(In)Frequently Asked Questions

Q: Will you review a book if I send it to you?
A: Probably not, but feel free to send me an email asking.

Q: I can't find a copy of a book that you've reviewed; can you help me out?
A: If you can't find a copy of a particular book for a reasonable price, then it's almost certain that I can't either -- I probably borrowed it from the library or a friend. Interlibrary loan is the single best way to get access to a rare book. If you want to own a copy of a hard-to-find book Alibris and eBay are great places to start.

Q: Do you have any book reports, Cliff notes, etc.?
A: No, and I don't respond to email of this form. Do your own homework, kids.

Q: How do you find out about all these books?
A: Finding books is not the problem -- finding time to read them is. Besides browsing bookstores, book pages on the web, and lists of prize winners, I get lots recommendations from friends, colleagues, family members, and random people on the net. I also track down literary references in books I like.

Q: Aren't you an "Amazon Associate" or something?
A: No, I think it's tacky to link every book on a personal book page to a bookstore. I'd rather have people patronize a locally owned bookstore anyway. I pretty much agree with Kristen on this subject.

Q: Are you an unusually fast reader?
A: No, I don't think so. Rather, I watch minimal TV and try hard to protect my daily reading time, even if it's just 15 or 20 minutes after dinner or before going to bed.

Q: How many hits does your site get?
A: During 2002 about 574,000 HTML pages were fetched from my book site. Between Feb 2000, when I started hosting this site at regehr.org, and the end of 2002 these pages received 2.23 million HTTP requests. (These are different figures because not all HTTP requests result in a page being fetched.)

Q: How are these pages produced?
A: The "sources" for these pages are several structured text files that are converted to lots of html by a kludgey 2000-line Perl script. The script evolved into existence during the summer of 1997 as I figured out what I wanted these pages to be (and learned Perl), and I've been incrementally modifying it since then. I eventually want to create a freely available general purpose software package for making a database of book information available over the web, but that project is barely into the design phase. (Mail me if you have any ideas about this, or want to help.) Life is too short to either create html by hand or deal with crappy WYSIWYG html editors.