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The Da Vinci Code

Holy Blood, Holy Grail,

Holy Unexpected,

The Faith Club.  (click on image for book links)

I am NOT religious, but fascinated by religion.  Go figure.

I love my video ipod. That’s Henry Lincoln, one of the author’s of the “Holy Blood Holy Grail” book. This podacst (or simply: Video) is “Origins of the DaVinci Code” off iTunes.

(Originally posted straight from my phone, to flickr, with Nakama.)

This is old news. But I only heard about it tonight. I once saw this book in the bookstore, and it’s one of the few I ever actually finished (I have this problem where I rarely actually finish a book).
As Nature Made Him: the boy who was raised as a girl

I read, and finished the book a while ago. Then I gave the book to my mother in law. Then M and I saw a documentary about the family on PBS (I think). Tonight I saw a similar documentary coming up so I Tivo’ed it and just watched it now.

Turns out the guy’s twin brother died of an overdose, they are not sure if he did it on purpose or not, and then shortly afterward, “David” killed himself. I feel like I knew him because I knew his story so well and his story was one of the few books I ever actually read cover to cover. It’s so sad to hear about this! This documentary is dated “2005″ but David died in 2004.

It’s just really sad.

I’m reading this neat book. It’s a good bathroom book cuz you can just read a snippet here and there. It’s called “One Heart” and I hate the title cuz it makes it sound like a girly book. The subtitle is “Universal Wisdom from the World’s Scriptures“. It has quotes from many different religious sources that say the same thing about love, giving, goodness, etc.

Of course, this is just one of MANY books I am reading. I just have to come to terms with the fact that I LIKE reading several books at once. If I beat myself up for always starting another before I finish the first, then I’ll never be happy. If I just accept it, and look at it NOT as “reading a.d.d.”, but rather “my brain is just too curious or smart for one book at a time“, and accept that, then I can enjoy my strange reading behavior and not feel bad about it, not feel presssued to finish them as projects.

On top of all the books that I own which I am on a quest to finish, I also have a compulsive need to leave any library I enter with an armload of books. Some of these library books I’m just curious to flip through and didn’t have time to do so at the library, and others I wholeheartedly intend to finish, even if I have to buy a used copy from AbeBooks.com.

This photo has Notes.

I’ve added two more daily bookshelves. Since the next shelf on my to-do list didn’t have a lot of books, I did two.

The pix have notes:

I’m trying to honor myself by making time to do the things I enjoy, instead of just dribbling the time away with work and surfing.

I want to make more time for reading, writing, and photography.

Yesterday I finally grabbed my D60 to take a picture of a fish in the lake out back before it disapeared, but, f*ck, I HATE Florida, my camera TOTALLY fogged up and STAYED that way as soon as I went outside. It’s in the high 80′s by 10am, the high tomorrow is supposed to be above 90. We keep the thermostat at about 75 inside. So when I walk outside w/ my camera, it becomes soaked. And being a $2100 digital SLR, I panic when it gets wet like that.

So no recent DSLR photos.

But today I talked to a girl who is also a photo nut and maybe she’ll be a photo pal. We exchanged numbers and may go photo shooting together soon. Ironically her first and last name are my cat’s name and my Pug’s name. How odd.

I’m also trying to make time to write. I don’t know why that’s the hardest. I guess because I’m trying to be creative, but fiction is not my thing. I’d much rather write a tech article than a short story.

And reading… I’ve been trying to catch up on my reading. I have reading ADD and tend to never finish a book, ever. I went around the house the other day and gathered up a pile of books that I intend to [*deja vu] either finish reading or start over reading and this time finish. * I have a feeling I’ve written this very thing before.

But yeah, so there’s a stack, and I’m working on it, including two books from the library on writing, including Stephen King’s “On Writing”. What I do is I read one book for a while, put that down and pick up another. I’ll take a pic of my stack. In fact, I think I’ll take one pic of a different bookshelf in my house each day, just to keep it interesting. There’s got to be a flickr meme in there somewhere.

(with notes)

Oh yeah, I just found the BookShelfProject Flickr Group!

My NERDS 2.0.1 book came today and I’m so happy! I wanted that book so bad back around ’99 and finally bought it in hardcover, and then the book got lost when we moved into our house, never to be seen again. So I finally broke down and ordered it off of AbeBooks.com. Add that to my stack. *sigh*

Listening to “Hindi Songs, Bollywood” on Live365.com. That’s a neat website, it even tells you what’s playing and gives you a link so you can buy it or see more about it.

While at that huge mall on Friday, on the other coast, I stopped into Hot Topic. M got an Office Space Shirt…
(moblog pic)
… and I got some comics and a book. The Hot Topic in our mall doesn’t have the comics and books.

I got:

Something At The Window Is Scratching
Children’s tales for disturbed children.

Lenore #3

Nightmares and Fairy Tales #6

Johnny The Homicidal Maniac #1

Round Ireland With a Fridge showed up yesterday, the last of the 3 books I ordered from my fav site AbeBooks.com.

“On his only prior visit to Ireland, English songwriter-comic Tony Hawks had seen a man hitchhiking with a refrigerator. For years, he was wont to tell the tale during late-night drinking matches, and after one particularly heavy-duty night of partying, he awoke to find a bet scrawled pillowside: a friend wagered 100 pounds that Hawks wouldn’t travel Ireland for a month with a refrigerator at his side.”

It’s a riot.

Today is an unusual rainy day. Not unusual probably by your standards, but unusual by south florida standards. Around here, in the summer, it’ll be 98F all day and then around 4pm you get a thunderstorm from hell that brings lightning, power outages, and floods. Then it ends an hour later, leaves everything more humid than before, but sunny, hot, and no storm clouds to be seen. Then, when it’s not summer, there is no rain any time and we have drought.

A day where it gently rains from the morning on is highly unusual any time of the year here. But that is how it is today. It reminds me of up north. That kind of rainy day is normal up north, but not here.

I was gonna run errands today but decided to stay in and read. I’m reading
McCarthy’s Bar: A Journey of Discovery In Ireland

It’s about Ireland, and written by a British guy, so I spend alot of time reading it in front of the computer so that I can try to look up the words. I never know if it’s his british vernacular or the use of an Irish term.

WikiPedia.com and www.bbcamerica.com/britain/dictionary.jsp are good places to look up British, Irish, or otherwise uncommon terminology. (thanks Conrad!)

I’m hoping that more of my Travel Essay books that I got for a steal off abebooks.com will arrive today, but my mailbox is depressingly empty.

With this rain it’s a good day to stay in and read. But u know that later I’ll have cabin-fever and be begging to be let out for sushi.

I love i love i love i looooove AbeBooks.com!

It’s a network of used book stores, and I swear I’ve gotten books (that I was looking for) for $1!

I just bought three books, and if I’d gotten them from amazon, it would have cost $38.49. But it only cost me $18.76 off abebooks.com.

And what’s really cool is that each book came from a different seller, but I only had one shopping cart, one checkout process, it was SO painless.

Yeah, the books are used, but so what. I’ll crinkle a new one in five days. You can search by ISBN number to ensure that you are getting the right one (i.e. the newest version).

You can search by country (or state or whatever), list by price, etc. One book was $2 more to buy in the states rather than England, but it’s better ’cause it’ll come MUCH sooner than if it were shipped from the England.

I highly recommend abebooks.

Got this book today, looks neat:
“Internet Babylon: Secrets, Scandals, and Shocks on the Information Superhighway”

I can’t sit anymore, my butt really hurts. I’ll take the book to bed but I know I’ll fall asleep before page 3.

Currently reading “Read This First, Europe“.

Why I hate my one-horse town:

The new library in San Jose, California is *EIGHT* stories tall!!! .:Link:. (a photo from a fellow blogger’s moblog) Oh, if only to live in a town like that, or Toronto, or anywhere where there is more culture, more intellect, more libraries, more coffee houses, more book stores, and more stuff to do for 30-somethings besides get drunk at bars… anywhere but here.

I was at a bookstore today, and they had a whole table of “Chick-lit” and the book “Why Girls Are Weird” was NOT on it. So I went over to the fiction section and took all but one of the copies and put them on that table. I’m bad, but I want people to know about the book, it’s a riot! (Thanks to Christine for turning me on to this great book.)

I’m in the middle of the book She’s Come Undone, and I have to say it is freaking depressing. How in the world did this book become so proclaimed? It’s completely unrealistic as far as how the author has people speaking to children, has this man ever been a child? And it’s just one ubelievable tragedy after another. My god, they should sell a gun with this book so that you can commit suicide when you are done reading it.

I “released” a book today. Have u seen BookCrossing.com? It’s so cool. If you have a book that you are done with, you can “set it free” by leaving it in public, but first you register it, assign it a BCID number, then you can track the book through it’s lifetime to see where it went, who read it, what they thought of it, etc. It’s a really neat site. You can also go to the site, look up your town, and see if anyone has left a book in the last day that you can go pick up. The website is alot of fun.

Went to the second-hand bookstore today. Picked up:

** Stanger in a Strange Land
** She’s Come Undone
** Price of Honor – Muslim women lift the veil of silence on the Islamic world.

I still need to finish:
** Fast Food Nation

I need to re-start (because I started to read, then got distracted, now it’s been too long and I’ll have to start over):
** Monsoon Diary – A memoir with recipes

And of course there are other books on my “To-Read” list, and those I will probably get off AbeBooks.com (a network of used book stores where you can get used books cheap!)

Today sucked. It rained all day, was so disgusting that I didn’t even want to leave the house to go to lunch. That says alot.

I surfed the web all day, read up on the band RUSH, bought a Rush t-shirt, surfed pencam photo galleries.

I finished Life Of Pi. IT SUCKED!!!! I already said that I don’t usually read fiction because I find it a waste of time to read a story that isn’t even true (which is why I don’t read The Onion). If I’m going to read a story, it’d better be either, a) true, or b) really good and worth my time.

The book was compelling in the beginning because I love both Canada and India and was pleasantly surprised to find it involved both.

The story was interesting.

But then…

((( spoilers follow, so don’t read on if you plan to read the book… )))
(more…)

As I’ve said before, I tend to start reading new books before I finish the one I’m reading.

But this has been going on in some form or another since I was a kid, but not by choice.

One time there was a short story about a boy and a wolf in my English book. I had no time to read it because school was busy enough. I had to return the book before I could ever read past the first page or so. As a kid I had no idea I could write down the name of the author and title and have my mom or a librarian find it for me, or that I could use a photocopier. I tried to type up the story before returning the book. Of course I could not complete that task. I cannot remember the name of the story, I just remember a boy, a wolf, and snow.

Once when I was in 7th grade, I started reading a book from the shelf in the back of the classroom. It was some book about a guy on a ship and alot of talk about “salt steak”. I have no idea what the book was or who wrote it.

This kind of stuff will probably go unsolved forever. I’ve tried to look online w/ no success.

I didn’t realize that September 2027 was Banned Books Week.

I’m on the hunt for a good read. I generally never read fiction. I’m funny, it just seems like a waste of time to read a story that isn’t even true. I have a strange brain.

Lately I have been more interested in fiction, or at least stories.
(more…)

Only 25 more pages to go. It’s 1:45am and I need to go to bed. I’m tired and I have a dreaded doctor’s appointment tomorrow. I want to finish this book. This is the best book I’ve read in a long time, I’m lauging my ass off.
Why Girls Are Weird

I wanted to read Life Of Pi but didn’t get around to it. Now people all around me have read it and are raving about it. If I had bought it when I first wanted it, I would not be “behind”. But I’ve started reading it. Add that to my LONG list of unfinished books.

Stealing The Network. It looks interesting, but I could not find it at Barnes & Noble tonight. “…a unique book in the fiction department. It combines stories that are false, with technology that is real.” From Wired News: “Stealing The Network: How to Own the Box, a compendium of tales written by well-known hackers, is a perfect summer read. The stories are fictional. The technology and techniques described are very real.

“Each chapter details not only the methods used to hack and counterattack, but also explains the thought processes hackers use to carry out assaults on computer systems and people.”

I was reading The Toronto Star online as I am sick of cnn, etc. and noticed in the ubiquitous Harry Potter news story that the kids were reading a book w/ a different cover.

While at Best Buy yesterday I noticed that the book was blue but the kids in the TorStar story were reading a book w/ a different cover.

I wonder why the covers are different in Canada.

(US) (CA)

UPDATE: Yeah, apparently each country gets a different cover and ALSO there is an “adult” cover which “appeals to adults”

Am I the only one who does this? I start a book, then start another one before I ever finish the first one. My shelf is FULL of books I never finished. I suppose it’s normal to not “finish” a three-inch thick bible on Photoshop7, but you’d think I’d finish:
“The nine emotional lives of cats”
“Fast Food Nation”
“Universe In A Nutshell / Illustrated Brief History Of Time (box set)”
“I do. I did. Now what. Life after the wedding dress”
“Sink Reflections”
“The Solution, never diet again”

I suppose I’m revealing too much about myself here. Oh well. I must have some sort of RDD – Reading Deficit Disorder? Reading Attention Deficit Disorder? I’m too eager to start a new book, long before I’m halfway thru the first book. I have such a thirst for new reading material, but why can I never finish a book? No, I do finish books sometimes. But looking at my shelf here in the family room I see more unfinished books than finished ones. Sux.

Don’t you ever wish you could just stop time, take a day to read, then start time again?

Don’t u hate it when u can’t remember the name of something? I finally remembered a favorite website and book of mine: Ask Cecil. www.StraightDope.com… … for books go to amazon.com and run a search for “straight dope” or “cecil adams” or “ask cecil”.

Here’s an amazon.com description of one of the books to give u an idea of what it’s all about:

“This collection of Adams’ best newspaper columns answers with erudition and wit all the weird questions Americans ponder to distraction. Why didn’t the Incas invent the wheel? Is the frequency of bald women on the increase? And how many square feet of flesh on the human body? Incredibly sarcastic, knowledgeable and entertaining, The Straight Dope makes a great bathroom book or gift book or personal treasure. “

I was wondering how long intestines were. I still don’t know.

Barnes and Noble annoyed me today. I went to possibly pick up two books that my doctor recommended. I figured I’d buy them instead of going to the library to ensure that I had the latest edition. But when I got there, they had only hardcover. Come on. God forbid you carry the cheaper paperback copy. So then I go to seek out one of the many comfy chairs so that I can leaf thru and decide which one to buy (since I had picked up a third along the way). Turns out, they took away all the chairs. (I later found SOME in the back far far corner.) Ok, so… I head to the cafe figuring I’ll leaf thru the books there. PACKED. So first they make u go to the cafe if you want to leaf thru books where you smell the coffee and see the drinks and see the cookies and cakes and crap, trying to get you to buy it. So there was nowhere to sit. For a BRIEF moment, I thought “oh, I’ll just buy all three since there’s nowhere to leaf thru them”. NO!!!! That’s a second way they make money by taking away the chairs! So I plopped right down on the dirty floor and spread out in everybody’s way. Goddamnit you are not going to make me buy something I’m not even sure I want. Jerks. I leafed thru and decided to buy only one of the three, the cheapest one. Barnes and noble, go bite me.

I’ve been wanting to read the book “Fast Food Nation“, and today I finally got it. Saw it in Target. I’ve only read a few pages so far, but already I’m impressed by it. Some of it’s pretty scary, like the fact that Americans spend more money each year on fast food than on higher education… and stories about how GM used front-companies to buy up railroads for the sole purpose of tearing them up and replacing them w/ GM buses. All this and I’m only a few pages into chapter 1. I think this is going to be a good read.

Update re. the “why paint cats” book: Some people “out there” (on the “why paint cats” website and on amazon.com’s customer reviews) seem to think this book is a spoof “like her previous books”. I don’t know yet. I HOPE the phtos were photoshopped (and that the cats weren’t really painted. Thing is, alot of feedback from readers is that THEY have painted their cats also. Ugh.