Morning Thoughts

On the train home, I ran through three books which I thought were rather blase. I tried to start reading Sagramande by Alan Dean Foster, but the writing was too disjointed for me to get into. Next, I tried reading American Nerd The Story of My People by Benjamin Nugent. It just did not click with me. The way he defined nerd was too off in my thinking. It seemed, that he was writing a lot of personal opinions without backing them with enough anecdotes and examples. I also tried to read a bit of the The Power of Now and had to put it down because it bored me.

I finally ended up starting to read One Foot In The Grave by Jeaniene Frost. This is kind of interesting so far. The main character, Catrina Arthur, seems to be modeled after the hard core femme fatale detective or agent like Ms. Tree, however, this time she is hunting vampires and the undead so the author can put in a lot more sex and violence. After all, you are supposed to kill vampires and the undead.

This is combined with dangerous romance. After all, what would be more fun for the male love interests than to chase after a mysterious woman who can get you killed by vampires, the undead, and other things that can go bump in the night. A little role reversal for todays modern man. http://www.jeanienefrost.com/one-foot-in-the-grave.html This is the page about the book. It includes an excerpt of the first chapter.

Diana Wynn Jones just came out with a sequel to Howl's Moving Castle. It is called House of Many Ways it should be out on June 10,2008. Howl's Moving Castle was made into an anime film directed by Hayao Miyazaki. The book is quite entertaining as well as the anime.

I am going to a training session this afternoon for the Ebsco magazine database. Apparently, they have a whole slew of new features available. I hope the coffee is good. I need to stay awake this afternoon.

The training session was not bad. They had fresh fruit, something which I appreciate. I can't stand huge piles of mini-muffins. There was also some coffee. The speakers were very straightforward. The first speaker spoke about the new version of Ebsco 2.0, a more advanced form of database for public libraries. The interface looks as he calls it, "googlized." I thought it was a little bit googlized.

The second speaker gave a talk about the new version of Literary Reference Center and Novelist databases. These are both databases for choosing materials for Readers Advisory and Collection Development. Literary Reference Center recently incorporated most of the books in Project Gutenberg, some 7100 texts, as well as 57,000 poems.

They gave a site with some basic tutorials, http://support.ebsco.com/training/tutorials.php . When I got back from the session, I looked at three of the tutorials, Novelist, Ebscohost 2.0, and Literary Reference Center. They were fairly simple and straightforward.

I spent some time looking through the awards lists on the Novelist database and put the 2007 Hugo Award winner on hold, Rainbow's End by Vernor Vinge.

I also took a few minutes to look at the Literary Reference Center database. Their glossary of literary terms is kind of interesting. I also looked at their alphabetical list of titles and genres. Most of my favorite genres were present, science fantasy, science fiction, fantasy, thrillers, techno-thrillers, utopian fiction, apocalyptic fiction, and others. Just to make sure they had some coverage of science fiction, I checked on a review of The Caves of Steel by Isaac Asimov. This is a classic science fiction mystery.

The Adventures of Johnny Bunko the Last Career Guide You'll Ever Need , a manga comic book by Daniel H. Pink came in today as well.