The Plan Thus Far

The Other Half is on a decluttering binge, inspired by the fact that he can never find what he is looking for when he is looking for it. I think this is not due to having too much stuff, just not organising the stuff one has in a smart way. Whatever it is, seems like we’re dedicating some serious time this year to decluttering.

His decluttering binge has been somewhat interrupted by the arrival of my Aunt and increased hours for me at my work. If my Aunt and I have the day off, we want to go out walking if the weather is good, which it has been. You see at the top of this post a photo of the stunning Jervis Bay on a recent walk we did. But even so we are Getting Shiznit Done here at home.

A few rooms of the house have been tackled, but one room needs a LOT of work and that is my Book Room, which also became the dumping ground for anything else that did not have a home. Before I take on this task head on, I need to make some decisions.

The Problem – E-books VS Physical Books.


Some of my heavy books – the Shakespeare one is very heavy!

I like to read before I go to sleep. I have a lot of physical books. Over 300 at last count, some of which I have owned for 20 years or more. They have travelled from house to house with us as we lived life. They have been good friends, there when I needed them. Which makes the decision to let them go quite difficult and I have never been able to manage it.

Sure, sometimes I have done a small book declutter and let books I was no longer interested in reading go. I would always take them to the second hand book store for credit, where I could get secondhand books with that credit. This is really no longer an option I am interested in, because I do not want more second hand books.


Click on this photo for a larger view

The reason why I do not want more second hand books is simple. Over the years I have mostly switched to reading on my Samsung tablet for many reasons. Here are some of them –

1. I don’t have to have a light on when I read because the tablet lights up.

2. No page turning = complete silence so The Other Half can sleep.

3. I can store a lot of books on my tablet and take them everywhere I go.

4. There are a lot of older books available for free via various sites – Project Gutenberg is the one I use most.

5. E-books cannot collect dust or take up room in the house.

Click on this photo for a larger view

6. Some e-book readers will keep a record of when you read an e-book, how long you have spent reading it, and it even works out how many words a minute. Mine has the Recent shelf, where it stores the most recent reads in the order I read them – or did not read them, if I was looking for a new read and then decided to look for another book. Those show up with 0 hours in the time spent reading.

I know a lot of people have not made this switch to e-books yet, but I am telling you it is awesomeness wrapped up in a nice neat tablet bow. I don’t miss physical books. Especially not on a cold night when I only need one hand available to tap the screen to turn the page.

I would read a physical book once every 6 months or so these days, but I mostly read them during the day rather than before bedtime. I have collected a lot of e-books over the years and my collection now contains nearly 12,000 books though some of these are the same title just in different formats – epub & mobi mostly.

I don’t carry them all on my tablet, I have narrowed that down to a select few, just under 4,000 books there which is nearly 4gb of data. I add in new folders every few months or so. Can you imagine trying to carry 4,000 actual books around?

Question Time

The next logical step in my life is to decide – do I want to keep physical copies of the books I have? If yes, do I want to box them up away from the elements so I could get them out never? If I am doing that, what exactly is the point of that? Would it be better to take some to the second hand book store so they can find new owners who will love them as much as I did/do? Donate some? Try to sell them online? I can use that money to buy digital copies of books.

Do I want to try and find digital copies of my entire library? There are some books I have which I would really love to own digitally, especially the very heavy ones. I have been slowly adding these books to my digital collection over time, one author at a time. For example I have a collection of Arthur Hailey books which I want on my tablet. They are available, I just have to buy them.

I guess what annoys me about this is, I already own these books. I just need them in the digital format. While I have no problem buying them again, it seems a bit unfair especially when I paid $25-40 for some books I own. I think there should be a scheme of some sort where you pay a lesser cost for the digital book if you already own it, and then you can return the book to the seller so they can sell it as a second hand book. Maybe there is such a scheme, does anyone know of one?

If I am going to buy digital copies is it worth joining something like Amazon Prime, do I get a discount if I buy them that way, are there other digital book services I should consider?

But then some of my books are not available digitally, so if I want to be able to read them again I will have to have a small bookshelf somewhere in the house.

The Current Plan –

I have a lot of questions without much in the way of answers as yet, so I think I will begin by sorting my books into – books I own digitally, and books I do not own digitally, and then decide what to do with the physical books that I have digitally.

I’m using my Timer to set 25 minute sessions, playing some of our great new techno/trance playlist, bopping along cleaning and sorting. I am finding if I do one timer session a day they do add up and I can get a lot done but in small, non-annoying chunks. Before I could even tackle the books I had to clean much junk out of this room and sort through all the Avon and various bits and pieces. I’m now ready to jump head on into this task.


Most of these I have in e-book format now.

I never thought I would want to let go of my physical books. Ever since I was little books have been a touch stone for me, a way to escape the present and visit other worlds in my mind. However it seems nonsensical to keep so many books when it is unlikely I will ever read them again in that format. The tablet is so much more convenient, I do have multiple backups of these books in case anything happens to the files, and I am feeling ready to say goodbye.

books, e-reader

Dead Wake

Snoskred was provided with a free copy of Dead Wake by Erik Larson from the website Blogging for Books which provides review copies of books to bloggers, retailers, librarians, and media outlets in exchange for an honest review.

deadwake

Image credit – Random House

100 years ago today, on the 1st of May 1915, RMS Lusitania left New York on her way to Liverpool. She never arrived. On the 7th of May 1915, the ship was torpedoed by a German U-Boat and sank completely within 30 minutes. Only six of the 48 lifeboats were able to launch.

Of the 1,962 people aboard, 1,193 died when the boat sank. Four more died later from injuries inflicted during the sinking. This was a terrible tragedy. I personally consider such an act to be mass murder and a war crime of immense significance.

You might have heard in recent days about the SBS sports reporter being sacked for making some quite offensive tweets on Anzac Day here in Australia.

While I do not agree with any of the things that journalist said, one tiny part of his tweets rang true purely because I had just finished reading this book. I will repeat just that part of the tweet and not the offensive first part.

pause today to consider the horror that all mankind suffered.

I think considering the horror of war and what our ancestors went through is something we do not do as often as we should. Books like Dead Wake are extremely important because they allow us to explore events that happened during war and to understand just how horrible those events were. Mankind did suffer. Mankind will always suffer during any war. It is important that we know this, and that we remember this.

This is a vast story with an enormous amount of people involved. Erik Larson has done an excellent job with this book to wrangle such an epic historical event into just one book and weave multiple story threads into a compelling tapestry.

I suspect that an author could easily write multiple books about various aspects of the sinking of the Lusitania without being short of material for any of them – you could have one about the boat itself and the people on board, a book about the U-boat and Germany overall, a book about the code breakers and the UK government, a book about the political situation in the USA.

There are so many threads to this story – and this brings me to the one negative I felt about this book. Sometimes I felt like the jumping back and forth between the different story threads made the story a little more difficult to follow..

In particular the focus on President Woodrow Wilson – while interesting – felt somewhat jarring to me. I felt like that story thread could have been cut back or even trimmed out of the book entirely, which would have allowed the other threads to knit together more closely. I could perhaps understand the inclusion of that thread had the sinking of the Lusitania caused America to join the war, but that did not happen.

There are two sections in the book which walk a very fine line between poignant and upsetting and it depends on the reader where they will draw that line. The author describes photographs taken of the dead to help with identification and the descriptions he gives paints the pictures better than any viewing of such images could do. There is also a description of an autopsy. I found these details relevant to the story being told. I can understand not everyone might feel that way.

As always I am deeply grateful no such images found their way into the book itself, but I do appreciate the author having viewed them and if I were writing a book of this magnitude I would probably want to do the same myself. I personally find those kind of images difficult to remove from my mind but I can handle a description.

I was looking forward to reading this book and it did not disappoint. As a reader I appreciated the detailed look at what it was like for passengers and crew alike to undertake the journey from US to UK via ship back in the days when planes were purely for short journeys and daredevils. Then the book would transport me to the U-boat which was responsible for firing the torpedo that sank her and allow me to understand what life was like for the crew on such a submarine.

Though many of the people spoken of in the book are no longer with us, their stories will now live on forever. What a marvelous legacy for future generations. I only wish history books could be this fascinating. I would have been found in history class more often if they were. :)

I will certainly seek out other books by Erik Larsen. In particular I will hunt down two books – The Devil in the White City which tells the story of the first serial killer in the US – Leonardo Dicaprio purchased the film rights to this book. Tom Hanks bought the film rights to In the Garden of Beasts. Both films are presently in development according to IMDB.

If you want to read Dead Wake, here are my suggestions – This is quite a long story however because of the multiple story threads and the fact that I knew a little about the story when I started the book, I found it easier to put the book down when my alloted reading time for the day was over. I read this book over the space of a week, spending an hour and a half to two hours reading each night. However please do keep in mind, I am a fast reader.

Snoskred rating – 10 out of 10 – Must Read.

So, two books reviewed, both of them have been spectacular reads. Either I am an excellent chooser of books, or there are a lot of high quality tomes being published at present. I suspect it might be the latter.

You can read my review of Trapped Under the Sea by Neil Swidey here.

Don’t forget, you can view my disclosure policy here. All opinions and thoughts are my own and will always reflect my own experience – positive, negative, or in-between.

I received this book from Blogging for Books for this review. You too can sign up to review books via Blogging for Books.

blogging for books, book reviews, books

Trapped Under the Sea

Snoskred was provided with a free copy of Trapped Under the Sea by Neil Swidey from the website Blogging for Books which provides review copies of books to bloggers, retailers, librarians, and media outlets in exchange for an honest review.

tuts1
Image credit – Random House

Trapped Under the Sea is the harrowing story of five men who were sent into a dark, airless, miles-long tunnel, hundreds of feet below the ocean, to do a nearly impossible job – with deadly results.

At the respectable bedtime of 10:30 on a Friday night, I snuggled in to bed and began to read.. somehow I got sucked into that temporal vortex that happens with truly excellent writing. This was not helped by the fact that the Kindle reader app hides the time – my normal reading app Moonreader gives me the time in the bottom corner – and the fact that I did not have to get up by any particular time on Saturday..

The next thing I knew I had finished the book. A quick check of the time – 4am. And I knew there was no way on earth that anything I could write here in my review could do true justice to this book. It is a beautifully written masterpiece. So my deepest apologies to the author in advance. :)

As I lay there in the dark pondering what I had just read, a quote from my favourite Stephen King book The Dead Zone popped up in my mind.

“Ninety-five percent of people who walk the earth are simply inert. One percent are saints, and one percent are assholes. The other three percent are people who do what they say they can do.”

The divers who were chosen to undertake this very difficult task were all 3 percent people – they were people who did what they say they can do. They had long personal histories of doing difficult jobs in tricky situations. In this situation, they were not underwater but they were deep in a dead-end tunnel that had no air supply, so they had to bring their own air with them.

It is vastly unfortunate that the person tasked with putting together their air supply was not one of those people who *can* do what they say they can do.. if anything, in my personal opinion he was in the one percent that are *not* saints.

He claimed he could put a safe air supply together but it was cobbled together with plywood, duct tape, air from liquid nitrogen and oxygen bottles and being mixed using a mixer not intended for the purpose it was being used for. There was absolutely zero testing of the system he created. This ended up costing people their lives, while he sat safely above ground.

The book also tells the history of the tunnel project, examines the people in charge of the project and the relationships with companies and personalities involved. It describes the investigation and tells the story of exactly what went wrong, also making clear what could have been done to prevent these deaths. It then leaves the reader to judge what level of responsibility those involved in the project have in the deaths of these workers.

I’m not going to tell you any more of the story, because I think you should read it for yourself. I will say that Neil Swidey seems to be some kind of writing magician. In this book, things that appear to be mundane details are somehow not mundane, rather they are gripping and mesmerizing. Complex concepts are communicated simply and clearly. Contract struggles, which would be boring in the hands of most people, are somehow transformed into fascinating essays.

The only tiny negative I could find – there were some great drawings in the book which explained concepts which had been described in writing before the drawing appeared. I felt that I would have understood the written explanation better if I had seen the drawing first, when I saw the drawing it was like “Oh, now I get it!” and I did actually go back to read the explanation a second time once I did see the drawing. But this is a tiny nitpick, it might be me rather than any fault of the book or the writing and it is also possible that the drawings appear in a different place in the actual book than they do in the e-book.

I was extremely lucky to pick such a captivating and beautifully written book as my first read from Blogging for Books. I do hope I will have that kind of luck again on a regular basis. With that said, this book was so excellent that *any* book I read for a while is going to seem mediocre.

You can grab a copy of the book on Kindle via Amazon here – the website for the book is here. There is also this great page – Behind the Book – which you can read with a little more info, some photos, and some links to interviews. Plus, there is this video.

The first thing I did when I woke up the next day was to seek out what other books had been written by Neil Swidey – and despite the fact that I am not a sports fan, I am quite determined to get my hands on The Assist via my Kindle account.

I truly enjoyed reading this book. I think this is an important story that workers and employers should read, if only to make people stop and think of the possible implications of the things they do at work, whether those things are safe, and whether the people above you truly have your back when it comes to occupational health and safety in the workplace. In Australia, over 180 people die at work every year.

If you want to read it yourself, here are my suggestions – It is unlikely that you will want to stop reading once you start reading this book, so I suggest pick a time when you do not have any fixed commitments for the next 6-24 hours, depending on how fast you read.. People have told me all my life that I am a fast reader and that is probably true, so if you are not a fast reader give yourself more of a buffer zone.

Snoskred rating – 10 out of 10 – Must Read.

Don’t forget, you can view my disclosure policy here. All opinions and thoughts are my own and will always reflect my own experience – positive, negative, or in-between.

You too can sign up to review books via Blogging for Books. I’d really love it if you did. Book reviews are something I never get tired of reading and some of the best gems I have found have been thanks to fellow bloggers who took the time to read the book and then write about it.

I hope you enjoyed my review, you can feel free to give me feedback in the comments. :)

blogging for books, book reviews, books

Bits and Bobbles

fhs

I got sucked in by the Facebook games. Seriously, who the hell am I, and where did Snoskred go? :)

It isn’t that bad – I really love Farm Heroes Saga but I flat out refuse to pay for anything. If I can’t get through the level with my own talent and skill and the occasional extra they give me just for visiting every day, then I’ll keep trying until I can get through. Sometimes it takes me several days to pass a level. I don’t usually play it during the day – I like to play is around 9:30pm during my mind wind down time..

Bunnings Bits

Today we went to the local Bunnings store to pick up some plasterboard. The Other Half is going to make a ceiling in his man cave shed this weekend. We picked up the ute from my parents place and I saw rain off in the distance but it looked like it was going in another direction.

So we drove over, parked in the trade bay next to the plasterboard, locked the car and went off to find assorted sundries like Liquid Nails and gap filler. Having got those, we paid for everything we wanted at the trade desk, and wandered over to load 15 sheets of plasterboard into the ute, while a staff member stood there watching us instead of helping.

This loading job seemed to take a very long time and by the time we’d loaded all the sheets in, suddenly it was raining outside. So I was tasked with finding a tarp. Several more unhelpful staff members sent me off to incorrect places. The very worst was the bloke I asked who sent me right down to the other end of the store – only to discover that we were standing in the aisle where the tarps lived when I asked him! I did find an excellent tarp in the end.

When looking for rope in the ute, I discovered two octopus straps. I thought these had been outlawed and banned years ago. But today they were perfect for our purpose – it wasn’t until we undid them that we nearly killed ourselves.

Book Bobs

My e-reader ran out of battery the other day. It has been a long time since I have picked up a physical book. I picked up one of the heavier books that I own – Aircraft Accident Analysis: Final Reports by James Walters and Robert Sumwalt – and almost right away I remembered why I love my tablet book reader so much now. It is light. I just tap it to turn the page. It can stand up by itself due to the case I own, and I can read in the dark.

Blogging for Books

One of the bloggers I read linked to Blogging for Books. I headed over to check it out and discovered that Aussies can participate via ebooks, so I signed up. I also joined up over at Netgalley.

You might see the occasional – or even regular – book review(s) here on the blog. My first book from Blogging for Books is Trapped Under the Sea by Neil Swidey. I am really looking forward to reading this. As the weather for the weekend looks not optimal, I might spend some serious time reading.

I am not a diver myself but I have read several books about diving now and find them to be oddly fascinating. There are two I would strongly recommend if you want to give a new kind of book a try. The first is Diving into Darkness which is also known as Raising the Dead in some places..

did

I picked this book up at the $5 book store purely because the cover grabbed me, then I turned it over and the blurb made me want to read the book right then and there. I took it home and read it from cover to cover, only stopping for necessary bodily functions when they could no longer be ignored. That is the kind of reader I am. This is also why I limit the books I read at bedtime if I have to be somewhere the next day. :)

Australian Story did a show “To Boldly Go” about this diving story back in 2005 but truly, the book is amazing, and I would recommend reading that first if you can source it. I especially loved how the author explained diving so I – a non diver – could understand it.

The second diving book I would recommend is Shadow Divers – which in researching for this post, I discovered Peter Weir is involved with making a movie about it, though it is still in development.

While I was creating my profile at Netgalley, I wrote something which I thought I would share here with you as well. Here it is :)

The story of Snoskred and books –

I have been reading books for over 35 years now. Favourite books when I was a child included

Enid Blyton – in particular the Faraway Tree books
Elinor Brent-Dyer – the Chalet School books
E.L Konigsberg – From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler started me dreaming about running away to the local Museum.

Favourites now include –

Jane Austen – these are my relaxing books, I read them when I have to get up on time the next day.
John Grisham – The early works, not such a fan of the newer stuff. I have good (but lengthy so won’t bore you with that here) reasons.
Stephen King – The favourite would be The Dead Zone, followed by The Stand, and then a multitude of books fight it out for 3rd place.
John J Nance – His aviation thrillers are amazing, can’t put down rollercoaster rides, I *highly* recommend this author if you have not read anything by him.

Other names that appear often on my bookshelves and in my e-reader include – Michael Crichton – Robin Cook – Anne Rice – Michael Connelly – Jeff Lindsay – Agatha Christie – Jodi Picoult – Thomas Harris – and many, many more.

Non fiction my interests are biographies, aviation – in particular crash investigation books – true crime as long as there are no scary photos – books about science or going to the moon, and other books which have come to me as a surprise eg- books about diving, submarines, interesting history books..

My book tastes are wide and varied. I’ll read anything once but if I like it, I’ll read it again and again, and seek out other books by the same author.

What are your bits and bobbles?

:)

About Snoskred, blogging for books, books, Gaming, General Chit-chat

So Anyway….

fawlty

Recently I was reading So Anyway…. by John Cleese.

The book was a fantastic read and there was much silent giggling from me because I like to read before going to sleep, and the other half likes to just go to sleep.

The trouble with silent giggling, while it is silent, it has a great tendancy to shake the entire bed. I tried very hard to control myself, but there came a section of the book where I totally lost any ability to keep it together, and twas so bad, the other half half-woke, looked at me, and mumbled something like he dreamed there was an earthquake. Oh, there was an earthquake, all right!

I covered my mouth to prevent an explosion, and I had to quietly and quickly leave the room. I sourced a pillow to giggle into, and the giggling continued for a multitude of minutes, until I got the hiccups.

I hope that John Cleese would not mind my quoting the section which caused an earthquake in the other half’s dreams. There are sections in the book which are even funnier but something about this one really got me giggling. Here tis –

—————————————————————————————————-

When I got back to London I was contacted by my old Cambridge friend Alan Hutchison, who had just returned from a long trip abroad that had taken him to places as far-flung as Japan and South America.

Alan’s travels had proved far more exotic than mine. At one point, after spending some time in Tokyo, he had decided to visit areas where Westerners had not yet trod. Realising that from now on his English was going to get him nowhere, he asked a fellow traveller to teach him the Japanese for ‘I’m sorry to bother you, but could you tell me where I could find accommodation?’ Then he set off.

Immediately the weather turned against him: rain bucketing down, thunder and lightning, the full works. Fortunately, a few rather small dwellings came in sight, so he approached one, knocked, and when the door opened, repeated his Japanese phrase. The householder looked very surprised, gathered himself, smiled, bowed three times and closed the door.

Mystified, Alan decided to try again at the next cottage, with the identical result. By now he was soaked to his skin but since he had no Plan B all he could do was to keep on and on, repeating the scenario, until at last he found a woodshed where he spent the night.

The next day, to his relief, he stumbled on a Japanese-style youth hostel, where the owner spoke some English. Alan asked him if he would translate into English the phrase that he had so carefully learned. The owner agreed, listened and explained that it meant ‘May I take this opportunity to wish you goodnight?’

How dismaying it must have been for those poor people to have been roused from their beds, to find, standing at their front door, towering over them, the first non-Japanese being they had ever set eyes on, a creature probably of aquatic origin, and moreover one who had chosen to make a special excursion to their home in the midst of this torrential downpour, simply in order to wish them goodnight.

In fact so implausible must this have seemed, that, as they lay tossing in bed, these Japanese can have only come to the conclusion that extraterrestrials were busy reconnoitring their neighbourhood, and, under the cover of offering blessings and asking, ‘May I take this opportunity to wish you goodnight?’, were estimating the strength of their defences. It says much for the legendary politeness of the Japanese that they did not band together to hunt Alan down with hoes and pitchforks.

—————————————————————————————————-

I sincerely doubt John Cleese would find my little blog, but if he did I would like to say thanks for all the laughs. Out of all the laughs I have had in my nearly 40 years, I would have to say that at least 20% of them have originated from Basil Fawlty. It does not matter how many times I watch the show or how well I know the lines, I still enjoy it just as much as the first time I saw them, possibly even more so. I have loved Fawlty Towers since I was a child, and I will always love it.

I have given the gift of the Fawlty Towers box set several times and on each occasion it was a case of my giving a gift I really wanted for myself. Somewhat bizarrely, I still do not own it, nor do I have a digital copy of it. The pay TV channels here are extremely generous in replaying it so regularly I can always seem to catch an episode when I feel like a laugh.

Of course I loved Monty Python too, and I have enjoyed everything I have ever seen John Cleese do. This book is a lovely addition to my book collection. I highly recommend So Anyway…. I greatly enjoyed it. :)

books, e-reader, funny, Happy Snoskred, television shows

Calibre Book Sorting

fw3

The Other Half and I have a huge collection of E-books now.

Over 14 thousand books at last count, many of which I (or we) have never yet read.

November was already crazy busy, what with

– trying to leave comments on 1,427 blogs – which is 47.5 comments each day if I want to finish this commenting challenge

– walking 5km every day on my borrowed treadmill

– chicken chores, house chores, cooking, general life duties

Somehow we have decided that now would be a good time to sort through these books! We’re using a free program called Calibre which allows us to grab metadata from the web for each book to make sure the info is correct, plus you can choose from different covers if the book had several different covers over the years.

Deleting A Book.

How do I make a decision to delete a book I have never once read? This is a tricky one, but the answer is actually quite simple on some occasions and within 5 seconds of loading the book, I say delete – if the other half has not already hit the key. Here are my rules for deleting a book.

– If the cover involves a bare male chest, delete.

– If the cover has a half naked lady, delete.

– If the cover has both a bare male chest and a half naked lady, delete.

My sister reads a lot of erotic fiction and somehow we’ve ended up with all of it in our collection.

So if a book survives the cover inspection?

Is it a book I have heard of? If no, then –

Is it an author I have heard of? If no, then –

A quick read of the book summary can usually tell me everything I need to know if I will like this book. Hey, I’ve known me for 39 years now, so I know what I like.

I like mysteries. I like books with medical examiners, detectives, police officers, investigators of some kind as the central character. I like airplane stories, zombie stories, stories of surviving an apocalypse of some kind, I love everything from Jane Austen to Stephen King via Jodi Picoult plus Tom Clancy. I *love* an autobiography. Overall my tastes are wide and varied and I’ll give most things a try.

Right now I am reading The Skin Collector by Jeffrey Deaver which is another Lincoln Rhyme book – you may remember The Bone Collector which was a movie with Denzel Washington and Angelina Jolie – there is a series of 12 books with those characters.

Yesterday, I was reading Hard Choices by Hilary Clinton. Last week I revisited Lizzy and co in Pride and Prejudice. Before that I checked in on Tom Ripley. Did you know there were 4 more Ripley books after The Talented Mr Ripley?

Physical Books

A few years ago I did go through and put in all my actual books into Library Thing. You can see them here. However I have probably added 50 or more new physical books, plus some books that I got in e-book version I took to the second hand bookstore and traded for new books.

Over To You –

How many e-books do you have?
How many real books?
Have you switched to an e-book reader and if yes, do you prefer it?

About Snoskred, books, e-reader, NaBloPoMo, NaBloPoMo 2014

Ready for bed @8:30pm!

The last two nights, I’ve gone to bed with Rob Lowe and frankly I am completely exhausted at this point..

I want to go to bed with him again tonight but I am not sure I have the energy.

Not only is he sexy and extraordinarily pretty but he is incredibly smart too!

And he is an amazing writer..

Of course the real truth is that I have been going to bed with his awesome book titled Stories I Only Tell My Friends.

The first night I was already tired and I intended to only read a couple of chapters. I finally managed to put it down with great reluctance when I finished chapter 8.

The second night I went to bed even earlier so I could read more of it before it was sleep time. One minute it was 10pm, the next minute it was 11:50 – where did that almost two hours go?

I was hoping I could finish it tonight but I honestly don’t know if I can manage it. I haven’t even got to the bits about The West Wing yet. I am looking forward to that.

I think maybe I’ll get an early night and seeing as I don’t have to go to work tomorrow, I might finish the book before getting up in the morning. ;)

books, The West Wing

More on Twilight

So. I liked the movie. I saw New Moon, and I liked that too.

The first time I read the books, I skim-read them – as in I did not spend a lot of time absorbing the deeper meanings of what I was reading. I just wanted to know what happened and how it happened. Reading them that way, I thought that I liked the books.

On second read.. turns out I actually don’t like them so much. In the books, I am not a fan of Jacob at all. Actually all the characters as written in the books are pretty sucky. Bella is whiny and needy, Edward is stalkerish and overprotective, even the high school friends become awful – other than Angela, who just may be the sanest person in the books other than Charlie, and he even lost his mind in the last book – as if he’s just gonna pretend like there are things he shouldn’t know! He is a police officer, fer chrissake! The only characters in the books who are not sucky are the Cullens – other than Edward.

I know that by typing this out loud I run the risk of many screaming twi-hards arriving here and commenting nastily. So be it.

Twilight is not really about vampires or werewolves. At the heart of the story is a love story and as far as love stories go, it is an ok one. But the vampires and werewolves get in the way of the love story in the books in a way they do not get in the way in the movies – at least in the two I have seen so far.

So, that is my overall thoughts on the books. Does anyone else have any thoughts? ;)

books, movies, Twilight

The Danger Of Flicking..

So there I was innocently flicking around on the teevee last week and I ran into a movie known as Twilight..

What I knew about Twilight before watching it – not a lot. Three things, to be exact –

– that the other half said vampires do not sparkle in the sun and how stupid that means it all is (he is a big Anne Rice fan).

– that the cast are very pretty.

– that Kristen Stewart really does not love being on the red carpet.

I did not reckon on

– Robert Pattinson being like a car accident you just cannot look away from and at the same time incredibly charming.

– Kristen Stewart being equally compelling and by the look of it an excellent actress.

– that they would use part of the movie like an advertisement for a very fascinatory Volvo that I recently looked at in a car yard and after investigation happens to contain the exact same motor which is in our XR-5 Turbo.

– that it would be so.. green and involve so many trees.

So I was surprised to find that I liked it – in fact that I liked it so much, I watched it a second time when it was on the +2 channel.

I then went off and spoiled myself for the future books because I wanted to know what happened next. Just a couple of days later, I decided it was time to get the e-books and read them. More on Twilight at a later time, I am still processing.

I do want to type about my stunning ebooky thingy. The other half got this gadget a while back mainly as a gps however you can use it for so many other things. He has since moved on to other gadgets and I have inherited the awesomeness as an e-book reader.

I have always been a huge book reader ever since I was a kid and I was not sure that I would like an e-book reader. However it turns out I adore it for the following reasons –

– percentage thingy – it tells me at the bottom of the screen what percentage of the book I have read.

– touch screen to turn the page – absolutely silent! this does not wake the other half up yay.

– can read it in the dark.

– can carry around a whole bunch of books in the one small unit.

– do not have to hold up a heavy book – the unit is very light.

– can download a bunch of free ebooks from places like project gutenberg.

I think it is pretty reasonable at just under $166 considering you can use it as a GPS also – and having used tomtom and navman, this is actually the best GPS we’ve used. So if you are looking for either a GPS or an e-booky-reader thingy, then this could be your answer.

I will leave you with a link to one of my favourite Volvo scenes from Twilight. Enjoy!

Volvo

books, e-reader, movies, Twilight