Text Book
Where You Can Buy English Books When You Go Overseas Country
August 31, 2011 | 
Author I love reading. I probably read more than the average person. I spend hours reading both computer technical books and books for entertainment. When I first came to Thailand, one thing I had to really get used to is the lack of reading paper books. There are many bookstores but few have a large selection of English print titles. Back home in the States, I had a fairly large library of technical books…mostly Cisco Press and Sybex books on networking. My fiction reading was mostly quenched by going to a Barnes & Noble or Boarders book store…or to the Chicago Public library off of State and Congress when I lived there.
Now I have just a handful of paper books and the bookstores/libraries here are limited as to any English language books. Fortunately, we live in a digital media age where most books can be found online either for free, for a fee per-book or through a book club membership where you can “checkout” virtual books for a monthly fee.
I use Amazon’s Kindle applications for my recreational reading. I tried both the Kindle and Barnes & Noble iPhone apps and found that the Kindle app was a bit more user friendly. Using Amazon or any other online bookstore for recreational reading can be expensive if you want to read all the latest books. Considering I typically wait until a book comes out on paperback before I purchase it, E-books are fairly expensive at -20 each. Fortunately, Amazon offers many books for free. Many of these books are “classics”. For years I’ve said I want to go back and read many of the classic books that I missed growing up. Now I’m able to do so in a digital format. For example, I recently finished reading “Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea” by Jules Verne. It didn’t cost me a cent. I have purchased several books through the Kindle app such as the new Dan Brown book “The Lost Symbol”.
Just a day before the Apple iPad was announced along with the iTunes bookstore, Amazon released a Kindle application for Windows and Mac OS X which lets you read kindle books on your PC or MAC. This is a nice addition and comes in handy for extended readings. The Kindle application is available for other mobile platforms including Android and Blackberry and even the iPad itself.
I have considered buying both the Kindle E-Reader and iPad but honestly, they’re too big for me. I like the ability of having books in my pocket. The fewer gadgets I carry around, the better. The screen size of the iPhone really isn’t that bad at all and the Kindle app options gives you the opportunity to customize the text size, text color and background colors to suit your preference and lighting conditions. I do much of my recreational reading in the dark before bed and find that white text on a black background is the least straining for my eyes.
For my technical needs, I use Safari Books Online. This is an online book “club” where you pay a monthly fee (annual fees also available) and can checkout technical books from most of the major publishers including Cisco Press, Sybex, O’Reilly and Prentice Hall. All the big players in the IT field are represented here.
My particular subscription costs .99 a month for “10 slot” bookshelf and 5 download tokens a month. A download token lets you download the PDF of a single chapter or section of the book that is in your bookshelf. Here’s a screen capture of My CCNA Voice Study Guide in my bookshelf:
One can purchase additional tokens… for 5 tokens but I’ve never needed to buy any more as the tokens accumulate for up to 3 months and I typically only download 2-3 chapters a months.
For a very brief time, Safari had an iPhone app on the iTunes store but it’s no longer available. The app was available before Apple had their own book store so it probably was removed due to a conflict with Apple’s book store or some copy-write issues with one or more publishers.
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Should We Exclude Lu Xun’s Work from Junior High School Text Books?
The first time I access to Lu Xun’s work could trace back to my junior high school period. I have no impression which article written by him I exactly read at the very beginning. While the majority of his works didn’t bring me a wonderful memory, on the contrary, they are far more dismal and abstruse.
Lu Xun is one of the most excellent authors in modern times. His articles based on the ugly side of the politics were used to wake up befuddle Chinese. His articles are the beacon, without it, there is not secure direction, without direction, and there is no life. It is as important as we need that is used to avoid appearing lazy and egotistic emotion.
Why do we learn literature in class? Learning language, knowing words, studying grammars, dealing with exam, and so on, but all they are secondary. I think the most important target is to set up a good and comprehensive philosophy for ourselves as we learn history. Perhaps everyone’s view of life is different, but at least it should be healthy and comprehensive, because a healthy person must have a healthy mind that is so important in all life. We read these articles of literatures then know and draw the different thoughts of different authors to build and modify our thought of the world more and more mature and perfect. In my mind, it’s a key time to build our views of life in middle school, and the element of LuXun is quite required and needful in our thought.
In fact, the style of LuXun’s articles is critical, but not sunless. I think the center spirit of all his works is one word:”Scowl to oppose fiercely the one hated by multitude of people, bows the head to serve the people whole-heartedly like a willing ox.” What a great and sagacious man LuXun is! I never consider his thought is full of dark, only his bright is in deep. If real and careful to learn his articles, maybe you should feel more heartened, but not depressed.
Some teachers say that LuXun’s articles are too oppressed and the sufferings of history in his articles make the bright future invisible for the students. In this case, the appeal to reduce LuXun’s articles is not so much sliding over LuXun’s articles as sliding over of the history. That could not be the excuse for reducing LuXun’s articles. To be honest,I think I were a indignant youth to some extent when I was a senior high school student. That may partly be affected by the critical Thinking in LuXun’s articles. Hah,whether can I say that reading LuXun’s articles is good way to cultivate patriotism? But it must be admitted that LuXun’s articles are really hard to follow, and the way he spoke and wrote are very different form us today, which made those articles read somewhat clumsy. Time is changing, and it is useless to stick to the outdated things, as it has little to do with the students’ improvements of writing.
All in all, the main thing is to remember the history our country. The classical article can tell us what did happen at the time. And many articles are difficult to understand for junior high school students. They need teachers to guide them. But the martial arts fiction is easy to understand and it isn’t any benefit of a student’s growing of knowledge.
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