What'sOnMyBookshelf? Beta

Now this is quite an interesting concept.

What'sOnMyBookshelf

It's a website for book-swapping. On first impressions it looks like a very simplistic book club (granted, it's still in beta) but if you read the details, you’ll find out that it’s quite a different concept. What happens here is you put up your old (or shall we say pre-owned) books, and people can borrow your books, and similarly you can borrows books from others.

It works on a points system, their FAQ explains it clearly, including the important bits about paying for shipping and handling. Just like any site dealing in online transactions of pre-owned stuff like eBay, a degree of trust is expected from the users.

It is interesting to note that the site encourages users to put back up exchanged books that you have finished reading.

Like I said, very interesting thing concept, although at the moment, they haven’t really started to build the user and book database, so there isn’t much to choose from. A site like this would probably work in the US, and not here in Malaysia due to a few reasons. Lack of interest in reading, being one.

Anyway, will probably check back on the website, in a few months time and see the progress.

Problogger: Essential Books for Bloggers

Darren Rowse, the problogger, has compiled a list of Essential Books for Bloggers after some feedback from his readers. There is a full list of almost 70 recommended books broken down into 5 cateogries - Blogging, Copy Writing, Business, Marketing, Creative Thinking & Miscellaneous.

While some of you may perceive blogging is just, well, blogging, to really market your blog and be successful at it, you need a fair knowledge of other business fields such as marketing and branding, hence the recommended non-core blogging books. Besides, it's always good to learn these topics for your own use or career, even if you're a weekend blogger...

Given below is an except of a few of the books, for the full list you can check it out here.

Blogging

• Blog Marketing
  
• Naked Conversations: How Blogs are Changing the Way Businesses Talk with Customers
  
• The Corporate Blogging Book: Absolutely Everything You Need to Know to Get It Right

Copy Writing

• Zen in the Art of Writing
  
• Write It Right: The Ground Rules for Self-Editing Like the Pros
  
• 1000 Most Important Words

Business

• The Art of War: The oldest military treatise in the world
  
• Raving Fans: A Revolutionary Approach To Customer Service
  
• Never Eat Alone: And Other Secrets to Success, One Relationship at a Time

Marketing

• All Marketers Are Liars: The Power of Telling Authentic Stories in a Low-Trust World
  
• The Little Red Book of Selling: 12.5 Principles of Sales Greatness
  
• Life After the 30-Second Spot: Energize Your Brand With a Bold

Creative Thinking

• Serious Creativity: Using the Power of Lateral Thinking to Create New Ideas
  
• Lateral Thinking: Creativity Step by Step (Perennial Library)
  
• Artist’s Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity

Review: Absolute Friends by John le Carre

Absolute Friends
by John le Carre

Okay, I've finally finished this book. Some of you may remember my mentioning how tedious and slowly it was going for me some time back. So I'm doing a full review. Except it’s not going to be very long.

In a nutshell, le Carre’s style is what it diffcult for me to read this book. It took me more than a year of plodding through the book, going off and on it, like a bad cough that wouldn’t go away. Of course, in between this I finished many other books. This is my first le Carre, although I have heard of him since the early eighties. Those days, I read somewhere that someone described him as "Ian Fleming’s James Bond without the glamour". It would seem apt a description, Le Carre’s Ted Mundy here is an ordinary English bloke, although with a colourful history.

The story is one of the aforementioned Mundy, first of his current life as an English-speaking tour guide in a Linderhof castle, and slowly flashes back to his childhood in Pakistan. Then the story slowly recounts his life from there right up until it meets the current again, almost to the end of the book. The story centers around Mundy, himself of dubious political beliefs (probably it isn’t dubious, I just couldn’t be bothered to fully understand his roundabout rhetorics) and his long friendship with a German radical called Sasha.

Both turn into double agents for their respective states and for each other, sometimes involving a couple of both legitimate and shadowy organizations, both often seldom mentioned in full detail. What le Carre has down is update his brand of espionage thrillers into the 21st century in the backdrop of post 9-11 terrorism and borderless nations. A lot of the book deals in arguments of ideologies and ideals that seemed old in the seventies, let alone the new millennium.

In the end, the ending is a little unnecessary, but not entirely unexpected.

le Carre is good at what he does, and he probably loves doing it. He crafts narratives and dialogue with a sharp wit and a deft touch, something few others can do. But the problem is that, he gets self indulgent, to a certain extent. His descriptions and dialogues can go on for a page or two, and more often than not I found myself skipping ahead, and finding they don’t really say much after a couple of pages. This book will no doubt delight his fans, but for the new readers who are accustomed to the fast paced and intriguing thrillers that are all too common these days, they may find this book a little too slow just like I did.

Hot Library Smut

Got this from swifty via sharon's blog. Man, this is hotstuff.

Hot Library Smut

No, there is no pron there. But great pics of libraries.

(Thanks, swifty!)

Reader's Digest

Anyone Remember Reader's Digest? Yep, that small booklet-sized magazine that adults read when i was a kid. I was never a big fan, but i had an uncle that collected it since the late sixties. Every time i visited his place, I'd pull one random copy out and read the funny columns like 'Laughter, The Best Medicine', 'Life's Like That', 'All In A Day's Work' and those humourous anecdotes and quotations they had at the end of the long, boring articles.

(image from wikipedia)


If you've read it, you'll probably identify a few things with it, like the annual sweepstakes they spam you with ("You may have already won something! This is the first step to your USD1million, watch out for the next! Scratch and see if you've won a year's free subscription!"), offer on those large encyclopedias or special dictionaries or first aid guide books people buy but never read, free watches / table clocks / diaries for renewing your subscription... and lots of articles to read when you've nothing else to do.

The articles are basically edited and concised from books and other magazine, usually politically correct, feel-good and middle of the road conservative, the kind that tries to please everyone.

One thing that is evident with Reader's Digest in recent years is that it is fast losing popularity here in Malaysia, and probably worldwide, although on Wikipedia, it says that RD is still the most widely circulated magazine in the US. I think in the age of Internet and connectivity, traditional print media is suffering this problem, just as in the case of newspapers.

Another thing that most people associate with RD is the spiralling price here in Malaysia. I remember charting the price since the 80's, i don't know how much it costs now, but judging from the RD website price, it'll be about RM12 per copy now.

You'd be hardpressed to find a newsstand that carries it nowadays, let alone someone who subscribes to it. Except my doctor, who leaves his copy in the waiting room...

Ten Most Harmful Books of the 19th and 20th Centuries

Got this from Human Events Online via the Law Librarian Blog. Human Events have asked 15 conservatives in America to list the Ten Most Harmful Books of the 19th and 20th Centuries. Surprise, surprise, guess who's number 1? (also included are 13 Honorable Mentions at the end of the article).


Number 1: The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels

Number 2: Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler

Number 3: Quotations from Chairman Mao by Mao Zedong

Number 4: The Kinsey Report by Alfred Kinsey

Number 5: Democracy and Education by John Dewey

Number 6: Das Kapital by Karl Marx

Number 7: The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan

Number 8: The Course of Positive Philosophy by Auguste Comte

Number 9: Beyond Good and Evil by Freidrich Nietzsche

Number 10: General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money by John Maynard Keynes

Honorable Mentions include:

The Population Bomb by Paul Ehrlich
On Liberty by John Stuart Mill
Beyond Freedom and Dignity by B.F. Skinner
Reflections on Violence by Georges Sorel
The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin
Madness and Civilization by Michel Foucault
Coming of Age in Samoa by Margaret Mead
Unsafe at Any Speed by Ralph Nader
Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir
Wretched of the Earth by Frantz Fanon
Introduction to Psychoanalysis by Sigmund Freud
The Greening of America by Charles Reich
Descent of Man by Charles Darwin

World eBook Fair

A lot of sites have highlighted this, but for those who have yet to check it out, it's worth a visit. It's ending 4th August, so you better hurry.

You can basically download as many books as you want, this is in celebration of Project Guthenberg's 35th anniversary.