying more books right now.

So instead I borrowed a Kindle from my boss for a couple of weeks, to see if it’s as cool as it looks, and if I can get any use out of it while I still have so many other books to read; or if I get over the novelty quickly once it’s actually in my hands.

Well, I’ve had it for two days now, and I’m starting to lean towards the latter, since I haven’t really looked at it other than to read a few pages from the user manual. Of course, that’s not really giving it the old college try, so I think I’ll download Sherlock Holmes later and actually test out what reading on it is really like.

Is there anything else one can do with it other than books? Guess I’ll have to google that later.

Relatedly, I created an Amazon wishlist specifically of books I’d want to get for the Kindle, only to find out later, when I went to the wishlist, that you can’t really ‘list’ Kindle books! All the books on the list had a button to “see buying options” instead of specifically including the Kindle information I’d been trying to save. WTF?? So much for trying to sort the books by Kindle price.

Deep sadness–Borders is in Chapter 11, and they’re closing a bunch o’stores. Here’s the list (sortable, so you can find the ones in your state easily). Looks like the one closest to me is safe, at least.

I know big box stores are evil and blah blah blah, but I loves me some Borders. There’s something about it that’s comfier than (most) Barnes & Nobles.

I don’t generally do top ten lists or lists of favorites, because let’s face it, I have the attention span of a fire ant, and all my favorites are likely to be from November and December, and maybe October if something in that month was truly spectacular. But I do have some favorites to share from this year (and yes, two of them are from the past two months, sue me), so I may as well lay them out there.

Favorite book(s) of the year: The Hunger Games trilogy
I can safely say this was my absolute favorite book of the year for two reasons: 1) Books are actually the one thing I keep track of, and looking back over the list from 2010, nothing even compares to The Hunger Games; and 2) I loved these books so much that I bought six extra copies of the first one to give away over Christmas, to try to suck other people into them.

Favorite new blog of the year: Mark Reads
OMIGOD I LOVE THIS WEBSITE SO MUCH! And yes, it’s deeply tied to my favorite book of the year, because Mark happened to be reading and reviewing The Hunger Games when I discovered his blog. The kick is that he only reads one chapter per day, then writes his review/recap, and if you’ve read THG, then you know it’s ridiculously hard to put it down at the end of a chapter, ’cause they all end in cliffhangers. Reading Mark’s journey through the book has enhanced my own memories of reading it, and now, reading his recaps of Catching Fire continues to make me chortle with glee. AND! He’s recapping his second reading of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone! (Which I just reread myself before Christmas.) Seriously, I cannot gush about his blog enough. Go read for yourself!

Favorite song of the year: Hey by Lil Jon & 3OH!3
I listened to this song on repeat for every morning for a week when I first found it, and every time it comes up on my ipod, I still listen to it at least twice. It makes me happy.

Favorite new (to me) TV show: The Vampire Diaries
I’d watched the pilot when it first aired, decided it was too Twilight for me, and gave up on it. Then over the summer, many of my friends whose judgments I trust couldn’t stop talking about how great it was, and how much it improved after the sixth episode. So, I gave it a shot. I Netflixed it in September, and OMIGOD! Fell totally in love. Immediately bought the first five episodes of season two from iTunes, and now I watch in real-time like everyone else. Sadly I have yet to pull my sister in, but I intend to keep trying.

Favorite movie of the year: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1
I had to look up the movies of 2010* to even remember what I saw this year, but that means I can definitively say that yes, Harry Potter was my favorite of the year. I thought it did a great job of staying as true to the book as it could, and really benefited from the decision to turn the last book into a two-part movie. Red was a close second (so much fun!), with Hot Tub Time Machine and How to Train Your Dragon vying for third.

And that’s all I’ve got. Not a bad list. I’ll try to keep track of my media choices over 2011 so hopefully I do this again next year.

*Beware the many popups on that link.

So I’m knitting again. Woot! I finished a (unfortunately heavy) orange and tag-yarn scarf last week, and now I’m working on two scarves/shawls (stockinette to the end, then drop every third stitch). One is sparkly red yarn (Karabella Stardust) and will be this year’s holiday scarf, and the other is a tweedy Plymouth Encore that I’m going to have to frog and restart, ’cause it’s too wide for only two balls of yarn.

I started up again because work, both my day job and my freelance projects, have been stressing me out, and after several near-meltdowns, I had a “D’oh!” moment and realized that I’d given up more than just something to do with my hands when I stopped knitting–I’d given up an important stress-reliever. I can’t believe I ever forgot how relaxing it is work with my hands and let my mind fly loose. Stupid.

Anyway, in other news, Drupal continues to kick my ass. I spent four hours yesterday trying–and failing–to beat the forums into submission. I still can’t figure out why setting a block exception for “forum” only works for the forum posts and not the other forum pages, and google was no help this time. I picked up another Drupal development book at B&N today, one more advanced and with far more customization examples than my other two books, so hopefully that’ll help, but for today I’m leaving the forums alone and working on some of the other things for the site that I might actually be able to fix. I need to get a few more successes under my belt before I tackle the evil forums again, and not just because my ego needs reinflating. I also need to have something closer to complete by Monday for the client. Yay?

And finally, because posts without pictures are just plain boring, here is a gratuitous photo relating to nothing else in this post. It’s from earlier this week at work, when the sun was setting and the fog was rolling in from two different directions. It was so damned beautiful that night I took about 40 pictures, but IMO this is one of the better ones.