TwiddleGeek

Along with playing games and watching movies, I simply love to read. I typically go through a fair amount of books on a large variety of topics including everything from time management to Japanese study, art to various fiction and humor. I’d say my favorite books are of the Sci-fi, fantasy, and study types. I love a good book that can make me laugh, think, or teach me something new. Of course this year I have several more that I’d like to read. I tend to enjoy long running series, last year finishing the complete Harry Potter set and this year His Dark Materials.

First and foremost, I’d like to read a new Bible I recently purchased cover to cover. SpaceKitty helped me pick out a new one over the New Years holiday and I’m quite fond of it. It’s based on the New Living Translation and although I wouldn’t use it for serious study, it makes for a nice and easy read. It neatly separates the books, further dividing them into sections with concise headings and useful information along the way. I’ve seen plans for ‘Reading the Bible in 1 year’ and a local church has plaques for reading plans… but if you do away with some of the hard to follow old English sentence structure, it’s really not that big of a task. This NLT Bible is 66 books with a total of just 759 pages. At a normal reading pace rather than a in-depth study, it shouldn’t take very long at all.

Other than that I’d like to get back into the Discworld series by Terry Pratchett. I’ve read the first 5 books, and I plan on reading the entire series as soon as I can. It’s funny, and I hear it only gets better as the books go on. I’d also like to pick up some more Halo books. I’ve read the first one, The Fall of Reach by Eric Nylund, and found it surprisingly good. I don’t have much desire to read the The Flood, but I want to pick up Nylund’s other two in the series, First Strike and Ghosts of Onyx. Another unlikely series is the Star Trek TNG books. I loved that series, and as much as I never thought I’d get into the fiction, they’re actually very enjoyable books. I’ve read about 13 of the 60+ official books, and I plan on reading many more. Sure, they’re the literary equivalent of junk food, but they’re entertaining if nothing else.

Other than that, I want to get back into some of my study books on Japanese and art. I’ve a lot of great Japanese study books by Taeko Kamiya and Naoko Chino published in the excellent Kodansha series, and I quite enjoy reading them. I also have art technique books ranging from more modern all the way to The Practice and Science of Drawing by Harold Speed, first published in 1917. Lots of good stuff to go through, but all of it taking a good deal of time to properly study.

Rating:

The Amber Spyglass wraps up the His Dark Materials trilogy, picking up almost exactly where The Subtle Knife left off. Will, Lyra, and the growing cast of familiar characters return once more to their great adventure. Compared to the other two books, Amber Spyglass is rather lengthy. The length tends to give time to tell the story properly however, rather than just dragging on.

What I liked about The Amber Spyglass was the sense of mystery and grandeur it produces. Will and Lyra’s adventures take them to the most extreme locations… the farthest depths and the greatest heights, on the grandest scale. It gets more absurd as the trilogy moves on, granted, but it makes for amusing fantasy none the less. In some ways the series begins to push it’s luck, spending too much time on unimportant events and not nearly enough on what it’s been building up to all along. I also can’t say that I’m overly fond of the ending.

I’ll also mention that while Golden Compass and Subtle Knife were rather subtle about the real world religion views, Amber Spyglass lays down the (anti-)religious messages fairly strongly in it’s final pages. They are expressed as the viewpoint of one character in particular, but it becomes pretty obvious what she’s talking about has little to nothing to do with the storyline of the book. Ignoring the story of the books, there are a few particular lines about religions that some may find offensive. If you can look past an author with an opinion that seeps into his work though, the series is a great read.

Just finished up the His Dark Materials series with The Amber Spyglass, and I’m glad I started reading it. It plodded on a bit in the beginning and got a little heavy handed with the messages at the end, but overall I sincerely enjoyed the lengthy reads and memorable characters. There were flaws, sure, and I’m not a huge fan of the ending honestly… but I think the books will stick in my mind far longer than merely seeing the movie would have.

I did some more work on the site and added up a wallpaper section, this time for desktop wallpapers. Honestly I don’t have a lot of skill for these, but maybe I’ll get better at it over time. I like what I’ve got there, and they seem to be in high demand… so I might as well try my hand at it. I realize my menu is getting rather crowded up there though, I might see what I can do about that. Some cascading menus sure would be nice, but difficult. I’ve looked into the subject once before without much success.

I also realize that the more I add to the site, the more my work becomes divided among all of it. But that’s the pessimistic view, the optimist in me says that while each individual section may get updated less, it gives me more options to update with depending on what I feel like working on. It increases the chance that visitors will find something they like, and generally just makes the site a better representation of my hobbies. Ideally I would follow an update schedule, but I can’t see that happening. Life tends to get in the way too often and I don’t want to be tied down to my site. I’m not gonna follow it, but general guidelines and an ideal update schedule would be:

* Anime / Gaming post - Whenever
* Off Topic post - Weekly
* Mobile wallpapers - Biweekly
* Desktop wallpapers - Biweekly
* Winamp Skins - Monthly

I’m glad I started reading the His Dark Materials series, but boy does it ever start slow. Pretty much the entire first book, The Golden Compass, is just introduction. Although it’s not a bad read, nothing terribly exciting happens until the end of it. On it’s own, it would be a terribly disappointing book with a lot of wasted potential. Imagine if you will the entire first book of Harry Potter introducing Harry and the cast, the concept of magic, and the world of wizards only to end right as he reaches Hogwarts. That’s pretty much how reading The Golden Compass goes.

Thankfully the book that follows, The Subtle Knife, jumps straight into the action. The new character that’s introduced is actually a great addition, and previous characters who return to the story benefit from already having so much groundwork laid out. Actually, for as much time as the author spends carefully explaining everything about the world in the first book, the second throws the reader straight into the unknown. His writing style seems to shift a fair deal between the two books, though maybe he’s simply hitting his stride here. Either way, I’m quite enjoying The Subtle Knife so far.

In other news, I’ve re-added some tag clouds to the sidebar since the side speed issues are long past us with the new host. The tags are pulled from WordPress’ built in systems in 2.3, so hopefully they’re fairly quick. The search cloud still uses the excellent Cloud of Google plug-in, which now thankfully has a previously suggested improvement of limiting the number of keywords it pulls, rather than parsing the whole database. Both look good and provide useful information, but are also great for SEO.

And finally it’s expected to snow tonight… flurries on Thanksgiving. I’ll be glad to leave the Midwest behind. I know a lot of people love the idea of a “white Christmas”, but it’s an entirely different matter when you’ve got to live and work in the stuff, defrost your car, and shovel your way out every morning. The salt on the roads rusts our cars, the black ice causes accidents, and the wind is biting cold. I could never see snow again and be quite happy for it. — Unless it involves skiing with SpaceKitty, perhaps.