In My Mailbox

Breaking news from Cheekyness: I'm not dead! Nor likely to be soon, or so it seems.

So it's still Tuesday, when I blog about books, and since I haven't read more than a few pages of anything non-textbook in a couple of months, here's what all my textbooks look like this semester. All cover images are from Goodreads except the one indicated.

The Rhetorical Tradition, Patricia Bizzell & Bruce Herzberg

Okay, just kidding! This was from last semester. It has 1673 pages, and I'm pretty sure we read all but 500 pages of it. Holy moly. I'm happy to report that this semester's books all together don't add up to that many pages.

Web Development: A Visual-Spatial Approach, Craig Baehr

This one helps make a subject that I struggle with less scary. Although the author does use "comprise" on about every page in a way that makes me cringe.

HTML5 and CSS3, by Elizabeth Castro and Bruce Hyslop

This does not make a subject I struggle with less scary. I don't want to blame the authors, because they do a great job explaining it. My brain just hasn't built the necessary synapses yet.

Ethnography and Virtual Worlds, Tom Boellstorff, Bonnie Nardi, and Celia Pearce

I'd never even heard of ethnography until I read this book, so I guess it worked!









Observing the User Experience, Mike Kuniavsky, Andrea Moed, and Elizabeth Goodman

I don't have anything interesting to say about this. Didn't hate it, so that's something.








Topsight, Clay Spinuzzi (image from http://clayspinuzzi.com/book/topsight/, because Goodreads doesn't have the image, for reasons passing understanding)

A couple of weeks ago, I was doing some ironing and thinking that I needed to hurry up so I could get some reading done, and then I remembered that my Kindle will read to me. I turned on this book and a couple of minutes later thought, "Is that thing saying 'wicked'?" I generally expect to find 'wicked' in books that also include worlds inside closets, brightly coloured roads, or giant flaming eyes.

I picked up the Kindle and found that, yes, it did say 'wicked,' as in: "... wicked problems that are hard to solve..." It's hard not to like a book after a beginning like that. It's about research, as are most of my books this semester, but it's a very approachable book. I read most of it in a single day.



Tracing Genres Through Organizations: A Sociocultural Approach to Information Design, Clay Spinuzzi


Yep, I have two books from the same author. I haven't started reading this one yet, so I can't possibly comment.






Edited to add: Since Trisha and Delores asked-- I have a Kindle Keyboard, so I don't know about other models of Kindle. I have "Text to Speech" enabled in my settings, so to make it read aloud, I go to the book and press Up Arrow + SYM. You stop it from reading in the same way. For books that have headings and short paragraphs (as a couple of chapters of Topsight do), the reading feature isn't so great, because it reads the heading and then doesn't pause before starting on the paragraph. So the heading and the first word of the paragraph end up sounding like one long word. Otherwise, it's fantastic so far!

And that's it! Well, except for a few articles here and there. So, what are you reading this week?