Thank you, but already read and I enjoyed it.
Did you read any of the sequels?I do pretty much the same thing. Bookmarks just get in the way I find.
What are you reading? (January 2016)
- Thread starter Maklershed
- Start date
Did you read any of the sequels?I used to remember page numbers. I would shoot for just a bit lower than what I remembered and then scan my way to where I was.
I'd also repeat the number to myself after closing the book in the back of my head to "lock it in". The more "rhythmic" or "chunkable" the number was, like "717" or "111", the easier it was to recall.
I'd also repeat the number to myself after closing the book in the back of my head to "lock it in". The more "rhythmic" or "chunkable" the number was, like "717" or "111", the easier it was to recall.
Bookmarks. Always. Especially since I tend to have multiple books going at once, remembering page numbers seems nuts. I've got a lot of Toastmasters ribbons lying around so I just use those; they're basically perfect.
AngmarsKing701
Member
That is a good place to start with King. Another good one is Pet Sematary (Spelled wrong on purpose). Or if you are the adventuring sort The Stand is probably my favorite, but it is super long.
TwntyOneTwlv
Member
Bookmarks. When I was a kid I'd fold the corner of the page down to mark my place. As I got older I realized that was barbaric. Ever since I've used bookmarks - notecards, dollar bills, ticket stubs. Stuff like that.
I started it today. I'm digging it so far. How about the 4th book?
Do you recommend it?
charlemagne
Member
Bookmarks. Always. Usually just a scrap of paper or similar.
Sometimes I keep a mental note, other times I just leave the book open flipped downwards. I rarely use a bookmark. On more than one occasion, I have had to spend a bunch of my 'reading time' trying to find my spot in the book, especially if it's been a few days since my last session.
Plasticine
Member
Bookmarks. I've got a couple of free ones from different specialty publishers, so might as well use them.
Quote
Member
This blows my mind. I've always had a hard time remembering numbers.
RetrospectiveLamb
Member
The writing isn't super sophisticated, but I found the plot kept me hooked. It takes place during new hope, empire strikes back, and return of the jedi, so even though the star wars' universe was foreshadowing, the characters' reactions to the world they live in kept me reading it. For a YA, I think it's okay but I shall warn you there is a love story.
The Gf and I luv bookmarks, the more original the better. It's fun to have a bookmark that matches the theme of the book your reading. We even made some from old fotos I've taken by editing them, printing and then giving them a good laminating. My girl is pretty amazing that way.
Read through my January freebie. Wasn't horrible, but read like a typical soap opera. Not super interesting and the characters were fairly unlikeable. Easy to get through, at least.
Starting to read through this, since it's about living with mental illness and the sample was pretty damn funny.
I either remember the page number or the page layout and usually know that I was 1/3 or so into the book. That's why it only takes some seconds to continue reading.
D
Deleted member 125677
Unconfirmed Member
Mumei, I don't quite get the hype you put out for this book. It was ok, but nothing mindblowing.
Dog ears in paperbacks, bookmarks for hardcovers.
Gordon0Freeman
Member
Started reading this
Good shit so far.
Just got this from Amazon. Liking what I'm reading as well
Atraveller
Banned
Finished Slaughterhouse Five, continuing The New Jim Crow, I shall have more time when I'm finally done with final exams.
fuck.
So you're enjoying it?
AngmarsKing701
Member
No! I kind of was until the midway point where something happens...I dont know. I've never felt so sickened and devastated reading a book before. I was really considering dropping it today.
Feel like I've been reading The Count of Monte Cristo since forever and I'm only 23% in (this isn't a knock on the book, I've just had little time recently). Really enjoying it now although the amount of time left in the book leaves me in a constant state of panic as to what new horror is going to befall him next.
Unless
! (I don't actually want to know, obviously)
This is going to make a mockery of my 50 book challenge.
Unless
all the bad shit is done and it's all about vengeance from here on in. Just finished the chapter in which he saves Morrell. Mean fucker making him wait so long
This is going to make a mockery of my 50 book challenge.
When I was younger, I would be reading 3-4 books at a time (one for car, one for table, one for couch, you get the idea). Just a habit i got into, I guess, and never really realized that it seems odd for other people.
Practice, I guess.
You MONSTER.
sparky2112
Member
I bet he cracks paperback spines, too.
PassiveObserver
Member
I have one of those thick lenticular bookmarks with two stomping T-Rexes on it...why wouldn't I use that? Back-up book mark is from that feminist bookstore in Portlandia.
BlazingDarkness
Member
Great recommendation here, The Crimson Petal and The White is amazing.
The BBC adaptation is one of my favourite dramas ever.
Glitchesarecool
Member
Does anyone have suggestions for other books in the vein of Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything? I'm having a great deal of trouble finding other science books that are written well/interestingly.
Plasticine
Member
I used to do the exact same thing as you, and my family/friends always found it puzzling. Nowadays I usually use a bookmark (old receipt, cheap Magic: The Gathering Card, etc.), though I'll also dog-ear if nothing's close to hand.
I used to be morally opposed to dog-earring, until I realized that the slow degradation of a book as you move from beginning to end is one of my favourite aspects of reading a physical book, and dog-earring, as a physical marker of each time you picked up a book to read, is something of an interesting archival method. They're like road markers placed on a long journey.
I'm in this recommendation, too. Loved Short History, but haven't found anything since that comes close enough to satisfy me.
Glitchesarecool
Member
The two books by XKCD's author, Randall Munroe, are really fun.
Maklershed
Member
Finished The Last Policeman and now strongly jonesin for some country noir so gonna start Knockemstiff ...
Knockemstiff by Donald Ray Pollock
Knockemstiff by Donald Ray Pollock
sparky2112
Member
I own them both but have only read What If? Even though it's presented in a humorous way, there really is some cool info in there. And, yes, you more than likely can swim safely in spent nuclear fuel rod storage pools.
I have a large collection of bookmarks. The Book Depository is at the moment sending out some rather nice ones with all its books.
...
I finished Gravity's Engines by Caleb Scharf. The author is astrophysicist, rather than a theoretical physicist like the authors of the two previous popular physics books I listened to (A Universe From Nothing, and From Eternity to Here), which made an interesting difference. It was about black holes, the history of their discovery and how they influence the formation of the universe. It was pretty good in describing the physical reality, scale, contents of the universe and there was some really great stuff like white dwarfs and quasars, but some of the explanations were a bit overburdened by metaphor.
I also finished Superintelligence by Nick Bostrom which for the most part was totally ace. I'd never seriously considered AI to be a big concern for the future, but Bostrom was pretty thorough in his arguments. Much of the book reads like science fiction, and anyone interested in reading - or writing - sci fi should very definitely listen to it. It was mostly about the Control problem, full brain emulation vs true AI, singleton vs multi polar superintelligence etc, but also lots of stuff like a society of emulated worker brains (what rights do they have?), turning the galaxy into computonium in order to calculate Pi, etc. The language/ style is quite academic, and it's unlikely I would have finished it if I'd actually read it, but it was totally fine listening to it. I did think he overlooked a few alternative arguments in order to plump for his own conclusions on occasion, and he seemed to have an odd view of how society worked at times, but those were very minor quibbles and very possibly my own error.
I also finally finished The Unreal Life of Sergey Nabokov, by Paul Russell. Russell is one of my favourite authors and I'd been saving this book up. It couldn't live up to expectations. It's a fictional life of Vladimir Nabokov's brother, covering life in Russia before the Revolution, then mostly Sergey's life in Paris between the wars, and during WWII in Berlin. The main problem I found was that Sergey basically seems to drift though his life (this may have been the point, but still), and all the famous people he meets in Paris (Cocteau etc) were pretty horrible. Vladimir Nabokov also came across as a dick. Russell has apparently taught courses on Nabokov and I think this book probably echoes things in Nabokov's work that I didn't pick up on, only having read Lolita and Pale Fire. It made me want to read all Nabokov's other stuff, minor work included. Russell is great at evoking certain emotions, and there were some great bits, like Sergey's loneliness and unpopularity as a teenager, his longing for closeness with his father and brother, but it didn't quite reach the height of some of Russell's other books. It was still really good, though. The period and events in the book were all really interesting and well done.
I am currently listening to The Physics of the Impossible by Michio Kaku. It's good fun so far.
...
I finished Gravity's Engines by Caleb Scharf. The author is astrophysicist, rather than a theoretical physicist like the authors of the two previous popular physics books I listened to (A Universe From Nothing, and From Eternity to Here), which made an interesting difference. It was about black holes, the history of their discovery and how they influence the formation of the universe. It was pretty good in describing the physical reality, scale, contents of the universe and there was some really great stuff like white dwarfs and quasars, but some of the explanations were a bit overburdened by metaphor.
I also finished Superintelligence by Nick Bostrom which for the most part was totally ace. I'd never seriously considered AI to be a big concern for the future, but Bostrom was pretty thorough in his arguments. Much of the book reads like science fiction, and anyone interested in reading - or writing - sci fi should very definitely listen to it. It was mostly about the Control problem, full brain emulation vs true AI, singleton vs multi polar superintelligence etc, but also lots of stuff like a society of emulated worker brains (what rights do they have?), turning the galaxy into computonium in order to calculate Pi, etc. The language/ style is quite academic, and it's unlikely I would have finished it if I'd actually read it, but it was totally fine listening to it. I did think he overlooked a few alternative arguments in order to plump for his own conclusions on occasion, and he seemed to have an odd view of how society worked at times, but those were very minor quibbles and very possibly my own error.
I also finally finished The Unreal Life of Sergey Nabokov, by Paul Russell. Russell is one of my favourite authors and I'd been saving this book up. It couldn't live up to expectations. It's a fictional life of Vladimir Nabokov's brother, covering life in Russia before the Revolution, then mostly Sergey's life in Paris between the wars, and during WWII in Berlin. The main problem I found was that Sergey basically seems to drift though his life (this may have been the point, but still), and all the famous people he meets in Paris (Cocteau etc) were pretty horrible. Vladimir Nabokov also came across as a dick. Russell has apparently taught courses on Nabokov and I think this book probably echoes things in Nabokov's work that I didn't pick up on, only having read Lolita and Pale Fire. It made me want to read all Nabokov's other stuff, minor work included. Russell is great at evoking certain emotions, and there were some great bits, like Sergey's loneliness and unpopularity as a teenager, his longing for closeness with his father and brother, but it didn't quite reach the height of some of Russell's other books. It was still really good, though. The period and events in the book were all really interesting and well done.
I am currently listening to The Physics of the Impossible by Michio Kaku. It's good fun so far.
RepairmanJack
Member
Finished:
I love the way Murakami writes, or at least how its translated. The atmosphere and feeling that comes from this is just eerie and amazing. Outside of that though, I'm not sure how much I loved this one. The whole duality and comparisons all came across pretty well, but there just seemed like not much conclusion past the idea of acceptance? And even then only maybe? I dunno, loved reading it, but not really sure how I feel about the book as a whole. It doesn't bother me though as I just love reading what I've read of Murakami so far.
I'm just about to read his The Devil All The Time here soon. Haven't read any of his before, but wasn't feeling like a collection of short stories.
I love the way Murakami writes, or at least how its translated. The atmosphere and feeling that comes from this is just eerie and amazing. Outside of that though, I'm not sure how much I loved this one. The whole duality and comparisons all came across pretty well, but there just seemed like not much conclusion past the idea of acceptance? And even then only maybe? I dunno, loved reading it, but not really sure how I feel about the book as a whole. It doesn't bother me though as I just love reading what I've read of Murakami so far.
Finished The Last Policeman and now strongly jonesin for some country noir so gonna start Knockemstiff ...
Knockemstiff by Donald Ray Pollock
I'm just about to read his The Devil All The Time here soon. Haven't read any of his before, but wasn't feeling like a collection of short stories.
Maklershed
Member
Fantastic book. Hopefully you like it as much as I did.
Cyrus_Saren
Member
CompTia A+ Certification. I figure I should stop procrastinating and take this before it's too late so I'm going back through the book.
D
Deleted member 125677
Unconfirmed Member
Dandy Crocodile
Member
Atraveller
Banned
Disgusting!
That's uncivilized.
I just use whatever's handy. Stuff like ticket stubs, receipts or boarding passes get used a lot.
I often put something solid on top of my paperbacks while they're being read to try to minimize the full impact of page bending too.
Stop book shaming. It's 2016 for Christ sake
Rug Monkey
Member
I used to do this, although when I was over halfway I'd switch to the back flap. For paperbacks I'd tear the corner with the date on it off a newspaper page + plus enough to stop them falling out.
Cool thread, first time here.
Just finished Bone Clocks.
As usual David Mitchell has beautiful and engaging prose, but boy am I hating his expanding literary universe. Bone Clocks takes what was facilitating background mysticism in Thousand Autumns and turns it into all-out nerd lore, complete with a DBZ fight scene.
Currently reading:
And listening to on audiobook:
First time listening to a competent piece of literature on audio and it's difficult to keep up with the prose. Previously I'd only listened to fantasy which is pretty much garbage so it doesn't matter if you miss the details.
Just finished Bone Clocks.
As usual David Mitchell has beautiful and engaging prose, but boy am I hating his expanding literary universe. Bone Clocks takes what was facilitating background mysticism in Thousand Autumns and turns it into all-out nerd lore, complete with a DBZ fight scene.
Currently reading:
And listening to on audiobook:
First time listening to a competent piece of literature on audio and it's difficult to keep up with the prose. Previously I'd only listened to fantasy which is pretty much garbage so it doesn't matter if you miss the details.
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