From the Library of...

I was recently pondering loaning out some books to a wider group of people, ones who I may not personally know. While doing so, I ended up writing down a lot of my thoughts about books and specifically about loaning them, as I was trying to work out what I would say to someone reading a loaned book.

So here you have my thoughts, in the form which I [if space permits] would likely put them in a "From the Library of..." at the beginning of a book I would loan out. Comments, thoughts and stories are all welcomed; criticism aimed at anything other than making this written form of my thoughts more clear [clearer?] should be avoided. :)

Thoughts About Books

1. Please treat any book like it was a treasured member of your family.
   If none exist, please give this book a hug and take care of it like
   you would want to be taken care of.
2. Much like a younger sibling, this book will probably get stains and
   creases as it ages. Trying to prevent that completely is a lost cause,
   but you may want to at least brush any dirt off so the next person can
   still read it.
3. Loaning a book is a lot like having children [or at least, I think so,
   not having any children]; At some point you have to let them go into
   the world and experience it on their own. They may find their own way,
   and they may return to you again and again. In either case your only
   hope is to cherish the experience of having known them, and welcome
   their return with open arms.
   • If you fall in love with this book and want to provide it a home,
     by all means do; I ask only that you treat it kindly, and share with
     me a story of how it came to your home. I worry over my lost children,
     and rejoice when one makes their own way in the world.
   • If you lose this book and find it again, share it with others. Unlike
     children, I can always buy another book; books that have been found
     have many stories about them, not just within the covers, and stories
     should be shared.
4. While writing is a thing to be treasured, when someone reads a book they
   are probably not interested in what you’ve written on the pages [unless
   you perhaps wrote the book!]. If you feel the need to write in this book,
   please do so here, in between the covers and before the story starts; poems,
   thoughts and dreams add a story to the book, rather than hide the one
   already written.
5. Reading a book should be enjoyable. While I only loan out books that I have
   enjoyed, that doesn’t mean you always will like them, or even that I enjoyed
   every single word or page. Take what enjoyment you can from each book, even
   if it’s as simple as reading a paragraph and deciding that you have no
   obligation to read the whole thing. Return it and someone else may find it.
   Similarly, I rarely agree with everything in a book; the only thing contained
   here that I agree with is what I have written here. And even that is
   uncertain: just because Present me wrote it doesn’t mean that Future me
   will agree.
6. I believe books should be shared; the stories you gain from the sharing may
   come to be even more important than the story you read in the pages. I love
   to hear how people experienced a book and what pieces they found interesting.
   If you want to share a story about a book, please do! If there’s no-one
   around to tell, please write it down and share it with me.

2AM: Not a good time to start reading.

So, after being up not overly late and conversing about short stories, I bounced along the web's links to various short stories. Oh, neat, A Study In Emerald is available online. I'd already read it, but it's an excellent short story: think Sherlock Holmes meets Cthulu (and delivered with Neil Gaiman's excellent prose). Oh hey, my favorite Gaiman short story is also online: How To Talk To Girls At Parties. This goes on for a while, but so far I am lucky and I have already read the stories I find that are online. Some I am looking for are not online - China Miéville's collection Looking For Jake, which has perhaps the scariest story I have read. I end up looking at various author's wikipedia entries, for they contain some information about upcoming books, when I hit a landmine.

John Scalzi's wikipedia entry mentions that "Agent To The Stars", the one book of his that I hadn't read, was originally published on the web. It's very familiar though. Oh, because there was a limited edition hardcover release, with Mike Krahulik providing cover art! Apparently there's a paperback release now - It says Oct 2008, so I must have missed it but I need to go buy it, now. But the entire story is still online!

You know how the next few hours went. Should you have time for a great story, go read it. But I don't recommend starting at 2am, for you'll still be up a few hours later, finishing it.

Open thread (open thread)

This is the open thread about open threads. So, what books have yall read lately?

Most recently here, I read:
_Glasshouse_ by Charles Stross
_Karma Girl_ and _Hot Mama_ by Jennifer Estep
_Radio Freefall_ by Matthew Jarpe

All were excellent, and I may get around to reviewing them sometime. The first is sci-fi, about a history professor (sorta) who gets his memory erased and proceeds from there. The second and third are superhero books, set in Bigtime. The author (and I think the books) I found out about via Girls Read Comics, and they are superhero action / romance / psychology. The last was a book which I spotted that had an absolutely beautiful cover. I ended up reading a chapter in the bookstore and had to get it. It's sci-fi and follows a musician named Aqualung (I caught the reference immediately! Thanks dad!), a computer programmer (sorta) and a band as they battle the evils of politics, censorship and lots of other stuff! Really tough to explain that one in a single line, but it was a good book and had some interesting ideas about artificial intelligences, communications distances and heterogeneity of society.

Addendum: So, I said it was the open thread about open threads, but it ended up being an open thread about books! Feel free to hijack it to talk about other stuff, like what open threads you've read recently that you found interesting. :)

Short Review

I've read a few books recently that I am having trouble writing longer reviews of. So here's short ones:

Accelerando, by Charles Stross. There are nine chapters, divided into three sets of three. Each set follows one main character, roughly, and each chapter is another jump in technology. Each chapter also stands alone pretty well, and I found myself trying to project what the next chapter would be like and found it impossible. But looking at previous ones it fits together perfectly how things got there, so it was a really neat effect. :)

Thirteen, by Richard K. Morgan. Based on other books by this author, I went in expecting a cool main character, an interesting plot with unforeseen twists, and no happy ending whatsoever, though it would also be a good ending. I was not disappointed on any count. The main character was cool and very interesting, the ending I expected happened about 2/3 of the way through the book and the rest was a major twist, and the ending was very good, but not exactly happy. There were also several very interesting ideas about racial/genetic identity and stereotyping, which were in the context of the story.

I seem to remember another book which I should review here, but it escapes me at the moment. It's likely Assassin's Apprentice, as I read that on the plane home from MI, but I don't recall what I was going to say about it.

Lies, Lies, Lies!

So, I finished reading The Lies of Locke Lamora, by Scott Lynch. Notably, this author was nominated for an award for best new author, and seeing as that was likely due to this book, I'm sad he didn't win, though perhaps it's a good thing, because that means that the author who did win must have had a BETTER first book. Wow.

You've probably already seen the Arcane Gazebo's review of it. If not, go read it either now or after you're done here. Please note that the following paragraphs may contain mild spoilers.

I really liked this book, and it falls into one of those weird categories of books for me: those that can't be read in a single sitting. This was due to the crazy complexity of the plot, and the quite unexpected turns it took at times, I just felt like I needed a breather before diving back in to the thick of things. This book contains the essence of the group heist movies: Italian Job, Sneakers, Confidence, to name a few that I've seen. No, I have not seen Ocean's 11 yet, though I picked up the DVD cheap. The lead man on the job is quite likable, and the gang is also great. Thus, finding out that this author is one of those for whom characters can and must die was a shock. Not that I mind that type of book, but wasn't quite expecting it here and so when several characters died
it was a very big shock.

Still, the plot was excellent and did a very good job of providing enough information that though it was being deceptive (unreliable narrative point of view, at times) you could still piece together some things before they got revealed, which is pretty satisfying. I'm definitely going to pick up the second book about the title character, as he's enough to keep me interested no matter the book.

Book Retrieval

Vromann's (a bookstore here in Pasadena) had many books which needed a good home.

I wasn't able to bring many home with me, but I did get more than usual. Here's the new arrivals:

Accelerando, Charles Stross
The Lies of Locke Lamora, Scott Lynch
Darwinia, Robert Charles Wilson
The Last Colony, John Scalzi
Rainbows End, Vernor Vinge

Also, as there's one book still on my to-be-read list from an earlier trip, I'll mention it as well:

Thirteen, Richard K. Morgan

Interesting things about these books: two of the five I bought today acknowledge TNH and PNH of Making Light (and I believe both of those were books which were edited by one of them). Their blog is usually very interesting, and the community which comments on it is one of the best I've seen. I believe both the authors which mention them have posted there, and there's a ton of interesting literary types there (and plenty of interesting non literary types, too).

Four of these books are sci-fi. One is fantasy, the other (Darwinia) I'm not sure how to classify based on the blurb on the cover, but I really liked one of his earlier books, Spin. I have read other books by four of these authors, and one book I got because I read a review of it. The last sentence of this paragraph is not needed to solve the logic puzzle posed therein, as the paragraph does not contain enough information on its own to do so anyways. But it would be cool if there was.

I will hopefully post some short (or long) reviews of these books as I read them, so if you're curious about them, stay tuned. Also, if anyone is particularly interested in one of the ones up there, let me know and I will try to write a longer review, or you can borrow it and write a guest review! :)

Sharing Knife

I finished reading _The Sharing Knife: Legacy_ today. The first book I had read a while back, but reread it before starting this one. The author is by Lois McMaster Bujold, one of my favorites for both the Vorkosigan series and the Cazaril series (ok, I know it's not his series, but I always think of it that way and don't recall the official name).

I thought it was good, and better than the first. I hesitate the recommend these two books though, both of them started out with scenes that left me decidedly uneasy, and while the rest of the books were usually a whole lot better, the openings were still a bit weird. The characters were pretty interesting, though I thought the female main character had extremely rapid personality changes, though that's based on the odd events at the beginning and could just be me. The good part was in the world building and societies involved, the Lakewalkers were well described and interesting, and the basic premise they were built on (seeds from a mage war centuries ago spawning new mage-creatures) was well developed. I think I'd like to see more books set in the same world, but from different points of view.

Yeah, I know I haven't said what the books were actually about, but I think that's not really necessary. If you haven't read any Bujold, I'd recommend you go read _The Warrior's Apprentice_ or _The Curse of Chalion_. If you have read Bujold, you may like this new series too, though it feels different from them in a way I can't quite place.

Soon I Will Be Invincible!

_Soon I Will Be Invincible_ is a book by Austin Grossman. I just read it based on the review over at Girls Read Comics. If you want a more critical review, go over there and read that one. The following is my not terribly critical review.

I really liked this book, and it was mainly due to the viewpoints used to tell the story: Doctor Impossible, evil genius super villain, and Fatale, futuristic cyborg who gets offered a spot on the super-team, the Champions. Doctor Impossible is exactly how I imagined an evil genius would work: logical, crazy ideas that he does make work, a humorous inner monologue, and even self-awareness of his villainry (is that a word?). He's got the plan right from the start, and though the key idea isn't revealed until much later, if you are carefully watching the details it's certainly possible to work out what he's doing.

Fatale, on the other hand, is very new to her abilities, and has that out-of-place perspective when she gets invited to join the world's most famous super team. This works really well, because she has the same thoughts and is curious about the same things that I was, figuring out how the different people on the team interact, what their real back stories are, that sort of thing. She's also one of the best people on the team at analyzing the situation and so getting the perspective from her eyes is key.

Finally, I was completely surprised by a plot twist near the end of the book. There were two, actually, but one of them was completely surprising and I thought it worked really really well. I'm going to have to go back and read it again just to be able to verify all the clues that were there (and there were plenty, since we got to see both sides of the story, the heroes and the villain). The entire world setting was pretty neat as well, I'd be tempted to run a superhero game in the setting just because there's a ton of great heroes and villains mentioned in passing which would make great characters.

I highly recommend this book for a fun read, especially if you like superhero comics, or stories from multiple interesting viewpoints.

In which books are "reviewed"

Books!

I recently read some books. This is probably not surprising at all, I tend to read books. What is surprising is that I will now review these books! Actually, since I pretty much like most every book I read, I'm just going to talk about the books I have read recently, and hope that that will serve as a useful review, or at least be interesting to read.

Book #1-3: Trading in Danger, by Elizabeth Moon. I also read Marque and Reprisal, the second book of the series, and Engaging the Enemy, the third book of the series. These were a slight twist on usual military sci-fi with a strong lead heroine (i.e., the Honor Harrington template), in that the lead character was a member of a family of traders, who at the start of the first book gets kicked out of the space academy for something she didn't realize was a mistake. Assisting me in this review is Cao Cao, who is entirely too curious about the laptop for my liking. Sorry for the non-sequitur. Anyways, the main character then goes into the role of a trading ship's captain, and ends up in one military situation after another, which was a pretty interesting and different take on the genre. The second and third books are also good, using the set-up of the first book to continue a long storyline involving the main character's family. Another interesting topic covers the FTL communications in the setting being controlled by a single corporation, and what happens when they get subverted. I haven't read the last book in the series yet, but only cause it's out in hardcover and I think it'll be in paperback soon.

Book N: March to the Stars, by David Weber and John Ringo. I've of course read a lot of Weber books, and knew he'd written some with John Ringo which I'd not yet read. So when I saw this one in the used bookstore, it was easy to pick up (sometimes used bookstore ones are hard as I won't recall if I've got it already or similar). Halfway through the book it became clear that it was the third book in the series. It was still quite good, the plot covering a stranded marine company and the prince (third heir to the Galactic Space Empire or whatever they called it) they were in charge of protecting. The prince apparently started out being pretty spoiled, but by this book he was pretty damn cool, and many of the characters were excellent. It also had some interesting insights into how four-armed roughly humanoid aliens would adapt to warfare ranging from swordfighting to rifle volleys and on to higher tech weaponry. Great characters and an interesting story, I'm going to have to pick up the two previous books, as well as the one after it in the series.

Other books which I may review in the future: Shadowplay, by Tad Williams. The Summer Tree, by Guy Gavriel Kay. Prime, by Poppy Z. Brite.