Lists #2: Books of 2017

I regularly read ProfHacker‘s blog posts, and like very much those recommending books. I also read often recommendations from NYT, The Guardian, El País and Corriere, and I love the end-of-year lists of “best” books. Now, here’s my own book recommendations (ie, books I read and liked in 2017), with both essays and literature. I favor noirs at this moment, so the majority of books falls in this category. I find that fidelity to one particular kind/style of literature brings happiness and depth.

I use my GoodReads account to save books, since it has an immense catalogue in the three languages that interest me, Italian, English and Spanish. It also has an iPhone app through which I can scan a book’s barcode and save it, thus bridging the gap between the physical and the digital bookstores. I am not very comfortable knowing that it is a property of Amazon, but for the time being I shall let it be. I don’t either particularly love the widget GoodReads generates: It doesn’t work well with WordPress (they say it’s an iframe issue–of “security”, I guess) and in this case I was unable to display the covers at a larger scale; however, it generates some static HTML that can be CSS-styled on one’s own. But that’s it.

I like it also because it facilitates my entering review info or notes on each book, which is quite useful. Plus, I can export a cvs file with all my books whenever I want, so I feel safe about archiving something on which I have no control and could disappear as Amazon sees fit. I could use LibraryThing, which is mostly independent of Amazon, but it has no scanning app.

Books of 2017

Antonio’s bookshelf: read

Magic and Loss: The Internet as Art
really liked it
Very very good. I’ll write soon a post in my blog skateofweb.com. It is the first essay I read on the vernacular of the Web, the new language. Compelling, full of bright insights. Very instructive also from the point of view of education…

 


goodreads.com

[Featured image — “A shelf in my library”. Photo by me. Use: creativecommons License BY-NC-SA]

About Antonio Vantaggiato

Professor, web2.0 enthusiast, and didactic chef.
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One Response to Lists #2: Books of 2017

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