In West Virginia, last spring, we happened upon this small book store/library that was completely open with no one on staff at all. Just a building along a road with the door open, actually open not just unlocked, where you could go in grab a book or two. Totally awesome.

“Editor’s note: I don’t know Mandy Brown but her blog is definitely in the top three well-written blogs that I subscribe to. Every post is excellent. Her blog will, more than likely, make my Best of 2009 list.”

Well, I forgot to add Mandy Brown’s A Working Library to this year’s list. For this I deserve to be duly punished.

Her recent Ways of reading piece is more a list of tips about reading and keeping a library. It is absolutely delightful.

/via Jason Kottke.

I’m loving this book. Too bad it doesn’t help me with my cats!

I recently finished reading Prey by Michael Crichton. I’m a big Crichton fan for nearly no other reason than because my first book that I ever read, on my own without the nagging of any teachers or parents, was Jurassic Park. That and he knows how to write a book that makes you want to keep reading until the end.

Prey was disappointing in a few ways. It was a page turner but only because I had the feeling that it was going to end well and make up for the lack of meat in the middle of the book. It was one of those stories where you hoped the ending would make it worth reading. The ending wasn’t horrible but it left you with a sense that Crichton really didn’t know how to end the story. Stories that you want to be over are never good stories.

Crichton seems motived to write by his opinions on matters of economy, technology, or politics. Which is fine – any reason to write is a good reason – but if you can’t wrap a good enough story around an opinion then all you are left with is an opinion – and everyone has those.

At the end of the day Prey is decent book to read but you will never tell anyone else to go pick up the book and read it. Which is why I’m not telling you to do that. I suggest picking up one of Crichton’s classics instead like The Adromeda Strain, Jurassic Park, Congo (horrible movie, great book), The Terminal Man, or Sphere.

In nearly every Twitter application, and on the site itself, you may favorite a Tweet with minimal effort. On the site you click the star, in Tweetie on Mac I have to secondary-click and select favorite, in Twitterrific on the iPhone I tap the asterisk and tap favorite. Those are the applications I use to interact with Twitter – so your mileage may vary.

Since Twitter is a literal stream of links (Fred Wilson, an investor in Twitter, remarked that its true value was in the act of passing links) I’ve come across a ton of valuable links from those I follow on Twitter. This can cause a lot of distraction, however. If I followed every single link that I found on Twitter, read them in their entirety, and continued my day … I do not believe I’d ever accomplish anything.

So that is why I use Twitter’s favorite feature to help me save links for reading later.

I still use it to save my favorite Tweets from those I follow. Tweets that are funny, memorable, mark an occasion, or the like – still make it into my favorites list. But mostly I’m using this feature to create a list of things I’d like to read later rather than at the moment they are posted.

This post could stop here because your favorites are easy to access on the site. Whenever you want to catch up on the links posted by those you follow – you could just log into Twitter.com and click on your favorites and do some reading. However I’ve found it much more efficient to subscribe to the RSS feed of my favorite Tweets and have that fed into Google Reader.

I check Google Reader a few times a week. I fly through my subscriptions and, in general, star the items that I want to read in detail, comment on, write about, or save for some particular purpose. As I’m going through my main subscriptions my favorite Tweets pop up and I’m able to then catalog those links appropriately, with some context, or just star them for later to read.

Not only do I rarely miss a valuable link posted by those I follow on Twitter, I get to read those links when I want to – rather than when they’re posted. Value without the distraction.

“In our own time, I wonder if the very slowness of books makes them more valuable in the face of all the quickness around us, if their singular nature will prove to be their saving grace. And if so, can that inspire the design of a reading experience on the web that strives for the same lack of haste? Can we envision a future where leisure has its place?”

You really should consider reading the entire entry. Grab a cup of coffee, or maybe start some dough for bread, and enjoy.

Editor’s note: I don’t know Mandy Brown but her blog is definitely in the top three well-written blogs that I subscribe to. Every post is excellent. Her blog will, more than likely, make my Best of 2009 ((See my Best of 2008 list.)) list.

Random 60: Reading. | Favorite on Viddler.

In this fast paced, Twitter-powered world it seems like all we do is consume shorter, and shorter bits of data. First it was blog posts, now it is micro-blogging with services like Twitter (I’m cdevroe by the way). I believe reading books can really slow us down, disconnect us from the Internet for a little while, and get us back to consumer larger ideas.

What do you think? When was the last time you read a book?

In short, Readability removes ads from around the content. However, unlike its predecessors (at least the ones I’ve seen) Readability also formats the article that you want to read into a much more readable design on the fly. So, ad-blocker plus.

Source: Readability.
See also: The Arc90 Lab’s blog post with video.

I’ve long respected Roger’s opinions of movies. It turns out I agree and respect his opinions on a great many things. Consider this my recommendation to subscribe.

Source: Roger Ebert’s Journal (Sadly it seems “blog” isn’t a good enough word.)

Ps. You can have a post-script on a blog, right? Anyway – I think I should take a taste of my own medicine and get back to some real blogging myself. Hmmm.

I’m no literary scholar by any stretch of the imagination. But I do know that there are only so many ways to tell a story. It is sort of like skinning a cat. There are many ways to do it but there are a few that are the most common. The Lord of the Rings is a “hero’s journey” story arc. It is the story of Frodo and the Ring. It doesn’t hide this, in fact, it states it plainly.

However, I won’t judge the story arc of The Fellowship of the Ring due to it being only the first three parts of a six-part series. In fact, it was never intended to be a book all its own at all. The rather anticlimactic ending shows this to be all too true. Instead I’ll focus on the way that The Fellowship of the Ring slowly unravels itself.

What I mean by that is that, I think, J. R. R. Tolkien does an incredible job at slowly, but not too slowly, revealing the backgrounds of the various characters that appear in the story line. The story progresses while at the same time it goes back and forth through time, mostly through the characters telling stories, so that the reader gets all of the information they need.

There are a number of ways to do this in story telling. Usually this is done by keeping the protagonist, or one of the main character’s in the story, ignorant of all the facts. This gives the other characters in the story many opportunities to fill in the details through dialogue. Many stories have a cast each with their own areas of expertise. An action hero paired with a scientist or scholar so that the “brain” can inform the “muscle” of the facts for the benefit of the audience. Or, this can be done with a narrator. The narrator, whether it be a character in the story or just someone telling the story, usually has all of the information because they are telling a story of times past. The Lord of the Rings has both of these really. Two of the main characters are, in fact, the narrators (and writer’s) of the books while their own characters, in this case the protagonist, is learning all of the details along the way. This leaves ample opportunity for explanation. Frodo is learning the story and telling the story at the same time.

I rather enjoy the way the back stories unfold in The Fellowship of the Ring. The deep history of the lands, characters, peoples, trees, and even mountains in The Lord of the Rings really shows the context of the current story. It shows that this particular story is only a small part, albeit an important part, of the history of the world in which this story is set. Small details are intertwined in dialogue, descriptions, and events that – unless the reader is paying attention – they may altogether miss. A few examples of this come to mind; Aragorn’s approximate age, the lineage of Arwen, and the history of Sauron. These stories are never told flatly but are rather pieced together through bits of information you get along the way. The only history not told in this way is the history of the hobbits which is told in the prologue. The history of Men, Elves, Dwarves, and many of the main characters are all unraveled from within the story itself.

By itself The Fellowship of the Ring is a great opening to a fantastic story. I was going to watch the movie version of this book in between finishing it and starting the next. But I fear that will ruin my mind’s impression of the book’s version of the story (since the movie version is a lot different). I’m looking forward to The Two Towers.

I have always enjoyed Michael Crichton’s writing style. He tends to write in blocks of thoughts and actions, uses new lines to emphasize something that the character feels is important, and jams just enough raw data into his books to make them real, but not enough to turn off most readers.

Airframe was written very much in this same Michael Crichton style – though that may be the only reason I was entertained by the book.

Airframe’s story is centered around Casey Singleton, an employee of an aircraft manufacturer, who finds herself with about one week to figure out what happened on a flight that killed a few people and injured many. The story has a few twists, like most good stories do, in that Singleton is being setup by her bosses to take a fall for the company, that the company itself has had a track record of problems with the plane that aren’t easily explained in a single sentence, and a popular TV-news program is about to run a story on her company’s “deathtrap” of a plane.

Airframe is captivating, no doubt.  Again, because I like the way Crichton moves through stories I was able to read this book with ease and without let up. It was never a chore.  But when I was finished with the story it didn’t make me want to start again.

If you’re a Crichton fan, I suggest giving this a read – preferably when you are on a plane, as I was when I began reading this book. It makes the story a little more fun.

Even though I read State of Fear a few months ago, I thought I’d jot down my overall thoughts of the book. As you might notice, I read nearly all of Crichton’s works, so even though the subject matter for this book isn’t particularly interesting to me, I read it because Crichton wrote it.

I’m a sheep, I know.

State of Fear is a story about the environment and the effect Global Warming is, or is not, having on it in the world around us. Is is also about a lawyer trying to pull all of the pieces together, along with a cast of other characters, of a plot to wreak some environmental havoc just as an environmental group is trying to score some dough for their work.

There is more to it, of course, like the whole ideal jousting about the environment and about whether or not Global Warming is a real threat, caused by humans or not, and even if it is having an effect on the planet as we speak.

An interesting way for an acclaimed author to get the information out there and into the hands of his readers without, perhaps, writing a work of non-fiction.

It is also hard to see where Crichton sits on this issue. Frankly, I do not care. Which is why I think he chose to keep it as vague and balanced as it appears to be by this uninformed environmental novice. It really seems like a report on the facts wrapped in an action-packed adventure.

Which is why, I believe, State of Fear will never become a movie. It would be very hard to strike this same balance with a movie. Everything would be critiqued. The Director’s opinions, the actor’s, the screenwriter’s, etc. Everyone that worked on the movie would have a play for the tilt.

Either way I applaud Crichton for keeping my attention long enough to give me all of the facts about Global Warming.  I’ll bet it was a challenge.

Then you have the health conscious individuals that focus on eating smaller meals much more often.  Proven to keep your metabolism raging throughout the day. Coupled with a good routine of exercise this is the sure-fire way to keep healthy and energetic.

But this post has nothing to do with food.  It has to do with reading habits.

I love words. Reading them, writing them, seeing them crafted in ways that I can only aspire to.  Because of this I read a lot.  But I don’t read books (as often as I’d like).  I read blogs, link lists, and tidbits of information strewn throughout the World Wide Web.

The link lists that I subscribe to are like little bits.  Snacks, if you will.  The really good ones will sum up entire articles in only a few sentences so that I’m not forced to read the entire linked-to-resource to find out why that person found it interesting.  Really bad ones do the opposite.

The blogs that I subscribe to, in general, are well-written, hand-crafted, and consistently of high-quality, interesting information.  The others are generally related to my work or things I’m interested in learning about.  There are, also, the few that seem to fill in the cracks to make my subscription list more human and fun like photo blogs, blogs written by friends or family, and Web comics.

Lately I’ve been questioning my information in-take.  What is better; reading these little bits of information rather than chewing on the whole meal, or maybe the other way around?

The more I think about it, the more I realize how new this dilemma is.  Before the advent of the Internet the only way to get this much information at one time was to have a stack of books or magazines sitting in front of you, rifling through them as fast as your thumbs would allow, and reading a single paragraph from each page as you did it.  You’d probably think someone doing that was crazy but that is exactly what it feels like I’m doing.

Have you ever spoken to someone who knows 20% about a topic?  Sure they can hold their own in passing conversation about the topic so long as the conversation doesn’t last longer than 30 seconds.  Once the conversation gets specific, the “20 percenter” is left standing there trying to catch up to the conversation and realizing they don’t know anything at all about the topic.

I’m beginning to think that unwittingly I’m going to end up being that person.  A topic will arise at a gathering that I’ve read only four sentences about and I’ll answer the inevitable question of “Have you heard about (insert topic here)?” with a resounding “Yes!”.  Then I’m caught.  I’ve just stepped through the door of saying that I know something when I truly don’t.  Well, yes, I’ve read four sentences about how the Mars-lander was able to take a solid, ice-like material, and turn it into water (H2O), but I know absolutely nothing more about the topic.

So what do I do?  Stop reading link lists?  Perhaps.

But then what about blogs?  More often than not blog posts by friends, family, or even those related to the industry I work in do little more than entertain, catch me up on “the news”, or completely distract me from what I should be doing.  Very, very rarely have I found a blog post to be wholly beneficial to have in my brain.

Think about it.  When was the last time you remembered a blog post, in its entirety, to solve a problem you encountered.  Right away you’re probably thinking about a problem you had with your iPhone, or some sort of electronic device, that you fixed because you read a blog post about it.  That may be true.  But couldn’t you have found that information by doing a quick Google search?

Since the Egyptians began beating up papyrus plants some 5,000+ years ago humans have used “books” ((Paper based products like scrolls, books, and loose-leaf paper included.)) so why should I be any different?  I really enjoy reading books.  The tangibleness of a book is much better than reading on-screen, which is part of it, but the other part is the wholeness of books.  It is an entire work in one spot.  Blog posts, for the most part, are just pieces of ideas and opinions about a given topic rather than an explanation about an entire topic.  More often than not they take for granted the fact that the reader understands the topic being discussed (perhaps due to context or just because it is something that is considered general knowledge by the audience).

So do I unsubscribe from every-single-blog, shutdown my computer, and just go to a library every time I need to learn something? I’d say absolutely not.  But I do think there is a balance and I’m going to work at striking it.