Thursday, September 15, 2005

Reading update

I finished the previous construction book I mentioned in my last reading post. Not bad. There were a few pointers that were useful. I have a bad feeling after the next one about managing the whole project I'll have grown saturated. It seems to be approaching a point of diminishing returns here.

I read The Wilding. If it were any other author...if it were even a different setting...it might have been an okay book. It was readable. It didn't feel like a waste of time. However, it felt rather disappointing. Gone was the evocative imagery of CS Friedman's previous books. Gone was the unique stylistic elements from the first book. Gone was virtually everything that was a stand out for Friedman or her books. I give it a C-. She really could have done much, much better. The story was flat and short....but not in pages. Anzha and Zatar's legacies were...simply uninteresting as presented. There were even some bits that contradicted the original book. Alas. Friedman is on my Buy Quickly list, but...she's had the "Don't preorder" bit set.

I started and finished another construction book. I don't recommend it. It could have been condensed down to about 50 pages at most w/o the diagrams. The diagrams were kinda useful, but...really...a lot of it was 'well, duh!' The first 20% of it was purely teaching the reader some geometry and trig. ugh. I bought it thinking that it was teaching you some trade bsed stuff that should be unique to construction. There are bits in the framing arena that are useful, but...most of it is just common sense and good planning.

Since then I have started Chronicle of the Roman Emperors. Light reading. Not bad. I picked it up as something that I could read for fun about the emperors that I knew very little about. I'm about 1/8 of the way through it.

After this will come a construction book. I am unsure which. It'll prolly be one on foundations again or one on working with concrete.


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