Tag Archive for 'Reading'
So this morning whilst perusing my feeds I came across a post about being more of a bookworm than I already am. Unfortunately, there were no tips about how to extend the day by another couple of hours so I have more time to read in my already cramped life but there was a little gem tucked inside: BookMooch. BookMooch is like what LaLa was to CDs in that you create an inventory of stuff you want to unload and a wishlist of what you’d like to get in return. Here’s my inventory and it is also in my side bar showing six random items.
Getting started was pretty easy requiring you to choose username and password and to make your postal address available so that people you want to mooch from can ship to you. Adding books to your inventory is as easy as banging in the ISBN number, books without one can be easily looked up by author and title, and failing that you can always hand enter the item in. I knocked out some 49 books in under an hour and had three people looking to relive me of four in a couple more hours. Not too bad.
The system relies on a sort of karma system in that each book added to your inventory nets you 1/10 of a point, shipping one domestically nets you 1 point and 3 for international shipments. You’ll need those points when you want to get books for yourself with a domestic mooch being -1 points and -2 internationally. Reading Kafka at Work lays out the system better than I.
So far the system beats trying to set up an auction on eBay and feels a little more social than just dumping them in a box and posting it on Freecycle. I am particularly impressed with how easy it is to use and the first three people mooching off me are awfully polite people who are just about as book-addled as myself. I’m looking forward to figuring out what I would like to mooch and see how that end of the system operates.
Well, it appears that the site I was relying on for tracking my reading list, Reader2.com, is down (SQL connection error) and has been that way for several days. The programmer, it seems, last updated it over six months ago–along with all the other related sites–so it looks like it’s reached the state of abandonware. It was a great service while it lasted and I managed to load in some 90+ books, tagged, reviewed, and cross referenced so loosing it is a bit of a downer.
Regardless, it’s passing gives me the chance to pull the reading list into the site which gives me a greater degree of control and to do so I’m using Roblog’s Now Reading plugin–after some hacking of the default templates it flows decently with K2. On the left you’ll see a grouping of pending books, currently reading, and finished as well as a link to the “Library,” while at the moment is a tad sparse I’ll be filling it out over the next couple of days. Hopefully, I’ll be able to revamp the existing reading list page to reflect the information from the plugin to make the page a little more useful.
In other site news, I’ve moved onto the latest K2. I’m finding it to be a more polished experience; live search is tightly integrated and commenting flows smoother. One minor annoyance was that page template with comments was broken so I had to make a copy of the non-comments one and commenting to it. Beyond that I decided to change the background color to draw eyes to the posts rather than have them sort of bleed out into the surrounding page.
Good times.
…but this snack sized serial novel format delivered hot and fresh via RSS is top notch stuff. David Wellington’s is dropping another serialized novel, Frostbite, on the heels of the excellent Thirteen Bullets. The first chapter went up yesterday, so check it out!
Looks like I haven’t really kicked my eBay used book habit. I was going strong there for a while but my insatiable need to finish a series once I start it pushed me into trying to round out the back half of Jordan’s wonderfully trashy soap opera series The Wheel of Time. In the process of hunting down the missing books I found myself bidding on other sets by other authors, this time four by Greg Bear.
Seriously, I have a problem. As if my “To Read” list of trashy fiction wasn’t already long enough (around 87) and my non-fiction list, which I haven’t touched in over a year, still remains with some 20 books waiting to be read. At my current rate of one book = one month Gabriella will be heading into middle school by the time I’m done. That is of course if I STOP BUYING BOOKS. Like some perverse math word problem my little habit will certainly outpace my ability to read and finish. “If Jimmy finishes one book per month but purchases four books every other month how soon until Jimmy is buried under pulp fiction?”
When Gabriella comes onto the scene this is likely only going to get worse as I try and hunt down every cool children’s book so that she can be buried just like her dad. If I’m lucky she’ll turn into a little reading junkie like us and her grandparents. If you’re going to be strung out on something literature isn’t the worst thing.
Guy Kawasaki’s Ten Questions with Dr. Joseph Chamie, Demographer and it’s follow up made for an engaging albeit brief read. I was especially drawn to it because of my minor in Sociology with a concentration in Economics and Dr. Chamie offers some well thought out “napkin notes” about the trends we will be facing in terms of globalization and how migration, urbanization, and in a broader sense domestic politics will impact the individual and collective fortunes of nation states.
For me it was a refreshing read as I usually dwell on doom and gloom being very much a pessimist and a believer that if you give a person enough rope they will inevitably try to string someone up followed by themselves. File me under the school of thought that humankind is a greedy brutish lot. Dr. Chamie paints a picture of movement on a regional as well as global scale that will carry with it the usual disruptions but at least from his depiction I, as an individual, might just be able to weather it.
While he is discussing trends on a massive scale it did get me thinking about when I wind down my fiction reading project that the next task I wanted to undertake was an understanding with regards to the interplay between politics, geography, demographics, and migration. Last year I began researching the role of corporations play in sustaining or undermining local economic enclaves. The Blue Back Square project in West Hartford and Evergreen Terrace in South Windsor prompted me to consider how many of these development projects are often a Faustian deal where the town is lead to believe that a windfall in tax revenue will occur and that it will possess a near infinite viability. When in fact these developments lead to capital flight as the majority of each dollar spent leaves the town and or region.
Could this be the same bargain that some members of the European Union will experience? Dr. Chamie writes, “European Union, for example, national boundaries have been opened for free movement and trade with a common market for its members.” More importantly, as he discusses migratory patterns to come, what is the impact of the communities that have forsaken locally based economic endeavors for multinational ones? Corporations follow the smell of money and if your community is experiencing zero or negative growth it will be the first on the list for vacating. Just look to the exodus in the Great Plains states.
Reading Kawasaki’s interview invigorated me to pull out my reading list and take a look as to what I have down so far. Starting off are Thomas Sowell’s Migrations and Culture and Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition both of which I read in undergrad but did not get the time to truly digest. Arendt’s work was read alongside works of Saul Alinsky which I found to be a nice pairing of thought and action. Following up are three books that I have read positive press on but have not gotten my hands on: William Bonner and Addison Wiggin’s Empire of Debt, L. Hunter Lovins, Amory Lovins, and Paul Hawken’s Natural Capitalism, Andres Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, and Jeff Speck’s Suburban Nation. Providing the structure for this slightly disparate list would be Jane Jacob’s The Economy of Cities and Cities and the Wealth of Nations. To fill in the cracks, I’ve spent the better part of the year gathering white papers and journal articles on planning and zoning, local political communication and activism, and analysis of regional economic trends. Heavy reading list but I’m sure I can spin it into something productive here or elsewhere.
If only I were born a trust fund baby, I would spend my life in academia as I am full of questions that want for answers.
