#53

Ultimate Spiderman #2

Practical application of a comic book. :) It's a trade paperback continuing the modern, updated, set-in-the-00's story of Peter Parker, teen superhero. Trade paperbacks collect several individual issues into one.

#55

A Scandalous Lady by Francesca Shaw

It took me forever to finish reading this ebook, and I have no idea why. It's a lively little Regency romance starring a "proper" young lady and her beau.... except she's living a secret double life as an actress, and he's an honorable rake set out to seduce her as an actress and, later, marry her.

Half-Assed: A Weight-Loss Memoir, by Jennette Fulda

The memoir of a woman who lost over 170 pounds. She doesn't say what diet she used, but the book is more of a record of her journey from morbidly obese to "normal." There are parts I wish she hasn't glossed over, like the transition between not exercising and walking, or the transition from walking to jogging and then running. These are, after all, important parts of the journey, and I missed the more "real" moments of that process with her. However, I know most of this is drawn from her blog, and she may simply have not posts about or recorded that very thoroughly. This is a great, and inspiring book.

(not numbered)

The Audacity of Hope by Barack Obama

Listened to this as an abridged audiobook. I don't count abridgments in my "how many books in a year" challenge, so I'm not adding this one to the count. But I wanted to include it so I don't forget that I read it. I suspect that this is a book that preaches to the choir. If you're politically left, you'll enjoy it. If you're not, you won't.

#58

Smoke Screen

Mystery/thriller, listened to the unabridged audiobook on my iPod. The setup almost sounds like a bad joke: "A firefighter, a cop, a journalist, and a lawyer...." But I won't ruin the punch line. It was a good thriller novel with twists and turns and only the normal amount of predictability.

#59

Soulless

While you're waiting for me to write, edit, and publish Getting Buried in Vegas, check out Soulless, a zombie apocalypse novel with an interesting origin twist (the origin is supernatural, rather than biological/scientific). I read it on the Kindle in a couple of days-- a dedicated reader could probably read it tonight between Trick or Treaters.

Okay, I know this is going to sound like a strange post, coming from someone who's been out of school for several years. But I know what I'm talking about, here. School books are expensive!

The 19th century was an exciting time around the world. It followed the American Revolution, the French Revolution, and covered the English Regency. It was the period of Wordsworth and the Romantics, Victorian England, Dickens, and pioneer America. It saw expansion in all ways, and the birth of the Industrial Revolution.

The 19th century is often called the "long 18th century" in literary studies because it spans the end of the French Revolution (1789) to the beginning of World War I in 1914. It was also sufficiently after the invention of the printing press and literacy was on the rise, so there are lots of books out there to be read, and most of them have survived to today.

The literature of this time is fairly exciting-- there's an almost equal weight between novels and poetry. Jane Austen wrote in the early 1800's, so you have some romance novels if you're looking for them. Mary Shelly wrote Frankenstein in 1818-- science fiction! Jules Verne was later in the century.

And so many authors felt the disaffection in the face of the political chaos of their times, they wrote volumes and volumes on the conflicts of political strife, evolution and science, expansionism, and imperialism.

The length of the time period and the depth of material available from the 19th century has led to large amounts of scholarship and literary inquiry. As a result, there is no shortage of books available on Project Gutenberg and other free ebook sites. Many of these are also being read and recorded on Librivox, a public domain audiobook project.

Most undergraduate and even graduate courses focus on reading the text and then reading a selection of articles and excerpts (often presented in a photocopied "reader"), most of which, if you can get the list of articles from the professor, are available in your library's archives or online documents (try JStor and other academic databases). You may also find that WikiSource is a good place for primary historical sources, though I haven't reviewed it for sources relevant to 19th century literary study.

In essence, you'll be able to source your primary texts for free and mine a wealth of secondary sources within your library's walls or Internet connection. If you're a fast reader, you may even finish your degree early-- unlike math, science, and engineering majors, you do not have to take literature courses in any particular sequence. If you're a really fast reader and writer, you can probably take an extra course in your major every semester and finish up to a year early.

Tip for high school seniors: Take AP English now to save yourself a semester or even two of basic writing and composition.

I do not recommend thinking that studying earlier eras will be a cheaper route. Anything prior to Shakespeare will hit your bank account, because of the need for translations from Middle or Old English, textbooks to learn Middle or Old English (not as easy to come by online for free), and the fact that there is less primary literature available to study, so you will need to read more secondary sources, which means purchasing literary analysis books and articles in your course reader.

I make no guarantees on your ability to get a job after college. I'm just talking about getting through school without spending $150 for each textbook. But I will point out that English majors with relevant backgrounds are accepted into med school and law school more often than any other major, due to the flexibility of their developed communication skills.

This plan is not recommend for: people who don't like to read, people who cannot write an essay (most literature courses use the essay for the final exam and have 2-5 additional essays due throughout the course), or people who are only comfortable with quantifiable test-taking.

If I were coming out of high school and wanted to get a degree as inexpensively as possible, I would go to a community college for 2 years and get all my GE's out of the way, taking the maximum number of transferrable lower-division literature courses as I could. I would then transfer to a state college or university and major in 19th century literature. I would check the book lists of each course I signed up for as soon as they were available in the college bookstore, and spend summer and winter vacations buying them for a few bucks at used stores, or downloading them for free on Project Gutenberg.

This is, in fact, what I did for my undergraduate degree-- in some cases, I was able to fulfill the book lists of 3 classes in a quarter for under $30-- and that was in 1995, before Project Gutenberg had really taken off. Today, I bet I could get through the major requirements for under $150 in textbooks, total (not counting the general education courses).

Invincible #2 TPB: The second in the Invincible comic book series, and the first inklings about the real identity of Invincible's father.

#45

Kiss Me, Annabelle: A fun Regency romance from a witty writer.

The Practical Paperless Office Using Microsoft, Adobe, and Some Sage Advice: Methods, Organization, Hardware and Software to Create a Clutter Free Work Environment, by Matthew R. Halpin. I almost feel like I shouldn't count this as a "book" since it's a very brief (14 page) e-book in PDF form and really, it's more like a report. In any case, I did review it over at the Paperless Home Office Blog, so if you're looking for a thorough review of this one, check there.

#50:

The Myth of the Paperless Office, by Abigail J. Sellen, Richard H. R. Harper

#51:

I read only one regular book in July, though I started several, and I did read about 10 comic books, which I will count here only if they're a trade collection or graphic novel-- not the individual issues (20 pages of story doesn't seem like it should count for as much as, say a full novel, even a quick romance novel that takes me no time at all to read!)

Remember last year, when I had all the trouble and anxiety and, well, angst over paring down my 900+ book library to the 100 or so that I really really wanted?

OK. Now imagine that kind of angst, only the books in question are over 100 years old, some priceless, and I haven't read any of them.

See, I have taken on the task of cataloguing the books in my grandmother's house, for purposes of estimating their value, and providing some kind of inventory to the auctioneer. Meanwhile, my dad and stepmom periodically ask me if there are any of the books I want or just can't live without, because my dad is willing to take a few in his share of the inherited goods and pass them along to me.

"Yes," I replied last night. "I want all of them. I can't live without any of them. They're books."

My stepmother doesn't entirely understand, but my father does, completely (so does my uncle, by the way, and grandma would understand, too). I remember doing this when my other grandmother died-- perhaps this is how I grieve? I go through the deceased's library? Certainly, one of my favorite things to do is snoop through a person's bookshelves to see what they like to read. You can learn a lot about a person by the company they keep, and of course, to a book-addict, the company of fictional characters counts just as much as any other riff-raff you might pick up.

In any case, I'm still trying to figure out how I can convert Steggy into a rolling antique book library. I doubt it's going to happen. Something about me already claiming more than my share of storage in the RV as it is may come up. I will have to let go and say "ah, how wonderful that these books are given to the world instead of being locked away in the attic again!"

Did I tell you about the wheel? Grandma left me a spinning wheel. Just the wheel, though. No frame, no spindles, no flyer head.... just the wheel (it's a great wheel-- you spin while standing or walking beside it). I'm thinking of making a PVC pipe stand for it and having a go.

Tuesday night, John and I played Scrabble with my dad and stepmom using Grandma's Scrabble set, but not her wacky rules. In her set, several pieces are missing, and she replaced them with pieces from another game. Since you can't tell from looking at the new pieces what the value of the letters are, those pieces have the values printed on the Scrabble board (you know, the chart with the letter distribution?) That means there's at least one 12-point "E" and a 1-point "Z" in her set.

We played with standard rules (and values), and I kicked everyone's ass.

More Meta Stuff:

For friendly LJ-crossposters and others following my blog and being confused by some of the posts in the RV category: they're being syndicated from my ustravel.today.com blog, and I haven't worked out all the kinks yet-- feel free to ignore them, although Monday and Tuesday's posts were amusing in the "fun and games" category (I needed something light and quick to write, given the fact that Monday and Tuesday were visitation and funeral days). In an ideal world, you'll be able to click a link and go straight to the rest of the entry on the correct site. I have that feed set up to send only excerpts right now, and I'm working out the kinks of having it cross-post here, then over to LJ.... and I'm sure you understand why that's complicated, right? The cross-poster I was using (WP-o-matic) completely failed to do anything it's supposed to. It would cross-post, but in doing so it cross-posted duplicates, did not pick up feeds automatically, and generally sucked. So I took it down and am trying a different feed plugin, one that unfortunately doesn't have any "add the source to the bottom of your feed" options. Ah, well.

Edited to add: I've now added a "Syndicated" category (and LJ tag) so if the post is coming off of one of my feeds, you'll know.

Also: I'm happy to entertain genuine, non-spammy comments in response to my sponsored post the other day. Did you hate it? Did you shrug and say "oh, well; at least it's not total crap." LJers didn't see it, I know-- that was deliberate, since my LJ is non-commercial, and the sponsored post was definitely ad-oriented. I think I'd entertain a great sponsorship for one of my blogs, but let's be serious: who would want to sponsor this navel-gazing dreck?