Free library books online
Since I found out that library books are available as free downloads here in Sweden, I’ve wanted to try. For various reasons, I’d really prefer not to have to go to the library and pick up actual books (though when it comes to buying new copies at the book store, it’s the other way around.)
Anyway, last night I decided to have a go. I did a search for a couple of mysteries I’ve wanted to read, but not felt able to buy – a combination of lack of money and doubts about the quality of those books – and found five titles. I thought ‘Great!’.
Most of the books were supposedly available in several different formats, including mobi and epub. I’d read that you could download the books from your computer to a portable device (iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad, any kind of e-book reader…). That’s interesting, even though I don’t own any such device, not personally. However, it was soon evident that all those symbols next to the title didn’t mean a thing. Adobe Digital Edition was the only software that worked. It gets worse.
I typed in my library card number and borrowed the first book on my list. So far, so good. I checked that I could at least open it on the computer and I could. Then I went on to the next two books and unfortunately, I got them in the reverse order of publication. When I’d finished the download of book nr 2 in the series, I get an error message saying I can only download three books in a seven day period. Three? I looked over the download window and the file where the books were saved. No. Just two. But the site was convinced. I’d already downloaded my three books. Since I refuse to read book 2 in a series before book 1, for all intents and purposes, I only got one book out of the whole frustrating experience. Three books might have been enough for seven days, one definitely isn’t.
Then my sister tried to transfer the book to her iPhone, just to see if it could be done and – to make a long story short – it couldn’t. Well, to be clear, it could be transferred, but then it couldn’t be opened. She went to check on the newspaper article where we’d found out about electronic book borrowing, and eventually found a couple of solutions that were supposedly going to work. Again, to make a long story short, neither of them did.
By that time, I was beginning to regret thinking of this idea in the first place, but at least I’ll now be able to read book three in a series where I’ve actually read books 1 and 2. And I’ll be able to try again in seven days time.
All this has also given me food for thought.
After our successful experiment with the Kindle, I had begun to plan ahead to a time when I’ll be able to afford an e-book reader and/or an iPod Touch or possibly an iPad. Now I’m wondering if I should bother. I love the Kindle. I’m sure I’d like the iPod Touch and the iPad, but would I actually have any real use for them?
I’m a book lover first and foremost even if I do love a shiny gadget, but the way I see it, I’d primarily be getting the e-book reader so I can download all those free books from Project Gutenberg and similar sites. I don’t see myself spending any money on new e-books. For one, they’re actually a lot more expensive than a paperback, and as far as I can understand, I won’t be able to read my free downloads on the Kindle. Secondly, in my opinion, nothing beats the feeling of holding a ‘real’, printed paper book in my hands.
I could get an iPod Touch when my old iPods (very old) stop working, which might be relatively soon, judging by the time it takes to charge them and how long they last before the next charge. But if I can’t even read my library books on it, maybe it won’t be worth it. As it happens, I really prefer listening to something with better sound quality. I’m not into taking all kinds of gadgets along when I go out. It’s just not worth it.
Maybe I should just be grateful I’m leaning towards an option that will save me a lot of money, but somehow that doesn’t seem very cheering. At this time I could really use some cheering up.
Oh, well, I should probably just wait and see. For all I know, my financial situation could change in the near future and then I could take the whole thing under consideration again.
The Kindle
My sister and I are working on getting our own books published. Eventually, we hope to be able to publish other people’s books too. In the course of our work, we decided that we’d need an e-book reader to optimize the file formats.
So I set to work doing a bit of research online.
To begin with, the Kobo was my primary choice and my sister was preferred the Nook. Unfortunately, we found out that neither are available here in Sweden, or at least that they’d be very hard to get. The only readers we can easliy get our hands on are some European ones, that were probably great when they were first made, but are beginning to look old. The iRiver Story looks great, but for various reasons I won’t go into now, eventually we decided against that too.
So we were back to square one. Early on, I’d looked at the Kindle and been very impressed, but I didn’t like the fact that you can’t change the internal battery. If the battery dies you need to send your Kindle back to Amazon and get a replacement, which will cost you almost as much as buying a new one, if I’ve understood correctly.
But since we felt that the Kindle was our only really positive option, we looked into it again. Apart from the battery issue, everything else I’d read about the Kindle was fantastic, so in the end, we decided to get one.
Ordering one to have it shipped to an address in Sweden was no trouble at all. We just had to get an adapter, but that was easy enough.
Then we just settled down to wait. Can you imagine our surprise when we got a notification only two days later? Two days after we ordered it, it was delivered to our house. All the way from America.
Alright, I’ll stop gushing now. LOL.
Perhaps I should mention that I’m a major book lover, if you didn’t know that already. Books (and animals) are my life. Printed books, that is. However, there are thousands of free books available on Project Gutenberg, and though in the past I’ve read some of those on my computer, I thought it might be time to get something more lightweight. (Not that my laptop weighs more than about two kilos.)
I don’t think e-book readers will ever replace the feeling of holding a paper book in my hand, but I’m also a bit of a tech freak, so the thought of another gadget is rather appealing.
In any case, iearning how to use it was very easy. I only glanced at the manual, because the controls on the device are more or less self-explanatory. Easler in fact than handling my sister’s and my mom’s iPhones.
It’s also really cute. 🙂 And not very heavy. Holding it with one hand for a long time, might get a bit much, but you can always switch hands or put it on the table or on your knees etc. We named it Spock, because my sister’s iPhone is Uhura. (Ok, enough with the geek talk.LOL)
My sister promised she’d get round to writing a more detailed review of the Kindle including a comparison with an IPhone as an e-book reader, and also, if we’re lucky, and some store near us begins to sell it, with an iPad (at least as much as they’ll let you play with it without buying it. LOL:)
Danish cop series 'The Crime'
Last week I watched the last episode of the Danish cop series ‘The Crime’ (Forbrydelsen 2, 2009). It was season 2 in the series and though I watched season 1 (2007) and liked it to some extent, this one felt like a big improvement on the first. That could be partly because season 1 was made up of 20 episodes (and to put that into perspective, I’ll have to mention that the series only dealt with one case) and season 2 only had 10 (again, dealing with only one case).
As most (or even all) Danish series I’ve seen, this was of very high quality. The acting, the plot, the scenery. For instance, one of the last episodes was (ostensibly) set in Afghanistan and though I’ve never been there, I thought, judging by the news footage I’ve seen, that it was made very realistic. I’m guessing it was shot in the Balkans somewhere. (Slovenia?)
One of the ‘problems’ I had with season 1 (one that I have with many otherwise great cop series) is that there were too few main characters. In this case, there’s only one, detective Sara Lund though there are recurring minor characters, for instance Sara Lund’s mother and son, as well as her boss, Lennart Brix.
She’s considered a brilliant cop, but not very socially competent. The first season ends with her in disgrace. Season 2 opens with her ‘exiled’ to the border police, where she lives alone, in a bare rented home.
A series of brutal murders puzzling her former homicide detective colleagues leads to her being called back to Copenhagen. Many people dislike the decision and fight to keep her out of the case. Her boss reluctantly tries to balance his position between her and his own bosses, one of which seems to be his lover (Ruth Hedeby).
Soon there are leads pointing to the army and a suspected war crime committed in Afghanistan. Even from the start it’s clear that there’s also a tie-in with the government.
I won’t go into the twists and turns of the case, I’ll just say that though some of the politics (a parallel plotline is set in national politics) were a bit boring, the plot was nowhere near as complex (as in too complex) as in the first season. All in all it was exciting and fascinating to follow the police work and the lives of the politicians too.
In fact, I will say something about the politicians. Unexpectedly, there were some very sweet slash vibes between two unlikely people, as well as some male/female bonding.
Another plotline dealt with the Danish army and there too, was some pretty cool (platonic) bonding between two rather unexpected people.
The ending was excellent, with the suspense building then declining temporarily, to climax in a brilliant finale. This time, I approved far more of the ending, I might add. No disappointment lingering after the last scene.
Fortunately, there’s already a season 3 on the way and I can’t wait to see it.
I also just found out that Swedish and Danish tv are working on a joint project, another cop series, ‘The Bridge’ (Broen/Bron, estimated release 2011) that promises to be just as good as ‘The Crime’. (The bridge mentioned in the title is the bridge crossing the sea between southern Sweden and Denmark.)
I know I’ve been complaining about the tv series from the second half of the 00’s until now, but I guess I’ll need to revise my opinions a little, thanks to the Danes (and to some extent Swedish tv).
If you get a chance to see Forbrydelsen 2 I think you should. Maybe even buy the DVD box. Since I’ve already seen it and know the ending, I probably won’t, but I don’t think it will disappoint anyone.
World Book Day
Because it’s World Book Day, I’d like to share a little story about a few of the first books I read myself, as opposed to all the others grownups read to me. Of course I didn’t love those any less.
When I turned four, I got – among other things – Tintin in Tibet and two little paperbacks about a girl named Camilla who solved mysteries in her little town. The first ended up in shreds, after I’d read it so many times. It also ended up giving me a lifelong interest in Tibet and the Tibetan culture.
The Camilla books were fun, because we shared a name, though I had a bit of trouble understanding why she was ten years older than me… They were cosy and a little exciting.
Book meme: Which ones have you read?
The BBC predicts most people have only read 6 out of 100 of these books.
01 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen (seen the movie, tv series and read the book)
02 The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien (of course)
03 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
04 Harry Potter series – JK Rowling
05 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
06 The Bible (assorted chapters…)
07 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
08 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell
09 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman (read The Golden Compass. didn’t like it)
10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens (maybe, don’t remember)
11 Little Women – Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier (seen the movie)
16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveler’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch – George Eliot (seen the tv series)
21 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald (yes, had to for school, but liked it)
23 Bleak House – Charles Dickens (seen the tv series, great)
24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams (saw some of the movie, hated it)
27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky (had to for school, hated it)
28 Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens (maybe, don’t remember)
33 Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis (and the movie.)
34 Emma – Jane Austen (and the movie and/or tv series)
35 Persuasion – Jane Austen (one of my favorites)
36 The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe – CS Lewis (and the movie.)
37 The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne
41 Animal Farm – George Orwell (had to for school)
42 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving
45 The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding (sort of for school, hated it)
50 Atonement – Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi – Yann Martel
52 Dune – Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon (will read some day)
57 A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime – Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez (liked it, except for one chapter at the beginning and one at the end)
61 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
62 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History – Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road – Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie (don’t remember, maybe)
70 Moby Dick – Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
72 Dracula – Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett (and at least one movie.)
74 Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses – James Joyce
76 The Inferno – Dante
77 Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal – Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray (seen the tv series)
80 Possession – AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens (probably saw it as a movie)
82 Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple – Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro (had to for school, didn’t like it)
85 Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web – EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (most of them)
90 The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton (no, but many others)
91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
94 Watership Down – Richard Adams (and the movie)
95 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet – William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo
Podcasts and audiobooks
I haven’t really listened to any podcasts and very few audiobooks. Generally, I prefer to read – ordinary paper books, and tv series and movies. However, I think I could get into podcasts (or video podcasts), at least a little, if the subject was one that I’m very interested in. Audiobooks on the other hand, they’re probably not for me. Mom likes them and I’ve tried to listen to some of hers, but I never really got into them. One reason is that the translated ones are by necessity read by Swedish actors. They’re reading books that have been written in another language – these days almost exclusively English.
I never read the first book in the series about The Ladies’ Detective Agency, I listened to it on a cd player. The actress reading it could be said to be ideal in most ways – like Mma Ramotswe she’s ‘of traditional build’ and she’s very funny, or at least used to. However, when the topic of lady detectives came up, the British mystery writer Agatha Christie was mentioned and the actress pronounced that with the stress on the second syllable. That was it for me… Funnily enough, I think she got the African names about right. At least as far as I can tell.
The other memorable audiobook I tried was one about Jeeves and Wooster (I’ve forgotten the title). Again, the ‘cast’ – a group of famous comedy actors – should have been ideal, and maybe they would have been, if someone had adapted the entire book to a Swedish setting with Swedish names. As it was, naturally they hadn’t. One member of the ‘cast’ was able to correctly pronounce the UK county Worcestershire (I hope I spelled that right), the others couldn’t. No one could pronounce the more unusual personal names – like Bertie’s friend Barmy Fotheringay-something or other (?) which I think is to be pronounced Fungy- Phipps? In any case, they all botched the names. One of them, who is really famous, and a movie maker/director as well as an actor let one of his characters (he played two) use a southern Swedish accent. Never again, that’s all I can say.
Of course, that’s not really why I don’t like audiobooks, I just – well, don’t. For me, books are about reading, not listening. If I want to listen, I’ll turn on my iPod for some music, or I’ll watch tv/dvd.
Disappointing books
Warning: Self-pity
Lately almost all the books I’ve read have been disappointments, at least to some extent. I can’t believe I’ve completely lost my judgment so I can only imagine that somehow the books (or their writers) or I have changed. It’s probably the latter. The me of today has changed too much. I’m sadder and more disillusioned. Maybe if I manage to pull myself together and straighten my life out, I’ll become more enthusiastic about books again. Don’t get me wrong, I still love books, I just don’t seem to feel as happy about them as I did, even three or four years ago.
I feel my life slipping away, slipping through my fingers, like in that awful biblical story I was told about in what the people who ran my daycare had instead of Sunday school (Saturday school?). It’s been haunting me ever since. You probably know it, if you’re familiar with the Bible.
A girl walks across a field. She’s to pick only the best grains, but every time she sees what she believes to be the best, she catches sight of others in the distance, that seem bigger and better. In the end, she’s walked across the field, her basket empty, and.she can’t go back.
What worries me is that even though I’m probably somewhere on the field still, knowing I need to harvest the grains, I can’t do it. There’s always something preventing me and I can’t stand still either, I keep moving ahead, in one sense, yet not moving at all, in another sense. It scares me.
I don’t know what to do and I suppose not liking the few books I can afford, is the least of my problems. It’s just that those books should be brightening my days and instead, they’re not. A waste of money, that could have been put to better use elsewhere. Oh, well. Sorry about all the self-pity.
Quiz: What kind of book are you?
Before posting this, I debated with myself – should I post this or not? I told myself I was too grown up for this kind of thing. Then I thought wtf? I can be as young as I want. So here it is:
You Are Fantasy / Sci Fi |
 You have an amazing imagination, and in your mind, all things are possible. You are open minded, and you find the future exciting. You crave novelty and progress. Compared to most people, you are quirky and even a bit eccentric. You have some wacky ideas. And while you may be a bit off the wall, there’s no denying how insightful and creative you are. |
Perhaps I should add that while I agree with the conclusion (that I’m a fantasy book) I don’t agree with all the details. I’m not sure I crave novelty and progress, though come to think of it, maybe this quiz knows more about me than – I do?
Mysteries and fantasy
I have found that many of my interests and hobbies are relatively rare. That is, not everyone shares my obsession with them. In fact, many of them never even heard of some of my favorites in a given area of interest.
It’s kind of like my favorite types of animals. (Though listing my favorite animals will take time and blog post space. It might be easier to list the ones I’m not too keen on, but I digress.)
So, to get to the point, it occurred to me that my two favorite genres of books are a bit like cats and dogs. Let me explain.
Crime novels, in general, are crime novels, though there are of course historic ones, thrillers, puzzles etc. So that is the same as cats. A cat is a cat, regardless of its breed or appearance. (Though to make this a little more complicated, most people haven’t heard of my favorite mystery writers either, so maybe I shouldn’t take this metaphor too far.)
Anyway – With me so far?
Fantasy is more like dogs. What’s a dog? A big tough, impressive one, like a – Eurasian? Yes. A lively, medium sized one, like a Tibetan Terrier? Yes. A small, adorable one, like a Lhasa apso or a Bolognese? Yes. A – you get the picture. My favorite fantasy books do have other followers, but really not that many. If I meet an average fantasy fan (yeah, I wish), I’m betting he or she might not even have heard of my favorites.
So there you have it. When it comes to crime novels, I like many different kinds. Fantasy, particularly my not so well known authors.
