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Re: Books!

Posted: Thu Jul 23, 2015 3:47 pm
by HowSerendipitous
The Heroes is pure awesome :twisted:

Re: Books!

Posted: Fri Jul 24, 2015 2:26 am
by Lum
So I've read, My Lord Squirrel, so I've read... :twisted:

Re: Books!

Posted: Mon Jul 27, 2015 10:03 am
by F4wk35
And here I sit, dumbfounded that I actually know almost none of the listed titles :lol:
Well...I always need new stuff to read *shrug*
For my own favourite i can only call the Stormlight chronicles from Brandon Sanderson (german translation). Really haven´t read anything like that before...
Also interesting/funny is the Libriomancer-series from Jim C. Hines. It´s simply fun to see, what you can do in reality with stuff you only find in books :lol:

Re: Books!

Posted: Mon Jul 27, 2015 6:27 pm
by Flatfingers
Speaking of books, this weekend I got to make my first solo pilgrimage to a used bookstore in maybe ten years.

It would be fair to say that I made up for lost time. I spent hours there. I could have spent more. I had two people ask me for directions in the store since no one could possibly have that many books in a shopping cart and not actually work there.

Then I brought them home. Then I hauled them up three stories to my office. Then I realized that I didn't have enough shelf space, even though just two nights earlier I had finally finished setting up the new eight-foot bookshelf to get all my books off the floor (where they had to go when we added the second-floor room).

Once again I now had more books than bookshelves. But I was NOT going to put books on the floor again. This required some thought.

Because this office has a door to the outside that can't be blocked, I couldn't just add another row of shelves next to the main set of eleven-foot shelves that end at the left side of the door. I did have a spare three-foot additional side unit that was ready to go on top of a eight-foot unit, but I only had one, not two.

Inspiration finally struck: move the new eight-foot unit to the other side of the door opening from the existing eleven-foot unit, then mount the three-foot add-on unit to the left side of the eight-foot unit. Now there's an eleven-foot bookshelf; then there are three new shelves above the door opening, but not blocking it; then there's the new eight-foot bookshelf; and they're all attached to each other sturdily.

Just enough for all the new books. :)

Of course, it's not that simple: because the new books go (literally) from A - Z, they have to be fitted into the existing books... which means everything has to get shifted. Which means a ladder, because I'm not eleven feet tall, and a lot of huffing and puffing as piles of books go from bottom shelves to top shelves.

And I'm not really complaining. I've been looking forward to this for years....

Re: Books!

Posted: Tue Jul 28, 2015 9:22 am
by F4wk35
Flatfingers wrote: *insert snipping sound here*
Yeah...I know that problem when you are looking forward to your new books and then notice, that there´s not enough space...even though you have lots of books more than I do, and even an office where you can use more walls to set shelfs up..(I only have ~200 books stored in my Wardrobe at the moment...running out of storage space again >.<) and i can´t even sort them in any proper way because I have to store them in Rows behind each over to fit them all. For starters I´ve wrote a catalogue with Microsoft Excel...

Re: Books!

Posted: Tue Jul 28, 2015 7:52 pm
by Flatfingers
F4wk35 wrote:i can´t even sort them in any proper way because I have to store them in Rows behind each over to fit them all. For starters I´ve wrote a catalogue with Microsoft Excel...
You know your book collection is getting to be a decent size when you need some kind of cataloguing system for them. :)

I actually got college credit for the first version of my fuzzy logic book database. The idea was that I'd enter all this information about every book; then I could use fuzzy logic to find which book I really felt like reading next.

It worked fine. Later I converted it to a C program. Then I converted it again to a Java program:
Image Now? Now I use an iPhone database app. :( I miss my old code. But this app lets me store images of every book's cover, which is nice. Plus now I don't have to carry around a thick printout of all my books like I used to have to do when I went book shopping. :D

Re: Books!

Posted: Thu Aug 20, 2015 8:22 am
by Just_Ice_au
Flatfingers wrote:
F4wk35 wrote:i can´t even sort them in any proper way because I have to store them in Rows behind each over to fit them all. For starters I´ve wrote a catalogue with Microsoft Excel...
You know your book collection is getting to be a decent size when you need some kind of cataloguing system for them. :)
<snip>
Now? Now I use an iPhone database app.
About a year ago I finally found enough time to input all the books I own/could remember ever reading into goodreads.com

I think it was worth it, because now I hit up their recommendations section when I'm stuck for something to read.
Gazz wrote:
Just_Ice_au wrote:Just read the RCN series by David Drake, I thought they were pretty good.

Not, you know, fantastic, but pretty good.
It can be a bit dull. His characters are the cardboard punch-out type.
The only one I found to have something of a personality is Tovera... even if... well...

Not bad enough to not take a look but no must-have. =)

His General series is a lot better.
I'll have to check out the General series.

I've tried to read some of his Hammer's Slammers books, but couldn't seem to get into them. I did read The Sharp End, though, mostly to see how the plot translated. I liked it.

I've also read his Belisarius series. From what I remember they were alt-history done well.

Re: Books!

Posted: Thu Aug 20, 2015 5:50 pm
by Skyfligher
Flat the final project in my Java programming class was to make almost exactly what you did for cataloging a library. Would have been interesting to see your code before hand to get some ideas. :lol:

Re: Books!

Posted: Fri Aug 28, 2015 3:33 pm
by Jazehiah
I've been trying to get through some "ebook only" series lately like Freeground by Randolf Lalonde. Also, finally finally caught up with the Coiling Dragon fan translation (all 620 available chapters). Next on the list is The Screwtape Letters by c.s. Lewis. Any recommendations in the Sci-Fi/Fantasy categories? Also, if you haven't already, Dan Abnett writes some good stuff.

EDIT: Obvious grammar fix

Re: Books!

Posted: Sat Aug 29, 2015 6:00 am
by Cornflakes_91
Jazehiah wrote:IAny recommendations in the Sci-Fi/Fantasy categories?
Peter F. Hamilton:
Nights Dawn (trilogy/hexalogy depending on publisher)

Commonwealth (technically a trilogy, but the first book is an intro to the universe and has no connection to the story of the later two books)

Void (same universe as commonwealth but a thousand years or so later)

Mindstar (three books with mostly independent stories)

The first three series are very well written "standard" scifi (spaceships and a few aliens and stuff), the mindstar series are near-future thrillers in which you feel strongly that mr hamilton is british and a patriot :lol:


On the more fantasy side theres the dragonriders of pern, technically scifi, but the people in the books forgot that :mrgreen:

Re: Books!

Posted: Sat Aug 29, 2015 8:59 am
by Idunno
Jazehiah wrote:I've been trying to get through some "ebook only" series lately like Freeground by Randolf Lalonde. Also, finally finally caught up with the Coiling Dragon fan translation (all 620 available chapters). Next on the list is The Screwtape Letters by c.s. Lewis. Any recommendations in the Sci-Fi/Fantasy categories? Also, if you haven't already, Dan Abnett writes some good stuff.

EDIT: Obvious grammar fix
It's not really so-if or fantasy, but it is really funny.

The Martian, by Andy Weir. :ghost:

Re: Books!

Posted: Sat Aug 29, 2015 9:37 am
by Mistycica
I'm kind of having commitment issues, and I can't really just go ahead and start a new series on a whim. So I'm reading odds and ends, mostly free promotional titles released on imgur. I'll toss a few in here because I feel like it, and some exposure for budding artists never hurts. My ratings are harsh, I don't believe in using only 70%+ like many review sites. They are also fully subjective, you might enjoy any of them.

- Parabolis. Highly illustrated dystopian steampunk adventure novel. Writing style is impeccable, but the entire thing is just uninteresting storywise and falls apart midway. The setting has almost no significance apart from the Nazis having Zeppelins. 2/5, not really worth the time; I'm guessing the writer put a lot more work into graphic design and visual content of the print book, but the free e-book is text only, which leaves me with a very lackluster novel.

- The Mage's Servant. Youth novel about a young servant boy whose master is mudered by a cackling superevil ugly man, so he has to discover his amazing magical prowess alone, learning techniques others study for seven years in a couple of days, using it to finally defeat his nemesis. Boring writing style, ridiculously flat, cliché, and linear story. 1/5, I think there's innumerate better fantasy stories for young readers, but it was leading sales charts on Amazon, so some might enjoy the simplicity of it.

- Black Book. It's a story about, yes, cowboys and time travel. We got to the real good stuff. The style is phenomenal, the switch between parallel scenes and pacing are great (very important for a time travel book), the story is heavily entangled and captivating, leaving me satisfied and puzzled by the end. 4/5; its only vice is that it's rather short, with a 'to be continued' ending and many loose ends. I hate waiting for the next book in a series :V

Re: Books!

Posted: Sat Aug 29, 2015 7:13 pm
by Gunther Haldan
I just finished The Night's Dawn trilogy by Peter F. Hamilton. The background tech was fascinating. I recommend it but it's three very long books. They were in the large paperback format with standard type size and between them they were over 3500 pages. But it will keep you on your toes through out all three books.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Night ... wn_Trilogy

Re: Books!

Posted: Sat Aug 29, 2015 7:22 pm
by Cornflakes_91
the three book lenght really depends on the publisher, my german physicals for example are six books.
I've also read an english six book version.

The content is although the same for both variants, at least within the tolerances of my memory.

Re: Books!

Posted: Sun Aug 30, 2015 1:25 am
by Lum
That's because there is usually the same lenght. They do the extra books to cash extra money and because they know some people prefer to read books instead of construction bricks. :D