Photography Friday

Not too much to report this week.  Just some pictures I took at my local library while desperately resisting checking out any more books.  It shouldn’t have been hard, since I don’t think I’ll finish all the ones I have now before I move, but somehow it still was! What I most wanted to check out was some more Meg Cabot books, since I’ve been reading the books of hers that I’ve bought for a signing in Des Moines on Tuesday.  I’ve never been to a book signing before so I’m super excited, especially since I’ve enjoyed her books a lot.  I hope everyone else had a great fourth of july and also has a great week to look forward too 🙂

A Preview

This morning, I finished the last book from the Percy Jackson series, and I must say, I loved the ending!  Although I expected a twist, I wasn’t able to anticipate what actually happened, which was nice.   As Jen at The Introverted Reader pointed out, character development was a strong point of these books and it was a lot of fun to see where everyone ended up.  So, having finished the series, I would still highly recommend them 🙂

Looking forward, I’ve gotten my next few books for reading through the Dewey Decimal system from the library and I’m pretty excited about them!  I’ve also decided to participate in my first meme, Musing Mondays, where book bloggers ponder thoughtful questions from Should Be Reading, the meme’s host.  Today’s question is: How far along are you in your current read before you start thinking about what you’ll read next?  As you can see from this post, I usually know what I’m reading pretty far in advance, just because I can’t help picking up large stacks of books every time I go to the library.  Fortunately, I don’t usually bring a tote bag, so I’m limited by the number I can carry!  But I typically still pick out my next fiction series and a chunk of non-fiction on the same or similar topics to read next.  So, without further ado, the next few books in my Dewey Decimal Challenge:

638 – A Spring Without Bees – According to wikipedia, a section on “insect culture”, which at my library meant a section on bees.  Since I don’t think I’m up to the challenge of raising my own bees, I chose this environmental novel over a how-to book.  It seems a little over-dramatic but also gives an interesting view of the ways our food industry depends on bees.

639  – This section was something of a hodge-podge, with books on owning a variety of non-mammalian pets to books on conservation and home gardening.  I was tempted to get one of the books on pets, since I’ve always liked animals, but I’m pretty sure if I did I’d be tempted to get a fish, turtle, or bearded dragon – for science.  So to avoid the temptation, I instead picked up two books about environmental activists: Nature’s Second Chance: Restoring the Ecology of Stone Prairie Farm and The Eye of the Elephant: An Epic Adventure in the African Wilderness.  The subtitles summarize them pretty well 🙂  And finally, I picked up a book called Welcoming Wildlife To the Garden: Creating Backyard and Balcony Habitats for Wildlife.  Although I don’t have a backyard, the section on tips for attracting wildlife to a balcony sold me on this one.  I’m sure my cat and I would both love to watch birds and butterflies if I can make a suitable habitat on my balcony.

So here’s to a week of good reading!  Feel free to post your own thoughts on the Monday Musings question in the comments or on your own blog.

Photography Friday

In keeping with the theme of the blog, I decided on another library picture this week.  This is a picture taken from the first floor of the Iowa State campus library.  I was attempting to create an HDR picture to capture both the lighting and the shadows well.  Unfortunately, it was pretty dark so I needed a slow shutter speed and I had no tripod, so I wasn’t able to get three shots lined up exactly enough for HDR.  What I ended up doing was manually merging two pictures – one at a normal exposure, for the lighting, and an overexposed image to make the concrete look brighter.  I’m still not entirely happy with the framing (maybe it could be better taken from the second floor?) and I would like to get a true HDR shot, so I might go back for another stab at this one later 🙂

Photography Friday!

Welcome to the first photography Friday!  One of my new year’s resolutions is to take a picture every week this year and those pictures will be posted in this section of the blog.   This is a chandelier in the Georgia Tech library.  I’ve been taking picture of chandeliers for a while and I’ve been thinking of starting a project photographing libraries, so this was too perfect an opportunity to miss!  If any of you are working on photography projects this year, feel free to pop over and follow me on flickr.  I’ll be sure to follow you back 🙂

I Can Haz Books?

My books came in!  I also stopped by the non-fiction section and picked up some books for the challenge:

005 – The Art of Deception – one of the very few books in this section I’d want to read all the way through, as most are tutorials for computer programs and programming.  This book is written by a hacker and describes the “most serious security weakness – human nature”.  Supposedly like reading a mystery novel.

006 – Click – this section includes books on “special computer methods”, mostly stuff on artificial intelligence.  Click describes the results of data-mining the information we share online, but seems less dry than that description makes it sounds.  Reminds me a little of Freakonomics – both authors search through seemingly unconnected data for conclusions about human nature.

The Books Are Winning

Yesterday I was in the library for twenty minutes and left with 9 books.  I even know how it happened.  First, I was just going to pick up a book in the 003’s (Systems) and the 004’s (Data Processing and Computer Science), so I did – easily grabbing just the one book which stood out to me in each section.  Then I thought, surely my blog readers would like to hear a little about why I picked the books I did and it should be easy enough to write about the very few other books available.