I have a lot of reading to do this semester. This morning I finished reading Chapter 4 for history, so that was good. But then I looked at what I was supposed to read next for English class, and it was the “Kenya” section of Barack Obama’s book Dreams from My Father. Now, we already read the Origins section, the first part of the book. But the syllabus says that we’re now reading Kenya, so I e-mailed the teacher and confirmed that we’re supposed to skip the “Chicago” section in the middle. I’m not sure why skipping the middle section of an autobiography is a good idea, but since I have to read Kenya for Tuesday, I guess I’ll be doing that skip. It’s not as big a deal in something like a history textbook, where chapters are about specific time periods and you can go between them pretty easily. But an autobiography, that’s just weird.

We went to yard sales this morning; I got a copy of Diary of an Anorexic Girl to flip through and a copy of Guided Tours of Hell for A for 50 cents each, and two boxes of Girl Scout cookies for $1 each. The books are both basically new. I don’t know how much time I’ll have for leisure reading anymore, though, because today my copy of Journey of Man by Spencer Wells arrived. That’s my first book for the honors program at Gallaudet; when I’m done with that one there will be another, and I also have to read Funny in Farsi for the general (non-honors) reading for the upcoming semester.

I also ordered a 1GB microSD card for my phone so I can carry around lots of pictures and lots of background themes and lots of music. But the damn thing is literally the size of my thumbnail. How does a gig of stuff fit on something the size of my thumbnail?!

Last month I got my annual Amazon gift certificate for being a Literotica moderator, and it was more than it has been in years past. I also had a little over $20 from Mechanical Turk, so I added that to my gift certificate balance and then spent at least a week dithering over what to buy. I ended up with four books three of which arrived yesterday.

Subway Style: 100 Years of Architecture & Design in the New York City Subway

I have been wanting this for a long time, and I’m really pleased with it. It’s much bigger than I was expecting, and it is chock-full of photos! The book is broken into chapters based on design elements (light fixtures, decorative tiles, etc.) and each chapter has a few pages of text followed by several pages of pictures from all around the system and all the way back to its creation. It doesn’t quite have as much as I was hoping for about the City Hall station, but it’s a great coffee table book and I will be browsing through it frequently.

Female Chauvinist Pigs

I wasn’t expecting this one to be hardcover - I guess because of the subject matter I was expecting something more flimsy. Although I support some points of feminist philosophy, I do not actively consider myself a feminist; this book seemed interesting anyway.

Deaf Peddler: Confessions of an Inside Man

For some reason this came individually shrink-wrapped. The subject matter is interesting to me, although I didn’t realize that the author was also in a wheelchair, which seems like it might affect the telling of the deaf peddler experience - this guy probably was more successful as a peddler because he was in a wheelchair. In any case, I’m reading this one first because it’s pretty thin. The print is large, the margins are pretty big, and it’s only 136 pages.

Embassy Residences in Washington

If you’ve been to DC and driven/walked along 16th Street or Embassy Row, you know there are some pretty awesome buildings there. One of my favorites is an African embassy along 16th street - I think it might be for Uganda - that has fantastic African architectural details. This book hasn’t arrived yet because I bought it at a discount from an Amazon Marketplace seller, but I’m looking forward to browsing through the pictures and learning how the embassies came to be.

I mentioned Library Thing in a quicklinks post, but I hadn’t had time to fully investigate the site. Now I have, and this definitely merits its own entry.

Like all good geeks and smart people, we have a few thousand books sitting around the house. Most are in bookcases, a few are in piles, some are in storage. I have wanted to catalog these for a long time - in fact I think I originally wanted to catalog my mom’s books when I still lived at home, and she has a ton of books. (Not that I’ve weighed them, but it might be close!) Over the past several years I have tried various ways of cataloging them. Early attempts were made with software designed for collectors of all types; more recently I tried using Palm software like BookBag. The problem with both of these was that they were not connected to the web. For every single book, I had to record the title, author, ISBN, etc. - and this usually meant physically taking them off the shelf and looking at each one front and back. Needless to say, this was a pain in the ass!

Library Thing is a revolutionary leap forward in book cataloging. All you have to do is type in a search that Amazon would recognize, and you get a list of matching results. Click the title of the right book, and it’s quickly added to your list and your cursor is put back to the search field (Google-style). Type another title (author, ISBN, whatever), hit enter, click the right one, and repeat. Library Thing pulls in all the other data from Amazon, so your catalog is complete with authors and publishers and even publication dates. The absolute easiest way to use Library Thing is with a laptop and a wireless connection. I literally sat down in front of the bookshelf and fired in title after title. If you don’t have that kind of setup, I suggest taking good-quality photographs of each shelf/section and working from those. You may occasionally have to go fetch a book - sometimes it can’t find the right one when I search by author, but if I search by title it works, or vice-versa - but working from pictures would be the most efficient way to do this if you are tethered.

So, all this raving about Library Thing and I haven’t even gotten into the social aspect. Like most new web applications, you can make up your own tags. You can also view the catalogs of users with similar collections to yours, and view books others have tagged with a particular term. Oh, and there are watchlists - they’re not public knowledge like a friends list, but you can keep an eye on the catalogs of others. You can also get recommendations of books you might like, import from a few different formats, export to CSV (very nice to have that), make a blog widget with your favorite/recent/random books, leave public or private comments on the profiles of other readers…and probably even more stuff that I haven’t found yet.

So, have I convinced you to sign up for Library Thing yet? (No, that’s not an affiliate link!) If you want to see somebody’s catalog, why not take a look at mine? It’s probably only about 5% of the books I actually have, and it’s heavy on queer and deaf stuff because I had already cataloged that elsewhere, but I’ll be adding more soon!

I had better hurry up and finish reading Devils on the Deep Blue Sea quickly! I just went to renew it and on the same page I happened to notice that I am now #2 in the queue for Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. I was approximately #600 when I signed up about four to six weeks ago. I’m glad I stayed strong and didn’t buy the hardback when I saw it numerous times in stores - now I can read it for free! (I haven’t re-read any of the Harry Potter books.) Has anybody noticed there hasn’t been as much hype over this one as there was for Order of the Phoenix? I remember people were climbing over each other in bookstores for that one, but Half-Blood Prince seems to have been easy to find since it came out.

Also, I spotted an interesting adopt-a-highway sign on Purcell Road near the intersection with Dumfries Road in Prince William County. It said the highway was adopted by “Republic of Koznia.” At first I thought that was the country of origin for Tom Hanks’s character in The Terminal, but that turns out to be Krakozhia. The nearest other reference I can find is a Justice League plotline involving Kaznia, which a single poster on a Justice League message board spelled as Koznia. So what’s up with this adopt-a-highway thing?

I did an excellent job on some voicing assignments yesterday, including a job interview I hadn’t been warned about. I knew the client was a difficult one to voice for, and I was hoping the “work meeting” wouldn’t be too interactive. When I learned it was a job interview for an internal position, I was worried…but not for long. To my own amazement, I aced the voicing. I always worry about job interviews, because I’m afraid any mistakes I make will reflect poorly on the deaf applicant. But even though my signing was a little below par (I was struggling with whether to go for concepts or exact translations) my voicing was superb. The client is extremely intelligent, and I had to match her level of professionalism. I used all the right phrases one uses in a job interview to make one sound good - in fact I probably did better interpreting that interview than I’ve ever done on any of my own interviews!

I also stopped at the library on the way home because there was a problem with my card that was preventing me from reserving books in the online catalog. It turned out they need to update their address data every two years, but the representative on the phone hadn’t been able to do the update so I gave it to the librarian at the desk. I also checked out three books - Alaska by Cruise Ship, Cruising Alaska, and Fodor’s Alaska Ports of Call. My experience working as the book geek for Rand McNally led me to feel Fodor’s is not the best guidebook series for me - I prefer Lonely Planet, followed by Frommer’s - but that was what the library had. I also put myself on the waitlist for Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince…I am #601 on the list. When I got home, my package from S. had arrived (thank you!) so I also had The Corset: A Cultural History and The Complete Idiot’s Guide to the Pentagon to look through. And I bought a copy of Out Traveler magazine the other day because the cover article was on gay New York City…so I have got plenty to read now!

I am currently re-reading the book I Raise My Eyes to Say Yes, which Carla gave to me a great many years ago. (It was so long ago, in fact, that I was at the time daunted by the size of the book; I was an avid reader even at that young age, but I remember thinking “Wow, there’s sure a lot of words in here.”) It’s the story of Ruth Sienkiewicz-Mercer, a woman with cerebral palsy so severe she cannot speak and has very limited mobility. She was institutionalized for 13 years at Belchertown (MA) State School, where despite the intelligence she demonstrated at home she was labeled an imbecile and treated as such. She communicates primarily through facial expressions and small gestures, and uses word boards to establish topical references. Her autobiography was co-written by Steven B. Kaplan, who worked with her through many hours of yes-and-no questions about her life.

The book was written in 1990, so a great deal has happened since it was published. I thought I would search around for information about how she is doing today at age 54, but to my surprise I found virtually nothing about her current life - only the miserable time she had at Belchertown. I am sure that computers, technology, and the Internet have made her life much easier…but I don’t know how. Steven Hawking is in a similar physical condition and is able to communicate just fine, so I imagine a similar system has been worked out for Ruth - but what is it? Perhaps after I finish re-reading the book I will embark on a quest to figure out what’s happened to her and how she is doing today.