Books
How to make an audiobook for iTunes
Fancy making an audiobook to sell on iTunes? Here’s what you will need.
- A script
- A microphone
- A filing cabinet
- A chair
- Two buckets (ideally metal ones)
- A sound editing program
And here’s how to do it:
- Plug the microphone into your sound editing program.
- Move the filing cabinet to the farthest corner of the room.
- Put the microphone on top of the filing cabinet.
- Put one of the buckets on top of the microphone.
- Move the chair to the corner diagonally opposite the filing cabinet.
- Put the second bucket on your head.
- Read the script very quietly.
- Save the file in the lowest possible sound quality.
- Profit!
Attack of the unsinkable rubber ducks
The new Christopher Brookmyre novel, Attack of the Unsinkable Rubber Ducks, is top fun. Unless you’re into psychics or Intelligent Design.
I’m ashamed to admit I got the geeky in-joke on page 124 immediately.
Book joy
Idly wandering around Amazon last night I discovered that not one, not two but three of my favourite authors have new books out or coming out in the next week. Yippee! They are:
- Hurricane Punch by Tim Dorsey. Serge Storms is back!
- The Watchman by Robert Crais. Elvis Cole is back! Well, Joe Pike is.
- The Overlook by Michael Connolly. Harry Bosch is back!
They’re all out now bar the last one, which comes out on Monday. And there’s a new Christopher Brookmyre (Attack of the Unsinkable Rubber Ducks) due in August.
Biffo’s book
Mr Biffo’s book of chatroom silliness, Confessions of a Chatroom Freak, is very funny. I laughed so hard I ended up in America!
Admittedly I was on a plane to America at the time.
Not so funny: the tacked-on “blog entries” that were clearly the suggestion of the publisher. And the typography’s a bit crap.
Kurt Vonnegut dies
Scott Kelby isn’t very funny. Just as well the rest of his book’s good
My quest for a decent digital SLR book took me to Borders at the weekend where, after a bit of swearing - “all these books are thirty quid and written in gibberish!” - I found something that (a) looked decent and (b) wasn’t thirty quid: The Digital Photography Book, by Scott Kelby. And it’s very good, provided you skip the chapter intros which try far too hard to be funny and which fail miserably.
Everything else, though, is excellent. As Scott explains:
If you and I were out on a shoot, and you asked me, ‘Hey, how do I get this flower to be in focus, but I want the background out of focus!’ I wouldn’t stand there and give you a lecture about aperture, exposure, and depth of field. In real life, I’d just say, ‘Get out your telephoto lens, set your f/stop to f/2.8, focus on the flower, and fire away.’ You d say, ‘OK,’ and you’d get the shot. That’s what this book is all about.
And that’s exactly what I need. If you want lots of theory, it isn’t the book for you. If you want an idiot’s guide that doesn’t talk to you as if you really are an idiot, it’s well worth £13-ish.
Are my photos any better? Nope - but at least now I know why. And I’m fighting the urge to buy a zoom lens and a tripod.
Get a brain! Morans*
This is wonderful: Amazon user reviews of Orwell’s 1984.
“If you like reading about old people think they are beating the system by saving a PAPERWEIGHT, then by all means…”
“You might like this book if you are interested in predicting the future and you can read lots of difficult words and know what they mean.”
“This is the second time I’ve been forced to read this book for aclass, and I have to ask, “What’s the point?” Maybe if you live in a country that’s a monarchy, this book’s worth reading, but this is *America*, ok? The whole reason we live in a democracy is so that we the people don’t have to worry about things like this.”
(Via Charles Arthur’s blog)
* One of the greatest internet cliches ever.
Things what I have bought and are good
- The Road, by Cormac McCarthy. Bleak!
- Lost Planet: Extreme Condition for the Xbox 360. Fun!
- On The Wealth of Nations, by PJ O’Rourke. Witty!
This book is brilliant
I’d never read Joseph Wambaugh before, but a cover blurb from James Ellroy persuaded me to buy Hollywood Station. And it’s brilliant - like the best bits of NYPD Blue crammed into a single novel. Funny, too.
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Dead trees
One of the great things about the Xmas holiday is that it gives you the chance to catch up on your reading. I finally got round to reading two books I’ve been meaning to get for ages: Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion and Michael Bywater’s Big Babies.
The former is an intemperate rant against religion, and while it’s biased - Dawkins doesn’t give religion any credit for anything - it contains some great argument fuel. Dawkins’ demolition of Intelligent Design is superb, and he does a great job of lambasting the stupidity of people who believe that every word of the Bible is true while cherry-picking the bits that suit them and ignoring the bits that don’t.
My favourite one, though, was Big Babies. Subtitled “Why Can’t We Just Grow Up?”, Bywater’s book has been billed as humourous but struck me as deadly serious. His argument is that our culture is utterly infantile, largely because Baby Boomers rule the world and won’t accept that they’re not teenagers any more. Where the Grumpy Old Men shows and books cover fairly predictable irritants (Young people can be ignorant! Celebrities are vacuous!), Big Babies does a much better job of nailing the various idiocies of our age from nanny-state legislation to iPods, shell suits, CCTV and quackery.