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20090221 Saturday February 21, 2009

Another Book Meme

Geoff mentioned on his blog about another book meme, this one originating from the BBC. Nobody has tagged me, but I thought I'd give it a go.

Apparently the BBC reckons most people will have only read 6 of the 100 books here. It's a weird ecclectic list. 

Instructions:
1) Look at the list and put an ‘X’ after those you have read ENTIRELY
2) Add a ‘+’ to the ones you LOVE.
3) Star (*) those you plan on reading.
4) Tally your total at the bottom.

For me, '+' will mean that I not only intend to read the book, I actually already have a copy of it. I'm also going to add another entry: '-' will mean that I HATED it.

  1. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen X
  2. The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien X+
  3. Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
  4. Harry Potter series - JK Rowling X+
  5. To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee X+
  6. The Bible
  7. Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
  8. Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell X+
  9. His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman *
  10. Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
  11. Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
  12. Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
  13. Catch 22 - Joseph Heller X+
  14. Complete Works of Shakespeare
  15. Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier *
  16. The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien X
  17. Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
  18. Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger X+
  19. The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger X+
  20. Middlemarch - George Eliot
  21. Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell X
  22. The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald X
  23. Bleak House - Charles Dickens
  24. War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
  25. The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams X+
  26. Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh X
  27. Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
  28. Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck *
  29. Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll X+
  30. The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame X
  31. Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
  32. David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
  33. Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
  34. Emma - Jane Austen
  35. Persuasion - Jane Austen
  36. The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis X
  37. The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
  38. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres *
  39. Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden *
  40. Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne X
  41. Animal Farm - George Orwell X+
  42. The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown X+
  43. One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
  44. A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving *
  45. The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
  46. Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
  47. Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
  48. The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood X
  49. Lord of the Flies - William Golding X-
  50. Atonement - Ian McEwan
  51. Life of Pi - Yann Martel *
  52. Dune - Frank Herbert X+
  53. Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
  54. Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
  55. A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
  56. The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
  57. A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
  58. Brave New World - Aldous Huxley X+
  59. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon X+
  60. Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
  61. Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck X
  62. Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov X
  63. The Secret History - Donna Tartt
  64. The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold *
  65. Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
  66. On The Road - Jack Kerouac *
  67. Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
  68. Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
  69. Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie *
  70. Moby Dick - Herman Melville X-
  71. Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
  72. Dracula - Bram Stoker
  73. The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
  74. Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson X+
  75. Ulysses - James Joyce
  76. The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
  77. Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
  78. Germinal - Emile Zola
  79. Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray *
  80. Possession - AS Byatt *
  81. A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
  82. Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
  83. The Color Purple - Alice Walker X
  84. The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro X
  85. Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert X
  86. A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry *
  87. Charlotte’s Web - EB White
  88. The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Alborn
  89. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle X+
  90. The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
  91. Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad *
  92. The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
  93. The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks X+
  94. Watership Down - Richard Adams
  95. A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole X-
  96. A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
  97. The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas *
  98. Hamlet - William Shakespeare X
  99. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
  100. Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

If I've counted correctly that's 35 that I've read and 15 (17 really as one is a three book series) that I own and want to read. I need to start working on that. So many books, so little time.

Some people may ask why read a book if you are hating it. Well one of them (Moby Dick) was a class assignment. Why they force that kind of book done the throats of kids who are barely into their teens, I don't know. For others, I take the Magnus Magnusson (Mastermind) approach: "I've started so I'll finish". The undying hope that the book can only get better. It rarely does.

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( Feb 21 2009, 08:52:13 AM PST ) [Listen] Permalink

20090105 Monday January 05, 2009

Sir Terry Pratchett

And well deserved too.

'There are times when the phrase “Absolutely, totally, gobsmackingly, mindbogglingly amazed” just doesn’t cover it.'
...
'This means that fans, while not calling me Sir, must now refrain from throwing things. Regrettably, no sword is included in the box :)'

And for anybody who hasn't discovered his work yet, start with The Color of Magic and continue until you get to Nation.

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( Jan 05 2009, 08:52:14 AM PST ) [Listen] Permalink

20080908 Monday September 08, 2008

Amazon Reviewer Reliability

Over the weekend I finished the book I was reading and was looking around for something new to start. I have a copy I am Charlotte Simmons and as I liked Tom Wolfe's other two novels (The Bonfire of the Vanities and A Man in Full), I thought I'd give his "latest" one a try.

So I went to Amazon to see how it reviewed. 3 and 1/2 stars after 598 customer reviewers. What was disappointing was that the top review only gave it one star. 361 of 596 people "found the review helpful", which I usually take to mean that they agreed with the reviewer.

When this sort of negative review happens for an author I like, I usually then go and look through the other reviews by that reviewer to see how they have reacted to something I've already read. I came across a review from Laurel962 for A Civil Campaign by Lois McMaster Bujold, and a book that I loved. This is a book that has 4 and 1/2 stars after 207 reviews. Again she gave it 1 star. 8 out of 38 people found it helpful. From reading the review, and I'm not convinced she got past the cover. Lines like:

"Obviously the many positive reviews here (which mostly sound as if written by one person, using different psuedonyms, and undoubtedly in the employ of Ms. Bujold's publicist ..."

make me sincerely doubt the reliability of anything she's reviewed.

At this point I decided to total up the number of stars that she gave for all of her reviews. There are 115 of them: 

   5 stars - 6 books
   4 stars - 6 books
   3 stars - 6 books
   2 stars - 41 books
   1 stars - 56 books

Wow! 97 of 115 books have rated 1 or 2 stars according to Laurel962. Somebody should recommend something good for her, although I suspect she'd even give that a negative review. What's disturbing is that her helpfulness is rated at 50% (1,955 of 3,970 votes), which I personally think is rather inflated, and yet this isn't obvious to anyone reading her reviews unless you dig into it.

What I'd like to see is Amazon actually put the reviewers helpfulness percentage beside their reviews so it's clear how useful other people find this reviewer. Maybe even the total number of reviews they've done as well. These are probably simple things to do.

How about it Amazon?

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( Sep 08 2008, 02:24:33 PM PDT ) [Listen] Permalink Comments [1]

20080827 Wednesday August 27, 2008

Four Book Lists Updated

I noticed that four of the book lists that I have near the top left corner of my main blog page, have acquired bit-rot. Most of the images of the book covers were no longer being found.

Now I don't know whether this is a result of Amazon changing their API's earlier this year, or the cache URL's are just no longer valid, but I thought I'd fix them up. Rather than taking the URL that Amazon supplies when you search for a particular ISBN programmatically, I'm now using the "standard" medium size image URL that seems to nicely work with most books at Amazon with a recent publication date.

The four lists are:

I'm one of those people that finds it easier to remember an unfamiliar book by its cover than its title. That doesn't always help as they seem to need to change the art-work for the same book with each new release. It did enable me to find a few of them at the Los Altos library book sale last Friday evening.

I also highly recommend the Salon.com Reader's Guide to Contemporary Authors. The list only gives the suggested book to start with for each of the authors, but the actual book goes much further than that with mini biographies and bibliographies plus various essays and digressions under a multitude of topics.

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( Aug 27 2008, 01:44:54 PM PDT ) [Listen] Permalink Comments [2]

20080731 Thursday July 31, 2008

J K Rowling Working On Her Next Billion

I got "spammed" by Amazon today, telling me that there will be a new book by Rowling coming out in December, and that it was written to supplement the Harry Potter series.

It's titled The Tales of Beedle the Bard and comes in two flavors:

And yes, like lemmings off a cliff, I'm sure we'll be ordering it (the common or garden variety), so the Amazon marketing machine is working just fine.

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( Jul 31 2008, 09:07:35 AM PDT ) [Listen] Permalink

20080612 Thursday June 12, 2008

Recently Read - 12th June 2008

Here's a list of the books I've recently read, with an Amazon-style star rating and a few comments.

Three more from the Salon.com list:

And finally four more books of famous plays:

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( Jun 12 2008, 04:59:24 AM PDT ) [Listen] Permalink

20080520 Tuesday May 20, 2008

Rating Your Book Collection

Now that I've nicely got my book collection under tellico, I thought it would be interesting to see how well each book rated, and what were the ones that garnered the most stars and number of reviews on Amazon.

This Python script will read in my book collection data on standard input, extract out a list of ISBN's, and for each one will look up the average Amazon customer star rating and the number of reviews. It then sorts the data (by star rating and then by customer reviews) and prints out the results to standard output.

The script processed 2604 books. I have more books then that, but it had problems reading the ISBN numbers for some of them (see notes below). Of those 2604 books, the star ratings break down as follows: 

    Number of stars  |  Number of books
  -------------------+------------------
       5             |        370
     4.5             |        644
       4             |        629
     3.5             |        241
       3             |        104
     2.5             |         14
       2             |         12
     1.5             |          2
       1             |          6
       0  (unrated)  |        582

Nice to know I haven't got too many low star rating books in my collection.

Here are the top ten entries with a 5 star rating: 

      Title                       |   Number of reviews
----------------------------------+----------------------------
'Lonesome Dove'                   |    374 
'The Complete Calvin and Hobbes'  |    305 
'Truman'                          |    271
'Boy's Life'                      |    254
'The Code Book'                   |    248 
'The Simpsons'                    |    210 
'Cosmos'                          |    150 
'Black Holes and Time Warps'      |     82 
'A Pattern Language'              |     76
'My Family and Other Animals'     |     72

Here are the top ten entries with a 4.5 star rating: 

      Title                       |   Number of reviews
----------------------------------+----------------------------
'Harry Potter (Book 7)'           |   3102
'Ender's Game'                    |   2475
'Memoirs of a Geisha'             |   2462
'To Kill a Mockingbird'           |   1736
'The Golden Compass (Book 1)'     |   1435
'Animal Farm'                     |   1137
'A Prayer for Owen Meany'         |   1055 
'Dune'                            |   1024
'The Lord of the Rings'           |   1000
'Pride and Prejudice'             |    870

And here are the top ten entries with a 4.0 star rating: 

      Title                                         | Number of reviews
----------------------------------------------------+------------------
'The Catcher in the Rye'                            |     2742
'The Time Traveler's Wife'                          |     1610
'Freakonomics'                                      |     1520
'The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time' |     1400
'The Poisonwood Bible'                              |     1395
'The Road'                                          |     1392
'Fahrenheit 451'                                    |     1242
'The World Is Flat'                                 |     1118
'The Great Gatsby'                                  |     1111
'Guns, Germs, and Steel'                            |     1045

Note that I've already read most of these. My tellico data doesn't (yet) differentiate between read and unread books.

For those interested in taking this script, and munging it to do something with similar book data, here are a few more details:

It uses PyAWS, a Python wrapper for the latest Amazon Web Service by Kun Xi, to get the average star rating and the number of reviews for each book. Thanks to Xun Xi for not only writing this, but also for helping me out with a problem on my script over the weekend.

Note that you will need to adjust: 

amazonAccessKey = "XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX"

to your own Amazon Access License key.

tellico allows me to export my book collection data in XML format. I wanted to extract out all the ISBN's. When I initially tried this with BeautifulSoup (BeautifulStoneSoup to be exact), it didn't like processing the XML file. Here's what I tried: 

#!/usr/bin/env python

from BeautifulSoup import BeautifulStoneSoup
import sys

if __name__ == "__main__":
    xml = sys.stdin.readlines()
    soup = BeautifulStoneSoup(xml)

and here's the traceback I got: 

$ python rate_books.py 
    soup = BeautifulStoneSoup(xml)
  File "/tmp/BeautifulSoup.py", line 1058, in __init__
    self._feed()
  File "/tmp/BeautifulSoup.py", line 1082, in _feed
    smartQuotesTo=self.smartQuotesTo)
  File "/tmp/BeautifulSoup.py", line 1705, in __init__
    u = self._convertFrom(proposed_encoding)
  File "/tmp/BeautifulSoup.py", line 1735, in _convertFrom
    markup)
TypeError: expected string or buffer

I'm not sure if it's a bug in tellico or in BeautifulStoneSoup.

In the end I decided to just roll my own getISBNs() routine, that looked for any lines in the tellico XML data that start with "<isbn>" (after stripping off leading and trailing white space), and then extracting out the ISBN number in between and adding it to a list.

Even then, there were lots of malformed ISBN numbers in the tellico data. I suspect they are all for books that pre-date when ISBN numbers were introduced, but it still seems wrong that this bad data is there.

I suspect I'm never going to read all the books I've got. There's always new good ones coming out and I'm discovering other already published ones that are good (especially when I find a new great author). I'm not quite at the point yet where I'm no longer buying green bananas, but with these rating results, I'll now know which books I should consider reading next. For a while, I'm going to focus on the ones that many others found enjoyable (i.e. the ones that are near the top of the list when you take the number of reviews and multiply it by the number of stars, or some other similar formula).

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( May 20 2008, 05:01:55 AM PDT ) [Listen] Permalink Comments [2]

20080512 Monday May 12, 2008

Recently Read - 12th May 2008

Here's a list of the books I've recently read, with an Amazon-style star rating and a few comments.

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( May 12 2008, 11:22:13 AM PDT ) [Listen] Permalink Comments [1]

20080502 Friday May 02, 2008

Children's Book Suggestions

In the evening my wife and I take turns reading to Duncan for 30 minutes each night just before he goes to bed. He's almost ten now. His preferred choice of reading material for us would be Calvin and Hobbes and Garfield if we let him choose, but instead we try to stick with chapter books.

We've had mixed success with this, so we are now going to try working off the list of Newbury Award winners and honor books (the honor books are the "o" indented ones for each year).

What I'm looking for are recommendations of books you think he might like. Either from this list or other junior page-turners. Not only for us to read to him, but for him to then continue reading on his own, because the story is exciting. To give you some idea of his reaction to three of the recently read books, he liked The Tale of Despereaux, really liked The Phantom Toll Booth and initially liked The Wrinkle in Time but didn't want us to finish it (it started to get "to scary").

Growing up in England about forty years ago, I had the Famous Five and Biggles books inflicted on me. It wasn't until I discovered the juvenille Clarke, Heinlein and Asimov books, that I really started wanting to read for myself. We are trying to find the modern day books that will make Duncan do the same thing.

Recommendations greatly appreciated.

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( May 02 2008, 02:25:19 PM PDT ) [Listen] Permalink Comments [18]

20080410 Thursday April 10, 2008

Revised: Another Python Library Script

See a previous post for the background on this one.

As mentioned yesterday and the day before, pyamazon no longer works, so the script in this post had to be rewritten to use pyAWS.

Here's the new version of check_los_altos.py. If you want to use this, you'll need to adjust the amazonAccessKey, amazonWishListIDs and libraryURL variables for your specific values.

That's all my Amazon Python scripts converted now. Onto other things (maybe even checking out BeautifulSoup).

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( Apr 10 2008, 07:52:40 AM PDT ) [Listen] Permalink Comments [2]

20080409 Wednesday April 09, 2008

Revised: Be Informed When Used Amazon Books Are Available At Your Price

See a previous post for the background on this one.

pyamazon no longer works, so the scripts had to be rewritten to use pyAWS.

Here are the new versions of make_book_list.py and cheap_books.py. If you want to use this, you'll need to adjust the amazonAccessKey, amazonWishListID and emailAddr variables for your specific values.

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( Apr 09 2008, 10:23:25 AM PDT ) [Listen] Permalink

20080408 Tuesday April 08, 2008

Revised: Finding Out When Your Library Has New Books You Are Interested In

See a previous post for the background to this one.

As I previously suspected, all my simple Python scripts that used pyamazon, stopped working on April 1st.

Time to fix them. Gene Kim at Tripwire contacted me last week, and gave me some great pointers on how to use pyAWS, the replacement for pyamazon that Kun Xi is working on. Thank you!

Last Sunday, I sat down and started converting my old check_books.py script. In short, I found a bug with pyAWS and reported it. Kun Xi has fixed it and given my permission to included the modified version of ecs.py with this blog post. Thank you too! You should also check back to the pyAWS web site, to get the fix in the official 0.3 release coming soon.

Here's the new version of the check_new_books.py script. If you want to use this, you'll need to adjust the amazonAccessKey, amazonWishListID, emailAddr and libraryURL variables for your specific values.

I note that it doesn't always seem to have an Author attribute for some of the book Item's that are returned after a specific ASIN search. I need to investigate this some more. For now I just catch the AttributeError and move on.

I'll hopefully soon post revised versions of the other Python Amazon scripts I've created.

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( Apr 08 2008, 03:06:55 PM PDT ) [Listen] Permalink

20080331 Monday March 31, 2008

Ripley's Curioddities

This was a $5 buy in the remainder bargain area at the local Borders store in Sunnyvale a couple weeks ago.

It's a huge collection of interesting facts (some of them are indeed seriously weird). It contains extraordinary feats accomplished by many committed people (and in some cases, by people who should be committed). I initially bought it thinking in might be of interest to Duncan, but there are a few things in there that I reckon might give him nightmares so I ended up reading it myself and then pointed out all the safe ones I thought we would be interested in.

Running at over 500 pages, there is a lot of stuff here. Typically each double page has between 1-3 pictures and a short story to go with them. The rest of each page is filled up with other facts but with no pictures. I initially found this frustrating, but by googling around, it's possible in a lot of cases, to find images and a much more complete story, to go with the ones that really fascinated me.

Here's a sample of three; all related to blind people.

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( Mar 31 2008, 08:23:21 AM PDT ) [Listen] Permalink

20080324 Monday March 24, 2008

Recently Read - 24th March 2008

Here's a list of the books I've recently read, with an Amazon-style star rating and a few comments.

First a load more graphic novels:

And the rest.

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( Mar 24 2008, 11:07:15 AM PDT ) [Listen] Permalink

20080319 Wednesday March 19, 2008

Arthur C. Clarke : 1917 - 2008

Yesterday was a sad day. We saw the passing of the last of the Big Three of Science Fiction with the death of Arthur C. Clarke.

When I started reading science fiction about forty years ago, it was with his juvenile novels (along with similar works by Heinlein and Asimov).

As Katu.com reports:

"Clarke was credited with the concept of communications satellites in 1945, decades before they became a reality. Geosynchronous orbits, which keep satellites in a fixed position relative to the ground, are called Clarke orbits."

And so much more. He wrote some damn good stories too.

I can still remember seeing 2001: A Space Odyssey when it first came out in 1968 and not understanding it at all. It wasn't until I went and read the original story that it was based on, that it started to make sense.

I keep a record of when I read books, and looking back, I noticed that I stopped reading his books in 1988. Then in December last year, I read a book of his that he co-authored with Stephen Baxter. Now he's gone. Same story with Kurt Vonnegut. I read his books when I was a teenager then stopped reading them in 1994, then started again in 2006, and he died in 2007. Hopefully these are just ugly coincidences. I want to go back and re-read some Jack Vance, but I'm having second thoughts now.

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( Mar 19 2008, 08:54:35 AM PDT ) [Listen] Permalink