on Taking Sips (of Books) (part 2)
Last May, I published a list of all the books (42) I had sampled on Kindle. The editors of WordPress featured the post on the 'Freshly Pressed' section of the WP homepage, bringing thousands of readers here and prompting hundreds of comments.The suggestions that readers left the comments were helpful, but not totally followed. From the first list of samples, I ended up buying 6 of the books - 5 on the Kindle, and one in paperback.
- The Hobbit – J.R.R. Tolkien
- What Technology Wants – Kevin Kelly
- Aleph – Paulo Coelho
- Alone Together – Sherry Turkle
- Beautiful Testing – Adam Goucher
- The Four Loves – C.S. Lewis
Two I finished reading - Lewis and Turkle - the rest I've begun but haven't finished. (Tolkien 35%, Kelly 51%, Coelho 17%, Goucher 77%) I've also finished probably 15 others that weren't sampled or on the list.I have continued my habit of downloading samples without eventually making a purchase, and I think it's a good time to post a list again and ask readers for their opinions on which of the books I should finish.So, here are my Kindle 'samples' since May of last year:
- The Man who Invented the Twentieth Century - Robert Lomas
- Theory of the Leisure Class - Thorstein Veblen
- Leaving the Atocha Station - Ben Lerner
- Paris to the Moon - Adam Gopnik
- Triumph of the City - Edward Glaeser
- Tropic of Capricorn - Henry Miller
- The Social Contract - Jean Jacques Rousseau
- How to be Invisible - J.J. Luna
- Hackers & Painters - Paul Graham
- White Noise - Don Delillo
- Social Media is Bullshit - B.J. Mendelson
- NW - Zadie Smith
- Cyber War - Richard A. Clarke
- Social Engineering - Christopher Hadnagy
- Mr. Penumbra's 24 Hour Bookstore - Robin Sloan
- Maps and Legends - Michael Chabon
- Antifragile - Nassim Nicholas Taleb
- Ninja Innovation - Gary Shapiro
- The Postmortal - Drew Magary
- A Field Guide to Getting Lost - Rebecca Solnit
- This is How You Lose Her - Junot Diaz
- How to Be Alone - Jonathan Franzen
- IV (4) - Chuck Klosterman
- The Man who Loved China - Simon Winchester
- The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet - David Mitchell
- Frank: The Voice - James Kaplan
- Generation Me - Jean M. Twenge
- The Last Night of the Earth Poems - Charles Bukowski
- Friend v. Friend - Ethan J. Leib
- Where Men Win Glory - Jon Krakauer
- The Waves - Virginia Woolf
- The Power of Now - Eckhart Tolle
- In Defense of Food - Michael Pollan
- Love in the Time of Algorithms - Dan Slater
- Escape Velocity - Charles Portis
- How Google Tests Software - Wittaker, Arbon, Carollo
- Networks: A Very Short Introduction - Calderelli, Catanzaro
- The Facebook Effect - David Kirkpatrick
- the Breakup 2.0 - Ilana Gershon