Free Candy For Everyone

Ok, so I’m not talking about stopping reading or anything. I love reading, books are one of my big passions. But books are piling up on every surface of my home. I have several overflowing bookshelves. They just get more and more full, since I can’t seem to stop buying books. And at some point, I’ll have to get rid of some of them or be unable to walk around.

My family tends to be early adopters of technology. I’ve had a TiVo since 2000. Just about everyone in the family got an iPhone within the first month of release. And my uncle bought and Amazon Kindle as soon as it came out. What’s a Kindle, you ask? It’s an electronic book reader. But those aren’t books! you say. I know, but they’re getting pretty darn close.

The screen is actually rather book-like. Reading it doesn’t seem like as much of a strain as you might expect. It’s light and small, and I’m getting sick of bringing 15 pounds of books with me when I go on extended vacations. I’m not sure if I’m ready to buy this first generation reader, but it seems pretty cool. You can go to Amazon and buy books straight from your Kindle and download them right away. You can link several Kindles to the same account and share books with you family.

Some books seem a bit pricey to me, given that they’re in digital format. $10 for a book when you don’t “get” anything? But I’m reading “The Golden Compass” right now, and it’s only $3.19 on Kindle, that’s pretty awesome. Check it out: The Golden Compass (His Dark Materials).

In any event, I’m not quite ready to dive in. My brother just picked one up as well, and I might have to borrow his and try to read a book with it, see how I like it. I’ll let you know how it goes!

Madeleine L’Engle has passed away. She was the author of “A Wrinkle in Time”, one of the truly classic books of my childhood. I’m saddened.

In case it hasn’t yet become abundantly clear, I’m something of a geek. A nerd too, pick you moniker of choice. But I’m going to step over the line and reveal something truly appallingly dorky even. Way back in the days of my youth, I was a young lass with an interest in computers. I’d messed around in Basic a tiny bit, but I actually spent a lot of my time in an application that was sort of a precursor to the spreadsheet, called MAGIC. Looking for info on it, there’s just a tiny blurb on this page on Wikipedia. My memories of the details of the program are hazy - I was probably ten years old at the time, so forgive the lack of detail. So I don’t quite remember how I did it, but what I did was write a database to keep track of my book collection.

You’re probably busy laughing at me right about now, but that’s ok. I have no shame of my youthful transgressions (or lack thereof). I read a lot and had a large collection of books, and keeping track of them, being able to sort them by title and author and all that jazz was just totally awesome to me. Flash forward to April 2006. I’ve got this blog and I’m trying to populate it with stuff. I’m searching out plugins and other nifty things to add to the site and I find the most wonderous thing - a plugin to track my books and what I’m reading! Rob Miller’s Now Reading let’s you search Amazon to find the book’s information, then stores the pertinent bits on your blog and let’s you rate it, review it, and say when you read it.

If you’re reading my blog in an aggregator, you’re missing out on the constantly updating sidebar where I list out books I’m reading. Don’t worry, you’re not missing much. I read a lot of junk. Here’s my full library of everything I’ve been reading for the last year or so: http://tara.teich.net/blog/library/.

The author of the plugin has a nifty extra bit on his site - he has a count of pages read as well! I wanted this too! I went over to his forum and found a thread on the topic. He’d actually already explained how to make a new plugin to add this functionality, so I dropped that onto my blog and voila, now you can see that I’ve read (as of right now) a total of 39,416 pages since April of 2006. That’s pretty darn cool.

I made some minor changes to the extra Now Reading Pages plugin that Rob had posted - his version would only add page data when you added a new book to your library. I wanted to loop over all the books I already had and add the page count, so I added that bit of minor functionality. If anyone’s interested, I’ll post a link. It requires Rob’s awesome plugin, so make sure you get that (and if you like it, give him your support!), then when you activate mine, it’ll pull all the page counts down from Amazon. NOTE: This is slow. Just be patient and wait, it’ll eventually finish. Well. How long it takes depends on the size of your library. My 120ish book library took several seconds to get through.

DOWNLOAD HERE

I don’t know what’s going on! There seems to be something in the air at the television networks telling them to sign up to make adaptations of fantasy series. A whole bunch of them are getting adapted.

First up is the Dresden Files. This is a series that’s already on the SciFi channel. It’s based on a series of books by Jim Butcher that I started reading last year. It’s fun fluff - wizards and magic and vampires in a modern city setting. If you’re curious, the first book is Storm Front.

Next, HBO is making George R.R. Martin’s mammoth fantasy epic into a show. I don’t know much about that, but I do like the series - starts with A Game of Thrones.

Then I hear that Lifetime is making a series out of Tanya Huff’s vampire Blood series. The first two books are collected in this volume. This series isn’t Huff’s best, but it’s mildly entertaining. The fact that Lifetime is adapting it implies it’ll be rather low budget. My hopes aren’t that high.

Sam Raimi has optioned the rights to Goodkind’s Sword of Truth series. No idea where that’s gone, how far along it’s going in the process…

Lastly, Charlaine Harris’ urban vampire series is also being adapted for HBO. Anna Paquin is going to star which gives me pretty high hopes. I think these books are fun reading, start at the beginning with Dead Until Dark.

I guess the fantasy movie success is spilling onto the small screen for now. We’ll see if these are worth watching!

A few months ago I mentioned that I was trying this website called BookMooch. It lets you basically trade your books with people all over the world at no cost except postage. Shortly after my first post on the subject, I had a bookmooched from me. I sent it out, and with my point, selected one and had it sent to me.

Since then, I’ve had several more books mooched. It’s actually kind of cool. I get an email when someone wants one of the books I have up for grabs. Then I just wrap it up and drop it in the mail. It costs less than $2 to send it anywhere in the US with bookrate media mail. According to my profile, I’ve mooched 6 books and sent out 4 (you 1/10th of a point for giving feedback to someone when you receive a book a 1/10th of a point for listing a book, so it is possible to get ahead a little bit). Got one in the mail today, sent one out yesterday, and just ordered another one. It’s kind of cool to think about all these books flying around the country.

Speaking of which, several of the books I’ve received came with bookplates inside directing me to BookCrossing. This awesome site is all about helping get books out there in the world, traveling and being shared. Each book gets registered on the site before you send it on its journey and then people can make journal entries as they receive it. You can see where the book goes and who gets it. I haven’t actually flagged any of my books (I have trouble “defacing” books, I treat them with much reverence and sticking something permanently inside it doesn’t come easily to me), but here’s my profile page and you can see the books I’ve caught.

Reminds me of the very cool Where’s George website. It’s just like BookCrossing, but for money. I received a bill with a where’s george stamp on it a little while ago, and it led me to the site. You enter in the serial number and can track where it’s been based on log entries. My bill hadn’t traveled all that far, unfortunately. But ooh, it’s pretty darn nifty to look at how far some things travel. Though I do wish the page weren’t so stuffed with ads. It’s a bit annoying.

Anyway, I love me the books and the reading. You should all go read a book or something. Meanwhile, I’m gonna play some World of Warcraft.