Hamarana

I was at the bookstore yesterday morning at 9am, lining up with other Potter fans, to get my hands on the last in the Harry Potter Series. I have been impressed by how J.K. Rowling has presented the previous books, beginning with the first, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, when Harry at age 11 discovers he is a wizard, right through the succeeding books, each one a little more grown up than the last, allowing the readers to grow with Harry.

Each book has become a little darker than the one before, and the last book is no exception. The thing that is an exception for me is that I just didn’t enjoy it as much as the others. There were too many loose ends, too many unanswered questions. When a series ends, I want it to end. The epilogue certainly lets us know that there will be no more Potter stories (at least not from Rowling, I’ll list some fanfic sites in a moment) but during the course of the book, much still remains unexplained.

I’ll read it again, as I always do, to see if perhaps I just read too fast and missed things which would clarify my questions, but I have a feeling I shan’t be satisfied.

Perhaps the “Encyclopaedia” which Rowling hinted she might write, will answer all other questions. I don’t know. But for now, I am quite disappointed.

Fanfic Sites Which Look Decent
Mugglenet Fan Fiction
Harry Potter Fan Fiction
Portkey.org Fanfiction

Of course there are many more, and I’ll likely make recommendations regarding good fanfic somewhere in the blog in the future.

In October 1997 a young law student at the Australian National University, Anu Singh, made a bizarre plan to murder her boyfriend after a dinner party at their house. Some of the the dinner guests, also mostly law students, had previously acquired for Singh, the heroin with which he was murdered, and had taught Singh how to inject, on the assumption she was going to kill herself. They said they did not believe she would, or that she would murder Joe.

Anu Singh and her best friend were charged with murder.

Helen Garner followed the trials in the ACT Supreme Court. She became very involved, to the point of emotional involvement with the Cinque family.

The book is interesting, and frightening. To think that such a callous act could go virtually unpunished was something I found quite shocking. Additionally, the issues of duty of care and duty to act are examined in the book, and found lacking…

Its worth reading.

Thanks to Ron at Bibliobillabong, I have now discovered Library Thing. Its an online catalogue of your books. A free account allows entry of 200 books and after that its either $10 a year or $25 for a lifetime (thats lifetime of the site, remember). Many people have their own catalogue on their personal computer, but this seems like a nice way to share your reading and collection…its also a way for people to get to know who you are. I do believe you can understand a lot of a person by seeing what it is they read

Starting with a free account allows you to see whether you will use it to any great extent, and if you get to the 200 and are still hankering for more space, its probably worth spending the $25. You can also insert some code into your blog to display a random selection, and you can reference any entry any time you like. To make the book entries, you enter the term you wish to search on, and Library Thing does its Thing and searches Amazon, the Library of Congress and 60 other world libraries, then presents you with a list to choose from.

Its a great service for the bibliophiles amongst us! Take the tour at Library Thing

Books of Revelation
By Eric Schmidt
The Wall Street Journal
October 18, 2005

Imagine sitting at your computer and, in less than a second, searching the full text of every book ever written. Imagine an historian being able to instantly find every book that mentions the Battle of Algiers. Imagine a high school student in Bangladesh discovering an out-of-print author held only in a library in Ann Arbor. Imagine one giant electronic card catalog that makes all the world’s books discoverable with just a few keystrokes by anyone, anywhere, anytime.

That’s the vision behind Google Print, a program we introduced last fall to help users search through the oceans of information contained in the world’s books.

The Point of Google Print

Try it out here

I rather like the idea, but I can see why the publishers are getting nervous.

I wonder, also, about the notion of one company having all of that… still… as long as we continue to have hardcopy, there shouldnt be any real issues except those of copyright.

Eric Schmidt is the CEO of Google.

[Addit] In order to read the full text of any book, you need a Google account. You might want to consider getting gMail for that purpose (leave a comment with a valid email address stating you’d like a gMail account and I’ll send you an invite). However you can sign up for a google account using any email address via this page.

One mut not forget e-books in the flurry of excitement over discovering audiobooks.

I’ve commented in an earlier post about e-books and dead tree versions and so on, so won’t comment here. This post is to list the sources of FREE e-books (legal, not stolen) which I have come across in my travels.

This list is not exhaustive and it does NOT contain “get rich quick” books of any kind.

Additions are welcome via the comments section, if you know of other sources, but be warned, all URLs will be checked and if found to be of the other kind (“get rich quick”) of ebook, they will be deleted with no discussion.

Without further ado:

The Gutenberg Project
Baen Free Library
Fictionwise (requires free subscription)
University of Pennsylvania Online Books
Blackmask Online
Manybooks

You’ll find that Manybooks, Gutenberg and Blackmask have books which are absolute classics. Don’t go looking for any new titles in these places, you won’t find them. Having said that, however, Fictionwise is a great source of freebies including snippets of new releases from new authors as well as full version ebooks, and the prices for their books for sale in most cases is quite reasonable. UPenn seems to have a predominance of academic texts but this too can be useful.

Have fun!

Free audiobooks are still in their infancy, and most available for free are of such poor quality that you really don’t want to bother.

Librivox has begun a project of getting volunteers to read the Classics and books which are in the Public Domain (they seem to be using the Guteberg texts). It’s a noble effort, and whilst they are still at early stages, by all appearances it seems that this project is going to be a whopper.

So, if you had or have any desire to read out loud for a project such as this, get on over there, join the forums, check out the lists, meet other readers, and hop to it!

Excellent work, Librivox!

I just don’t have space in my house for the number of bookcases which are required to hold the books I have had over the years, I suspect I could fill a small council library with those. My current bookcases (only two, admittedly, 6′x3′) are overflowing onto the floor and I dont really have room for more.

Enter the eBook.

When I was using a PC, I had three main methods of reading. The least enjoyable was Adobe reader, for the pdf versions, the next least enjoyable was Microsoft reader which has its own format, incompatible with any other reader, and the most useful of all was yBook reader which at that time was free and probably still is, and it could read a variety of different formats including text (which neither of the others could).

Now that I am using a Mac, Microsoft reader is unavailable to me (except via VPC but I am not that inclined to use it), Adobe Reader is okay, as it was on PC, and I am using eReader from Palm (also available in a Windows Version), and getting free palm format books when I can, from sources like Fictionwise, and others. I wish there were a comparable text reader like yBook, on Mac. Text editors do the job, but you just don’t get the same bookish feel.

For the purists who say theres nothing like reading dead tree versions, I say, I agree absolutely. But trees are limited and books are many. Conservation has become critical to the planet’s survival, so… give it a go. It really isn’t that bad.