Category: books

Game of Thrones

On By Rick McIn books, TVLeave a comment

A Song of Ice and Fire is a series of epic fantasy novels written by American novelist and screenwriter George R. R. Martin. …

A Game of Thrones (1996)
A Clash of Kings (1998)
A Storm of Swords (2000)
A Feast for Crows (2005)
A Dance with Dragons (2011)
The Winds of Winter (forthcoming)
A Dream of Spring (forthcoming)

I listened to audio versions of the first two on my recent travels.

Long … But engaging. Especially during dark nights in the tent.

… While the first novel contains nearly no magic at all, the prominence of magic grows within and beyond each novel to the next. The assortment of disparate, subjective, and not always accurate points of view confronts the reader with a variety of perspectives on each of the other characters from one chapter to the next. The reader may not safely presume that a favorite prominent character will prevail, or even survive. Violence, sexuality and moral ambiguity frequently arise among a set of over a thousand named characters. …

Too violent, I’d say.

Still, I’ll likely download A Storm of Swords for my next trip.

And watch the TV series.

Click PLAY or watch the season 1 trailer on YouTube.

Tales From Firozsha Baag

On By Rick McIn booksLeave a comment

tales firozshaAs is everything Mistry.
Excellent.

Tales From Firozsha Baag is a collection of 11 short stories by Rohinton Mistry about the residents of Firozsha Baag, a Parsi-dominated apartment complex in Mumbai (formerly Bombay). Mistry’s first book, it was published by Penguin Canada in 1987.

Tales from Firozsha Baag

Lonely Planet India

On By Rick McIn books, travel, travel IndiaLeave a comment

India_travel_guide_Large

I just purchased the essential Lonely Planet India — 1248 pages — for $10.

Published Oct 15th, 2013 for USD $34.99, I got the PDF version early.

The PDF should be $24.49. But LP has a sale on right now. The electronic versions of every guidebook are just $10 with promo code Ebook10.

bibiliographic databases

On By Rick McIn books, product endorsementsLeave a comment

Back in the 1990s I worked a fair bit with Endnote. We tracked thousands of books and articles.

Since 2012 I’ve been working with two of the big four: Mendeley and Zotero.

Mendeley competitors

Both are free. Both available for Windows, Mac and Linux. Both work with MS Word.

Mendeley is the darling right now, a NEW start-up from England. Very friendly.

But there’s a problem.

A gigantic publishing company Elsevier bought the start-up a couple of months ago, claiming only good intentions.

Mendeley-Elsevier-eArmin.com_1

The news was not well received by librarians and scholars. Here’s their thinking …

elsevier.mendeley

Evil, greedy, unethical Elsevier will ruin Mendeley.

They might be right. Therefore, myself and many others are organizing to move to Zotero.

It’s free, open source, developed by the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University in Virginia.

I recommend Zotero.

Lonely Planet soon DEAD to me?

On By Rick McIn books, dead to me, economics, internet, things getting worse, travelLeave a comment

I love Lonely Planet.

But not — perhaps — for much longer.

The end of guide books? Lonely Planet lays off one-third of editorial staff

lonelyplanet

Venerable travel guide brand Lonely Planet, which has bounced from owner to owner in recent years, just announced some bad news: They’re slashing staff on three continents and getting rid of much of their content staff. Almost 100 jobs were slashed in Melbourne, Australia alone, and additional layoffs were made at Lonely Planet’s London and Oakland offices. …

Update: According to an email from a Lonely Planet publicist, “Print will continue to be part of the mix” for the company.

END OF AN ERA: LONELY PLANET SLASHES CONTENT JOBS

They say they’ll switch to more digital format, more user generated content.

The time’s not right. Yet.

Show me a worthy digital alternative to a Lonely Planet guidebook?

World War Z – the book (2006)

On By Rick McIn books, moviesLeave a comment

After seeing the movie, I downloaded WW Z as an audio book.

World_War_Z_book_cover The Zombie War came unthinkably close to eradicating humanity. Max Brooks, driven by the urgency of preserving the acid-etched first-hand experiences of the survivors from those apocalyptic years, traveled across the United States of America and throughout the world, from decimated cities that once teemed with upwards of 30 million souls, to the most remote and inhospitable areas of the planet.

He recorded the testimony of men, women, and sometimes children who came face-to-face with the living, or at least the undead, hell of that dreadful time. …

Ranging from the now infamous village of New Dachang in the United Federation of China, where the epidemiological trail began with the 12-year-old Patient Zero … this invaluable chronicle reflects the full scope and duration of the Zombie War….

Amazon

Pretty good. Any zombie fan would enjoy this story.

I’m glad I got it as an audio book.

Martin Scorsese, F. Murray Abraham, Rob Reiner, Henry Rollins, Mark Hamill and many, many more voices were used.

In her review of the audiobook for Strange Horizons, Siobhan Carroll called the story “gripping” and found the listening experience evocative of Orson Welles’s famous narration of The War of the Worlds. Carroll had mixed opinions on the voice acting, commending it as “solid and understated, mercifully free of “special effects” and “scenery chewing” overall, but lamenting what she perceived as undue cheeriness on the part of Max Brooks and inauthenticity in the Chinese accent of Steve Park.

Publishers Weekly also criticized Brooks’ narration, but found that the rest of the “all-star cast; deliver their parts with such fervor and intensity that listeners cannot help but empathize with these characters”. In an article in Slate concerning the mistakes producers make on publishing audiobooks, Nate DiMeo used World War Z as an example of dramatizations whose full casts contributed to making them “great listens” …

wikipedia

The author has stated that the Brad Pitt film has nothing in common with the story other than the title. He’s mostly correct. Yet the movie is inspired by the books.

I enjoyed both.

World War Z | White House Down | Superman

On By Rick McIn books, moviesLeave a comment

I rarely see first run movies in the cinema. Especially Hollywood summer blockbusters.

But somehow I saw these three current hits.

TOP 5 USA Friday June 28, 2013:

1. The Heat (Fox) NEW [Runs 3,181] R
Estimated Friday $13M-$16M, Est Weekend $35M-$30M

2. Monsters University 3D (Pixar/Disney) Week 2 [Runs 4,004] G
Estimated Friday $13M-$16M, Est Weekend $45M-$55M, Est Cume $170M-$180M

3. World War Z 3D (Paramount) Week 2 [Runs 3,607] PG13
Estimated Friday $10M-$12M (-60%), Est Weekend $33M-$36M, Est Cume $127M-$130M

4. White House Down (Sony) NEW [Runs 3,222]
Estimated Friday $9M-11M, Est Weekend $25M-$30M

5. Man Of Steel 3D (:legendary/Warner Bros) Week 3 [Runs 4,131]
Estimated Friday $6M-$9M, Weekend $19M-$25M, Est Cume $247M-$232M

I enjoyed all three, plotless and absurd as they are. Jamie Foxx as President?

Best was World War Z. Brad Pitt works for me.

world-war-z-first-trailer1

The zombie CGI are excellent. Actually, I saw it in 3D. Don’t bother. I can’t say the 3D improved the film.

I’m looking forward to the inevitable WW Z sequel(s). And will likely get the book, which I hear is far better.

Atheist in the FOXhole

On By Rick McIn books, government, humour1 Comment

With glee I instantly bought the new FOX News expose (as an audio book) by Joe Mudo.

… Then made the trip to Manhattan to confront the biggest FOX star himself, Papa Bear.

Papa Bear Rick

Like Colbert, I’m a HUGE fan of mocking Bill O’Reilly.

Release date: June 4, 2013 – An Atheist in the FOXhole:

The “Fox Mole”—whose dispatches for Gawker made headlines in Businessweek, The Hollywood Reporter, and even on The New York Times website—delivers a funny, opinionated memoir of his eight years at the unfair, unbalanced Fox News Channel working as an associate producer for Bill O’Reilly.

Imagine needing to hide your true beliefs just to keep a job you hated. Now imagine your job was producing the biggest show on the biggest cable news channel in America, and you’ll get a sense of what life was like for Joe Muto. As a self-professed bleeding-heart, godless liberal, Joe’s viewpoints clearly didn’t mesh with his employer—especially his direct supervisor, Bill O’Reilly. …

FOXholes

An Atheist in the FOXhole: A Liberal’s Eight-Year Odyssey Inside the Heart of the Right-Wing Media

Sadly, I didn’t learn much from the book.

FOX News is no villain, merely a highly successful, insanely profitable business.

Boss hog Rupert Murdoch is just as happy with FOX News dollars, as he is with profits from The Simpsons and Modern Family, both FOX business products.

Joe Mudo concludes the book predictably …

If FOX News would only concede that they mainly take a right wing point-of-view, we’d have nothing to complain about.

EVERYONE — EVERYONE — knows that “Fair and Balanced” is a motto that can only be taken ironically by any thinking human being.

Only the blind take that motto literally.

Joe confirms that O’Reilly is more about high ratings than Conservative “idiocracy“. 🙂

Bill went rogue in 2008, backing President Bush’s massive Bank bailout.

More recently …

Bill O’Reilly marched into the mother of all battles against the forces of intolerance, and it hasn’t nearly ended. He said that gays are winning the battle over marriage because they have “the compelling argument,” and that those opposed to gay marriage need to come up with an actual argument rather than just “thump the Bible.”

This erupted into in a made-for-YouTube shouting match with Laura Ingraham, which O’Reilly happily hosted on his Fox show …

HuffPo

Dr. Laura is worst of the worst. Still.

Even the truly mentally ill FOX host Glenn Beck is back-pedalling on Gay marriage.

Astonishingly, it turns out that Ann Coulter is no she demon, but — in real life — a likeable and charming woman.

O’Reilly impressed me, overall, in the book. Sarah Palin comes off worst.

You can skip this book. Any episode of Jon Stewart or Colbert will tell you as much as you need to know about FOX National News.

The local news affiliates are quite good, so far as I can tell.

Red Planet Blues

On By Rick McIn booksLeave a comment

I buy and read every new Robert Sawyer book. He’s one of my favourite authors.

His latest (very popular) book is called Red Planet Blues. A futuristic detective novel.

The book is set on a future Mars, where a town called New Klondike thrives under a climate-controlled dome. Most of its citizens were lured by the promise of the Great Martian Fossil Rush, a craze begun when two explorers found remnants of early life forms on Mars, which prove to be exceedingly valuable at home on Earth.

But like the gold rush that populated our terrestrial Klondike, the Martian Fossil Rush hasn’t turned out to be endlessly lucrative. New Klondike is now a boom town gone bust …

At its best, Sawyer’s fiction is a fascinating blend of intellectually compelling big ideas and humane, enduring characters. His recent WWW Trilogy, in which the World Wide Web gains consciousness as an intelligence called Webmind and communicates with Caitlin Decter, the teenage daughter of a professor at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Ont., is one of the most satisfying fictional thought experiments of recent years. He is capable of great empathy and insight, which is what makes Red Planet Blues so disappointing. …

Globe and Mail review – … noir fiction on the red planet, but it loses its orbit

I agree with that review. This is a good book, not not nearly Robert’s best.

Fantastic setting. Great speculative science fiction. But the plot is far too intricate. I didn’t empathize much with any of the characters.

If you are looking for a good book series this summer, read Wake, Watch, Wonder instead.

www