Joseph Javier Perla

I updated my booklist which I link at the top of my blog.  Please let me tell you a little about it.

Generating the Page

Organizing the Books

I use GoodReads to organize my books.  James Currier, proprietor of MedPedia, invests in GoodReads.  It lets me add books quickly and easily, plus I easily export the book list. I prefer it to Shelfari or LibraryThing.

Creating the HTML

I exported my book list along with which shelves (categories/tags) each book occupies on GoodReads.  I hacked up a short Python script that reorganizes the list by shelf and puts the shelves in order.  The script generates HTML which I can paste into that page.

Linking and covers

I grab the images from Amazon using some great hacks I learned about recently: how to abuse Amazon product images.  Nat Gertler does a great job clarifying all of the great things you can do using Amazon’s huge dynamic image generation system. It’s okay for me to use these images since I link you to the Amazon site.  I refer to the Amazon pages using my Amazon Associates Referral Program Account.  If you click on one of the lists and then buy something from Amazon, I get a few pennies.

The Shelves

currently-reading

Under this heading, I list the books that I, of course, currently read on a daily or weekly basis.  Most of them I downloaded to my Kindle.  I agree with myself more and more every day: the Kindle is nearly perfect.

to-read

Many people recommend different books to me.  I love to hear about books that people love.  If you want to recommend to me one of your favorite books, please tell me so that I can add it to this queue.

maybe-will-read

Sometimes I hear some second-hand recommendations of a book or an off-hand remark about the quality of a book.  Or I might want to read one of an author’s less critically-acclaimed books.  I might want to remember that book for later, in case I have extra time, so I add it to this list.  For example, I loved The Scarlet Letter, so I might also enjoy The House of Seven Gables, but I have other priorities.

unfinished

Sometimes I start a book, read a few chapters or get half-way through, and then never pick it up again.  This happened more often in high school; most of the books here come from there.  Now, I will often not finish a book when I start a book owned by someone else then fly to another city soon after.  Fooled by Randomness I will finish once I can sit down for a couple of hours in a Borders or Barnes & Noble.

favorites

I have a few favorite books that I am very happy to have been fortunate to come across.  Most have impacted me in a deep way or have given me knowledge that changed the way I acted in the world.  They make me who I am today.  The list will change with time, though, I think.  For example, I forget now but why did I put The Giver here?

worthwhile

I loathe 5-star rating systems.  I really have just 3 categories.  My favorite books.  Books which are worth the time it takes to read them, and books which are not worth the time it takes to read them.  This can happen if the book is inordinately long or, more often, barren of content.

Any book on this list, every book really, I recommend that you read.

not-worthwhile

Every book on this list, I suggest you pass on, unless you read all of my favorites and worthwhile books.

Some of these books show up here because other books describe the same ideas more succinctly or in more interesting ways.  Or more cheaply.  For example, pretty much every essay in Paul Graham’s Hackers and Painters he already posts for free on his website.

Actually, looking over this list, I see that I heavily bias it toward (non-scifi) fiction and poetry.  This probably reflects more my distaste (or at least the distaste I had in high school) for fiction.  Maybe I would understand and appreciate more if I read these books today.  Probably.

At the same time, perhaps my bias will help you identify the “greatest” classic fiction books.  I really did enjoy some greatly, and put them onto my worthwhile list: The Grapes of Wrath, The Scarlet Letter, To Kill a Mockingbird, The Metamorphosis, and The Chocolate War.

avoid

At the bottom of the list are books which I wish I could erase from my memory.  Never buy these books, never look at them, never gift them to a friend.  These books sucked life from my veins.  Let me explain why I put the current 4 there:

The Magic of Thinking Big:  The book vapidly repeats the same tired aphorisms throughout its several hundred pages.  It should be 1 page long or printed on the back of a cereal box.  Summary: think big visions and you will try hard to achieve them.  I hoped, at the least, for some fun anecdotes.  No such luck.  Instead, expect some general, detail-poor descriptions of general scenarios which are often either so ridiculous or common place I sincerely doubt any are based on real events. No, read How to Win Friends and Influence People instead.

Vagabonding: This books is so forgettable.  It says nothing.  It is so forgettable, and I’m not exaggerating, that I forgot to cross it off my list of books to read.  Six months later, I bought the book from Amazon again, read through 3 chapters in agonizing pain with a slight feeling of deja vu, before finally realizing that I had already bought and “read” the book before.  I tried to salvage the situation by perhaps trying to read more carefully and figuring out the meat of the content of the book only to suffer through an agonizing 3 hours skimming over jumbles of bad puns and base allusions.  Avoid this book and find one with real details and advice, real meat, like the 4-Hour Workweek.

Go Green, Live Rich: So awfully terrible that Amazon had to give it away as a promotion on the Kindle.  I knew after 10 pages that it was terrible, but I finished anyway for some reason.  At least 60% of the book simply repeats the same thought: you should “go green”.  You should go green.  Tip #2.  You should go green.  Tip #3.  You should go green. Tip #4…..  It makes me want to tear the eyes out of the author.  This pain would be salvaged if the author picked just a handful of actually useful tips.  But he doesn’t.  He goes on for hundreds of pages with useless garbage.  Let me give you an example of a tip (one of the more “profitable” ones mind you): spend hundreds of dollars and who knows how many hours evaluating your home for tiny amounts of heat loss, then buy things to repair that yourself saving you a net dozens of dollars a year.  Or, lower your thermostat by a few degrees and shiver with fear of anticipation every time you step up to your front door so that you can save $15 a month.  The only impactful tip is to get rid of your car which is impractical for most families or working people.  No, read something else, anything else.

Good to Great: Actually, a lot of people thing this is a great book.  It’s not.  Jim Collins pretends to be very scientific with this book (also in Built to Last), but he’s not.  The methodologies are so riddled with selection bias, his sample size is so small, his comparison companies are so different.  It’s amazing this became popular.  He could come to any conclusion by simple manipulations of the data.  More likely, he and his team saw what they wanted to see.  I don’t necessarily disagree with the conclusions, but this book offers no substantive evidence of any kind toward these theories.  I recommend Stocks for the Long Run instead of this pseudo-science.

Amazon recently released their Kindle eBook reader, and it’s nearly perfect.

Imagine that you have a 6″ small, unusually light, paperback in your hand or backpack everywhere you go. Instead of that paperback just being a single copy of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, it’s truly magical. Flip the page, and you can see Catch-22, flip another, and you read Slashdot live. Forgot to pick up the Wall Street Journal on your way to work this morning? Don’t worry, it’s already in your hand.

As you start reading Catch-22, you come across a word you don’t recognize, like infundibuliform, so you instantly read the definition right in your little book. It’s battery lasts nearly a week. You can annotate the books. It works perfectly in sunlight, it is easy to hold in either hand, and you can adjust the font size to the exact size that you want. It is nearly perfect.

Moreover, it is identical to that amazing encyclopedia, the Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. The Kindle should have the words “Don’t Panic” inscribed in it. It’s a small, electronic book on which you can look up Wikipedia on the fly through its wireless connection. The Hitchiker’s Guide, too, is an electronic book, and

…though it cannot hope to be useful or informative on all matters, it does make the reassuring claim that where it is inaccurate, it is at least definitively inaccurate. In cases of major discrepancy it was always reality that’s got it wrong.”[3]

The Guide can receive updates to its data base via Sub-Etha. Field researchers (like Ford Prefect) can also use the Guide to edit entries and transmit these back to the publisher.

Finally, if you have a question, although you cannot use Google, you can ask Amazon’s Now Now service to get it answered quickly.. The only thing I can’t do that I would want in a small, personal computer is SSH.

Why isn’t it a perfect ebook reader? Well, mainly, the restrictions and the price. The device itself costs $400. Moreover, the books designed for the reader which you buy on Amazon.com cost $10 each. You can easily get a paperback book for less than $10, plus you can resell it. The Kindle’s delivery costs are far lower, so it’s hard to justify that price. One can infer that the book industry has pressured Amazon into a Faustian deal. Each digital e-book is highly DRM-infested, which means it you can’t use it as freely as you could a real paper book or a DRM-free book. Book publishers still haven’t learned from the music industry’s mistakes.

Nevertheless, Amazon offers a revolutionary product on par with the iPhone. They introduce a revolutionary business model where they subsidize the cost of high-speed wireless delivery of information through the price of the content. Although Sony also has an eBook reader, in terms of usability Amazon’s Kindle trumps it. The Kindle is the eBook done right (almost, it just needs fewer restrictions). Because of its uniqueness, Amazon can charge a premium, just as Apple did for the iPhone.

I don’t think I would buy this version of the Kindle. Given the thought put into this, the popularity of the device (Amazon is sold out), and the massive feedback they are getting from users, the next version of the device will improve. And not just in a superficial way. Yes, the price will improve, and yes, hopefully, they will ask an Apple designer to make the case more aesthetically pleasing. More importantly, other manufacturers will see and try to imitate this revolutionary device. They will provide competition, hopefully innovate even more, and ideally start freeing books from the shackles of DRM.

Disclaimer: I have owned Amazon in the past and may buy it before their next earnings call given this product. Also, I include affiliate links to Amazon in my posts.

In Godel, Escher, Bach’s chapter on Zen:

Here is another koan which aims to break the mind of logic:

The student Doko came to a Zen master, and said: “I am seeking the truth. In what state of mind should I train myself, so as to find it?”

     Said the master, “There is no mind, so you cannot put it in any state. There is no truth, so you cannot train yourself for it.”

     ”If there is no mind to train, and no truth to find, why do you have these monks gather before you every day to study Zen and train themselves for this study?”

     ”But I haven’t an inch of room here,” said the master, “so how could the monks gather? I have no tongue, so how could I call them together or teach them?”

     ”Oh, how can you lie like this?” asked Doko.

     ”But if I have no tongue to talk to others, how can I lie to you?” asked the master.

     Then Doko said sadly, “I cannot follow you. I cannot understand you.”

     ”I cannot understand myself,” said the master.