Each month, on the first Sunday, a group of people meet to exchange books. This month, together with S I managed to attend to.

To some, it might look strange, why can’t we take them from the library or from friends? Because it’s not the same thing. You meat new interesting people and exchange opinions about books. Some love ‘Lolita’ or Garcia Marquez, other don’t bother to finish them. You’ll find new authors or genres to read, make new friends, explore new horizons.

I offered The Brethren by John Grisham and Three Man on the Bummel by Jerome K Jerome, and went home with The Hedonism Handbook by Michael Flocker and a book by Pascal Brukner for S.

Overall, a very entertaining meeting, I’m looking forward to go to next month.

Legion of the Lost by Jamie Salazar

A story about life (or rather the first 2–3 months) in the French Foreign Legion written by an american guy.

I was curious to read more about the Legion, partly because I like reading action stories and partly because I wanted to see a glimpse of what a friend felt there. My friend joined the Legion 4 or 5 years ago, and unlike our hero from this book, served in Djibouti and other strange places and is still enrolled. I haven’t had the chance to speak with him much, but the other friends told me that he looked changed. His look was cold. Now I can see why.

What I liked about this book is the fact that our hero left a cosy place (his 9 to 5 corporate job) to do something wild. I didn’t like that he didn’t stay to finish what he started, though.

If you like army/war like action books, this is a nice book that would entertain you.

Three books I’ve started to read this week.

The first one, which I already named last Saturday, is Freakonomics, which, I found out these days, I could have borrow it from Daniel. His copy it’s in Timisoara now.

The second one is ‘Agile Web Development with Rails’. Even my site is Django powered, I’m interested in other technologies for web available these days. It’s not to make my resume buzzwords compliant, but see other perspectives of web development. To better learn Rails, I have to think at a toy project that would help me assimilate it faster.

The third book, borrowed from my company’s library is ‘Practice of an Agile Developer’. I’ve decided to ask for this book a couple of months ago, when I’ve seen various quotes from it used by different technology bloggers. If you’re one link in the software developer chain, this is a good book to see a list of things you can improve.

Yesterday I’ve picked up my last set of books. This summer, I’ve ordered a couple of programming books (Rappin’s and Dunn’s WxPython, Thomas’ and DHH‘s Agile Web Development with Rails, Meyer’s CSS The Definitive Guide), some messenger mania books (Culley’s The Immortal Class, Zephyr’s Pedal book + DVD, Hurst’s The Art of Urban Cycling) and a couple of casual reading ones (Bill Bryson, of course, Freakonomics, and one about the French Foreign Legion).

I’ve already finished The Immortal Class and currently I’m enjoying Freakonomics.

The first one, was wrote by a bicycle activist, Travis Culley, about his 9 months experience while he was working as a bicycle messenger in Chicago, with some fragments from his life before that.

He gives some insights on how hard is to commute by bike in Chicago (and United States in general), which, fortunately, doesn’t apply to Europe much. From my experience, cycling in Western Europe (Germany or The Netherlands) is much much better then in the US. Cycling in Eastern Europe is not bad also, Budapest for example, has lots of bike lanes and cyclists.

Also he writes about the messenger’s challenges on day to day life (like trying to dodge security guards from some buildings to gain a couple of minutes and do their jobs faster). Though, I’ve read that some persons don’t consider his book a good reference for messenger’s life I consider it a good read if you want to see a glimpse from cycling courier’s life (as was my idea when I’ve bought this book).

Freakonomics, on the other hand, is a different kind of animal. It explains some situations in life from an economic perspective. Why do teachers cheat and artificially raise their’s students marks in US (and probably other countries)? Because they want to create the appearance that they are great teachers and their students progressed a lot, to gain more money or pass different tests. What they didn’t think is that this can be easily discovered using statistics. I just finished the first chapter, but I recommend it to anyone that wants to have a light fun read.

Following books will arrive on my tiny city, far far away from western civilization and culture, from the mighty Amazon:

• Legion of the Lost by Jaime Salazar
• Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything by Steven D. Levitt, Stephen J. Dubner

And when the fate will decide that the time is right:

• The Art of Urban Cycling: Lessons from the Street by Robert Hurst
• The Immortal Class: Bike Messengers and the Cult of Human Power by Travis Culley

Until now Earth’s Rightful Ruler, Jah, considered that it’s not the case, and decided not to use the two opportunities he had to have the books moved from Munich to Timisoara.

P.S. This post was brought to you by Safari Beta 3 on Windows, which doesn’t have ctrl+backspace for delete words, doubleclick to open new tabs, or / to search in the current page, but strangely opted for a funky css default scheme with quite thick fonts and strange antialias. Later added: also crashes on exit, and doesn’t preserve sessions between browser restarts like Firefox 2.0 and Opera.

P.P.S. This post was saved by vim for Windows from Safari’s idea of “I’ll post what I consider from what you’ve wrote, so I’ll pick just the first sentence”. Safari Beta 3 should be renamed to Safari Release Candidate 1. As others already said, this Apple’s WWDC was not too great, to be gentle.

Bill Bryson – Notes from a Big Country

Or by the alternative title, “I’m a Stranger Here Myself”, is a collections of small stories published by Bill Bryson in an American magazine between 1995 and 1996. The author, born in Iowa, moves back to US after he lived the previous 20 years in Great Britain and he discovers quite a few differences. Some of the stories are parodies to the American system, like the ones about IRS forms or the INS, to the American culture or self-irony.

Bryson’s style is easy to follow even for non-native English speakers. I recommend this book to all those who want to have an easy read and a good laugh.

The Brethren by John Grisham

A novel about three judges from a minimum security prison that are using extortion to get money from older homosexuals. They post ads in a gay magazine to fish for victims. Unfortunately, they pick CIA‘s candidate for the next presidential elections.

In theory, it should be a law-related novel, but the only link to law are the 3 judges and their lawyer. To me it looks like a normal mystery novel.

On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft by Stephen King

A non fiction book about writing. Not as grammar or style oriented as Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style (which I got for my birthday, BTW :) ), it talks about general stuff rather then details.

In a couple of lines:

• about his life (how he got to the first published book, Carrie, who inspired him, about his not so easy life before becoming successful )
• about writing (he wrote short stories that sent them to various magazines during his high school and university period)
• about his accident (happened in the same period when he was writing this book)
• a second draft example ( 2nd draft = 1st draft – 10%)
• a list of good books to read (Bill Bryson’s A Walk in the Woods is there too)
• a good writer must read a lot and write a lot

I recommend this book to anyone who’s interested in writing, as a career or hobby.

Three Men on the Bummel by Jerome K Jerome

A sequel to Three in a Boat (which I haven’t read yet, but I found this from the foreword). It is about three guys (Jerome, Harris and George that make a short trip through Germany. They use only two bicycles, a tandem and a normal one. The book is not so much about bicycles or travel, but a parody on English and German social system from the 19th century end.

My favorite part is that were explains how his Uncle Podger was a methodical man. Always made lists when he had to pack, and always lost them, just before he needed them. :)