Archive for the ‘ Books ’ Category
I’ve been thinking about jailbreaking my Kindle for a while, just for one reason really; I hate that you can’t choose which images are displayed on the screensaver. That it isn’t an option on the Kindle by now is ridiculous, at the very least it should show the cover of the last book you opened on it.
So using this simple guide and then visiting this lovely blog of Kindle wallpapers, I give you my jailbroken Kindle:
It’s no secret I am a geek, and always have been. It is something I am proud of, but this was not always the case! Like many people I became more aware of what others may think of me during my teenage years. I’m not sure when exactly I did it, either just before going to college or just before university, but I trashed a lot of my geeky things through shame that the new people I would meet would judge me negatively. Which in retrospect is shameful in itself, and of course I gravitated to people that were fellow geeks anyway. It was probably the fear of scaring off girls actually, which is a silly thing as there was no real danger of them entering my bedroom, let alone my house.
One of the things I binned was a technical manual of the USS Enterprise D. I loved this book: 
It attempted (pretty well) to scientifically explain all the ins and outs of the ship, with a few bits of behind the scenes trivia on the show. I have regretted throwing it away for a while, so the other day, on a whim, I looked it up on Amazon to find it going second hand at the tidy sum of £2.81 including delivery. Well I could hardly refuse! So it’ll be part nostalgia re-reading it but part correcting the mistake I made of being ashamed of what I love.
So when it arrives this week it will take pride on my shelf amongst my comics, games, DVDs and programming books. The funny thing is this time there will be a woman in my house, and this one will call me a loser. But it’s ok, we’re married, it’s allowed and she loves me anyway.
I finally finished The Naked God, thereby completing the epic Night’s Dawn trilogy. Again no surprise, I found it to be brilliant.
*Major Spoilers*
There are just a few niggles I had with the book. The ending is very Deus Ex Machina, which in a way was always obvious from the moment Joshua and Syrinx set off to find The Sleeping God, but I feel there should have been some greater challenge once they found it. Not simply just *Bing!* Joshua is given God-like abilities to save the day. His solution was good and interesting, but I didn’t like the way his ability was used to tie up so many threads, especially that of Quinn Dexter. Such a brilliant villain was disposed of all too easily. I was expecting Louise, Fletcher, Powell Manani, Dariat and Tolton to all battle Quinn and outsmart him.
My other niggle is that I can believe in God like machinery that can transport whole solar systems with wormholes, I can believe Al Capone came back from the dead to conquer the galaxy and I can believe in all the different dimensions with vampire like alien souls, but the romance between Joshua and Louise? Nope. Throughout the books the love between Josh and Ione is built up so much to be this love that can never be, you assume that in the end, against all odds they will end up together. But no, he goes and marries the woman he shagged a few times and barely spoke to. He never once expressed any feeling for her other than guilt at leading her on. So to then at the end of it say he loves her and wants to marry her is just very unbelievable to me. Josh should have ended up with Ione and Louise with either Fletcher or Andy.
*End of spoilers*
Anyway they are really minor niggles compared to the rest of the book. I found each of the plot threads to be entertaining and I really do feel like I’ve been on the adventure with them. They are very, very lengthy books but if you’ve got the time and you love epic science fiction, you won’t be disappointed!
Today’s post is just to recommend to those of you with children under 5 a book, “Trouble At The Dinosaur Cafe”.
There are three main reasons why I like it.
So yes, highly recommended. It helps that Hannah loves dinosaurs but even so I find it a great bedtime read and she asks for it every night.
So I’ve finished the second part of the Night’s Dawn Trilogy, and again very much enjoyed it! Like all good second parts, it ups the scale of events started in the first book, has a satisfying couple of conclusions, furthers other plot lines along nicely and leave a huge cliffhanger at the end.
Now, straight onto the final book! I shall have to slow down slightly as my OU courses have started properly this week. Boo! Half term is just over a week away so hopefully I can do my best to get this book finished. That’s the thing I’ve found with Peter F Hamilton, his multi-book stories really do follow directly on from one another. If you read them back to back as one volume you’d never be able to pin-point where one book ends and another starts.
Well I give it 30 minutes before I’m ready for bed (yes, it’s got to that stage already) so I best cram in all I can.
Ok so I finally gave up waiting for The Neutronium Alchemist to arrive on the Kindle store. After reading this blog post by the Mighty Flub, which linked to this simple guide on stripping DRM, I went for it. Yeah it’s a breach of T&Cs, illegal, but certainly not immoral. I’ve legally purchased two copies of this book. I won’t distribute the digital version and the paper copy will go to a charity shop.
Picked the book up for just under £7 on the Waterstones website, downloaded Calibre and following the above mentioned instructions, I now have it on my Kindle with little to no fuss. Wish I’d tried this before buying the paperback but hey ho!
I think I will make a habit of converting my collections to DRM free versions, and not just books but music and movies as well. I don’t know what devices will become the most widely used in the future. In the past a new format arriving meant ditching the old. How many of us still play VHS movies? Why bother when you can pick up a lot of old films for a few quid on DVD. Well with digital stuff you can in a sense format-proof it by converting them to a DRM free, widely used format that isn’t tied to a specific device.
Anyway, I’m now off to cram as much reading in as possible before falling asleep, and today I won’t tire my wrist out holding open the little obese book that is the second part in the Night’s Dawn Trilogy.
So today I finished “The Reality Dysfunction” by Peter F Hamilton. All in all I give it “BLOODY FANTASTIC!” out of ten.
(Minor spoilers to follow)
Now I have read his later stuff and very much enjoyed it. He’s creeping up to be my joint favourite author with Alastair Reynolds. But this book I think is my favourite of his that I’ve read. As is the case with all his books, it is a right slog to get into it. The guy really takes his time to set up all the different pieces on the chess board. He loves to describe planets and architecture. A lot. It seems for the first 200 pages you’re having to learn a new person/planet/species/ship on every page. It is for this reason that it took 3 attempts over nearly as many years to read the first book I picked up by him, “Pandora’s Star”.
So what’s the book about? Well the basic premise is that the dead are coming back to possess the living. The intriguing part is that it is all set up as hard sci fi. Spaceships, anti-matter, frontier worlds. The possessions initially seem to be an alien entity. But then a religious aspect is added. They turn out to be dead people that have been trapped in, essentially, hell. What I’m finding interesting is I’m thinking the same things the characters are. Most of them don’t believe in the dead coming back to control the living yet as the book goes on the evidence does seem to suggest this. However in all his other work there is science to explain everything, he doesn’t really delve into fantasy. So I’m left guessing how it can all be tied into a scientific explanation.
Also along the way is plenty of sex and explosions. Can’t go wrong with that.
The thing with reading a trilogy is that you don’t know how it will work. Will each part be self contained? Will there be a huge cliffhanger or will things still have their own satisfying conclusions? I think this book does well in setting up overall events. You get a feel for the universe and the major conflict to overcome is built up. In the last few hundred pages you get an idea of what conclusion the book is building up to and it really doesn’t disappoint. It’s a great victory for the good guys and yet you know it’s only the beginning of the whole saga.
As the second book is still not available on Kindle (as stated before, publisher expects it to be back up within 2 weeks) I decided to look for a copy in town. I couldn’t wait. Ideally I wanted to get it from the library so I could return it if/when the Kindle version was available. No luck there so I tried a charity shop thinking a cheap copy would suffice. Again no luck so I thought bugger it I’ll just buy it new. It is very hefty (1200+pages) and the print is a bit too small for comfort for me. It’s for this reason that if the Kindle version does pop up soon I’ll buy that too. Bigger text, lighter and more discreet. Not as likely to sneakily read a page or two at work when the paperback is large enough to kill a small animal with ease.
Anyway, if you’re looking for an epic sci-fi saga I highly recommend this book!