Creating a reading list of the great books
Tagged with: books
I suspect that I enjoy creating lists even more than I like reading books, which is a lot. Combining the two activities creates some kind of critical density in my brain so I thought it might be fun to create a super reading list, a large list of all of the worthwhile books that I should try to read over the course of my life.
Now, I’m fairly open-minded when it comes to the meaning of worthwhile. The problem really is knowing where to start. It would need to:
- be large, but manageable – say around 100 books initially, with another couple of hundred added as I went along
- cover the essentials of a wide variety of subjects – art, metaphysics, history, mythology, psychology, architecture, scientific method, biology etc etc
Here’s a start to give some suggestion of what kind of reading list I’d like to create – a mixture of fiction and non-fiction, classic and modern and without getting bogged down in any one area (although I will confess a soft spot for continental intellectualism!).
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So help me out – what books can you recommend that are indispensable reading? What should I be reading that will introduce the essentials of a field or change my understanding of a subject I thought I knew?
Why the iPhone makes such a good camera
Tagged with: iphone, Photography
On the face of it, the camera of the iPhone 3GS is pretty poor. For those that care about megapixels, it has significantly less than other phones. It doesn’t even have flash, unlike the K750i phone I had back in 2005. And despite the ability to select your point of focus and exposure, it’s still tricky to get a good quality image from the thing.
You know what? Doesn’t matter. It’s still a great, great camera for two reasons:
- apps (eg in-built editing)
- connectivity
Apps
There are loads of really great photo apps now available that make the general crappiness of the inbuilt camera work for you. My current favourites include:
Lo-mob (£1.19)
My newest find, but also my best. The app let you apply a couple of dozen effects like a through the viewfinder look, vintage Polaroid or, as below, 35mm shot in a medium format camera:
ShakeitPhoto (£0.59)
The best fake-Polaroid app out there, for my money. The piece de resistance is that when you shake the iPhone, the picture develops before your eyes, which never gets old.
Best Camera, CameraBag and PerfectPhoto are all worth a look too. They all offer a different look and it’s worth experimenting with them to see which you’d want to use in different situations.
Connectivity
Take the photo, drop it into an app to get the look you want and email it to your friends, or for wider impact, Posterous (which’ll autopost up to Flickr, Twitter, etc.). Perhaps I’m a little simple-minded, but this still seems amazing to me. I know MMS has been around for ages so we’ve been able to send photos to each other over the air for a while, but it wasn’t until devices like the iPhone came about that we reached a tipping point in ease of use.
Now I suppose other smartphones have similar levels of connectivity, but with them you’re stuck with the normal badly exposed, grainy shots you just took. Combine the iPhone’s connectivity with its ability to actually produce worthwhile material and you’re onto a real winner.
Books and films 2009
I started 2009 with a simple ambition: read a book a week for the entire year. Now, I’ve failed miserably at this, but realised in doing so that a book a week isn’t really a very good measure (and that’s the story I’m sticking with). Happily, I also kept a record of the number of pages in each book, which makes it easier to see the quantity of reading (of books) done. The 24 books below come to just over 10,000 pages, which is 50 books with 200 pages – a count which I don’t think is too bad at all.
Books
- Moon Dust – Andrew Smith
- Flowers for Algernon – Daniel Keyes
- Hyperion – Dan Simmons
- The Fall of Hyperion – Dan Simmons
- Endymion – Dan Simmons
- The Rise of Endymion – Dan Simmons
- Pattern Recognition – William Gibson
- The Black Angel – John Connolly
- Bad Things – Michael Marshall
- Up Till Now – William Shatner
- Live Bait – PJ Traci
- All Politics is Local – Tip O’Neill
- Black River – GM Ford
- Gone – Lisa Gardner
- Dead Until Dark – Charlaine Harris
- A Blind Eye – GM Ford
- Lucky Man – Michael J Fox
- Into the Woods – Tana French
- Adventures in the Screen Trade – William Goldman
- Generation A – Douglas Coupland
- Everything Bad is Good for You – Steven Johnson
- What I Talk About When I Talk About Running – Haruki Murakami
- Starship Troopers – Robert Heinlein
- Quicksilver – Neal Stephenson
Still, it’d be good to hit 52 in 2010,which I’m on the way to achieving (three down so far, although it is of course a marathon and not a sprint…).
The missing data here is the amount I’m reading online though. Along with (it seems) everyone else, I’m reading more noit less, despite my ‘traditional’ sources being used less. I can’t think of a good way of tracking my online reading that wouldn’t be monumentally tedious though. And I daren’t keep track of the number of hours I sit in front of a monitor – it’s not the kind of answer anyone wants to hear.
Films
I’ve seen a lot of films this year and most of them I’ve forgotten, but here are the highlights:
- Moon (changed my opinion of Sam Rockwell)
- 2012 (turn your brain off and go with it)
- Wall-E (a masterpiece of sound design with an engaging story and more heart than 99% of the other films I’ve seen this year)
- Star Trek (possible the greatest of all re-imaginings)
- Avatar (visually stunning enough to outweigh the trite story – and it’s the return of Jim Cameron)
And yes, they’re all science fiction. I’m comfortable with it.
Why Dollhouse got cancelled
Simply - it just wasn’t very good.
I love Joss Whedon’s work. I own complete series of Buffy, Angel and (the all too short) Firefly and I’ve watched them all many times.
But Dollhouse just seems so… pointless. It’s a bit like the second season of the Sarah Connor Chronicles – it doesn’t know where it wants to go, or what it’s trying to say. Being a Whedon fan, I wonder sometimes if he’s taken a back seat on this one as it lacks almost all of his trademarks – clever dialogue, playing with genre, pop culture and self-reference. It feels at times like someone else’s attempt at a Joss Whedon show.
His previous shows have all taken a simple premise and pushed it to its extremes with great results.
- Buffy – a beautiful example of using a fantastic setting to tell stories about the difficulties of growing up.
- Angel – the obvious sequal to Buffy dealing with redemption and the grey line between good and evil.
- Firefly - more redemption and the importance of family and holding on to your convictions and independence whatever the cost.
Dollhouse though – just what the hell is it supposed to be about? Prostitution? Identity? To be honest, the overriding theme seems to be ‘let’s get Eliza Dushku and Dichen Lachman into skimpy outfits’.
I like ambiguity as much as the next man, but how are we supposed to feel about the characters of Dollhouse, with its catologue of sociopaths, broken people, murderers and willing sex-slaves. Worse still, as it busily spins its wheels with yet another ‘imprint of the week’ episode with a tacked on ‘twist’ ending to show that there really is an arc (really! honestly!!), we all saw the apocalyptic future in the final episode of the previous season. And it looked awesome. So why do I now have to sit through a bunch of doll in peril episodes while they drip feed us plot developments that have already been revealed?
And on top of all that, we are constantly expected to overlook the fact that it’s fundamentally a show about sex-slaves and their pimps. Even if we can overlook the ethical issues (and that’s difficult when the Agent Ballard character (now a ‘reluctant’ pimp) brings it up every week), the premise just doesn’t make sense – if you had the technology to wipe people’s minds and implant new personas, why would you dick around with a worldwide network of brothels? If it’s about co-opting the rich and powerful – as has been hinted – there must be easier ways.
Anyway, I hope they can do something interesting in the final nine episodes to restore some of Whedon’s reputation. He’s promised a proper climax and they have a couple of epsiodes left to film, so we’ll see what happens (and if S2E4 was anything to go by, things are going to get a lot darker). And I’ll watch it because:
- I still have some faith in Whedon’s ability to pull something out of the bag and
- I quite like watching Eliza Dushku and Dichen Lachman in skimpy outfits.
Using social media when travelling
Tagged with: Social media, travel
When I’m away from home, I like to write a travel journal. However, they tend to get stuffed into a drawer when I get back and I’d like to be able to merge what I’ve written with the photos I’ve taken. Obvious answer then – put it in a blog.
Thing is – I’m on holiday. I don’t really want to be spending a lot of time each day writing up what I’ve done and the last thing I want to happen is reporting the experience to get in the way of actually having the experience. I’d prefer to put longer posts together after I get back to the UK to give me the time to write something more considered (and fully illustrated), without breaking into my time away.
What I’ll be doing during my (very shortly) impending trip to south west USA is updating my Posterous photoblog from my iPhone. Posterous is brilliant and perfectly suited to this kind of task as (1) updates are made by email and (2) everything happens automatically.
So, for instance – I’m on the road in Arizona and come across the Daily Pie Cafe in Pie Town (seriously, it exists). Perfect photo material so I get out my iPhone, take a photo of whichever pie I’m eating and email it to my Posterous account, along with some content explaining where I am and what is going on. I’ll have turned my data connection off due to stupidly expensive roaming data rates so the email will go into the send queue. As soon as a I get to a wireless access point it sends and a new post is added.
Posterous then autoposts the photo to my Flickr account, Facebook account and onto Twitter with a link back to the blog post, so all my friends and followers can find out what I’m up to.
I’m still very impressed by this (thanks to Phill Howson for telling me about it). It seems perfectly suited to travel and is both simple and clever. It also lets my friends get in touch with me easily, though loads of channels (either direct on the blog or on Twitter, Facebook, email). It’s good to be reminded of what an amazingly connected world we now live in, able to share experiences instantaneously from one side of the world to another (and using a device that’s smaller than my wallet and has more computing power than a three year old laptop). Who needs science fiction?