And now for something completely wordy...

Ready Player One

Ready Player One - Ernest Cline g

The Road

The Road - Cormac McCarthy "Good­ness will find the lit­tle boy. It al­ways has. It will again." Ha, ha, ha! McCarthy may be as monotonous as hell, but every once in a while he winks out an hilarious zinger... It was *meant* to be LOL funny, right? (But I think I'll cry if I find the above in the quotes database.) Alas, as ridiculous as that line was, it wasn't enough to make up for the rest of the tedious puerility.The fire's inside you, boys, don't you forget it. Happy trails.

This Book Is Overdue!: How Librarians and Cybrarians Can Save Us All

This Book Is Overdue!: How Librarians and Cybrarians Can Save Us All - Marilyn Johnson As a devout library lover in my youth, though finding very little reason to visit in my older years (and actually feeling sad about this) due to largely to lack of reading time... this was a fun book to read. It does its job of making libraries seem exciting, and full of awesomeness. The writer expresses the loves that are close to all library-lover's hearts: books, collecting books, organizing books, reading book, knowing about books and the stuff we found in books -- oh and all that other media and stuff as well. She expresses this while describing the struggles, experiments, and changes made in libraries in these internet times. As a fairly adept computer/database programmer and all-around "IT" guy, and developer of a web site that currently gets about 500,000 unique visits per month, I felt that she could have used the thing she stresses many times in the book that libraries need now: competent computer/IT consulting/staff. Pretty much every library computer/web interface I've seen (in Canada) has sucked extremely badly. Excusing this by saying these companies who supply these systems (and horrifically expensive prices) were the only ones capable of handling such large collections at the time is just ridiculous to those of us who have some knowledge of these things. Excusing great mystery of the missing holds as finally (after how long?!) as being not the fault of the software, but of the librarians, equally misdiagnoses the problem. Were there no simple audit trails? Do the developers have no respect for data integrity?!!! Excusing this on having to interface with or work on top of legacy systems and structures, while certainly a consideration and a constraint, does not seem credible to me.It's truly broken my heart to see the crap my beloved libraries have installed, and tied themselves to. And continue to. The IT consultants they seem to end up with these days seem more to be sales people --- selling them a bill of goods. A short term we-want-to-be-hip-and-up-to-date solution tied to specific devices, or pathetic DRM schemes.And the length of time the author spends in Second Life is, to me, also rather startling. She does mention the lag and glitches. But she doesn't mention the relatively steep learning curve and hardware requirements just for entry. She describes the scenes she participates in that world with beautiful imagination: the (virtual) reality is vastly (if not infinitely) more clunky. Yeah, it's interesting and fun that a group of librarians have gravitated there and done interesting things... but Second Life is rather rather old technology by this point, which never really took off as expected: it's a niche of which you can say at least it did better than all of the other "revolutionary" virtual reality environments that were supposed to change the way we interacted with computers. Admittedly it's been years since I looked at it, and frankly I felt like I had entered a time machine and gone back about five years to hear such glowing reviews of it in this book. Five years! I was more interested in the social activism side of librarians; and some of the history of library initiatives was quite interesting. Lately, though I have no "information systems" training, I have found myself helping a local non-profit organization (for free) get their old, approximately 2000 volume, card catalog into a computer. I set up Koha for them (an excellent, free, open-source, library software -- even if it feels a bit hodge-podge) and wrote up documentation on the cataloging process, and circulation. Actually I've ended up doing the input for 1500 of the volumes myself in my spare time over the last year. I've become very familiar with MARC (in it's various flavours), Z39.50, worldcat, and related things. I've also become rather intimate with the blessed cards, and all their peculiarities. Notes written on them by librarians 20 years ago which are now indecipherable. At several points the cart catalog was gone through and a system of small lines, dots or checkmarks were added to the corners of cards indicate some sort of status. No one really remembers what the marks meant -- and what they do remember no one knows if the information is still valid. There are professinionally printed cards with LCC numbers. But most of the cards are manually typed: I am amazed by the skill of the old typewriter formatting! So much time and love went into these cards. Little details. They were lucky to have had a real librarian labouring with love on these. Some cards are hand written...the physical cards themselves are a treasure which in some ways I hate to supplant. Perhaps we will image them, and add the card catalog as an item to the online database as a curiosity. (Most are already photographed as part of our digitizing process.) Some amateur librarian in the future who cares about this little library may like to just randomly flip through some of the card images -- for some nostalgic fun, and inspiration. Anyhow, it was interesting to read the author's own, non-techie, struggle with the simple (yet so complex) business of saving web pages for herself. And it was nice she gave a vigorous and insightful nod to the importance of open source software in cataloging and storing information for the long term (even if it what she meant was "open formats").I just wish i had more time.

Lord Arthur Savile's Crime and Other Stories

Lord Arthur Savile's Crime and Other Stories - Oscar Wilde It seems to me that some here are not taking into account the potential for wider echoes, for deeper metaphors, contained within some of these stories, beyond the cute and clever word-play and emotional moral parables. There is, it seems to me for example, a rather blatant hint towards the end of “The Portrait of Mr W.H.” that, as wonderful as the plot's fabrication is, it is itself a particular shadow on a certain cave wall...But perhaps its just my cataracts...

Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West

Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West - Cormac McCarthy I'm gunna be harsh. Why not? McCarthy is. I novel is hanged with the fancy rope so many other reviewers extravagantly embroider for it: monotony, flatness, and one-dimensionality. Hold on there illiterate scum, you say, what about all that blood dripping symbolism (and bold historical perspective). But by the time you'll be done saying that (I'm politely pausing, in fact, to let you finish -- I'm more considerate than McCarthy), your scalp will've been ripped from your head and stuffed, clotted with blood, back in your mouth to choke on until your eyes pop from their sockets like boated exploding mules, shoved from dark, high, mist enshrouded ledges, strewn with coyote bones. Out of time. That is all.

Underworld

Underworld - Don DeLillo This needs some explaining. After rating many hundreds of read books, this one had me the most perplexed as to how to rate it. I was thinking, either a 3 or a 5. A three, or a five?! It was suggested I average it out as a 4, but that seemed to me to just misrepresent both ratings.There is no question for me that the writing in this book is 5 star, all the way. Though the lengthy baseball stadium scene at the beginning, packed with American cliches and the slapstick team of Hoover and Gleason, started me off decisively thinking I was not at all going to like this book, it won me over with its amazing presentation and acute powers of observation. To my amazement I found myself eventually able to see the baseball game (and fans) from a whole other perspective than I thought possible. This is 5 star stuff. And it just keeps going, and going, and going...And yet, honestly, the book is extremely American, and as much as I'm dazzled by the writing and observations, the characters and content just don't speak to me personally very much. Hence, for me, though the writing is top notch, I can't get much beyond "liked it" (3 stars). So, seeking enlightenment, I naturally read a bunch of reviews here to get a sense of how others have evaluated this work. There's very little middle ground. There's a blanket of 4 and 5 stars, peppered with shotgun blasts of of 1 star holes. The 1 star hits are, without a doubt, the more substantial (sadly) and fun to read. I guess the 5 star reviewers are just too in awe and humbled to attempt to write anything insightful after completing the masterpiece? What more is there to say?I am in entire sympathy with most of the 1 star reviews I read. Yes, the book really feels long. Yes, what "plot" there is, there hardly is. Yes, Delillo is brutally long winded. Yes, it can't help but drag on probably even the most ardent fan in places. Yes, it's really hard to hang on to the thread, and not drift off into the aether of words. I am in sympathy with those who "did not like", for these reasons. They are justified in this perspective. And yet I am also sad. They seem to have missed so much. I feel, when confronted with such a sweeping, complexly structured, and yet minutely detailed work as this, that the lack is in us the readers rather than in the text. This is a work we really do need to expand ourselves and apply ourselves to connect with, as lovers of literature, lovers of observation, and lovers of life.And so, slightly ironically, it was the delightful and painful one star reviews that pushed me from the middle of the road into the extremely starry expanse. This book deserves the stars, even if I don't entirely feel them.I still like White Noise more (the only other Delillo I've thus far read) -- though it has less stars from me.I hope this explanation of my here aberrant rating is satisfactory (to me).

Uncle Tom's Cabin

Uncle Tom's Cabin - Harriet Beecher Stowe "Poor critters."
SPOILER ALERT!

The Road

The Road - Cormac McCarthy "Good­ness will find the lit­tle boy. It al­ways has. It will again."

Ha, ha, ha! McCarthy may be as monotonous as hell, but every once in a while he winks out an hilarious zinger... It was *meant* to be LOL funny, right? (But I think I'll cry if I find the above in the quotes database.) Alas, as ridiculous as that line was, it wasn't enough to make up for the rest of the tedious puerility.

The fire's inside you, boys, don't you forget it. Happy trails.

SPOILER ALERT!

The Road

The Road - Cormac McCarthy "Good­ness will find the lit­tle boy. It al­ways has. It will again."

Ha, ha, ha! McCarthy may be as monotonous as hell, but every once in a while he winks out an hilarious zinger... It was *meant* to be LOL funny, right? (But I think I'll cry if I find the above in the quotes database.) Alas, as ridiculous as that line was, it wasn't enough to make up for the rest of the tedious puerility.

The fire's inside you, boys, don't you forget it. Happy trails.

Ready Player One

Ready Player One - Ernest Cline g

Uncle Tom's Cabin

Uncle Tom's Cabin - Harriet Beecher Stowe "Poor critters."

Uncle Tom's Cabin

Uncle Tom's Cabin - Harriet Beecher Stowe "Poor critters."

Lord Arthur Savile's Crime and Other Stories

Lord Arthur Savile's Crime and Other Stories - Oscar Wilde It seems to me that some here are not taking into account the potential for wider echoes, for deeper metaphors, contained within some of these stories, beyond the cute and clever word-play and emotional moral parables. There is, it seems to me for example, a rather blatant hint towards the end of “The Portrait of Mr W.H.” that, as wonderful as the plot's fabrication is, it is itself a particular shadow on a certain cave wall...

But perhaps its just my cataracts...

Lord Arthur Savile's Crime and Other Stories

Lord Arthur Savile's Crime and Other Stories - Oscar Wilde It seems to me that some here are not taking into account the potential for wider echoes, for deeper metaphors, contained within some of these stories, beyond the cute and clever word-play and emotional moral parables. There is, it seems to me for example, a rather blatant hint towards the end of “The Portrait of Mr W.H.” that, as wonderful as the plot's fabrication is, it is itself a particular shadow on a certain cave wall...

But perhaps its just my cataracts...

Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West

Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West - Cormac McCarthy I'm gunna be harsh. Why not? McCarthy is. I novel is hanged with the fancy rope so many other reviewers extravagantly embroider for it: monotony, flatness, and one-dimensionality. Hold on there illiterate scum, you say, what about all that blood dripping symbolism (and bold historical perspective). But by the time you'll be done saying that (I'm politely pausing, in fact, to let you finish -- I'm more considerate than McCarthy), your scalp will've been ripped from your head and stuffed, clotted with blood, back in your mouth to choke on until your eyes pop from their sockets like boated exploding mules, shoved from dark, high, mist enshrouded ledges, strewn with coyote bones. Out of time. That is all.

Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West

Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West - Cormac McCarthy I'm gunna be harsh. Why not? McCarthy is. I novel is hanged with the fancy rope so many other reviewers extravagantly embroider for it: monotony, flatness, and one-dimensionality. Hold on there illiterate scum, you say, what about all that blood dripping symbolism (and bold historical perspective). But by the time you'll be done saying that (I'm politely pausing, in fact, to let you finish -- I'm more considerate than McCarthy), your scalp will've been ripped from your head and stuffed, clotted with blood, back in your mouth to choke on until your eyes pop from their sockets like boated exploding mules, shoved from dark, high, mist enshrouded ledges, strewn with coyote bones. Out of time. That is all.

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