This is the website of Abulsme Noibatno Itramne (also known as Sam Minter). Comments here or emails to me at abulsme@abulsme.com are encouraged... or follow me on twitter as @abulsme.
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 Author: Orson Scott Card
Original Publication: 2008-11-11
Started:2011-02-05
Finished: 2011-02-13
Format: Physical
380 pages / 9 days
42.2 pages/day
This is not the last Enderverse book, but this is the book that Brandy had gotten me for Christmas/Birthday/Something that had prompted me to systematically use all my fiction slots from May 2009 to February 2011 for reading all of the Ender Series books up until that point. I liked the series, but for the most part it started strong and got weaker as it went. And almost two years of no fiction other than Orson Scott Card was probably a bit much. I’m not sure I’ll give that sort of special treatment to a series again, even if I am gifted a book that is not the next in the series I have to read. After this book was read, the next Ender Series book… Shadows in Flight is on my big list of potential fiction to read but is not given any preferential place relative to anything else. Which means, at the moment, it has a 1 in 203 chance of being picked the next time I pick a fiction book to read.
Anyway, how was the book itself? Well, the whole enjoyment score I mentioned in my last post is out the window, because I read a physical paper version of this book. But my 2+ year old memory of it is basically that it was OK. Not great. Nothing special. But OK. It filled some additional gaps in Ender’s life that hadn’t been covered in the previous books, and it started typing things together with the Bean books in the series. So, fine for Ender completists, but unless you are making sure you read all the Ender books, I probably wouldn’t bother.
I can’t use the locations per day as a score, but it still can be ranked within the physical books by page per day, so lets give that a shot. The last ten books reviewed at this point are:
- 695 – Shadow Puppets (F)
- 656 – Fatal System Error (NF)
- 647 – War of Gifts (F)
- 614 – Shadow of the Giant (F)
- 446 – First Meetings (F)
- 326 – All the President’s Men (NF)
- NA – [Physical 42.2 pages/day] Ender in Exile (F)
- NA – [Physical 25.8 pages/day] Nurtureshock (NF)
- NA – [Physical 14.9 pages/day] 9 Ways to Bring Out the Best in You and Your Child (NF)
- NA – [Physical 9.08 pages/day] Agile Project Management with Scrum (NF)
And now the graphs:
% of the last 20 books I reviewed that are now available on Kindle:
% of the last 20 books I read (including 26 I haven’t reviewed yet) that I actually read on Kindle:
(I bought my Kindle when the first ratio hit 50%. I will do these charts until each ratio gets to 90%. We are close, but not quite there yet.)
 Author: Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward
Original Publication: 1974
Started: 2011 Jan 19
Finished: 2011 Feb 5
Format: Kindle
5862 locations / 18 days
326 locations/day
Once again writing these years after reading the book. Perhaps I’ll catch up someday. Ha!
Well, in any case, this is the classic Woodward and Bernstein narrative of their watergate investigations. More than two years later, my main memory of this is being disappointed that it ended before the resignation, so didn’t take the story the whole way. Yes, I know they did another book that covered the last days of the Nixon presidency, but I still wished this just continued.
I have a vague memory of thinking that while the events themselves were interesting and of course are historically important, than the actual tone of the writing was a bit dry and “this happened, then this happened, then this happened” for my taste. But it has been a long time since I read it, so who knows.
I’ve been toying with giving a star rating or some such when I do these things, but realize I actually have a better measure of how much I enjoy a book, and it is already listed above. When I am really into a book, I make time to read. I read in the spare moments during the day. A minute here or there whenever I catch a chance, and I end up choosing to read instead of watching TV or even instead of sleeping sometimes. I end up reading it faster. Not in terms of how fast I actually read while I’m sitting with the book, but in terms of how much I read per day. Meanwhile, for books I am NOT enjoying, I end up forcing myself to read a little every once in awhile, but don’t actually seek out time to read, so those go much more slowly.
Of course, this is also effected by how much free time I have. Although there are exceptions, in recent years this has been relatively steady, so I’ll just ignore it at the moment. :-)
And yes, this is also somewhat determined by the “difficulty” of the reading. A light fiction book is going to “flow” better than a dense textbook. But I think that also matches up with my enjoyment. The dense textbook may well provide me with valuable information, but I’m not sure “enjoy” would be the right word to describe my interaction with it.
With physical books, if you look at pages, that is of course a measure that depends on the size of the pages, the size of the print, if there are photos or illustrations, etc, etc, etc. But if I’m reading on a Kindle, most of that is abstracted out by the “location”. And look there above, I already have locations per day. With my patterns of reading (one book at a time, always finish any book I start), this is a good measure, at least for books I read on Kindle.
So, for All the President’s Men, I give an enjoyment score of:
326
As context, here is where this fits with the last 10 books I’ve reviewed (in order by score):
- 723 – Shadow of the Hegemon (F)
- 695 – Shadow Puppets (F)
- 656 – Fatal System Error (NF)
- 647 – War of Gifts (F)
- 614 – Shadow of the Giant (F)
- 446 – First Meetings (F)
- 326 – All the President’s Men (NF)
- NA - Nurtureshock (NF) [Physical 25.8 p/d]
- NA - 9 Ways to Bring Out the Best in You and Your Child [Physical 14.9 p/d]
- NA – Agile Project Management with Scrum (NF) [Physical 9.06 p/d]
So yeah, I guess I wasn’t all that excited by it compared to the last few things I’d read previously.
Finally, my usual two Kindle adoption graphs…
% of the last 20 books I reviewed that are now available on Kindle:
% of the last 20 books I read that I actually read on Kindle:
(I bought my Kindle when the first ratio hit 50%. I’ve said before that I’ll do these charts until the ratios get to 90% or so.)
 Author: Orson Scott Card
Original Publication: 2007
Started: 2011 Jan 18
Finished: 2011 Jan 19
Format: Kindle
1294 locations / 2 days
647 locations/day
I continue my tradition of writing “quick” reviews of books over a year after I read them… uh, almost two years after I read them. Oops. Anyway, I guess this has value as it leaves in my head only what is fundamentally memorable about a book, not just the initial impressions.
So on Orson Scott Card’s War of Gifts, basically my memory at first blush was really weak:
- It is yet another in the Ender series. #10 in publication order.
- It is not a full novel. Maybe a novella? Really not much more than a short story.
- It has a Christmas theme.
That is about all that persisted in my memory all this time, so I reviewed the Wikipedia page to refresh my memory.
It really is an oddball little Christmas story that doesn’t fit in all that well with the rest of the series. It is like when your favorite hard rocking band comes out with a Christmas album. Some kind of effect. You end up thinking “Uh, OK. But what??”
In the end it wasn’t a bad little short story. It just seemed out of place.
The five second plot summary is that a student who is fairly religious arrives at battle school, where overt religious expression is forbidden as divisive. Hijinks then ensure over the Chirstmas season as various groups try to express their religious beliefs in various ways. Finally, Ender comes in and plays diplomat and resolves the situation.
The end.
If you are trying to be a completist and read all the Ender books, by all means this needs to be part of that. Otherwise though, I’d probably skip this.
OK, as has been my pattern, with each review, a couple of graphs regarding Kindle coverage:
% of the last 20 books I reviewed that are now available on Kindle:
% of the last 20 books I read that I actually read on Kindle:
(I bought my Kindle when the first ratio hit 50%. I’ve said before that I’ll do these charts until the ratios get to 90% or so.)
 Author: Joseph Menn
Original Publication: 2010 Oct 26
Started: 2011 Jan 12
Finished: 2011 Jan 18
Format: Kindle
4589 locations / 7 days
656 locations/day
So yeah, yeah, first I’ll just get it out of the way. I am writing this review over a year and a half after I read the book. Oops. Oh well. That’s just the way it is sometimes. Way behind. You know what that’s like.
Anyway, this is a book that looks at some aspects of internet crime, specifically spending a lot of time on DDOS attacks, defending against them, and some messy battles involving internet gambling sites, but also expanding to include some thoughts on “cyberwarfare” between governments and some on identity theft.
I remember the biggest impression I left the book with at the time was basically “Wow, really, there are REAL criminals and bad guys doing this kind of stuff?” I have to admit, that while I was vaguely aware of that fact, my overall impression of this sort of thing was that it was a bunch of small time folks, doing annoying stuff from their home computers. Not really the “organized crime” sort of picture that this book paints.
Of course that makes perfect sense though. If there is money to be made by scamming people or whatnot, and it can be more easily done via the internet, sure, there may be small timers out there, but why the hell wouldn’t it get organized and big? And since we’re talking about illegal and unethical acts for the most part, obviously that is going to take on the flavor of organized crime, and all of the sorts of things that implies in terms of violence and threats of violence getting added to the mix.
The book itself was an interesting detective story following the process of tracking down some of these crimes and tracking down who was actually doing what, and in some cases trying to actually move toward prosecutions and arrests, including dealing with corruption in Russia and other obstacles.
It was a good read. I don’t have the expertise to really understand how representative the types of stories outlined here really are, but it was interesting and disturbing. Worth the read if you are curious about this sort of thing.
Finally, in the past I’ve separately done posts with charts on what portions of my recent reviewed books were available on Kindle, and what portion of my recently read books were actually read on Kindle. Going forward I will just include that at the end of my review posts. So here goes.
% of the last 20 books I reviewed that are now available on Kindle:
% of the last 20 books I read that I actually read on Kindle:
(I bought my Kindle when the first ratio hit 50%. I’ve said before that I’ll do these charts until the ratios get to 90% or so.)
 Author: Orson Scott Card
Original Publication: 2005
Started: 2011 Jan 3
Finished: 2011 Jan 12
Format: Kindle
6136 locations / 10 days
614 locations/day
It really has been too long since I read this for me to say anything too much about it. Most of it has slipped from my mind. It is the continuation of the story of Bean, and in fact is the last of the Bean centric books in this series… so far anyway, I gather a couple more are planned.
This basically continues to follow the battle school kids (and Peter) as they are instrumental in global politics and wars, until the point where Bean finally leaves the planet.
This was an OK read, but just didn’t have the impact of the first few books in the series. My basic thought this far in (8 books) was that the first was of course the classic and best. Then as we did #2 through #4 each was not quite as good as the one before. Then #5 freshened it up by shifting to Bean and was probably somewhere between #2 and #3, then as we went through 6, 7 and 8 we once again were in the pattern of each being not quite as good as the one before.
Having said that, they were all enjoyable reads. The only “must reads” in the series up to this point are #1 and #2. But if you enjoy those, the others aren’t bad at all.
 Author: Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman
Original Publication: 2009 Sep 3
Started: 2010 Dec 22
Finished: 2011 Jan 3
Format: Hardcover
336 pages / 13 days
25.8 pages/day
I am now so far behind in these, it is a miracle I remember the books at all. It has been over six months since I finished this book. Uh… make that 7 months… Oops. Oh well, let me give it a try anyway. This was the second “parenting” kind of book I read in a relatively short period of time. But I swear it was complete coincidence, it is what came up next.
Anyway, this one just reviews a bunch of different areas where research into child development has shown counterintuitive results and where simple things perhaps have a much greater effect than one might otherwise expect. Things like how praising a child for BEING smart is actually counterproductive, while praising them for something they DID that was smart helps quite a bit. Which makes sense when you think about it of course, but they show a lot of the backup research, lay it out, etc. I think that one was the first chapter.
That is just one of many examples. They key to each of these is that they take relevant research, walk through the situations, the results of the research, etc and then apply it. Nothing is just “this is the right way to do this because I think it is”. Everything is backed up and nothing is actually that absolute. And they are all interesting bits that you may or may not have thought of otherwise.
Anyway, I found this fun and interesting. Now, several months later do I actually remember much of it? Nah. In fact I had to go online to remind myself of the one example I used above. But still, it was a good read. And it does seem like it had some good points that I could be applying to both Alex and Amy right now.
Uh… if only I could remember them.
 Author: Orson Scott Card
Original Publication: 2003
Started: 2010 Dec 17
Finished : 2010 Dec 22
Format: Paperback
2676 locations / 6 days
446 locations / day
Up to #8 in the Ender Series. This one isn’t a novel though, but a compilation of four short stories. One is about Ender’s father as a child. One is the story of Ender’s parents meeting. Then there is the original Ender’s Game short story that Ender’s Game novel was an expansion of. And finally the story of how Ender first met Jane the sentient computer program/network.
This made it very different than reading any of the actual novels in the series. I enjoyed the two backstory ones about ender’s parents. You understand a little bit better where Ender came from, and it fleshes them out a bit. Similarly, I liked the Jane origin story, although it seemed slightly gimmicky.
The oddest one though was the Ender’s Game short story. Not that it was a bad short story, it was a good one, and of course prompted this whole series. But having it included this way was a bit jarring, since I’m reading the series in sequence, but this essentially retells the first story, but in a bit different way. It was interesting to see the differences between the short story version and the novel length version, but still, a little odd to read this as part of the overall sequence of the series.
I do like the novels better. But this was an interesting addition to the Ender Universe.
 Author: Ken Schwaber
Original Publication: 2004 Mar 10
Started: 2010 Nov 30
Finished : 2010 Dec 17
Format: Paperback
163 pages / 18 days
9.06 pages / day
So, having been involved with Scrum like project management methods for a few years, I finally read one of the books about it. This one specifically was about how to adapt Scrum to various sorts of situations, generally where Scrum was not used in the past.
I’d expected this would all just be “well duh” sorts of things since I’ve been in such a scrum centric environment for the last few years, but the reality is that what we’ve used where I’ve been, either directly in my group, or in others I’ve dealt with, has generally been highly adapted scrum, with many changes from “pure” scrum. Now, changing things to adapt to local needs is actually part of what Scrum anticipates, but actually reading something that had a more “pure” focus was interesting. I had many “Ah, so THAT is how that should be done” sort of moments. Well, “should” is a strong word. Maybe “could” would be better. The ways I’ve done it or seen it done are not necessarily worse, just different.
Anyway, interesting to actually read a book like this. Probably would have been more useful for me two or three or four years ago, but hey, that’s the way things go.
 Author: Orson Scott Card
Original Publication: 2002
Started: 2010 Nov 23
Finished : 2010 Nov 30
Format: Kindle
5563 locations / 8 days
695 locations / day
So, we’re now up to the 7th book in the Ender series. Shadow Puppets picks up soon after the last one ended up. But the main source of drama switches again, and the book seems to start moving back to the more philosophical sort of orientation as books 2-4 as compared to the more “things happening” sort of orientation of Books 1, 5 and 6. Which is OK I guess, but in this case a bunch of it seems to be pushing the whole “the purpose of life is to produce children” sort of agenda. Which actually started to get annoying.
The main plot point is that Bean, who is a genetically enhanced individual who gains great intelligence at the expense of abnormal growth patterns and an early death, initially intended not to have any children at all. But he is convinced otherwise. But they decide to create a number of embryos, test them for his condition, and only actually bring the ones without the condition to term. But, oh my, the people helping in this process are in league with the bad guy, and all the embryos, both with and without the condition, are stolen. Then we run around trying to get them back while also working to thwart the bad guy’s global plans.
I mean, I guess it is OK, but just a bit too much of it was centered around the “must have children, children are the meaning of life” thing. I’d say of the books in the series I’ve read, this was the weakest so far. I mean, it wasn’t horrible or anything, just not at the level of some of the others.
 Author: Maggie Reigh
Original Publication: 2004
Started: 2010 Nov 8
Finished : 2010 Nov 23
Format: Paperback
239 pages / 16 days
14.9 pages / day
This book was a gift. The inscription on the inside of the cover says:
“With love to Sam – Hope something here is helpful  – Mother – 2007″
So this was from my mom, but at a time well before Alex, so we were talking at the time about parenting a 11 or 12 year old Amy , depending on if this was a Birthday gift or a Christmas gift. But see, I do eventually get to reading books I am given as a gift… even though it may take a few years.
I am generally very suspicious of these sorts of books that tell you how to be a better whatever, be it a better parent or a better manager, or just a better person. It isn’t that they can’t hold nuggets of truth, but rather that many of these things either just come naturally or they don’t, and I am dubious of learning such things from instruction rather than from experience. Having said that, there is always the bonus of actually learning from other people’s experience rather than repeating their mistakes, and I must admit I did end up noting a few things in here where I thought “Yeah, I could do better at that.”
Now, most of the advice, the “9 Ways” are things that might get a “Well duh” reaction from anyone who did not come from a background where the old fashioned disciplinarian “kids will speak when spoken to and do what they are told” sort of style was the norm. At least in the circles I have traveled that sort of thing has been quite rate. To some degree this book comes down to “don’t do that” and instead treat your kids with respect and as people.
To be specific, the 9 “Ways” are:
- The Way of Mutual Respect (Understanding and Respecting Boundaries)
- The Way of Vision (Have an idea of how you would like things to be and evaluate things on if they help get closer to that.)
- The Way of Mutual Empowerment (Turn judgement to curiosity, empower your child to decide things on their own as soon as they are ready and want to.)
- The Way of Emotional Grounding (Staying centered and enabling the draining of frustrations… both yours and the child)
- The Way of Communications (Talk and communicate meaningfully. Listen.)
- The Way of Encouragement (Encourage, be specific, look for the good in things rather than obsessing on flaws)
- The Way of Living Harmoniously with Others (Don’t resolve kid’s arguments, teach them how to resolve them)
- The Way of Loving Discipline (Not punishment, self-control. Help find root causes of misbehavior to find solution.)
- The Way of Parenting with Spirit (Some sort of nonsense about inner lights)
Anyway, as you can see from those titles, there is a lot of fru-fru gobbledegook pop-psychology in here in terms of the terms used to describe various things. And some of the anecdotes also seem like the idealized “yeah, no real person would react quite like that” sort of thing. But they do serve to illustrate the basic principles though. I’ve tried to distill the actual meaningful essence in my parenthetical comments. And I do think once you boil out all the fluff here, the general principles are good ones.
As I mentioned earlier, there were definitely a variety of places where when reading I thought of various interactions I’ve had with Amy (not so much Alex yet) where I could have taken a better path if I’d followed some of the advice in here. In most cases, actually obvious in retrospect, but where in the moment as things happen, perhaps thoughts aren’t as clear. The value of a book like this, as I said, unless you are coming from a strict child-rearing starting place, which I am not, is not so much telling you anything you don’t already know… you know this stuff instinctually… rather it is that it makes you take the time to think about it a bit and raise it to something you are consciously aware of , and therefore perhaps you will be better able to step back and approach things in more healthy ways in situations where perhaps before you might just react and then think “oops, I could have handled that better” after the fact.
Or not. Even when you know a better way, sometimes the moment wins. But it is good to just explicitly think about some of this stuff sometimes.
Wow, oops. I can’t believe I’ve been mostly positive about this book. I *am* skeptical about this kind of book. And a good portion of this book WAS fluff and such, and the last chapter really did start taking a sharp right turn into LaLa Land, but if you pick through all that stuff, the core bits are indeed valuable to spend some time thinking about.
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