Linkage #12 - Piclens Publisher/Prettier Books

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I already linked you before to the very awesome PicLens Add-On that lets you view images as a 3D picture wall. Meanwhile you can even have a video wall and search youtube videos with it. It’s amazing.

Also new is the Piclens Publisher, that lets you very easily make your own galleries. Not necessarily for websites (although that’s possible, too), but you can also just use it for your holiday pictures or whatever else you have on your computer.

Of course I already tried PicLens Publisher and the result is a beautified Books I’ve Read website that is PicLens compatible. Yay!

Books I’ve Read

I would like to point out to you that I now have this ingenious site with all the books I’ve read. Actually, that’s not quite true. I’ve read a lot more books in my life, but the pictures on this site are of all the books that I had a) already read and b) with me at home when I made this site. So it doesn’t include any library books or any books that I borrowed (well, except for two that I used a screenshot for) or any of the books that I gave away afterwards.

From now on I want to add a picture of every book I’m reading (and preferrably mark when I read finished reading them), and if I give them away afterwards or only borrowed them to begin with, I will mark them with a yellow border. Let’s see how long I will stay enthusiastic about this project. ;)

So the link of the site is above, right below the red banner, or if you’re too lazy to scroll up, just click on this link to the list of books I’ve read. Comments?

Book: Time Enough For Love by Heinlein

This is the last book I finished and it took me a while. Why? Well, it’s Heinleine’s fault.

Time Enough For Love by Robert A. Heinlein is a book about Lazarus Long, a guy who is very very very old. Maybe you shouldn’t read on if you want to read the book yourself, because I’ll tell you what happens.

*spoilers*
Lazarus is this guy born sometime around 1920. Since his family has very good genes and in their lineage they all get very old, they take part in this project where they procreate among similar families, so they reach a very old age. By rejuvenation, they get to be even older. Lazarus is the oldest person around, and pretty much everyone is a distand relative of his, most people are descendants of him.

So far so good. Interesting in this book is whenever Lazarus describes settling down on a new planet, describes some of the customs there, some of the new technology they have. That’s the strong point of the book.

The weak point of the book is that the author was evidently very fixated on the procreation part and every female character in the book is exactly alike: promiscuous, complaining about all the taboos of society and she more than anything, wants to please lazarus and have his baby. And when I say every woman, I mean every woman: the slave he buys, who he refuses on account that she’s in reality in love with her twin brother; the girl he raises from when she was three; the women in the rejuvenation clinic; the computer that has been transplanted into a female body; his clones that got an extra X-chromosome; and oh, his mother, too. And don’t be upset by him sleeping with his own mother, it’s okay, because she’s pregnant when he does, so she can’t end up with a baby with a birth defect or anything…

You know, I think I’ll leave my review at that, because having read all 589 pages of this book, him sleeping with all these mentally identical women is really the only thing this is about. Have I mentioned that they’re all nudists in the future?

If you really want to read a Heinlein book, don’t read this, read Stranger In A Strange Land! (Or better yet, read something by Kurt Vonnegut.)

Monster

I just finished reading the book Monster: The Autobiography of an L.A. Gang Member, and I’m glad I did. Finish it, I mean.

Monster Kody Scott is recruited into a gang (the Crips) when he’s 11 and he mostly describes in his book how that went and how they “dropped bodies”, i.e. murdered people. Mostly other gang members. Often times he compares his gang activities to the Vietnam war or his gang to the military, and while at maybe two places he hints at feeling a slight bit of remorse for murdering people, in general he glorified gangs more than anything else.

He writes about time spent in jail. At some point, I got the idea that he wanted to be seen as a morally superior guy for the fact that he kept one of his cell mates from sodomizing the other one, although he silently tolerated all the torture he had put him through before that (severly beating him, peeing on him, making him eat soap, etc.) Yeah, wow, what a great guy you are, Kody.

In the end he meets a Muslim in prison who tells him that “New Africans” should stick together and fight against the white oppression and so forth, and again I thought to myself what a moron Kody is to listen to that guy’s reasoning. Sure, I do believe that blacks still get discriminated against in the US and I’m strongly against discrimination. But this guy’s reasoning was that “human” has the word “hue” in it, which means colored, and so only colored people are real people. White people mutated, degenerated, and they’re just a “kind of man”, a.k.a. as “mankind”. O-kay, whatever gets the gangster off the streets, I guess… I’d like to hear his reasoning in German, though.

So, the book got on my nerves and Kody Scott’s writing got on my nerves and his reasoning and justifications and so forth. I do not recommend this book.

Have you read a book yet?

As I already mentioned in my German blog (http://devanna.wordpress.com), a study by TMS Emnid revealed that 22 percent of us Germans haven’t read a book yet in 2007. While I feel the study is somewhat limited because they only asked 502 people (14 years and up), it still surprises me. I was proud when I realized that I have already read at least seven books this year. And of course, I have this list of books I still want to read, so I’m not going to stop reading anytime soon.

Someone commented on the German entry (I really like comments *hint, hint*) and said that he’s not surprised since books are expensive and besides, the Internet takes a lot of people’s time and only requires little concentration. While I disagree with the books are expensive-reasoning - you can get many good books for only a few bucks, you can get books free from the library, and you can always ask a friend to let you borrow something, after all - I do agree with the explanation that the Internet takes away your time. I shamefully have to admit that once I got home from work today, I switched on my computer and spent all evening online. I watched a videoblog during dinner, then I answered emails, then I wrote a blog entry, then I answered another email, looked for friends on Skype, read through a friend’s DVD list, googled “‘fan makes weird noise’ Dell” (which didn’t help me find a remedy)… Well, you get the picture. I figured I do a lot of my reading on public transportation.

Therefore I suggest someone do a study to show the connection between how many books you read and how much time you spent on public transportation. I’m guesstimating that I read 20 pages a day on my way to and from work. Maybe even 30. If the book manages to captivate me, I’ll read more when I’m home, but mostly I’m just hungry and tired and leave it for the next day. 20 pages a day makes 100 pages a week makes about two books a month (at least if we take into account that I tend to read some on the weekends, too). There I am, proud of the seven books I’ve read, when really I should be at book 21 meanwhile. But considering that the public transportation situation only started this October, I think I’m still doing pretty well. :)

Hollywood Undercover by His Highness Halperin

I just finished reading Hollywood Undercover: Revealing the Sordid Secrets of Tinseltown by Ian Halperin. I can’t bring myself to say it was a bad book, since it actually did have interesting parts, but it wasn’t exactly good either.

Ian Halperin was supposed to make a movie about struggling Canadian actors trying to land parts in TV pilots, but then he ended up making a different movie that is more about the inside of Hollywood. Kind of. And this is the book about it.

Basically what he does is, he runs around LA in an extravagant shirt, calling himself “His Highness Halperin”, and he tells a lof of people he’s royal. Sometimes he tells people he wants to make a movie or he tells them other stories he’s making up. Frankly, I think he’s a little full of himself and he makes fun of people believing all his tall tales. Who knows how many of the tales he’s been told and retells in his book are actually lies?

Mostly, the book is full of gossip. What I don’t like about it is that it is so unstructured. First he tells a short history of Scientology, which bored me since I read Janet Reitman’s very interesting Rolling Stone article Inside Scientology a while ago. And while Reitman’s article was thorough and exhaustive, Halperin seems to be doing everything halfheartedly. He starts investigating Scientology, but stops his investigation quickly. Then he talks about how supposedly most male actors in Hollywood are gay. Suddenly he’s talking about the rampant drug use among the stars of Tinseltown, and then suddenly he gives an overview of the theories surrounding Marilyn Monroe’s death.

Sometimes in this book you’ll find references to his YouTube videos. He uploaded short clips to some of the things he describes in the book, but they’re mostly not very spectacular and thus a are somewhat pointless.

I think his book could’ve benefited from just picking one or two topics and exploring them in greater detail rather than covering a wide range of topics. This way, his book is more like a collection of anecdotes and a string of stories of brief encounters with celebrities. Since some of those encounters and anecdotes are interesting, I still enjoyed reading the book, but sometimes Halperin just annoyed me.

Girl Meets Boy

Until a few weeks ago, I had never even heard of Ali Smith, but this week I think the money I spent to visit the Frankfurt book fair (a.k.a. die Frankfurter Buchmesse) was absolutely worth it. They eventually sold off books cheaply because I went on Sunday, the last day of the fair, and I suppose the publishers didn’t want to have to take all their books back with them. So, in the last hour of the book fair, I bought three books for a total of 10 EUR:

1. Girl Meets Boy: The Myth of Iphis by Ali Smith
2. Hollywood Undercover: Revealing the Sordid Secrets of Tinseltown by Ian Halperin
3. Monster: The Autobiography of an L.A. Gang Member by Kody Scott

Number 1 and 2 aren’t even officially out yet, so I’m especially excited about those. I already read Girl Meets Boy and it only took me three days, which is quite quick for me (I’m a slow reader). I completely enjoyed this book. Ali Smith is a discovery for me and I will be reading more of her books in future. I really enjoy the way she writes, how her characters talk and think, how they interact. I enjoyed the humor in it and the politics and the love story and I felt the book was a real page turner. I also enjoyed the “pop culture” references. I enjoyed it as a whole. I don’t know what else to say about it (I’m bad with reviews) other than get it when it comes out.

I think I’ll be reading Hollywood Undercover next, although it is a big book, and big books are not as enjoyable in crowded subway trains as small books are. But it sounds interesting and might be a quick read.

As always, by the way: reading suggestions are welcome.

Timequake by Kurt Vonnegut

Either Vonnegut has a unique style of writing, or I just haven’t read anything from the guy he stole from yet ;) Seriously, it’s hard to describe what his books are about. Timequake, for example, is basically about an occurrence that made everybody live through the past seven (I think) years again - just this time without their free will. But then, at the same time it’s not really mainly about that. You’d have to read it to understand, and it’s very much worth being read. Britannica.com describes him as “novelist noted for his pessimistic and satirical novels that use fantasy and science fiction to highlight the horrors and ironies of 20th-century civilization”. But don’t be scared now! He’s nothing like the typical science fiction. My point is, go get one of his books (preferably Timequake), read it and see for yourself. I guess the book he’s probably best known for is his Slaughterhouse Five in which he describes (in his unique way, satirically) his time in Wold War II, in Dresden during the bomb attack. (Look inside the book at Amazon.com)