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Problem – you have a directory full of epub files with names like 1234.epub and 4567.epub files, and what you’d really like to have is all those files organised into directories by author name, and the filenames themselves being of the form “Author – Title”.
Solution – first, install Calibre, because it comes with a handy command-line tool called ebook-meta that spits out all the metadata from a file. Then, from the directory where the files are, run this:
Time to try and catch up with the “what books I’ve been reading” thing. Here’s a partial list since last time. I’ll let the rest roll over into the next one, and I’ll be more brief than ever about these…
TL;DR – Take your DRM and sling your hook
It all started when I finished reading one book and got a few pages into another I didn’t really want to read. It occurred to me that it must be about time for another Ian M. Banks book to be out (it’s been this long since I read the last), and perhaps even one of his Culture novels. Sure enough, it turned out that that Surface Detail came out last year.
One snag – after years of stubborn nay-saying, I’ve finally come to the conclusion that ebooks are good thing, for various reasons which I’ll save for another day. This shouldn’t have been a snag, of course, it should have made it easy – instead of an hour’s round trip to the bookshop, complete with the costs of petrol and parking and the need to mingle with shoppers, I could have had it there and then. Or, relatively painlessly if I was prepared to wait for the postman.
Part of me wishes I’d never started doing this. It should be easy to write a couple of sentences about every book you read, but for some reason it seems to be really hard and I end up leaving it for months before I actually finish it, by which time there’s another list waiting to be written.
On the other hand, another part of me wishes I’d started doing it when I started reading. If nothing else, it’s really nice to be able to look back for a reminder when you forget what a particular book was, so I’m going to keep doing it. Here’s the latest batch (or at least, it was the latest in August):
In which I present, for no apparent reason, a list of books I’ve read since the last list.
The Secret Agent – Joseph Conrad: This is the fourth of his books that I’ve read (the previous three are here, and it’s now level pegging, with two of them (this included) being very enjoyable, and two not so much.
Dead Souls – Ian Rankin: First of a set of “three for five quid” picked up in a bargain bookshop that’s conveniently near where I was waiting for the old Merc to pass it’s MOT test. This one was picked because I’ve read quite a lot of Rankin’s stuff. A fairly standard “Rebus” novel, but with an unexpected twist – I spent quite a lot of the time having a strange sense of deja vu, like I’d read some passages of the book before, and some bits of the story were familiar too. It turned out that it was adapted from a short story I’d already read, which was published in Beggar’s Banquet.
The Front – Patricia Cornwell: The second of the bargain-bookshop-three. This was ok, but it deserved to be in the bargain bookshop.
Roman Blood – Steven Saylor: The wildcard entry from the bargain bookshop. I’d never heard of it (or him), or any of the other books on offer, so I picked it up almost at random to make up the set of three. It turned out to be the best of the lot by a long way. Very good indeed. Luckily it’s also the first of a long series, of which I’ve already purchased the next book.
The Turn of the Screw – Henry James: This was ‘recommended’ by my wife. Recommended as in she read it, then passed it on to me, but failed to inform me beforehand that she didn’t really like it. There are two stories in the book. I got about halfway through the first page before I asked if she’d read them both, and she said no. I wondered why not, but with hindsight it was a valiant effort even reading the first in its entirety. I lasted about three chapters then gave up.
Brave New World – Aldous Huxley: An astounding vision of the future, for its time, although it doesn’t seem so far away now. Also, in my opinion, an astoundingly bad piece of writing.
Set In Darkness – Ian Rankin: More of the Rebus stuff. Readable enough, as always.
The Falcon Flies – Wilbur Smith: Without any reasonable grounds for doing so, I always had Wilbur Smith down as some kind of author of junk fiction. I only read this because I found it lying around. I thought it was great, and I’ll be reading more of his books.
This is the third list of books I’ve been reading. (One and two). I’m not sure what made me start doing this. Even writing a couple of sometimes sarcastic comments about each book can be hard work. It’s worth doing though, I reckon. To be accurate, the first two of these should have really been included in the last batch, but I forgot about them so they’re here instead. Anyway, without any further ado, here is the list:
Something that occurred to me when I wrote my previous list of books I’d been reading is that I’d only got through 13 books in the whole year. I did a quick mental calculation on how many more years I might expect to live, and thus how many more books I might read EVER! It wasn’t many.
With that in mind the obvious course of action would be to select each and every precious book wisely. But no, because as before these are mostly books I found lying around the house rather than ones I chose. On the other hand, I did decide to write the list more frequently from now on, not least because I might drop dead at any moment and leave the world wondering what garbage I’d been filling my head with in my final days. So, without any further ado, on to the list:
I’m pleased to be able to say that this year I managed to get back to reading more fiction. None of it, unless by accident, was actually fiction from this year – it just so happens that I read it this year. I’m no more interested in the latest book than I am in the latest blockbuster movie, which if it’s any good will still be good when it’s on TV. Mostly, these books weren’t read out of choice, but because I happened to find them lying around the house, and in any case this is only the stuff I can remember. Nonetheless, without any further ado, I present my review of fiction for 2008: