Books

Finished reading "The Lies of Locke Lamora" by Scott Lynch. Rather good. Found on the "fantasy" shelves (where almost all of my reading material comes from), it's about a long con expert grifting in a city almost indistinguishable from early Renaissance Venice. With a revenge plot thrown in.

Though I bet my "summon author" spell fails miserably :)

http://myelvesaredifferent.blogspot.com/2007/02/summon-author-is-good-term-for-common.html

Right now I've got a big pile of books to get through.

I read George R R Martin's "A Feast For Crows" at the start of the month; at the second attempt. I don't know why I never managed to get into it when I first got the book, as this volume is as good as the rest of the series so far. However, there is a definate "slowing down", both in terms of the pacing of the story and the appearance of the actual books themselves. Hopefully he's not coming over all "Jordan" on us. Though I still hold the Wheel of Time series in high regard, I just hope that RJ manages to get the epic finished.

Just finishing the Jasper Fforde Thursday Next sequence. Silly stuff. And a return to the sort of exchanges that opened the series, after all the BookWorld stuff in the previous two volumes. Not a series that I will feel compelled to re-read in the future, though.

After that, well I'm waiting on the first two books by Joe Abercrombie to arrive from Amazon (who are currently reporting a 4-6 week delivery window, unfortunately). If they don't turn up on time, then it might be K J Parker's previous paperback that gets read next. I really enjoyed her first trilogy and the second was also very good - but she does lose a few points as a result of my suspicion that she might be married to Tom Holt. Not so much because I don't like his books (I don't, but can't hold that against anyone), but because I didn't like him - or his views about my field of work - very much when I met him a few years ago.

I have some Games Workshop "Warhammer 40k" books to read at some point. Bought on a whim because from time to time, their background material could be quite readable - nonsense, but readable (and certainly better than most of their games). They are probably just the thing to read post-lobotomy.

And finally there's Understanding Exposure, by Bryan Peterson, which I am getting through at a rate of a few pages every few days. Highly recommended to all budding photographers who want to move the dial on their camera away from the "auto" setting once in a while. I'd recommend his "Understanding Digital Photography" over this one, though. There's enough repetition of material between the two books to make reading both unnecessary, but either gives a very good grounding in some of the technical aspects of photography using SLR-type cameras. It certainly helped me to understand what I was trying to do with my moon shots the other week.

I don't know if I mentioned at the time, but I was using an old 300mm telephoto lens. This meant that not only did I have to focus manually, I had to shoot in manual mode - setting an appropriate aperture and shutter speed, without the benefit of in-camera metering. Knowing not only what all those settings meant, but how to actually manipulate them to get the image I wanted, was pretty important.