Leser du fort?

Mirthful 1 Comment

Jeg leser av og til alt for fort, tror jeg. Særlig dersom boka jeg leser er spesielt spennende og jeg virkelig vil finne ut hvordan det ender. Da kan jeg lese boka igjen senere og oppdage at jeg har gått glipp av hele episoder i iveren etter å nå slutten.

Nettopp derfor er det litt morsomt å ta Aftenpostens lesetester, som jeg oppdaget i dag, siden de tester både hastighet og leseforståelse. På alle fire fikk jeg 100% på det siste, og hastigheten lå fra 390 ord i minuttet på test B for 5. trinn (336 på test A) til 243 på test A for 8. trinn (305 på test B). Gjennomsnittet er altså ganske raskt, kan man si.

lesetest_del 4

We’ll be right back after these messages

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Litt reklame er vel nettopp det de er ute etter skulle jeg tro:

Jeg er velsignet med et barn som ikke vil ha hamburger, så jeg er befridd for mas om Happy Meal foreløbig. Har du derimot et barn hvis største lykke her i livet er en burger på mækk’ern er dette måneden å innfri deres ønsker, for i samarbeid med Läsrörelsen gir McDonald’s bort barnebøker sammen med Happy Meals fram til 4. november. Kampanjen gjelder visst i hele Norden, i alle fall også i Sverige.

Og nå: Tilbake til reklamefri sone.

It’s Monday! What are you reading? #3

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reading-on-monday

Books I read last week:

  • I Left My Tent in San Fransisco – Emma Kennedy

Books I reviewed last week:

  • I Left My Tent in San Fransisco – Emma Kennedy

Books I’m reading now:

  • A. A. Milne – Thomas Burnett Swann
  • The Inheritance – Robin Hobb (Kindle)
  • Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter – Mario Vargas Llosa (Kindle)
  • Bluestockings – Jane Robinson
  • The Whisky River – Robin Laing
  • Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen (Kindle on the HTC)

Books I’m planning on reading this week:

I think I’ll concentrate on finishing the ones I’m reading, but I’ve got the following lined up after that:

  • Persuasion – Jane Austen (Kindle)
  • Only Time Will Tell – Jeffrey Archer
  • Adventures on the High Teas – Stuart Maconie

I may be mad

Mirthful 3 Comments

But I’ve unearthed my book cataloguing software. Well, that is, I unearthed it, copied the database file over to the new computer and went ahead and purchased a new licence. I think I may have purchased a lifetime licence some time way back when, but a new one was 40 dollars and, seriously, the time it would take me to find documentation and communicate with the company to get that sorted is worth more to me than a measly 40 dollars. Besides, it’s pretty good software, so I don’t mind supporting them a bit.

It’s called BookCAT. If you have a collection (or you’re responsible for a collection) that is being lent out, I imagine it’s really great. For us booknerds it’s great, too. You can track all sorts of things, like where you bought the book, for how much, when you read it, how much it may be worth now, and where you keep it. There are custom fields, so anything they haven’t thought of you can add (I’ve got «Foreign currency purchase price» and «Purchase notes», and may add Bookcrossing ID).

The downside is the time it takes to enter the data. The process has been sped up a bit in the new version, since you can get a lot of information off the internet automagically, but if you really want to keep track of where you purchased a book and how much it cost, obviously you need to enter that. And I last updated my database in… 2005. Ugh. In fact I had version 6 of the software on my old computer, I now have version 10. Still, importing the old database was painless, so there is little cleanup to be done, and if I take one shelf at a time and call it a work in progress, I may, sometime in the next century, get more or less up to date.

We’ll see.

I’ll start with the books we purchased in Scotland, if I can at least keep up to date with new purchases I may stand a fighting chance.

Smakebit på søndag: Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter

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llosa_aunt_julia

I’m late, but I am reading Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, and I’m rather enjoying it, too. Writeup hopefully in the next few days, in the meantime, here’s a quote, as an entry in Mari’s Smakebit på søndag round.

I asked the bank clerk to summon my brother Juan, and surprisingly (since I’d never had any brothers), he came and told me, by way of the kindly voice of the medium, not to worry about him, because he was with God, and that he prayed continually for me. Reassured by this bit of news, I lost interest in the séance and occupied myself mentally writing my story about the senator.

Since I’ve got the Kindle edition I have no idea what page that is on, I’m afraid.

I Left My Tent in San Fransisco – Emma Kennedy

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kennedy_san_fransiscoI Left My Tent in San Fransisco by Emma Kennedy was one of the books I managed to pick up in Elgin last Saturday. After cracking up over The Tent, the Bucket and Me in February, it was a must-have. When the kindle ran out of battery one evening and I couldn’t immediately lay my hands on the charger, I started it, and I also brought it on the plane, as the kindle is no good during take-off and landing (being «electronic equipment» which has to be switched off).

Emma and her friend Dee go to the USA in 1989. The plan is to get jobs in San Fransisco for two months, earn lots of money and then travel back to New York for flights home, seeing the country on the way. Unfortunately, getting jobs in San Fransisco isn’t as easy as the pair have been lead to believe, and they end up having very little money to cover their trek across the nation.

The book is very funny. It is even laugh-out-loud funny, just like its prequel. It’s less funny than said prequel, but perhaps that’s mostly because I have been camping but I have never travelled across the USA by ground transport, and so the force of recognition is diminished (though not absent, I have, after all, travelled in the USA and also made my way around rather large chunks of Europe by bus).

Some of the best parts of the book concern the people Emma and her friend Dee meet along the way. They have to rely heavily on the kindness of strangers in their travels, and meet some pretty odd characters. To a certain extent this is also where the book is least satisfactory, because the description of the people and the situations are just a bit too shallow or short to really grab me as a reader.

But still: Very, very funny.

Bokbloggsjerka

Mirthful 5 Comments

Tilbake fra en vellykket ferie i Skottland og tid for en ny bokbloggsjerka:

Läser du helst bokserier eller föredrar du fristående böcker eller kanske en mix av båda?

Tja. Hva skal man si? Det korte svaret er en mix av begge. Men det er et interessant spørsmål. En ting som er helt klart er at i den grad jeg leser serier foretrekker jeg de der bøkene egentlig fint kan stå på egen fot eller de som er «ferdige», det vil si der alle bøkene er utkommet og tilgjengelige. Eksempel på det første er Jasper Fforde sine bøker. De er deler av planlagte/pågående serier alle sammen, men hver bok er en avsluttet historie med løse ender mer eller mindre knytt opp. Eksempel på det andre er Robin Hobbs trilogier, som jeg ikke begynner å lese før alle tre volum er kommet ut. Harry Potter er også eksempel på det siste, og det er nettopp den serien som fikkk meg til å sverge å unngå å havne i den fella igjen at jeg må sitte på pinebenken i årevis mens jeg venter på at forfatteren skal somle seg til å skrive neste bok, og der jeg ber tynt til en gud jeg ikke tror på om å passe på vedkommende slik at de ikke blir overkjørt av en buss eller truffet av en meteor eller noe slikt før de har fått fullført serien.

Tålmodighet er ikke en av mine dyder. Som jeg og en av mine beste venner pleier å si: Når de delte ut tålmodighet gadd vi ikke stå i kø.

Fordelen med serier, som jeg ser det, er at man til en viss grad vet på forhånd om man vil like boka når det er den andre, tredje, fjerde osv. i rekken. Med en frittstående bok er muligheten alltid tilstede for at konseptet er helt feil, selv dersom man kjenner og liker forfatterens andre bøker. Selvsagt skjer det med serier at kvaliteten faller eller at forfatteren har en helt annen idé om hvor historien skal enn det man selv hadde tenkt seg, men sjansen er god for at det ikke er helt bom.

Ellers liker jeg også frittstående bøker, og det er vel strengt tatt det jeg leser mest av.

The Last Dragonslayer by Jasper Fforde

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The Last Dragonslayer by Jasper Fforde
The Last Dragonslayer by Jasper Fforde

As I said in Smakebit på søndag, when I’d read the first chapter of The Last Dragonslayer on Friday, far too late in the evening already, I didn’t want to put it down, and in other circumstances I probably wouldn’t have. As it was it was Sunday before I finished. And it is a compelling story, with Jennifer Strange as a most compelling heroine. But while I liked it, I really, really liked it, I still felt it fell a little short of perfection (unlike Shades of Gray which really IS perfection).

For while the story is compelling, I felt it lacked something, a little drive, perhaps? And I should have liked to see more of Tiger Prawn, a most worthy sidekick. And I should have liked to see more of the wizards, too, even the ones – or perhaps especially the ones – with a less than sunny personality. And I really want more quarkbeast. Charming creatures, they are.

Now I realise that this is the first book in an intended series, so that hopefully I WILL see more of these characters, but though I adore series, even long series, I still feel that at least the first volume ought to be able to stand on its own two feet. It should leave you wanting more, yes, of course it should, but there is a difference here. Comparing, again, with Shades of Gray, which had me craving more the moment I closed the book, but which felt very much like a complete whole, The Last Dragonslayer leaves me wanting more because the book itself feels somewhat incomplete. 

Perhaps it’s because it’s written for a younger market? I don’t know. I’m not sure that’s an excuse, though. Why should younger readers not want complete books?

On the whole, though, The Last Dragonslayer is better than most books out there. I could compare it to almost any book and it would come up trumps, I just know Fforde can do better, and so I am a little disappointed. A very little. I’m still preordering The Song of the Quarkbeast, because, well, complaining that I want more and then not grabbing at it with both hands when I’m offered more would just be stupid, right?

On a side note: Why, oh why have they radically changed cover designs between volumes 1 and 2?

Top Ten Tuesday – Books I Want to Reread

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For the first time since I discovered Top Ten Tuesday at The Broke and the Bookish (it’s only a couple of weeks ago, actually), there is a theme that is close to my heart: Books I want to reread. I am a rereader. It’s one of the main reasons why I prefer buying books to borrowing them, if I like it I will want to reread it, at least once, probably several times. Of the 50-odd books I manage to get through every year nowadays (it used to be more, before kids and work), I’m guessing at least 20 or so are rereads. Which makes it even more frustrating that I can’t read MORE because there are so many books in Mnt TBR and so many I could include on the following list and life is simply not long enough. Well, on to the point:

Top Ten Books I want to Reread

1. Persuasion by Jane Austen: I’ve actually got it lined up on the Kindle, I’m just going to finish Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter first.

2. The Neverending Story by Michael Ende: Writing about it in the Tematrio made me realise I need to reread it. I think it’s one of those books I have actually only read once, which is monstrous.

3. Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston: Another Tematrio threw this one up, and made me ache to reread.

4. Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad: Joanna mentioned this in the same Teamtrio, and I realised it’s been 20 years and that I really don’t remember much except thinking it was brilliantly horrible. About time I picked it up again, don’t you think?

5. The Chronicles of Robin Hood by Rosemary Sutcliff: It’s just one of those books I HAVE to reread every other year or so.

6. Notes from a Small Island by Bill Bryson: Dear Bill, please, please, please go back to Britain and write a sequel taking in more of Scotland. And Wales, if you can manage. We need you! Sincerely, me.

7. The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (a trilogy in, uhm, five parts) by Douglas Adams: It’s been a while. And I need to reread the Dirk Gently books, too (if possible: Even more brilliant than H2G2).

8. As the Crow Flies by Jeffrey Archer: Or one of the others, maybe. In any case, the next time I need some comfort reading – if this cold develops it might be quite soon – I’m going to reread one or more of Jeffrey Archer’s ripping good yarns.

9. Used and Rare by Lawrence and Nancy Goldstone: Which I will probably follow with Slightly Chipped and Warmly Inscribed.

10. Seierherrene by Roy Jacobsen: I found a good, clean copy of this at a jumble sale recently, which suited me very well, as it’s a book I’ve been meaning to reread for a while.

It’s Monday! What are you reading? #2

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reading-on-monday
Books I read last week:

  • The Yellow Admiral
  • The Hundred Days
  • Blue at the Mizzen
  • The Last Dragonslayer – Jasper Fforde

Books I reviewed last week:

  • Uhm. None.

Books I’m reading now:

  • A. A. Milne – Thomas Burnett Swann
  • The Inheritance – Robin Hobb (Kindle)

Books I’m planning on reading this week:

  • Bluestockings – Jane Robinson (I’ve started this)
  • The Whisky River – Robin Laing
  • Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter – Mario Vargas Llosa