Full Review: "John Shaw's Guide to Digital Nature Photography"

"What camera should I use?"

I was pleased to see the author's answer: "The one you have with you." Good man. I can learn something from him. He jokes that a frequent comment he hears is "'you must have a really good lens,' as if the lens went out all by itself and took pictures." There is very thorough information here on gear you might buy, of course, but most of the chapters will be helpful for getting the best results with just about any digital camera. The real practice of photography, Shaw insists - the art - is the "capture of optimal vision," by the photographer, not the equipment. He is a very good teacher of that art.

This is not a book for complete beginners (who would undoubtedly not want four whole pages devoted to focusing a lens, for example), but rather for people who have basic digital camera skills and want to raise their game. (Those four pages on lens focusing taught me more than any number of other texts.) There are chapters on gear, getting started, lenses, composition, close-ups, and the photographer at work, plus many dozen of Shaw's nature images.

He's been doing this a long time. Highly readable, in-depth, with a lot of advice that could only come from experience.

Highly recommended.

I received a complimentary copy of this book from Blogging for Books in exchange for a review. The image above links to the book's Amazon page.

Full Review: Journaling with Questions - "Q&A a Day"

Here's an interesting idea, although you're going to have to write small. The book is called "Q&A a Day" and it is put out by the Potter Style imprint of Crown Publishing Group. Every day has a question associated with it. Each page has a single date with five spaces underneath (you fill in the year), so you answer the same question on the same day for five years. When I asked to review this book, I thought I'd get some huge coffee-table size thing, but it's tiny - about 4x6x1 inches - and hardcover, with gilt-edged pages. Very classy. It would fit in a purse if you so chose.

No matter how cute the book is, though, the important thing is the quality of the questions. Here are the first five: 

• January 1: What is your mission?
• January 2: Can people change?
• January 3: What are you reading right now?
• January 4: What was the best part of today?
• January 5: What was the last restaurant you went to?

Most of the questions are pretty good, thought-provoking without being grim, light without being stupid, and it will be interesting to see how answers change through several years, although I thought "What was the last fruit you ate?" kind of silly, and there's no where near enough space for "How do you want to be remembered?"

Still, this is a project I'd like to sink my teeth into. It's March 8 today. What was the last music I listened to?

I received this book from Blogging for Books in exchange for a review. The image above links to the book's Amazon page.

Short Review: "My Life in Middlemarch"

 
Rebecca Mead's book "My Life in Middlemarch" is a longform account of how her life was informed and enriched (and in some cases aligned with) literature in general, but by George Eliot's novel "Middlemarch" in particular. Mead moves back and forth among her own life, Eliot's life, and the characters in Eliot's novel, weaving in analysis from Virginia Woolf and others. Part critique, part love letter, part history, and part philosophy, the book is particularly lucid on how young people feel as they are trying desperately to grow up, flailing and oversharing and searching wildly for meaning...noting for example that Eliot's purple teenage writing "...move[s] me because of [its] dreadfulness, not in spite of it [as for so many other analysts]."

As a lifelong frequenter of libraries, originally in buildings and now more often online, I found this book inspiring. I know what it's like to be startled into thought by printed text, to turn around and try to write something original after inspiration by a classic work, to befriend fictional characters and then change and grow because of them. Mead has done us a great service in showing how this book stimulated her through her life, in multiple contexts. I ordered Middlemarch (which I've never read before) about 20 pages in. About time.  

Highly recommended.

I received a free review copy of this book in exchange for a review. The image above links to the book's Amazon page.

Short Review: "Provence, 1970"

 
The author of Provence, 1970 (Luke Barr) is the great-nephew of MFK Fisher, a writer well known in the mid-20th century for her books on food, cooking, and their influence on culture. Fisher's first book was in published in 1937 (Serve it Forth, an unusual, sophisticated, and fearless culinary history). She had a long and distinguished career, but Barr's book focuses on just a few weeks, in France, in 1970, as Fisher participated in an incipient revolution in how Americans viewed cooking and eating. Her companions in these lively conversations were giants of the food world: James Beard, Julia Child, and others.

Working from a variety of family papers, including Fisher's diary and the original notebook she kept from the 1970 visit to Provence, Barr (who has inherited his great-aunt's gift for beautiful prose) has crafted a leisurely, intimate, fascinating book on French and American culture and the changes at work in the world of cooking at a single point in time. Don't try to read this in a hurry. Savor it.  

Highly recommended.

I received a copy of this book in exchange for a review from Blogging for Books. The image above links to the book's Amazon page.

Full Review: "The Martian"

I checked out some of the other reviews of The Martian, by Andy Weir, and they are overwhelmingly positive. A lot of that strikes me as a collective relief response.  Surprisingly for a civilization allegedly obsessed with happy endings, we've been concentrating on nihilistic shock in both book and film for a very long time now (think Mad Max, The Road, Hunger Games - a whole library of just how miserable fiction can make us.)

Weir's novel does act as a corrective to all that. It's suspenseful, although in the same way as Apollo 13 is suspenseful; we know everything will come out okay. And it is indeed fun getting there. The story is knowledgeable about science (I teach chemistry, and there's some fine instruction here) and innovation (try, fail, try again), and teamwork. I liked it.

But I also get where the few naysayers are coming from. Very little uncertainty, pedestrian sentence structure, almost textbookish narration - there's not a lot of psychological depth here. This is adventure science fiction from the early days, when we thought we could do anything we put our minds to. We need that, no question about it, and it's time we got off our self-flagellation kick, but just a little more nuance or character development or elegance next time? Please?

I received this book from the Blogging for Books program in exchange for this review. The image above links to the book's Amazon page.

Short review: "Empire of Sin"

 
You think we have a problem today with racial violence, government corruption, and embedded injustice of epic scale? Take heart. It's nothing compared to Victorian-era New Orleans. 

Gary Krist's book is a spellbinding piece of writing. Hard to believe it's non-fiction, but Krist used original news reports and other historical documents to craft this true story of mayhem. After a prologue, the book starts off with the murder of Josie Lobrano's brother, in front of her, at the hand of her paramour in their brothel, and the subsequent crooked trial in which said paramour is let off the hook. Things get worse from there, and continue to be worse for at least four decades, through several city administrations and various heroic attempts to clean up the mess. Between minute by minute descriptions of murders and lynching, we learn about the culture of New Orleans, the roots of jazz, the founding of Storyville, and much more. 

Very highly recommended.

I received this book from the Blogging for Books program in exchange for a review. The image above links to the book's Amazon page.

Introducing Brad Warner

I am a fan of Brad Warner, punk rocker and Buddhist practitioner. My favorite book of his (he has written several) is Sit Down and Shut Up. Here's his latest post at his website, HardCore Zen.

http://hardcorezen.info/staying-hungry/3019

 

The Manifesto of Speculative Posthumanism

Bruce Sterling notes that a real posthuman would find this very funny...

http://feeds.wired.com/c/35185/f/661427/s/36a5b6eb/sc/7/l/0L0Swired0N0Cbeyond0Ithe0Ibeyond0C20A140C0A20Cmanifesto0Especulative0Eposthumanism0C/story01.htm
“Over the last decade the possibility of innovations in areas such as artificial intelligence or biotechnology contributing to the emergence of a ‘posthuman’ life form has become a focal point of public debate and mainstream artistic concern. This multi-disciplinary discourse is premised on developments in the so-called ‘NBIC’ technologies – Nanotechnology, Biotechnology, Information Technology and Cognitive Science. The transhumanist claim that human nature should be improved technologically is likewise predicated on the NBIC suite affording the necessary means for enhancement...
(continued at above link.)

There's a big argument going on in the news and the blogosphere about Amazon (indie publishing) vs. Hachette (legacy publishing). My only contribution is to note that this isn't David and Goliath. It's more like Goliath and Goliath. I took up fiction writing recently, but by the time I'm ready to publish they'll probably be working on a different lawsuit, so my overall plan is to get out of the way and let them fight it out. (I thought I could finish a novel in a summer...hah! I'm only on the third chapter and it's already July.)

The question I do consider, though, is whether to go with independent publishing (like the Amazon Kindle and Smashwords and so on) or the legacy publishers (Hachette and the other Big Five and their minions). I spent (and spend) a lot of time reading about writing, and one interesting book that helped with that decision is The Business of Science Fiction, by Mike Resnick and Barry Malzberg. These two guys are archetypal professionals in the field, with many dozens of novels, short stories and screenplays between them. If anyone knows how to get published with a legacy publisher, it's them. Excellent book, and after reading it through, I had an interesting reaction. 

No way do I want to do this. 

Go to conventions and butter people up, send out endless query letters and proposals, try and get an agent, watch while they auction it off, scrutinize contracts, adhere to publisher's rules and word counts, go on book tours, wince while the publisher sets the book price too high, get only about a third of the money it makes, and then have no say in when, where, or whether the ebook gets published.

When would I get any actual writing done?

Current status: leaning heavily toward indie publishing. Yes, I'll have to hire and pay my own editor, and no, I won't get an advance. OK on both counts. 

QuiBids

Trying out yet another auction site - for buying,  not selling. (http://www.QuiBids.com) Very interesting - you pay for every bid you make, so the effort is to find a strategy to bid as little as possible. Here's what I've figured out so far:

• wait to bid until something you actually want comes up. Makes it worth the time you'll need to actually get it, and it means that if you lose the auction, you won't mind paying the full price plus shipping. (They even recommend this.)


• don't bother with the voucher style bids...they cost a little less to buy, but once they're gone, they're gone. With regular style bids (you buy them...they're $0.60 apiece) the site subtracts what you bid from the full cost of the item if you don't win it, and offers an identical item to you at that lower cost. You don't get a bargain, but it minimizes loss - the gift cards (which I highly recommend as a training option) are particularly good . You might have to buy the card if you lose the auction, but the shipping charge is minimal, and you get the money you bid back to spend as you want.


• unless you're prepared with many hundreds of bids and a lot of spare hours, don't even bother with the real high ticket items like iPads and such. High PRICED items often go for very little, but high STATUS ones go way up and take a long time to stop. If you're determined, wait until the high status item is at least at 80% of what the next highest winner paid. Then you might have enough bids to win at reasonable cost.


• Do not scatter bids hither and yon, or wander away once you've started bidding on something. You might as well throw money out the window. This is not eBay.


• Don't bid right away on any item. Wait until the clueless run out of money. The exception to this guideline would be in the middle of a workday - the number of people bidding is much lower, and high priced items often go for pennies.


• In fact, don't bid at all except when the timer is at 1...on anything! And then stick with it. Every bid posted gets 10 to 20 seconds added to the clock, so there's no reason to bid anything at 8 seconds or 3 or even 2. And if the timer jumps back up, don't bid...someone else did it for you. The only thing I would recommend is to click "Bid" AS SOON AS the timer gets to 1 - I've lost a couple expensive auctions now by waiting just a split second too long.


• Watch yourself. When you're winning, move your mouse away from the Bid button. I've bid myself up a couple times by accident. (the timer was at 1, so I clicked...duh! I might have won it if I hadn't clicked.)


• Check the history of the item before you even start (there will be an identical one tomorrow, don't worry.) What was the price range it sold for? WHEN during the day or night did it sell? Is the price related to the time of day? (In many cases it is...middle 5 hours of a workday is the absolute best, at least for the things I've been looking at.)


• Make certain you have enough bids...you don't want to have to buy more in the middle of an auction.


• If there is more than one "Bid-o-matic" active, don't bid at all. If there's only one active, bid only (at 1 or 2 seconds) when the Bid-o-matic is currently winning.


• The most likely auctions to win are those where only one or two other people are still bidding, and they're smart enough to wait until the last seconds on the timer. If you're focused, you can outlast them. The ones where idiots are bidding at 10 or 15 seconds might be worth watching, but don't click "Bid". Remember: the goal is the FEWEST bids, because you're paying for them. The actual "price" of the auction is usually very low, but also completely irrelevant - FEWEST NUMBER OF BIDS is your goal to save money.


• If your bid total is approaching the item value, stop bidding when you get to the item value MINUS the shipping charge - you'll still be able to buy it, but you won't exceed the MFRP plus shipping. For God's sake, don't spend bids worth more than the item is worth.