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bowmore posted:Does anyone else have 5+ series they have all started and are halfway through? I pretty much only ever read one book at a time, so no, not really. Exception: series that the author has not yet finished. 
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Sep 14, 2014 21:50
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I just keep everything in one library and tag books with "unread" when I import them. A search for "tag:unread" (or opening Category: unread on my e-reader) shows me only books I haven't read yet.
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Dec 20, 2014 18:32
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Ornamented Death posted:No offense, but one a week isn't a particularly rigorous pace for TBB; Stupid_Sexy_Flander typically finishes some absurd number like 200+ books in a year, for example. I just use the Reading Challenge thread as my book log. I keep a local notes file where I log each book as I finish it and then transfer to the thread at the end of the month.
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Jan 4, 2015 01:07
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Mahlertov Cocktail posted:Ahaha that's awesome. Lucky find! Is it worth having a go at Kraken if I found the Bas-Lag books really disappointing? They kind of put me off Mieville.
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Mar 17, 2015 14:31
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Ragequit posted:Random question here. I read the Raymond Feist set Magician: Apprentice and Magician: Master a long time ago, but I remember enjoying them quite a bit. I see that the Kindle Chaoswar Saga is on sale for $12 (for three books) and was curious if I would be missing anything starting back up with that. I see it has Pug as a main character, and he even has a kid, which means a fair amount of time has passed from where I left off. Generally each series stands on its own; you may get more out of it if you've read the earlier ones, but it's not assumed that you have. I didn't even realize he was still writing in the Midkemia/Riftwar setting, the last thing of his I read was the Serpentwar books. (also, Magician doesn't stand alone, it's the first two books of the Riftwar series -- it's followed by Silverthorn and A Darkness at Sethanon.) ToxicFrog fucked around with this message at 16:48 on Apr 8, 2015 |
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Apr 8, 2015 16:04
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Fenrir posted:I just re-read all the main series books (the 11 that Weis & Hickman wrote) and most of it's fresh in my mind now. Also, Death Gate Cycle? Those were probably better, but the ending probably ruined a lot of people on it Oh? I read the first two Death Gate books and then decided I wasn't really enjoying it, but it was kind of curious about where it was going.
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Apr 17, 2015 14:29
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I read books because it's fun. 
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Aug 19, 2015 19:12
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Blurred posted:Okay, this is a very long shot, but I'm looking for myth or legend that I read a while ago. I believe it comes from Islamic lore, but I could be wrong about that. That sounds familiar, but I can't place it. You may have more luck in this thread.
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Aug 31, 2015 11:21
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A human heart posted:Yes, that's correct. So what you're saying is that a hardcover book containing the text of a novel, and one containing random garbage like, say, your posts, have the same value, as the value of a book comes entirely from the physical object it's printed in and not from the actual words inside?
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Nov 5, 2015 17:40
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CainFortea posted:Okay, I'm asking you guys cause i'm pretty much at the end of my rope. There's a thread for that. The "child-like robot" bit sounds like the Asimov short story Lenny, but nothing else sounds like any of Asimov's robot stories.
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Mar 15, 2016 22:09
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:Otherwise I'd talk about trickster myths and the adaptation of traditional folk tales for modern fantasy. Almost every set piece in BoB, from the gold making GBS threads goat on down, is taken out of traditional folk tales then re-imagined. On that topic, anyone have recommendations for more books in that vein, i.e. modern adaptations of traditional trickster folk tales?
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May 27, 2016 20:28
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So, what should I be looking for if I'm looking for "airplane fiction"? That's one of the Booklord Challenge objectives this year, but I really have no idea what to even look for. I know the basic idea, I think -- they're trashy books you pick up in an airport bookstore so you have something to read during the flight -- but since I always bring my own books, I don't know what authors or genres or whatever I should be seeking out.
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Aug 1, 2016 13:23
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A human heart posted:You can interpret it however you like so just read a cool book that happens to feature an airplane That is a solid suggestion, but blue squares posted:Just read The Brethren by Grisham my dad was a huge John Grisham fan, so I'm going to read one of those in his memory.
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Aug 2, 2016 02:36
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Philosopher King posted:If anyone out there has played the Witcher series and read the books, what are the actual books in the series I should be reading? Is there an actual start and finish or are they all just random Gerald mini stories? The wikipedia page answers this, doesn't it? There's two short story collections, a five-book series, and one standalone novel. If you want to read the whole thing in internal chronological order, I think what you're after is The Last Wish, Season of Storms, Sword of Destiny, and then the five "main" novels.
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Nov 16, 2016 21:27
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StrixNebulosa posted:I got books for Christmas! A Matter of Oaths by Helen S Wright, and The Dragon Never Sleeps by Glen Cook and they're both A+ sci-fi that appeals to me greatly through interesting world-building. Read both of those recently. A Matter of Oaths was tasty, a few rough patches but a loving solid debut novel. It was recommended to me as "if you like C.J. Cherryh, you should check out...", and that recommendation completely on point. It's a pity that's her only book, but it is at least available for free. The Dragon Never Sleeps was good but weird, and is a book that demands close attention to keep track of all the names and places and, critically, the date, since sometimes it advances by five minutes between chapters and sometimes by five years. I liked it more than Starfishers, or the Chronicles of a Dread Empire (which are written in a similar style), but less than the more tightly focused Passage at Arms and Black Company.
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Dec 28, 2016 15:15
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Mel Mudkiper posted:The explicit world-building, the overlong dialogs that serve only to establish the rules of the world, the intricate political details of a wholly imagined world, the lethargic pace of her descriptions. IMO, Cherryh has two modes of writing; the slow, often politics-heavy building up of the characters and setting, and the fast oh-poo poo-everything-is-on-fire. Pretty much all of her books end up in the latter eventually, but most of them start in the former, including all of her longest stuff (Cyteen, Downbelow Station, Fortress in the Eye of Time, Foreigner, etc). I love both styles, but I wonder if you might not prefer one of the books that starts off with everything on fire like The Pride of the Chanur. Or Voyager in Night if you enjoy the feeling of your brain being rolled up and slowly pulled out through your eyes. ToxicFrog fucked around with this message at 20:22 on Dec 25, 2017 |
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Dec 24, 2017 03:03
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Those are all dangerous only because of what people will infer about you based on the title or contents, though, which is a difference-in-kind from books that will literally kill you if read without protective gear.
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Dec 25, 2017 20:24
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FirstAidKite posted:
Cat functioning as intended, no refund will be issued.
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May 15, 2018 17:48
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Most of the bookplates I've seen have been cat- or astronomy-themed.
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Jun 2, 2018 03:15
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learnincurve posted:No I don't read much in the way of mysteries, but I do enjoy them in moderation, and that book looks like it might be very to my taste. I'll check it out!
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Jun 9, 2018 15:52
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. I suspect, going from my goon goodreads friends, It would only be me and you in it anyway.
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chernobyl kinsman posted:the opposite, its people who are not only mad that the children's wizard books don't have enough diversity, but that rowling's attempts to make up for being insufficiently woke 20 years ago by being woke now are actively bad It's less that and more than when it was pointed out her reaction was "ok, here, there's nothing to support it in the text, and there won't be anything to support it in the movies or books that have yet to come out, and basically no-one who just reads the books/watches the movies will ever know, but according to my secret notes this character is actually gay, so here's your  representation , have fun".Which definitely ruffles more feathers than just going "yeah, there's no gay characters, didn't think of it at the time " because it comes across as trying to get points for being "LGBT inclusive" without actually doing any including.
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Jul 4, 2018 17:50
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sunken fleet posted:Is there any good free software for reading ePubs on PC? Calibre is more a full-power ebook organization/conversion program and e-reader manager, but it comes with an epub reader built in, as well as the ability to convert to other formats.
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Jul 5, 2018 14:30
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Are we seriously having the "using cheats in a singleplayer game means you're enjoying it wrong and should be shunned" debate except with books?
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Nov 1, 2018 23:35
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Disco Elysium looks like it's extremely my jam, especially as someone who liked both Torments, but on the other hand, what the gently caress is this
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Jan 12, 2020 03:07
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Jerry Cotton posted:Reading in bed is bad sleep hygiene anyway. Reading on the bog is just bad. On my way from the parking lot to the office building and vice versa (if it's too cold for bare hands or captouch gloves I turn the page on my e-reader by bonking it gently against my nose) On my way to/from the bathroom, meetings, etc While waiting for unit tests/package uploads/deployments/etc During lunch While doing dishes While waiting for stuff to boil etc if I'm cooking Literally any time I'm doing something that requires only one hand and very little attention, like grinding flour, transferring clothes from the washer to the dryer, petting the cat, and so forth Also in bed, because who needs sleep when I have books
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Jan 13, 2020 05:06
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excellent bird guy posted:i like paper but kindle is fine on airplanes and in public I've almost completely abandoned paper books in favour of digital; in particular, being able to lay the book flat on any surface without it flopping closed (a perennial problem with MMPBs), easily hold it one hand (a problem with hardbacks and TPBs), and turn pages with any part of my body (a problem with everything) is a huge advantage even apart from the whole "I can keep a thousand books in my pocket" thing. I do still prefer hardcopy for reference materials; stuff where I'm frequently seeking rapidly from page to page, looking at large diagrams, etc. But that's not most of my reading.
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Jan 13, 2020 16:34
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Enfys posted:How do you read while washing dishes? E-reader on the counter near the sink, look over and read a paragraph while doing something that can be done entirely by touch and peripheral vision like rinsing off already-clean tableware or filling a pot to soak. regulargonzalez posted:I was about to ask what other body parts you use to turn pages besides fingers then realized I really don't want to know Elbows (if my hands are wet or I'm carrying something) or nose (if I'm outside and wearing gloves), typically. Being able to turn the page by bonking the book gently against my face rather than trying to fumble the pages wearing heavy gloves or mittens is great. Lex Neville posted:wait isn't skipping forwards and back for annotations way simpler on an ereader? Usually not. Like, if you mean marginalia you've added yourself, sometimes, in that "skip to next note" is faster than manually flipping through a book you didn't leave bookmarks or sticknotes in, but footnotes are usually a pain in the rear end -- there's no technical reason why they couldn't be rendered at the bottom of the screen or in a popup window, but usually what you get is a tiny link that takes you to a note at the end of the book, at which point you need to find the "return to previous location" button buried in the menus. This makes reading e.g. Discworld pretty painful. Oh, and if you miss the link it either turns the page or opens the dictionary rather than just ignoring it. In my experience, this isn't a huge issue because most authors don't use footnotes at all, but this is a two-edged sword because I really like a well-done footnote like Pratchett or Cuppy are fond of. Marginalia added by the author like the dates in I, Claudius usually isn't rendered particularly well either.
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Jan 13, 2020 19:22
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Disco Pope posted:This made reading Nabokov’s ‘Pale Fire’ really interesting, because it changed the format of the book significantly and it had the side-effect of adapting to what was most likely a totally unforeseen technical advancement really well. EPUB is just HTML wrapped up in a zip and with some metadata glued to the outside; there's a lot more you can do with it than most digital typesetters take advantage of. Sadly.
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Jan 15, 2020 20:59
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Sham bam bamina! posted:If you know what nacre is, not the most common word but hardly esoteric, you should be able to figure out "nacreous". "nacreous" is uncommon but not unheard of but I think I've only seen "nacre" once in my life and I don't even remember what book it's in.
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Feb 19, 2020 15:21
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StrixNebulosa posted:Not dickish at all, and a good point, but - where can I get a not-kindle with all the same features? Kobo? They're built on the same e-ink technology and have basically the same feature set, AFAICT. They support a different set of formats and DRM scheme that means they are a pain to use with Amazon but easier to use with basically everything else.
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Apr 22, 2020 03:40
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:It's basically Anthony Trollope, except all dragons My biggest complaint about Tooth and Claw is that it doesn't really feel like "all dragons". Like, there were lengthy periods of the book in which I completely forgot that the characters were not meant to be human, and then there'd be some passing reference to wings or cannibalism and I'd go "oh, right", but it really does feel like she wrote a Trollope homage and applied the thinnest possible veneer of draconism to it.
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May 19, 2020 18:49
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TheAardvark posted:What was y'all's first "adult" book? I was 8 or 9 when I read Call of the Wild because it was on my grandma's bookshelf. I still kept to more age appropriate/YA stuff mostly for a while but it kinda broke the barrier for reading non-children stuff for me. That was a long time ago, but the first one I remember was an unabridged copy of The Swiss Family Robinson, which took me a while to get through. I grew up in a house with a lot of books, though, and my memory is notoriously awful, so there's a lot of other possibilities.
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Jul 2, 2020 23:30
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For a while now I've wanted to make a good digital copy of The Swiss Family Robinson to replace my beloved, but on the brink of complete disintegration, hardback from my childhood. After rummaging around I found that Project Gutenberg has a relatively recent version, donated by the (apparently now defunct) Pink Tree Press, edited by Anne Wingate. This is a new English version based on a synthesis of existing English translations to restore much of the material that is commonly abridged. Sounds great! However, the actual details of the ebook are maddeningly inept! It looks like Gutenberg may have actually converted it from whatever the original format was (epub? html?) to plaintext and then back again, or something of that kind. Whatever the reason, it's a mess: - italics are rendered with <angle brackets> in the frontmatter and omitted entirely in the main body - quotes are rendered with `backquotes and apostrophes', nested quotes with "double quotes" instead of ‘these’ - footnotes are a * followed by the actual footnote text as an interstitial paragraph, rather than using intradocument links or EPUB footnote annotations - several parts of the front matter are duplicated - formatting on the epitaph poems is completely hosed - and lots of paragraphs have hard linebreaks inserted in them, often in the middle of dialogue. As for the footnotes themselves, there's some editorializing going on there that kind of bugs me. Like, basically the footnotes come in four flavours: - clarifications of the text, i.e. for terms that have changed meaning since it was written or are no longer in common use, such as noting that "lumber" is used in the sense of "bulky objects placed in storage" rather than "milled wood", or that "a la fourchette" is an archaic French idiom meaning to eat food using your fingers rather than cutlery. (Some of these are unnecessary, I think; upon finding a small furred creature with webbed claws and a duck-like bill, I think the footnote declaring it to be a platypus is superfluous.) - clarifications of the setting, such as noting that watered wine is a universal drink in this era as untreated water is often unsafe, or that all Swiss men were expected to own, and be competent with, a firearm - equivalencies with other translations, by (when a character is first introduced) listing other names they might be known by (e.g. Jenny is Emily in some versions) - snarkily pointing out the author-narrator's mistakes, such as when he contradicts his earlier statements, engineers a solution to a problem that would not work in real life, or suggests that pineapples grow on vines or sugarcanes can be tapped for syrup. And I feel that #4 there doesn't really add anything to the book. My original plan was to edit the epub to re-instate the chapter headings that the PTP edition removes (the editor sounds proud of this in the foreword, the monster) but it's rapidly turning into a complete overhaul of it.
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Oct 8, 2020 19:21
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:From what I recall there were numerous different editions of Swiss Family Robinson. Id suggest tracking down an ebook of the precise edition your childhood copy followed. I am aware of that (and alluded to it in my post). My childhood version is the "Books, Inc" Art-Type Edition, which doesn't come with any information about the translation, but based on comparing it to older Gutenberg editions it is almost certainly W.H.G. Kingston's abridged 1849 translation of Mme. de Montholieu's French translation of the original. What interests me about the Pink Tree Press edition, however, is that it is not the version I grew up reading, although it follows Kingston's translation very closely: Foreword posted:[...] most modern editions omit an incredible amount even of Kingston's translation by making small cuttings here and there, some of them maddeningly inept. The Editor's Cut edition from Pink Tree Press has been based on, and compared with, no fewer than five previous editions, all of them out of copyright. Most, though not all, of the cuttings have been restored. The material that continues to be omitted is of little imaginable interest to anyone other than a scholar of nineteenth century literature. And based on spot-checking against both the hardcopy on my shelves, and the Kingston version on Gutenberg, there is indeed restored material there not present in the Kingston translation (or at least, the printing of it I'm familiar with). So, I would quite like to read the PTP edition specifically; it's just a shame the ebook is so poorly put together.
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Oct 8, 2020 21:37
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Arkhamina posted:The very early Project Gutenberg texts sometimes had problems, due to '1 pair of eyes' (and not, say, an actual editor). In 2003 you could just scan, proof, format at upload a book on your own. I project managed 5 or 6 books, and it's a hell of a lot of work. Distributed Proofreaders developed first scripts, then actual software, and now most books have three unique proofers, 2 unique formatters, a project manager, who may or may not be the post processor too. Most of the scans are internet harvested, vs me, with my scanner, drinking and trying to get the text off of the deep gutter to be grabbed by OCR. Yeah, I think I assumed that PTP gave the book to Gutenberg in digital format and it got mangled by PG's postprocessing, but on reflection, in 2003 it may have been donated as a hardcopy and scanned in, right? I was reading ebooks then but they weren't nearly as commonplace as they are now. quote:Anyways, if that vs sucks, flag it on PG and it will be redone, replaced. A title like that will sail through, vs the insect ecology translation from French I am currently puttering around on. I'll do that, then. Thanks. I've already done a lot of work on my copy, but the cleanup changes (restoration of italics and accented characters, fixing the poetry and paragraph formatting, properly annotating the footnotes, fixing quotes) aren't well separated from the for-my-personal-enjoyment changes (deleting/editing footnotes, copying in some footnotes from other editions, reinstating the chapter headings).
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Oct 9, 2020 17:05
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Almost like Disney are total scum who just loving love copyright, but only when it's keeping their stuff out of the public domain.
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Nov 19, 2020 13:59
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Gripweed posted:a 2021 read thread could be fun, where people post the books they've read and little reviews of them Like the "what did you just finish" sticky thread, or (for a somewhat more goal-focused approach) the yearly "booklord challenge" threads?
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Dec 31, 2020 21:51
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TheAardvark posted:I really, really wish they would let you use the book's cover as the lock screen. I know it was seen in leaked code or something(?), other readers have it.. I assume there's some amount of marketing value that outweighs it for Amazon. They want you seeing the Kindle itself or the advertisement, not trying to read what book somebody's reading, maybe. The Kindle seriously doesn't do that?  Between that, the ads, and the weirdly restrictive list of formats, it kinda seems like the only reason to get a Kindle rather than a Kobo or something else is if you really like Amazon.
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Jan 22, 2021 03:58
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Carthag Tuek posted:yeah except if you wanna pay for it!!! In that case it's legitimately easier to pay for the book and then log out of amazon and go pirate a DRM-free copy somewhere else As an added bonus, the pirate version will come in six different formats, and there's a 50/50 chance that someone will also have gone through it and fixed the hosed-up typesetting that gives it 1" margins or makes every italicized word twice as large as it should be or something Hieronymous Alloy posted:https://www.medievalists.net/2015/09/top-10-medieval-book-curses/ drat, mine are just a drawing of a cat sitting atop a stack of books with EX LIBRIS TOXICFROG below them I guess they might curse someone to have trouble getting their book out from under the cat ToxicFrog fucked around with this message at 23:40 on Feb 4, 2021 |
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Feb 4, 2021 23:37
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freebooter posted:Ereader question: (a) The Sony PRS line is still supported by Calibre, which is free, so if you really want to keep using your PRS you can use that; that said, it does take some work (and some additional software) to get Calibre to process DRMed books, so this is only a practical suggestion if you're willing to spend a while loving around with your computer in to save the cost of a new e-reader. (b) Pretty much every e-reader today has integrated lighting, but if you don't like it you can turn it off. The screens are still e-ink (i.e. reflective, not emissive like an LCD screen) and the lighting is an integrated booklight for reading in bed and stuff, not an integral part of the screen technology. (c) Kindles do not support epub, but most library software supports downloading in kindle formats as well, and there are also converters you can use (although you'll probably have to strip the DRM off first). Also not mentioned but (d) most modern e-readers either have no hardware buttons at all or just have forward/back buttons and rely on a touchscreen for everything else. Also the UI for browsing books is worse than the PRS. Sorry.
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Dec 5, 2021 19:04
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