Top Five Apps, with bonus features

I have more than 200 books in my house on my to-read pile. Thus, I often think about Winston Churchill talking about the pleasure of unread books, and I finally tracked down the quotation I had in mind, from his book Painting as a Pastime, which I guess I have to put on my to-read list (ie 100 or so more books not yet on my pile):

'What shall I do with all my books?' was the question, and the answer, 'Read them,' sobered the questioner. But if you cannot read them, at the very least handle them and, as it were, fondle them. Peer into them. Let them fall open as they will. Read on from the first sentence that turns the eye. Then turn to another. Make a voyage of discovery, taking soundings of uncharted seas. Set them back on their shelves with your own hands. Arrange them on your own plan, so that if you do not know what is in them, you at least know where they are. If they cannot be your friends, let them at any rate be your acquaintances. If they cannot enter the circle of your life, do not deny them at least a nod of recognition.


I especially love the idea: "Arrange them with your own plan...". Is your to-read pile arranged in some personal order? Mine is. It helps me to know where they are, if not what is in them. Churchill was a smart guy. How thrilling to have something in common with him.


I take the same attitude toward iPhone apps. I love scanning over what is available, following up tips from friends or magazine writers, tracing thoughts through to possible apps, and I love downloading them. I love the idea of having research tools available in my pocket when I might need them. I find it all to be a dream-library of potential.


So, when someone asks me what I recommend on an iPhone, I have many pages to scroll through. Finally,  after a couple of discussions with the iPhone users around me, I thought it would be fun to list my top five apps, and have them conveniently arranged to offer people who ask, so here's the list:

TOP FIVE APPS

#1 - Of course - Evernote - free

It holds all your information, and has a desktop and mobile version, and you can also access your information from anywhere via the Internet. It can store lists and text, but also photos and voice and best of all, if you have it on your desktop, under any print menu you can choose the option "save as pdf to Evernote". The pdf document will be OCR-searchable in Evernote, so you can find info in long documents by words that appear in them. Fantastically useful. (And, in fact, I will paste the Churchill quotation above into my "happiness" document on Evernote, so I can read it reassuringly to any other person who worries about buying books faster than they can be read.) PS Thanks K.




#2 - My favourite game - Rat on a Scooter XL (Donut Games) - The best $0.99 you will ever spend.











 It's a great way to kill a few minutes in a waiting room or a parked car. As addictive as they say it is. And I am not a gamer (in case you didn't know that). PS Thanks J.


#3 - Nike +iPod

Totally worth the price of the sensor in the shoe - links to music, history of runs or walks, gives distance and time elapsed, and calories burned AND Lance Armstrong calls you up to tell you when you've completed your personal best mile ever! Sort of.


#4  - The free Kindle Reader app

Possibly better on an iPad, but still, apart from the many free-content readers that help you pass time in an airport lounge while carrying only your phone, the idea of getting the content you want to read right now while you are waiting in an airport lounge while carrying only your phone is too compelling to resist.


 #5 - App Miner -  free

Searches through apps on a number of categories, in a slightly different way than the app store, but the best is it tells you apps that are on sale, for free or at a discount, and that lets you try things that you would never search for, or know about, or want to pay for to find out about, and it can lead you to other things that you then know about to search for, so it becomes like following your nose through a library.

ALSO RAN

LibraryThing Mobile -  Free, just like on-line - I can look up my library from a bookstore to see if I already own a book I find interesting. It happens a lot. Also good for giving an exact title and author recommendation to someone no matter where you are. Also good for tracking down a title or author you are trying to think of no matter where you are.

App Box Pro - $0.99 - full of little useful utilities that you would otherwise be downloading separately, and paying for separately, and cluttering up your menu with separately. Some that I have used on the fly: tip calculator, currency converter, level and ruler. They have just added a password keeper and I see it has a translator too, although I like specialty programs for that.

Yorkdale - free and I refer to it weekly. No more need be said.

24/7  - free - language tutors and my kids like them too.

Flood-It 2 - free - my favourite of the LAB PIXIES games (just for a break from Rat on a Scooter)

MOST INTERESTING POTENTIAL

Dragon - free - audio search/audio dictation

Ted - free - the Technology, Entertainment, Design video website, mobile version

Canon wireless printer app! Yes! Just bought one of the printers. Can't wait to print wirelessly from my iPhone and iPad.

MOST UNFULFILLED LONGING

Birding version of Shazam. Caveat: I have never yet managed to get Shazam to identify a song, so it might be the same bust for bird song. Plus I am been trying other ways around it - recording birds I hear to my phone - usually too far away to be captured by the mike. Now I have loaded my birding identification Cd's into my phone, so maybe I can go to my best guess in iTunes while in the field and see if it matches. Haven't had a a chance to test it yet. Still trying to decide on which (expensive) birding app to buy. Which provider? How big an area? All in one or multiple for different areas?

I have more than 10 pages of apps (that's a little over 150) but you don't need to know everything I have. Find your own. Make your own list. Send it to me.

The marigold does wonder nervously:
Am I really going to need 130,000 of the 148,000 available apps, as someone has estimated? How many are free? (I try to constrain myself to free, unless it is something of great importance to me. Otherwise, we'd only be eating macaroni at my house. Plain. Would that be good for the children?)

Re-reading books

I am a passionate user of and advocate for LibraryThing. (See sidebar for hot link). I love cataloging my books, or rather my reading experiences, and I love to rummage around for recommendations and ideas and to follow trails through reading lists.

Some of the things that have come out of it for me is that I have a mental library of about 1100 books. This includes not only books I own, but also books I have read but given away, books I have borrowed from friends or the library and books I own but have not yet read (there are about 200 of those - woo-hoo!) (Actually I am hoarding books and wine against the day that all world currencies collapse. I figure I'll be in good shape to enjoy life, and possibly be able to trade for necessities.)

A very surprising statistic that came through is that I have only re-read about 10 books. Ever. That started me asking around a bit among my friends. Not only which books have you re-read, but why. The first answer I got was so charming - it was a fellow biblio-adept - who re-read a book as an adult that he read as a teenager enjoying his first passionate relationship with a girl.

Now I plan to write up the stories here in a nice long post. Please send me your lists. Those of you who know me can pass along suggestions in any form of communication.

The marigold is left wondering nervously if the library in question is also "mental"?

Review

Shelf Monkey
by Corey Redekop


For starters, I usually prefer not to read books about our time. We live it. We are inundated with it. The news coverage is already overwhelming. The worse it gets out there, the more I long to reread Buddenbrooks.


However...occasionally a book overlaps so closely with my actual life that I not only bother reading it, I really enjoy reading it. (Wow - does that ever sound egocentric!)


Shelf Monkey is, delightfully, one of those. Although the narrator, megabookstore-employee Thomas Friesen, is almost painfully manic, his tastes, his book dreams and his book frustrations are similar to mine. I am even a bit of a shelf monkey myself, volunteering in a school library once a week. (Is anything more pathetic than a librarian wanna-be? We even inhabit the same loser-land.) The key idea for a shelf monkey is that the books are more important than the readers.


The premise of the book - bookstore staff jointly working up their frustrations to the point where they snatch an opportunity to attack a talk-show host cum purveyor of trash-fiction - is the set-up for a disquisition on the culture of reading as I guess is experienced by...dare I say it?...many readers and most, if not all LibraryThingers. The tone is hard and smart and funny. The story is sufficient unto itself - no padding. Hate padding!


I have promised to lend my copy to a few friends, but I really want to keep it close to hand, to track down the references to books that I couldn't get or re-read the ones that seem like they might bear new fruit. The whole book is like a conversation about books with a smart-ass friend.

And thus, in conclusion, Shelf Monkey rox!

Fun fact: I discovered Corey Redekop on LibraryThing because I saw that he connected two books I love through Recommendations, and I looked at his profile only to discover he is a writer himself! Go LibraryThing!

A Grade 5 book club: is it possible?

I have been working on an idea: can Gr 5 kids have meaningful book club discussions about books?

I have been reading along with my kid, now in Gr 5, for fun, for a couple of years. Now that I am thinking about this, I am trying to read with a different kind of attention.

The issues are these:
1) the books put into their hands are just about all pre-approved for content and values;
2) the books are largely plot- and character-driven, which does not leave much room for "literary discussion";
3) there is a bit of a herd mentality in their critical thought - everyone tends to like the book or the character, and they are still so righteous at this age that all wrong-doing is easily disapproved of.

Then, I would kind of want to avoid the "middle school" trend, which is funny but not really mostly literary, and I would want to avoid "issue" books, which are represented in the curriculum.

Then, as my sister, the school librarian, says "You are asking them to do extra work!" No. I think they do the work already, but without articulating it to themselves. I would like to turn their attention to the devices that have lead them to their conclusions. Wouldn't that be cool?

Finally, it would be most interesting to introduce books that most if not all have not yet read. (The hardest challenge in a group of keen readers, I think.)

So...how can one find books that are suitable in content yet of enough literary interest to offer food for discussion? Books that would lead kids to the discovery of imagery, allusion, ambiguity.

My thoughts on possible books are these:
1) a manga Shakespeare?
2) a Blue Balliet novel, with it's leit-motifs, and references to other arts, in addition to plot and character
3) Heck by Dale Basye, for the concept of allusions, and the pointer to Dante (despite its middle school orientation)
4) The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane by Kate DiCamillo, as a retelling of The Velveteen Rabbit - a nod at the continuity of artistic ideas
5) The Hundred Dresses by Elizabeth Estes - a vivid book about standing by a person in need without helping
6) Tales from Outer Suburbia by Shaun Tan - a new book that offers a taste of the subtle and surreal

I am wondering about Swallows and Amazons by Arthur Ransome (mentioned in a Kit Pearson book).

What I would really like to find are some books that really use imagery and poetic construction, but I have not yet thought of any good possibilities.

Please send your suggestions.

The marigold wonders nervously:
Would it be fun? Would it be FUN?

Books In, Books Out, Part II

I have been fiddling around with LibraryThing again. I feel myself to be obsessed with data-mining my own reading patterns. It's so much easier to talk about reading ideas if you have already sorted out the way they make sense. I enjoy looking at other people's libraries and tags too, but then I am often searching for new ways to sort my own. (Like adding the tag "epistolary". Fun. Or updating my tag "to read" to the tag "unread" which LT mentioned as a meme attracting attention. It's more meaningful to tag with the crowd.)

I found out that there is a way to figure out how many books came in over the transom in a certain period by checking the entry date on LT. Thus, when September felt like a huge intake month, I could check.

I guess it is because a number of friends handed over books after summer holidays, plus I was back in the school library surfing the action, plus I was catching up on some summer book thoughts that I could not pursue at the time. So, 28 books in! A minimum of dollars out! I think I have read all or part of, maybe, a third of them.

Looking back through the record, it seems like I usually take in about 10 or 12 per month, still far too many to read. One trip to the bookstore sale tables is good for half a dozen; plus my lovely spouse probably shows up with one or two presents each month; the school library is a source of one or two books each weekend; and I often get a book or two loaned or passed on from one friend or another; not to mention the odd LibraryThing Early Reviewer copy!

It's a good life.

The marigold wonders nervously:
If I read somewhere between 6 and 10 books a month, when will I actually drown in the to-read pile?

“If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need.” - Cicero

No more need be said.

Books About Libraries

I've searched for a list of fiction featuring libraries, and have not yet found one. One of my project ideas for this blog is such a list. I'll start with a couple of titles, and build it as I think of other titles, read other titles or receive suggestions of other titles. I think I will not include mystery novels, unless they are superior.

The Name of the Rose Umberto Eco

Labyrinths Jorge Luis Borges

Of course, the marigold's nervous question is:

Is that all I can think of??? Two books???

The Shadow of the Wind Carlos Ruiz Zafon

Houellebecq

What a brain. I just started reading The Possibility of an Island, and I had to stop and get a highlighter, so I would not lose track of his trenchant observations on modern culture. AND his thoughts are rather marvelously enclosed inside science fiction novels. What could be better??? PLUS he writes on only page 19 (Daniel 24, 1) about "...hazardous attempts at memory downloading through the intermediary of a data carrier..." which means the writing and reading of books. What a provocative way of thinking about books and culture. Books as data carriers for memory downloading. They are chance-y. There may be a better way. (Of course, photos and films and art and everything else is implied, but I think book-format leads most directly to it being about books.)

The marigold wonders nervously:
Is it really going to turn out like this?

Borges

I have been reading tangentially about Jose Luis Borges having conceived of the Internet long before such a thing existed. As a writer, bibliophile and librarian, I guess his imaginings could lead there in a meaningful way. I finally borrowed his Labyrinths from the local library, and found a cool link to the world of Borges - see links. My bibliophile dream is for the Internet to become even more of a library, with academic sites somehow demarcated from blog sites. Can someone arrange this, please?

Still, the marigold wonders nervously:
What is the correct pronunciation of BORGES?

New York with kids

We took our two kids to New York for a long weekend. We reviewed all the books and movies we could remember about New York, and watched a couple of videos. As a consequence, their trip had a feeling of resonance and they felt familiar and comfortable with the BIG city.

Funnily, our 6-year old loved to say "Let's grab a cab," and both kids adored hailing them, something we don't do at home.

Here are some of the materials we enjoyed and the experiences to which they lead us:

movie: Ghostbusters - particularly for the New York Public Library. We all loved the library (and Bryant Park, right behind it). The original toys from Winnie-the-Pooh are displayed in one of their galleries. The reading rooms are awesome, and their shows are sensational. And it's free! The movie also got us looking up at the decorations on so many of the tall buildings.

book: Seen Art? by Jon Scieszka- created for the opening of the renovated Museum of Modern Art - funny and arty. Made for a kind of scavenger hunt through the museum for works we recognized from the book.

movie: Night at the Museum - for the American Museum of Natural History. This museum is the perfect fulfillment of the dream of a museum. Big, beautiful and romantic.

book: The Most Amazing Dinosaur, by James Stevenson - works for both the Metropolitan Museum and the Natural History Museum. Adorable book by a fabulous author/illustrator/New Yorker cartoonist (a wonderful category that also includes William Steig).

movie: Madagascar - for Grand Central Station (where we all enjoyed eating at the Oyster Bar) and for Central Park Zoo.

book and movie: Eloise by Kay Thompson - for the hotel experience, and Central Park

movie: Home Alone 2, Lost in New York - also for hotel experience and Central Park, and for Rockefeller Center

movie: Fantasia 2000 - for the city streets and for skating at Rockefeller Center

As we catch up with more suggestions, I'll add the good ones to this list, with comments.

Extra ideas:

movie: Enchanted - we dialed it up in the hotel room in New York, and were delighted to see New York as a "character" in this cute film

book: I am Pangoo the Penguin by Satomi Ichikawa - an adorable story featuring the penguins in the Central Park Zoo. This is now a family favourite.

Not New York enough despite our expectations:
book and movie: Harriet the Spy - a kid in the city.

The marigold asks nervously:

How long will I need to do this?

So I am adding to this list a year later with ideas that have come up:

1) movie: Desperately Seeking Susan - I have not seen it recently, and it may not be suitable for young kids. I'll have to watch it again and report back.

2) movie: Annie - I have not seen this recently either. It is OK for kids, but may be too dated to be useful.

3) movie: Crocodile Dundee - Definitely New York, not for the littlest kids.

4) movie: The Muppets Take Manhattan - perfect for the littlest kids.

5) book: The Mixed-Up Files of Mrs Basil E Frankweiler - by E.L. Konigsburg, kids, New York, a museum, a mystery. All good.

6) book and movie: Stuart Little - fabulous book, by an icon of New York writing, E.B. White. So-so movie(s) but Central Park with it's pond features strongly.

7) Both Madagascar movies, but especially the first one, show New York scenes, with a focus on the Central Park zoo.

Some other ideas I have been given but have not checked out myself:
movies: The Fantastic Four and Antz