Books for Sale

We’re moving again, and in honor of not wanting to cart too much stuff around, I’m selling a bunch of books and CDs on Amazon. They’re all listed on my Books for Sale page, and it’ll be updated as I get more listed.

Closing Some Tabs

Delicious is being cranky at the moment and not accepting any updates. So instead of using the handy widget in the sidebar to highlight some interesting articles, here’s a post intead:

• Conscientious Cook: Mindful About Waste
• Paying Cash Only, Family Spends $1800 Less
• Third Ghostbusters Movie Rises From The Grave
• Neal Stephenson’s Tale of Two Planets
  And yes, I am so going to buy Anathem when it comes out next week despite my fears that he’s gotten too powerful and his editors can’t make him cut all of the stuff out of this book that they should have so it’s going to be another good 300 page book stuck inside a 900 page one and I’ll have just wasted $20 I should have spent on something more worthwhile.
• “Bechdel Rule” Should Really Be Called “Ripley Rule”
  “1. Does it have at least two women in it,
  2. Who [at some point] talk to each other,
  3. About something besides a man.”
• Kibera’s “Instant Farm” System Is The Future of Urban Agriculture
• Ghost Skyscraper
  When I worked for Amazon, there was this perfect point during sunset when you could look out of PacMed over downtown Seattle and it seemed like you were seeing through the buildings because of how the light was reflecting off them. It was lovely.
• Obama Promises National Tech Officer and a Space Advisor to the President
• A City Prepared for Disaster Is a City that Looks to the Future
• Sexy Librarians: The Appeal is Ethical, Not Asthetic

…On Books

• Let’s Hear It for The Autodidact
  “Nor is it the standard, ghost-written, fan-fodder. It’s thoughtful and – the word is inescapable – cultivated. [Sean] Connery emerges from its pages as an impressive autodidact.”
• Two of a Kind
  “And, perhaps most important, Orwell was a secularist whose greatest fear was the emergence of Big Brother in this world. Waugh was a Roman Catholic convert whose greatest hope lay with God in the next. Indeed, about the only thing Orwell and Waugh seem to have had in common was the rather boring fact that they were both Englishmen born to middle-class families in 1903.”
• Anthromusicology
  “Levitin divides his book into impressionistic chapters that address the six categories he believes all songs (or at least those possessing lyrics) fit into: songs of friendship, songs of joy, songs of comfort, songs of knowledge, religious songs and love songs.”
• The Un-Bird
  “Whither the pigeon? Ubiquitous beast, rat of the sky, object of children’s chase — how did this “un-bird,” as some ornithologists deride Columba livia, become part of every city’s natural environment?”
• Zogby’s Crystal Ball
  “What Zogby probably means to say is that the demographic group he refers to as “the First Globals” is the first generation of Americans who would have the nerve to describe themselves as being colorblind and not expect to be laughed at. Whenever I see glowing reports about color­blind white people, I wonder how many black people were included in the polling sample.”

…On Books

• Bizarre Death of the Man Who Talked Too Much
  “In “The Terminal Spy” Alan S. Cowell, a veteran foreign correspondent for The New York Times, gives an absorbing account of Mr. Litvinenko’s life and bizarre murder. Along the way he explains how Russia lost and got back its tremendous energy resources after the fall of the Soviet Union, describes how wealthy Russians have turned London into “Moscow-on-the-Thames” and tries to determine if the Litvinenko murder is the harbinger of a new and especially dangerous kind of terrorism.”
• Top 10 Literary Gypsies
  “It’s fascinating that century after century, Gypsies are both the most romanticised people on earth and the most vilified: this is almost as much the case now as it was two centuries ago. Writers, of course, have been milking the situation for donkey’s years.”
• Yiddish Policemen Triumph at Hugo Awards
  ‘In April The Yiddish Policemen’s Union – which takes as its premise Franklin Roosevelt’s proposition that Alaska, rather than Israel, becomes the homeland for the Jews after the Second World War – was named best novel at the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America’s Nebula Awards. Some bloggers questioned a work of alternate history winning science fiction’s most coveted prize, but Chabon told an interviewer in America that science fiction had “porous” boundaries, and that “there is definitely room in it for a work of alternate history”.’

Articles About Books

Note: I’m not sure if this is going to be a regular feature or not. Consider it an experiment for the moment.

• And The Plot Thinned…
  “He also pointed out that the most successful of these books distill the best bits of the fashion world — the clothes, the famous brand names, the over-the-top characters — instead of dwelling in a fashion house or idling too long backstage. Could the travails of designers be a bore? It seems so.”
• Shelf-Possessed
  Yes, a book about books, not something I’m normally into. But those shelves at the top are beautiful.
• House Proud
  “Thrumpton Hall is a Jacobean manor house in Nottinghamshire. To judge from photographs, it’s nothing special, except for being big and grand. Much finer houses have been torched by their owners or else auctioned off to save on taxes. But the place had an extraordinary hold on Miranda Seymour’s father, and though it’s a source of mostly unhappy memories, to this day she can’t quite bring herself to sell it. Her odd and oddly affecting book, beautifully written, is in part a story of house-love that borders on madness.”

Best Line of the Day

I can’t imagine I’ll come across a better one:

Most serious novelists are wary of including ninjas in their writing. That’s a shame, because many much-admired works of modern fiction could benefit from a few.

From an interview with Nick Harkaway (whom I’d never heard of before, but you can bet I’ll be reading his book soon).

How’d That No-Reading Thing Go?

I did want to give a quick update on my plan to not read any books during January. It went… all right. A couple of Sandman books creeped in, but otherwise nothing. I turned into a *slightly* better email correspondent and any Economists got more thoroughly read than normal.  So the plan to have it make me be more social only slightly succeeded. However, it did make me realize that I really have very little interest in reading the pile of books that was next to my bed. I’m not sure why: if I’m read out for the moment or what, but I look at the books on the bookshelf now and I’m just not interested.

Which isn’t to say that I’m not reading at all. I picked up a book called The History of Western Intellectual Thought — a textbook of my husband’s that was published in 1960, so out-of-print that Amazon doesn’t have a listing for it. It’s taken me most of the month to get through the first half, but I like it.

I like not feeling pressured to read books just because I feel like I should, and I’m in no hurry to start that again.

No Books

I don’t usually make formal resolutions. This year’s no different, except for one thing: I’ve been spending too much of my off time with media (old, non-interactive, entertainment-style media). It’s come at the expense of spending time with people. So, my non-formal new year’s resolution is to watch less TV and read (books, blogs of people I don’t know, magazines) less often. I’m starting by trying to go one month without reading a book.

We’ll see how this goes.

What’s a Tesseract?

Madeline L’Engle died yesterday.

Ms. L’Engle’s writing career was going so badly in her 30s that she claimed she almost quit writing at 40. But then “Meet the Austins” was published in 1960, and she was already deeply into “Wrinkle.” The inspiration came to her during a 10-week family camping trip.

I think I’ll bring A Wrinkle in Time with me camping this weekend.

Be Quiet!

I apparently have to start my self-imposed media embargo early (thanks NYTimes) so I don’t find out what happens in the final Harry Potter until I read it with my own eyes.

My husband’s actually planning on taking Monday off work.

You may not hear from me for a week or so. I’m not going to post a review of it because I know at least one of you who is likely planning on reading it and reallyreallyreally hates spoilers.

Two Literary Links

Because I’m sure you haven’t already heard, Kurt Vonnegut died. If you don’t want to read the three-page NYTimes obit, go read the shorter, more elegant Guardian one.

It’s drop everything and read day. I’m sure your bosses will understand if you take the day off work to go read a book. Really.

Libraries Are Good Things

The WSJ has a free publicly-available article about the current state of the American library. They seem to have mostly gotten it right: there’s a lot of parental discussion around which libraries have the best story times, my daughter loves the for-preschoolers computer they’ve got set up, the older kids cluster around the computers, you do see the kids looking at the books, but more often, it’s their parents, and DVDs are popular as hell.

The only thing they missed is one of our favorite SJ Library System features: the ability to reserve a book online from any library in the system and go pick it up at our local branch when it gets there. Plus, since they partner with San Jose State, you get access to all those books, too.

*And* they’ve started to open coffee shops inside the libraries around here. Local libraries are Good Things.

End of the Week Randomness

• From last week’s Economist, “Put down that Xbox, young man.” Environmental groups are worried that as kids spend less time outside, they’ll care less about nature.

• Apparently, Bay Area schools have something called “Ski Week” in addition to spring break. Schools are closed all next week so families can go skiing. In a month or two, there’ll be the normal week off, too.
• Cute: Order of the Science Scouts of Exemplary Repute and Above Average Physique merit badges. Includes the “Has ‘frozen stuff just to see what happens’ badge (level II). In which the recipient has frozen something in dry ice for the sake of scientific curiosity.”
• News Break! The books people actually read aren’t the ones with magical realism or talking dogs. People read books about “life, and it is exactly as we know it.” The two SLIS classes I took at UW hammered that point home: the books people want in libraries aren’t elite in any way shape or form. Most people read for entertainment. I can tell you from personal observation that the new Pynchon has been lingering, unchecked out on my library’s New Books display.
• The Manolo quotes Cary Grant on shoes.

More Harry Potter

The Guardian has a profile of JK Rowling. My favorite bit:

Anticipation hasn’t run this high since George Lucas turned Anakin Skywalker into Darth Vader, and Deathly Hallows, which is expected to appear this summer, will undoubtedly outperform its predecessors. That’s no mean feat: the last three were the fastest-selling books ever; 2005’s Half-Blood Prince shifted more copies in 24 hours than The Da Vinci Code did in an entire year.

Twenty-four hours.

Some Links

Here are two articles about how immigrants are changing houses and patterns of living in the US. First, Hispanics in Virginia are making strip malls into town squares, which is a concept I really like: making them places to hang out and see and be seen, instead of just places to spend money. Second, in LA, the advent of Persian Palaces is changing the housing there.

And in bookseller news, a UK author wants his book removed from the amazon.co.uk site, to force people to buy it from their local bookseller.

Must… Have… Bookshelves…

These? Are beautiful. I can just see all my books fitting in them, from the mass market paperbacks, to the math textbooks I can’t make myself get rid of.

I mean, I’ve got five boxes of books (and more on the floor) that I can’t fit on our current shelves.

Repeat after me: we’re renting. We’re renting. Moving this looks to be a pain and a half. Wait until we buy. Then get the shelves. =)

For Sale, or, Shameless Self-Promotion

I’ve listed a bunch of books for sale on Amazon, so if you’ve ever wanted to buy one of these, now’s your chance to get it cheap. In an effort to make this a more interesting post, I’ll also tell you why I own it in the first place. =)

• Mission to America. Christmas present last year, bought off my wishlist. I’d read a good review, but it didn’t live up to my expectations.
• The Revolt of the Cockroach People. I bought it from the University Book Store during a summer sale, and never read it.
• Family Sayings. I took a class in college called “French and Italian Jewish Literature of the 20th Century in Translation.” I’m not kidding. It was essentially getting up to go hear stories about the Holocaust first thing in the morning for four months. It earned me my three ethnic studies credits I needed to graduate, though.
• BUGS in Writing. This is a how-to-write book for technical people. My husband and I both have copies, and there’s no reason to have two in the house.
• The Last of the Just. From the aforementioned Jewish Literature class. I remember sobbing on a train home from Chicago as I finished it up.
• Darwin’s Dangerous Idea. Bought for a graduate school class about the MoRAS. (Although I can’t remember for the life of me what MoRAS stands for anymore.) A good book, but we’ve got two of them.
• The Trouble with Computers. Ah, the Foundations Courses at SI. This was from 505, I think. Another duplicate.
• Le Corbusier Talks with Students. I got this for free when I was living in Seattle… Maybe when I worked for Amazon? I’m not sure. Anyway, it turns out that I’m not as interested in architecture as I thought I was.
• Six Walks in the Fictional Woods. Bought during my Umberto Eco phase. Not a bad book, but not something I’ve read since.
• Imperial Russia. Copies of official documents from Russian Imperial history. I bought it for a Russian history class, which turned out to be much cooler than I expected.
• Reading in America. The last two semesters before I graduated from the University of Wisconsin, I took a couple of classes from their SLIS department to see if I wanted to be a librarian. This is from one of them, where we studied the history of how people read.
• Prisoners of Hope. More from the Jewish Literature class.
• Bobos in Paradise. I read this one while I was pregnant and not working, and basically getting caught up on what all the pundits in America think.
• A Year in the Merde. My husband bought this one because he’d heard good things about it from a colleague. Alas, neither of us thought it was anything special.
• Minimalism Beyond the Nurnberg Funnel. This one I got for being a student volunteer at CSCW 98 (which, incidentally, is where I met my husband). Never read it, maybe should have.

What Your Books Say About You

Of course, this article says a lot about the author, too. Everyone edits their collections. There’s a reason all my mass-market paperbacks are squirreled away upstairs.

Holy S***

Since I’m a Harry Potter freak, this seems like news to me.

The seventh and final volume of the Harry Potter series, most keenly awaited children’s book of all time, almost became collateral damage in the international security panic.

JK Rowling, returning from a charity book reading in New York just days after the security clampdown, was confronted with a demand that she consign the unfinished manuscript to the hold.

She pleaded with security staff in New York to allow her to keep the manuscript with her. They relented finally, and allowed her take it into the cabin, unwrapped and bound together with elastic bands.

In a revelation which will have left her publishers shuddering, she disclosed that the manuscript was largely handwritten and with no back-up copy.

More Books. More Than I Needed.

Just as I was thinking about adding “what Kate got rid of this week” to my weekly “What Kate Is” series, my dad brought six or seven boxes of stuff from his house in Wisconsin. Four of them are full of old mass-market books. They’re mostly science fiction and mystery, including everything Isaac Asimov ever wrote.*

What this means for you? There’s going to start to be a lot of mystery and science fiction over on the book blog. What this means for me? Stressing over where to put another 100 or so books, when we already have about that many just sitting on the floor.

*Not everything. I didn’t buy most of his non-fiction, but I’ve got all the Robot, Empire, and Foundation books.