Purple Library Pleasure
Apr. 18th, 2010 10:54 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
maribouLibrary Camps and Unconferences, by Steve Lawson
On a pragmatic level, if you want to make some kind of library-related unstructured but functional conglomeration of interested people happen, you should find this book very useful - clear and concise but with meaty details and good "go look over here" stuff. Since the author is a friend of mine, I was reading it for entirely different reasons, which were equally well-satisfied.
(73/200)
Pure Pleasure, by John Carey
A delightful book for the books-about-books crowd - very short pieces on what purports to be the 50 most enjoyable books of the 20th century (it's actually a little more complicated than that). My joy in these sorts of essays is always dependent on the author's style above all else, and in this case, I enjoyed myself very much indeed. And there are a few books that have moved from my "one of these days" list to being things I'm going to seek out and read very very soon. He got a few books I have read very, very wrong, IMO, but that didn't make the book less fun.
(74/200)
Purple and Black, by K. J. Parker
This book is 113 pages long. Short pages with lots of blank space. And it didn't transcend entertaining pointlessness until page EIGHTY-THREE. So if you have less patience than I do, I guess you shouldn't bother. But I thought the last 30 pages were extraordinarly good, and that long build-up was necessary to the story. So I was completely happy with the book. (Also, it probably helps that KJ Parker is my favorite writer of this sort of book, so even when it was just ok, I wasn't precisely unhappy - just waiting for the other shoe to drop.)
(75/200)
On a pragmatic level, if you want to make some kind of library-related unstructured but functional conglomeration of interested people happen, you should find this book very useful - clear and concise but with meaty details and good "go look over here" stuff. Since the author is a friend of mine, I was reading it for entirely different reasons, which were equally well-satisfied.
(73/200)
Pure Pleasure, by John Carey
A delightful book for the books-about-books crowd - very short pieces on what purports to be the 50 most enjoyable books of the 20th century (it's actually a little more complicated than that). My joy in these sorts of essays is always dependent on the author's style above all else, and in this case, I enjoyed myself very much indeed. And there are a few books that have moved from my "one of these days" list to being things I'm going to seek out and read very very soon. He got a few books I have read very, very wrong, IMO, but that didn't make the book less fun.
(74/200)
Purple and Black, by K. J. Parker
This book is 113 pages long. Short pages with lots of blank space. And it didn't transcend entertaining pointlessness until page EIGHTY-THREE. So if you have less patience than I do, I guess you shouldn't bother. But I thought the last 30 pages were extraordinarly good, and that long build-up was necessary to the story. So I was completely happy with the book. (Also, it probably helps that KJ Parker is my favorite writer of this sort of book, so even when it was just ok, I wasn't precisely unhappy - just waiting for the other shoe to drop.)
(75/200)
