find books
| book | topic | posts | last activity |
|---|---|---|---|
| What do you think about the main antagonist of this new Lincoln Rhyme novel? | 1 (1 new) | 2 hours, 10 min ago | |
| Cammie and Zach | 459 (459 new) | 6 hours, 44 min ago | |
| why does McCammon keep this book out of print? | 1 (1 new) | 7 hours, 15 min ago | |
| Dave Zirin at Busboys and Poets in Washington DC | 1 (1 new) | 8 hours, 12 min ago | |
| James Loewen at Busboys and Poets In Washington DC | 1 (1 new) | 8 hours, 25 min ago | |
| Chole and Derek??? | 7 (7 new) | 9 hours, 31 min ago | |
| How to download the free e-book? | 2 (2 new) | 9 hours, 34 min ago | |
| Spirit Bound? What do you think will happen? | 55 (55 new) | 10 hours, 24 min ago | |
| Dimitri and Rose. | 7633 (7633 new) | 10 hours, 47 min ago | |
| Love the cover! The most sexy one so far! | 2 (2 new) | 11 hours, 54 min ago | |
| what next?! | 30 (30 new) | 12 hours, 19 min ago | |
|
http://runninginheels.co.uk/articles/review-lubin-tales-gerry-king/ | 1 (1 new) | 14 hours, 13 min ago |
|
11/07
La Petite
is currently reading:
Angela's Ashes (Paperback) by Frank McCourt bookshelves: currently-reading |
my rating:
|
|
11/07
Bethany
gave  to:
Class (Paperback) by Jane Beaton |
my rating:
|
|
read in November, 2009
Bethany said:
"I didn't find this funnyor interesting really. I liked the character of Maggie and David.
My major problem about this books is the fact that it repeats the fact that Maggie is an outside adn not of the upper middle class. This shouldn't need to...more I didn't find this funnyor interesting really. I liked the character of Maggie and David. My major problem about this books is the fact that it repeats the fact that Maggie is an outside adn not of the upper middle class. This shouldn't need to be written so many times. Once when she was nervous at the interbiew but it was made a big deal of. Also, I doubt that privately enducated children and teachers will make references to somones different backgounds like they do in these conversations- I think most people have more tact and I would be very angry if someone brought up my upbringing like that. The fact that David the love interest thought to bring it up so many times is not a good omen for their upcoming relationship i'm sure. I don't think I will be reading the others in the series.(less) " |
||
|
11/07
Min
gave  to:
Breaking Dawn (Twilight, #4) by Stephenie Meyer |
my rating:
|
|
read in August, 2008
Min said:
"Absolute fail. Don't even bother. Vampire spawn, werewolves falling in love with said spawn and a lame battle scene where no one even fights. Only good part was the wedding. Bella's transformation was handled well I felt. It was justified rather then...more
Absolute fail. Don't even bother. Vampire spawn, werewolves falling in love with said spawn and a lame battle scene where no one even fights. Only good part was the wedding. Bella's transformation was handled well I felt. It was justified rather then just being "Oh well yep she's killing herself for her boyfriend" (less)
"
|
||
|
11/07
Jacki
gave  to:
The Reagan I Knew (Hardcover) by William F. Buckley Jr. |
my rating:
|
|
read in October, 2009
Jacki said:
"Fantastic and heartfelt; the correspondence between WFB and RR/NR dating back to the 1960s is endearing and witty splashed with elements of historical note.
"
|
||
|
11/07
Min
gave to:
City of Bones (Mortal Instruments, #1) by Cassandra Clare |
my rating:
|
|
read in August, 2009
Min said:
"A decent YA fantasy series. Little cliched and the writings a bit dodgy in some parts but overall a fun read. Felt a bit awkward about shipping Jace/Clary so avidly for awhile.
"
|
||
|
11/07
Laura
gave  to:
Any Bitter Thing: A Novel (Paperback) by Monica Wood bookshelves: fiction |
my rating:
|
|
read in October, 2009
Laura said:
"Good story. Sewn up a little too neatly at the end which bugs me.
"
|
||
|
11/07
Min
is currently reading:
Quiet Days in Clichy (Paperback) by Henry Miller bookshelves: currently-reading |
my rating:
|
|
11/07
Laura
gave to:
We Went to War (Hardcover) by Mike Pride |
my rating:
|
|
read in October, 2009
Laura said:
"Short interviews with NH WWII veterans about their war experiences. Very good.
"
|
||
|
11/07
Melzz
marked as to-read:
Puss in Boots (School & Library Binding) by Charles Perrault bookshelves: to-read |
my rating:
|
|
recommended to Melzz by:
My Inner Child
Melzz said:
"Lovely cover. Words tend to break the spell, so this is perfect! Puss in Boots was my favorite tale. It was the first one I read by myself, in the big book of fairy tales I had. He was intelligent and sly, which makes for a very fun story!
"
|
||
|
11/07
Samantha
gave  to:
Five in a Tent (School & Library Binding) by Victoria Furman |
my rating:
|
|
11/07
Rita
gave to:
Good Bones (Paperback) by Margaret Atwood |
my rating:
|
|
read in November, 2009
Rita said:
"Teeny short pieces, many of them very amazing. Imaginative beyond my limited powers of imagination,in many cases. Many are very powerful. They read almost like prose poems. They are NOT stories. Agnes gave me this little book off her shelf, after I ...more
Teeny short pieces, many of them very amazing. Imaginative beyond my limited powers of imagination,in many cases. Many are very powerful. They read almost like prose poems. They are NOT stories. Agnes gave me this little book off her shelf, after I gave her a copy of Atwood's Robber Bride.(less)
"
|
||
|
11/07
Samantha
gave to:
Spoon River Anthology (Paperback) by Edgar Lee Masters |
my rating:
|
|
11/07
Trevor
gave to:
What the Dog Saw: And Other Adventures (Hardcover (Large Print)) by Malcolm Gladwell |
my rating:
|
Trevor said:
"I’m very fond of Malcolm Gladwell’s writing. It is hard for me to not gush about someone who is living a life I would love to live. I guess I should feel jealous of him, but instead I just feel grateful to know that someone can live that life. ...more
I’m very fond of Malcolm Gladwell’s writing. It is hard for me to not gush about someone who is living a life I would love to live. I guess I should feel jealous of him, but instead I just feel grateful to know that someone can live that life.
And I really love his writing. He is a writer who never leaves his readers behind, who is always beautifully clear and who structures what he has to say in ways that not only compel you to go on reading, but also so he takes you by the hand and makes sure you are always alongside him. It is impossible not to feel perfectly safe with Malcolm Gladwell – and given that some of these articles are about killer dogs and mass murderers, feeling safe with the writer seems almost obligatory. I’m not going to talk about the subject matter of any of these articles – I’m assuming that most of you are going to eventually read them anyway, so it feels a bit pointless spoiling things for you. Instead, I would like to look at how he structures his articles and why I find what he does so utterly compelling. If there is a philosopher that I really admire it is Aristotle. I mean, the guy was a genius and dominated Western thought for two thousands years. It is fair to say that for a very, very long time Western thought, as far as it was ‘thought’, was Aristotelian. But I admire Aristotle because he is so different from me, not in the least because I would like to be like him. If there is one thing I truly know about myself it is that I am nothing like Aristotle. You see, Aristotle was the great categoriser. He had a brain that was like a filing cabinet and he could come to something completely new, something no one had ever thought systematically about before and he the remarkable ability to see how to file things away in this totally new subject. He virtually created many of the disciplines we study now, such as physics, biology, metaphysics, logic, poetics, and the list just goes on and on. I need to make that a bit more clear. It wasn’t just that he could come to a subject like poetics and say (this is not a literal quote, though he does say something similar), ‘the major division is between tragedy and comedy – in tragedy a character gets what he deserves, while in comedy a character gets what he thinks he wants’. It was more that he was able to see that the division between tragedy and comedy was a key division. If you were going to talk about drama, Aristotle just knew that you had to virtually start by talking about that division and how a play that was a comedy was different from a play that was a tragedy. He didn't just invent the filing cabinet, he also put the first labels on the files and then put some gobsmacking content in those files as well. Even while dancing around in my most sunny of dispositions I don't for a moment think that I am anything like Aristotle. I really don’t do categories in the way he does. My mind doesn’t quite work that way – just as I don’t paint like Picasso – but I’ll tell you what, I love it when I see it. And what has this got to do with Gladwell and his latest book? Well, the whole way through this book I kept thinking that Gladwell has learnt so much from Aristotle. He has learnt how to play with categories in ways that are pure delight. What he does looks so simple and so obvious - it is really no wonder that people try (and generally fail) to copy it. It takes lots and lots of hard work to make writing look quite this effortless. I cavalierly started off by saying I wouldn’t tell you anything about the articles in this book and now find I have to – such are the meanderings these reviews take me on. In the last chapter of this book there is a long discussion of what is a Pit Bull Terrier and whether it is the dog or the owner that should be put down after an attack (no prize for guessing the answer to that one). Except, Gladwell’s point is that banning a bred of dog is incredibly difficult, as Pit Bull is a category that is imposed on a wide and various group of individual dogs and as a category it struggles to stretch across all of the dogs it seeks to cover. This is because a category is generally selected to identify a problem – but the dogs themselves aren’t actually the problem – it is the (as they say in France) arseholes that own them. That he then used this distinction to talk about the identification of terrorists and why stopping only people who look like Middle Eastern men is a stupid idea almost had me cheering. In another article he deconstructs the category of FBI Criminal Profiler and confounds it with the category of psychic cold-reader – and not in a complimentary way. In yet another chapter he compares our categories of quarterback (someone who involves himself in a kind of game mostly played, from what I can gather, in the US) and teacher. What Gladwell often does is force us to look again at the categories we use to divide up the world and then to see if they really still make any sense. In a way, he is doing the opposite of what Aristotle did. But either way, I think he does it just as beautifully. As a case in point, it may be that my favourite part of this book is where he says at the end of one of his articles that if we are expected to spend so much time outside of the box perhaps we should be getting a new box. You know, watching someone do that to a cliché (particularly one I hate) is just about the most satisfying thing I can think of. But he doesn’t just tear down old and tired metaphors – he also helps to show interesting distinctions between categories we generally think of as being pretty much about the same things. Like the fascinating distinction he draws between a puzzle and a mystery. Do you see what he does? He uses metaphors in the way that they are meant to be used. A metaphor can be used in two ways: either to stop us thinking or to get us to see something almost as if for the first time. Metaphors that stop us thinking are called clichés – let’s list some: to my way of seeing, thinking outside the box, at the end of the day, let’s unpack that, we should populate this data set … I’d better stop or I’ll be making myself sick. Metaphors can do better than that, though. They can also be used to instruct us in things we don’t know anything about and they do that by comparing the new thing to those things we think we already know very well. In this book when Gladwell discusses how he would like to distinguish between a puzzle and a mystery he uses the example of the sorts of questions that might have been asked during cold war spying on Russia (what is the size of the Soviet economy? how many nuclear weapons does China have?) and then that most amusing of games, where in the world is Osama Bin Laden? to show that these are questions that could be answered if only we had enough new data, if we had enough new information. These are puzzles. They are problems that could be solved if we just had a couple of more pieces. A mystery, though, is something quite different. To solve a mystery you don’t need more information – one of the ‘rules’ of mysteries is that you already have all of the information you need. The problem isn’t that you have too little information, it is that you have far too much and that you have no way of grading the information you’ve got into what is important and what is just trivial noise. And right there you see a new distinction open up between categories that allows you to think anew about a range of issues that might not have made a lot of sense before. Gladwell discusses Watergate as a puzzle and Iraq as a mystery. He then has some very interesting things to say about public accounting of private corporations and whether companies providing us with thousands and thousands of pages of information on how they are going is designed to inform or confuse us. And then asks if maybe we need to not look at company accounts as ways of solving puzzles, but rather if we might not be better off approaching interpreting the health of a company more as a mystery. It is possible that this distinction sounds more profound than it really is – I’m quite prepared to admit that – but all the same, I’m not terribly concerned about that. What it does do is to get me to think about that distinction and to wonder about it. He does this over and over again in all of his books. Needless to say, I really like it. I love Gladwell’s stuff. He brings so much joy and so much interest to his articles that it is always a delight to read him. (less) " |
||
|
11/07
David
gave to:
Bartleby the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street (The Art of the Novella series) by Herman Melville |
my rating:
|
David said:
"This really is my favourite Melville, I kid you not. Great minds... Delightful correspondence. I first saw it years ago in a TV adaptation with Paul Scofield as the boss. It was set in a modern-day London office block, with him finding his unenthusia...more
This really is my favourite Melville, I kid you not. Great minds... Delightful correspondence. I first saw it years ago in a TV adaptation with Paul Scofield as the boss. It was set in a modern-day London office block, with him finding his unenthusiastic employee sleeping under the desk. It’s a sort of precursor to Sartre and Camus, early existentialism. Blah, blah... Actually, on April 1st 1990 I had a Bartleby Day in which when anyone told me to do anything I’d reply, ‘I would prefer not to’. Performance art for an April fool. These humourless days I’d just be sacked of course. I have to mention also another prank in which during system testing I changed the wording of a line that appeared on the top of every one of three million policy documents sent out to customers. It read ‘This is an important document: please insert it in your portfolio’. I changed ‘portfolio’ to ‘bottom’ then forgot all about it and it almost went live. So I sympathise with the Bartleby attitude. It’s a great story. He even has a website devoted to him.(less)
"
|
||
|
11/07
Raghu
gave to:
Quantum: Einstein, Bohr, and the Great Debate about the Nature of Reality (Hardcover) by Manjit Kumar |
my rating:
|
|
read in November, 2009
Raghu said:
"Manjit Kumar's book is a fascinating history of one of the most fundamental areas of science.Just as the title says, it is a history of the great debate about the nature of reality with Einstein and Neils Bohr leading the opposing views. Quantum Mech...more
Manjit Kumar's book is a fascinating history of one of the most fundamental areas of science.Just as the title says, it is a history of the great debate about the nature of reality with Einstein and Neils Bohr leading the opposing views. Quantum Mechanics has always been a fascinating subject for me, mainly because I could never hope to understand it enough, however much time I spent on it. This brilliant work takes you through the history of the ideas behind quantum mechanics from the late 19th century all the way till the latter half of 20th century.
Manjit Kumar sets the stage slowly as he describes the contributions of great scientists ranging from Rutherford, Max Planck, Einstein, Bohr, de Broglie, Pauli, Heisenberg, Dirac and Schroedinger. Their works are captured along with a short historical background to provide the context. Then the stage is all set for the great question about the nature of reality. Bohr and Heisenberg and many others insist that there is no objective reality. Bohr says: 'There is no quantum world. There is only an abstract quantum mechanical description.It is wrong to think that the task of physics to find out how nature is. Physics concerns what we can say about nature." On the other hand, Einstein insists on his belief in the existence of a causal, observer-independent reality. He says: "What we call science has the sole purpose of determining what is". Einstein and his Princeton team produce an ingenious thought-experiment called EPR that casts a major shadow on the Bohr-Heisenberg view called the 'Copenhagen Interpretation'. However, for all practical purposes, most scientists by the mid-20th century accept the Copenhagen view and get on with their science. Albert Einstein toiled till his death to find a Unified Field theory from which he hoped to derive the laws of Quantum Mechanics. But he wasn't successful. The book brings out the essence of those exhilarating times in science when great minds battle year after year on the nature of Reality amidst two major world wars and the looming threats of fascism and communism. In spite of their battles for decades, both Bohr and Einstein were such great human beings, having a great regard and affection for one another. The other giants like de Broglie, Pauli, Heisenberg and Schroedinger also show great respect and regard for their opponents' views and keep egos and personalities out of the equation. Manjit Kumar's narrative brings out all these essential human qualities quite vividly. He has a great ability to write. The book is lucid and delightfully accessible in spite of the difficult subject matter. I enjoyed reading it immensely. In many ways, it is like a thriller, as you keep looking for the next thought experiment that Einstein would come up with to counter Bohr only to find out how the Copenhagen team overcomes each of these hurdles. I would recommend it strongly to anyone interested in popular science in general and Quantum Mechanics in particular.(less) " |
||
|
11/07
Leena
gave to:
The Lost Symbol (Robert Langdon, #3) by Dan Brown |
my rating:
|
|
Leena said:
"as filmy as can be, dan brown has created yet another heart pounding thrillerific chase through the elegant streets of capitol city, a place that holds many more secrets than a politicians income!
I enjoyed this even more than The Da Vinc...more as filmy as can be, dan brown has created yet another heart pounding thrillerific chase through the elegant streets of capitol city, a place that holds many more secrets than a politicians income! I enjoyed this even more than The Da Vince Code, mainly because the villain was so scary and the action was non-stop. Even better was the vast symbology that brown has included in the book, making me wish that we had textbooks like these back in school ;). A great read, if you are interested in ancient history, symbology, the triumph of good over evil and all the action you could wish for! A fun movie in the making :).(less) " |
||
|
11/07
Kendra
added:
One Snowy Knight (Mass Market Paperback) by Deborah MacGillivray (Goodreads author) bookshelves: romance |
my rating:
|
|
read in November, 2009
Kendra said:
This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here.
"Scottish lass rescues injured knight, heals him, and finds out he's to marry her and take over the fortress. They get along pretty good from the beginning, and while there's some fighting, it's not irritating.
"
|
||
|
11/07
Samantha
gave to:
About a Boy (Paperback) by Nick Hornby |
my rating:
|
|
read in October, 2009
Samantha said:
"I really liked it, but I had a difficult time removing the image of the irritating boy who played the role in the film from my mind----
"
|
||
|
11/07
Kendra
added:
A Christmas Scandal (Paperback) by Jane Goodger (Goodreads author) bookshelves: romance |
my rating:
|
|
read in November, 2009
Kendra said:
"Followup to Marry Christmas, with Maggie and Lord Hollings. Good though a bit drawn out.
"
|
||
|
11/07
Niek
gave to:
De groeipijnen van Adriaan Mole (Pocket ) by Sue Townsend bookshelves: dagboek, fictie, jeugd |
my rating:
|
|
read in October, 2009
Niek said:
"Net als het eerste boek over Adriaan Mole erg leuk om lezen, maar hopeloos gedateerd.
"
|
||
covers
own (105,999)
fiction (94,704)
non-fiction (94,067)
nonfiction (53,628)
books-i-own (48,425)
favorites (32,740)
romance (29,897)
fantasy (29,716)
mystery (26,071)
young-adult (20,172)
biography (19,740)
series (18,016)
ya (10,716)
memoir (8,986)
teen (7,878)
paranormal (6,586)
memoirs (5,556)
vampires (3,206)
paranormal-romance (3,052)
vampire (1,761)
twilight (119)
stephenie-meyer (18)
More shelves...
fiction (94,704)
non-fiction (94,067)
nonfiction (53,628)
books-i-own (48,425)
favorites (32,740)
romance (29,897)
fantasy (29,716)
mystery (26,071)
young-adult (20,172)
biography (19,740)
series (18,016)
ya (10,716)
memoir (8,986)
teen (7,878)
paranormal (6,586)
memoirs (5,556)
vampires (3,206)
paranormal-romance (3,052)
vampire (1,761)
twilight (119)
stephenie-meyer (18)
More shelves...
