8 posts tagged “books”

Roman Blood: A Novel of Ancient Rome

Steven Saylor

On vacation I read Roman Blood, first in a series of mystery stories set in ancient Rome by Steven Saylor. Saylor's books are known for being exceedingly well researched. His history knowledge is a bit better than his writing, but the story is exciting enough. Amusingly I had to remind myself at times that the far-off world the story's set in wasn't a fantasy setting like so many other books I read, but a time and place that actually existed. The murder case in Roman Blood is a case that actually happened, and many of Cicero's words are taken directly from written counts of the events. Couple this with HBO's Rome and you'll get a very good idea of what life was like back then.

I'm reading the next book in the series now, which is a set of short stories. Not sure if I'll go on from there, but I recommend picking up one of his books for a good look into a cool time in history. While all the books are part of a series, I think they're all separate stories, so you can pick up any of them and probably follow along just fine.

I've written up some of my Deathly Hallows thoughts here. I'll probably add to them as I think of more stuff about the book.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (Book 7)

Wands are only as powerful as the wizards who use them. Some wizards just like to boast that theirs are bigger and better than other people's.

–Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, page 415

Here’s two facts about me that, if you knew me, you might have thought weren’t true:

1. I’m not very well read when it comes to sci-fi and fantasy novels
2. I’ve never played a pen and paper role-playing game

Via kwc, here’s a list and some instructions.

This is a list of the 50 most significant science fiction/fantasy novels, 1953-2002, according to the Science Fiction Book Club. Bold the ones you’ve read, strike-out the ones you hated, italicize those you started but never finished and put an asterisk beside the ones you loved.

1. The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien *
2. The Foundation Trilogy, Isaac Asimov
3. Dune, Frank Herbert
4. Stranger in a Strange Land, Robert A. Heinlein
5. A Wizard of Earthsea, Ursula K. Le Guin
6. Neuromancer, William Gibson
7. Childhood’s End, Arthur C. Clarke
8. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Philip K. Dick
9. The Mists of Avalon, Marion Zimmer Bradley
10. Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury
11. The Book of the New Sun, Gene Wolfe
12. A Canticle for Leibowitz, Walter M. Miller, Jr.
13. The Caves of Steel, Isaac Asimov
14. Children of the Atom, Wilmar Shiras
15. Cities in Flight, James Blish
16. The Colour of Magic, Terry Pratchett
17. Dangerous Visions, edited by Harlan Ellison
18. Deathbird Stories, Harlan Ellison
19. The Demolished Man, Alfred Bester
20. Dhalgren, Samuel R. Delany
21. Dragonflight, Anne McCaffrey
22. Ender’s Game, Orson Scott Card *
23. The First Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever, Stephen R. Donaldson
24. The Forever War, Joe Haldeman
25. Gateway, Frederik Pohl
26. Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, J.K. Rowling *
27. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams *
28. I Am Legend, Richard Matheson
29. Interview with the Vampire, Anne Rice *
30. The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K. Le Guin
31. Little, Big, John Crowley
32. Lord of Light, Roger Zelazny
33. The Man in the High Castle, Philip K. Dick
34. Mission of Gravity, Hal Clement
35. More Than Human, Theodore Sturgeon
36. The Rediscovery of Man, Cordwainer Smith
37. On the Beach, Nevil Shute
38. Rendezvous with Rama, Arthur C. Clarke
39. Ringworld, Larry Niven
40. Rogue Moon, Algis Budrys
41. The Silmarillion, J.R.R. Tolkien
42. Slaughterhouse-5, Kurt Vonnegut
43. Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson
44. Stand on Zanzibar, John Brunner
45. The Stars My Destination, Alfred Bester
46. Starship Troopers, Robert A. Heinlein
47. Stormbringer, Michael Moorcock
48. The Sword of Shannara, Terry Brooks
49. Timescape, Gregory Benford
50. To Your Scattered Bodies Go, Philip Jose Farmer

So yeah, 8/50. Guess I have a good list to work from once I finish what I’m reading now.

The Walking Dead Book 1 (Walking Dead)

Robert Kirkman

It happens every year or so that there’s a show, movie, book, band, or whatever that I’ve heard enough good things about that I know it’s going to be great, yet still never get around to picking up. Over the weekend I checked one of those off my list with the purchase of The Walking Dead Book One. There are five trade paperbacks out collecting the first two years or so of its run, and there’s one hardcover out which collects the same material as the first two trades [1]. In the afterword the writer says that he loves horror movies but what he hates about them are the words, “The End.” What happens once they flee to the island, or get rescued by the army? The Walking Dead is an ongoing comic series which tells the story of a group of survivors trying to stay alive and avoid zombies. Each story arc reads like a movie, so you end up really seeing the characters develop as the story progresses.

[1]: Comics have a strange thing that’s the opposite of books, where they’re usually collected in paperback first, then hardcover later if they’re successful. The hardcovers are usually printed on better paper, collect more issues per book, and contain lots of extras like sketches and interviews. The downside is that where the paperbacks usually lag behind the monthly comic by 6 months to a year, the hardcovers are that much farther behind the current storyline. The hardcover “book 2”, which will collect 13-24, is due out in February. By that time you’ll be about a year behind the comics, which will be at issue 33 or so I think. I hate owning series in multiple formats. If I start reading it from issue number 1, I’ll keep reading it as a monthly comic. If I start reading it late, I’ll only pick up the softcovers. Since I’m already behind on this one, I’m just going to wait for the hardcovers, and when the series ends I’ll have a nice set of volumes to lend out.

Amazon.com is a great resource for information about books, CDs, and movies, and it has a very open policy for allowing webmasters to use their information on their own sites. The problem, especially with DVD images, as anyone with a copy of Delicious Library knows, is that the images for some DVDs have very crummy art in the Amazon database. When you want a nice image of the product cover, you’ll sometimes get an annoying 3-D perspective with some discs flying out the side:

And even when you don’t have that problem, not all images are present with the same aspect ratio. In my experience, a DVD cover is about 6x9, but not every image on Amazon uses that ratio.

This becomes a bit of a problem when you’re trying to present lots of cover images on a website and want everything to line up nicely, which was my goal in building archives for my movie watching and book reading logs. Fortunately, there are some good resources on how to pull data from Amazon that I’ve found helpful, most notably Abusing Amazon Images. Reading through the various manipulations presented there, here are a few options I’ve played around with, using Red as the example:

1. Default image size:
   
   This looks nice, but when you put a bunch of movies on a page together, you’ll see that they’re not all the same width, so they won’t line up.
2. Cropped to 60x90 pixels, with spillover to the bottom and right not being shown:
   
   Works well. You get most or all of the image, and it cuts off any discs flying out the side, but if the image is presented in 3-D, you’ll see a lot of white on the top and left.
3. 60x60 square:
   
   Provides a very nice uniform look, but movies end up looking like CDs.
4. Scaled to be 60 pixels wide:
   
   The best option I’ve found so far. You lose a little bit of fidelity on larger images, but the idea is to get a thumbnail anyway.

After playing around with everything, I settled on option 4, which you can see on my movies page and my books page. You can also view reviews by their rating, as linked from the master Archives.

I’m a whole chapter into the new one and I’m wondering, what all did Voldemort do the first time around? Maybe this book will tell us more, but all 9 billion pages of the first five books I don’t think anyone’s ever really rattled off a list of what happened during his first reign. We know he killed some people and stuff, but beyond that no one ever wants to talk about it. Did Voldemort try to take over the whole world? Did he succeed? What did Joe Muggle perceive was going on?

When I recoded the Trust for Museum Exhibitions website, I replaced the late 90’s era markup with lean, standards-compliant XHTML and CSS. The result was a page that looks cleaner than the original at one-sixth the size. The page loads faster for you and costs less for the Trust to serve. The benefits of coding with stylesheets and standardized techniques should be apparent enough from that alone. For anyone interested in learning the new way of the web, I strongly recommend Jeffrey Zeldman’s Designing with Web Standards. It’s a great read, and has a striking orange cover. (Which is now green in the second edition.)