Tag Archives: books

Book Review – Damn You Autocorrect by Jillian Madison

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I guess you could say I “read” Damn You Autocorrect, even though the book is mostly photos. This doesn’t mean it’s bad, it’s just the nature of taking photos of phone conversations. I’d consider the book a picture book, but it does require reading. With that out of the way, Damn You Autocorrect is a book filled with peoples’ phones changing the words they were intending to type into a funny misunderstanding or the like. I read a lot of these things online and quite enjoy them there.  I also like to read books, so the book version was quite welcome.

damn you autocorrect

I won’t say it was an amazing read. It’s what one would expect.  If you like reading autocorrect fails on the internet, this is the same thing in book form, some of which you might have already seen, some you might not have. In the book there is no (bad) swearing.  As that kind of censoring isn’t possible on the internet, I still wouldn’t give it to a kid or even some teens. But it isn’t the swear-fest the same kind of thing is online, which could be good or bad. I found it no less funny.

The chapters are roughly categorized, though they aren’t very different from one another. The screen-caps are all easily visible and in the correct proportions. Full names are omitted, which is always a good thing in these situations. It’s well put together in what seems to be an attempt at justifying it being a physical book. But hey, I bought it, so no need to justify to me. One little snag is it’s all in black and white. I’m guessing this is to keep the cost down since you are just paying for a collection of screen captures.  I can’t fault this, but the online viewing experience is better.

Overall, I like the book, and I’m glad I purchased it. Would I purchase it for full retail price? Maybe, if I had the money to buy more than a few books at full price. Is it worth it? Not really, in my opinion, but I can look at them when the internet isn’t available, I have a reference at least, and I got some laughs I wouldn’t have gotten before. I thoroughly enjoyed it, but it’s far from a necessary

Book Design Choices I Dislike

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I read physical books, still, quite a bit. One might say I do most of my reading in them. That may or may not be true, but it is true for most of my long-form reading. And there are a few things I notice bookmakers doing that I just can’t understand. I would assume that, aside from actually selling you a thing that you want to read, a bookmaker’s job would primarily be to provide you with the best possible reading experience. And many publishers do (my favorite-feeling books are regular Penguins, though sometimes Penguin makes mistakes, too.) And while none of these things will ever drive me away from reading physical books, they seem like easy-to-fix things that the printers would think about.

My least favorite of the three things I’ll mention are deckled edges. I cannot fathom why they still exist when I know that we easily have the capacity to produce nicely squared-off books. If it’s an older volume I’ll let it slide, but what are my brand new, just from the bookstore copies doing with this unprofessional edge? It looks like they don’t know what they’re doing. To some it might make them feel, I don’t know, “nostalgic”, for lack of a better word. But the uneven pages are just a nuisance, it’s hard to keep, find, or even turn a page, which I do quite often when reading a book. It also makes then not fit nicely against the back of bookshelf, I don’t understand why they are there, they only detracts from the reading experience and is so easily avoidable.

Not quite as antiquated or problematic, but just as nonsensical, are dust covers. I will never understand who invented them in the first place, but removal of the dust cover is phase one of reading a hardback book, and feeling bad about completely ruining it is at least one phase at some point in the reading. They just don’t do anything. They protect nothing, and at this point, printer tech has advanced enough that we can print high-quality images right on the book’s cover. I guess they do allow one to swap between the flashy, bookstore cover, and the classical library cover, but who in the world does that? I’ve only ever ripped the things or laid them next to me when reading. I guess they can serve as a bookmark, too, if you want to bend them out of shape.

And least annoying, and only really annoying to those with collections, as it affects the reading of the book in no way, is the inconsistency in the graphic design of series spines. This is especially true before the boxed sets of series are released, when sometimes two books in the same series are released with different spine heights. This is also the most excusable because I know that many people and companies can’t predict the exact time between two books in a series, or if a book will even be a series at all. But, still, a little more consistency would help my shelves a lot. And looking at little problems like that irk me. But I will still read boks, so the publishers have me there

My Books are Available Now!

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Hey guys I’m very excited, and those of you who like All life, no lemons and Panzerkampfwagen should be, too, because I’ve made books out of both of them that can be bought on Createspace (more money goes to me) or Amazon (for your convenience) If you are late in buying Christmas presents, they can ship really fast (Amazon Prime shipping still applies!) Or, if you like the comics and want to see them in glorious paper form (it’s at least glorious to me!) you can pick up a copy and help me out at the links below. And even if you don’t, thank you for enjoying my comics and happy holidays!

Createspace
ALNL
Panzer

Amazon
ALNL
Panzer

 

Book Review – Hitlerland: American Eyewitnesses to the Nazi Rise to Power – By Andrew Nagorski

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Hitlerland is an amazing title for a book, and it was one of the lesser titles in a set of books I picked up one day that I hope to read. Still, it was one of the first that I wanted to actually read.

hitlerland-book-cover

Hitlerland covers a period from 1922 to 1942, and follows American journalists, diplomats, and military attaches in Germany from that period. It attempts to display their feeling and ideas as they were at the time and generally not colored by hindsight, though many times the author will jump in with what the person said later, showing their changes in attitude and/or willingness to admit they made mistakes. Many different pieces of writing, letters, postcards, published and unpublished manuscripts, and more, are used in an attempt to show what these people were doing and how they were feeling during these historic decades.

And I believe it works well. The people are laid out in such a way that they can be judged, but really it’s more interesting to see where they are taken. Whether or not some of these people underestimated the Nazis, or wanted to aid them against the communists, or give the communists aid against them, is much less interesting than how they arrived at their conclusions.

There is a wide variety to be had with the book. Their varying jobs, from radio broadcaster, newspaper reporter, ambassador, diplomat, and military attache are fleshed out to an extent and serve to show how each one would act differently to gain different types of information and be treated differently by the Nazi government. The “story”, which is really a loose conglomeration of anecdotes about Nazi Germany, is well told and exciting. I quite enjoyed the book. It’s one of those with the pictures printed in the middle, though, so one has to be careful with them to not look too far or miss out at the end. (Someone should format the pictures better, maybe with corresponding page numbers). It is a fascinating look from a different perspective, and one often not considered, about the post-WWI German era. And like all sane books, Hitler is indeed condemned, though some of the figures in the book are late, or cautious, in doing so.

If I had any complaints other than formatting, (The hardback also comes with the uneven cut (deckled) sheets that just make it harder to read) it would be the ending is a bit lackluster. It ends rather abruptly after summarizing an amount of time that would’ve take twice the number of pages at least earlier in the book. There is the indication that nothing much happened in the later times.

It’s a good book, but one for those who know some about WWII coming in. It is by no means an introduction, except to the concepts of American correspondents in Berlin during the period leading up to and under Nazi rule. It’s like and introduction to an advanced course. So, if you’re interested, I’d recommend reading up on some other WWII and inter-war things first before diving in. But I believe you will enjoy if you are interested.

Table Topics Family 30 #59-60

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QUESTIONS

1. What are your favorite kinds of books to read?

2. What’s your favorite ride at an amusement park?

ANSWERS By: Austin Smith

1. If the question is of genre; all of them. Really anything where to writer either cares enough or is good enough to draw one into the reading experience, that’s what I like to read.

2. The cotton candy machine.