Posts Tagged ‘reading’

Nooks Are Awesome

Thursday, March 3rd, 2011

Kat and I decided to treat ourselves this tax return, and got ourselves both Nooks.  We agree that this was a really good idea, a huge quality of life improvement, and generally pretty nifty.  I led the way, and after a couple of days she ended up getting one too — because while I expected to like my Nook, I didn’t expect to like it nearly as much as I did.  Surprise, I guess.

Of course, the first thing I did was visit the Baen Free Library and Project Gutenberg.  Kat also ran across Feedbooks, which is pretty neat, but the open-source public domain selection seems quite a bit smaller than Gutenberg’s.  The Feedbooks ones might be a bit higher quality (as much as that matters in ebooks) and Feedbooks had The Great Gatsby, which I didn’t find on Gutenberg, but all things considered I prefer Gutenberg for my public-domain works.

Of course, the first thing I noticed in the Baen Free Library was that it contained 1632 and 1633, which I had just recently bought in physical form.  Which is fantastic; they’re both great books, I’m delighted to be able to carry them around on my Nook, and I don’t mind supporting the author a bit.  Still, if I’d known, I would have picked up 1634: The Galileo Affair and 1635: The Cannon Law instead.  Drat.

I also scored almost the entire Honor Harrington series, by virtue of running across a copy of War of Honor that came with a CD with the entire series to that point on it.  This made me rather explicably happy, though I haven’t got around to the series yet.  I mean, I haven’t even cracked open Towers of Midnight, which I got for Christmas, yet.  This is mainly because I want to do a full reread of The Wheel of Time this time around — I didn’t when A Gathering Storm came out, and while I got along well enough it’s been a few more years now.  I also have The Way of Kings, which, again, I’m looking forward to but I want to get some smaller stuff out of the way before I jump in.

Of course, at the moment “smaller stuff” is The Wise Man’s Fear.  When I found out I could preorder it on my nook and have it in my hands pretty much the instant it came out, I pretty much had to do so.  The Name of the Wind is my favorite fantasy book since . . . well, since Tolkien, probably.  No, actually, I like it more than Tolkien.  This probably owes itself to the fact that I was pretty well steeped in post-Tolkien fantasy by the time I got around to reading The Lord of the Rings.  You know that guilty feeling when you read (or watch, or hear) something classic and it feels derivative, but you know it’s actually the original and all the stuff you read before is derivative of it, but you still can’t quite like it as much as you feel like you should?  I have that with Tolkien.  It’s kind of sad, actually.  I feel like someone’s going to kick in the door and revoke my geek credentials.

Regardless, I got The Wise Man’s Fear on my nook, and also The Name of the Wind since I gave my first copy to my mom a year or so ago.  (No regrets on either count; I like having it on my nook, I’m happy to throw a little more money Rothfuss’s way, and that book deserves to be shared.)  I finished reading The Name of the Wind at 2 AM on the 1st, so I couldn’t really have timed it much better if I’d tried (which I did, to be fair (am I a parentheses addict?)).

Of course, it’s the 3rd now and I’m . . . well, I was going to say “only X pages in,” but X=413 so I’ll just shut my trap.  Yeah, I haven’t gotten quite as much reading done on it as I could have, but let’s face it, I have a lot more time right now than most people.  Which is rather nifty.

Well, I’ve rambled enough for now.  I’m going to get a bit of writing done, if my muse will cooperate.

Current music: My primary Pandora station, via a Chrome extension.  Current song is . . . The Taste of Ink, by The Used.  I think I preferred the Creedence Clearwater that was just on, but then Down On the Corner is a hard act to follow.

Tags: , ,
Posted in Life, reading | No Comments »

Amusement in Bite-Size Chunks

Wednesday, January 27th, 2010

Most of the RSS feeds I watch tend toward the long side.  Generally this is a good thing.  I enjoy reading the wide variety of articles at Tor.com; I like reading lengthy Scalzi-rants or game reviews by Shamus Young.  Sometimes, though, I just need a bite-sized chunk of amusement to pick me up.

Historically, these bite-size chunks have been most frequently proffered by webcomics.  For the last several months, I’ve been subscribed to F My Life.  A frequently hilarious site, FMyLife is a place where people come to offer twitter-like explanations of why their life, at that very moment in time, sucks. Really, its only significant downside is it makes me feel like a horrible person for laughing.

Enter It Made My Day.  It’s pretty much the same thing, except instead of horrible happenstances it’s happifying ones*.  IMMD.

*Interestingly, some IMMD posts look a lot like FML posts, the notable difference being that the author ended with IMMD instead of FML.  This says things about psychology and stuff.

Tags: ,
Posted in Life, reading | No Comments »

It’s good to know I still can.

Friday, January 22nd, 2010

Right now, I’m reading Neil Stephenson’s Anathem.

Count ‘em.  One book.  What’s wrong with me?

The worst part is, I’ve been reading it since . . . oh, some time before Christmas — and I’m on page three hundred ninety something.  Somehow or other, for some unknowable reason, I just haven’t gotten much reading done lately.

But I feel good.  Because two hundred of those pages?  I read ‘em last night.  Just sat down and read, finally forced myself to stop because I figured I should get some sleep, checked the clock, and discovered that I wiped them out in just a bit less than two hours.

It’s good to know I can still do that.  To some extent, a lot of my identity and self-confidence — a lot of my self-image, really — ties into reading.  I like to read.  I really like to read.  And it seems like, for the past five years or so, reading just gets pushed further and further back on my agenda, until I start to wonder if I’m still allowed to identify as an avid reader.*  So two hundred pages in two hours feels pretty good to me.

*I say “the past five years” as opposed to “the past three months” because, while my reading time has dramatically decreased even from what it was before she was born,** it’s really been dropping ever since I went to ASMSA in 2004.  As in, I read the (I think) seventh book of The Wheel of Time in a couple of days before I went there, and the eighth over the course of a couple of months.  I’ve been busy ever since.

**And I don’t begrudge her that.  She’s pretty darned awesome.

Tags: ,
Posted in Life, reading | No Comments »

General Updatery

Saturday, November 21st, 2009

Hopefully it will come as no surprise that my NaNoWriMo push this year is about where it was when I mentioned I’d try for it.  I did allude to the insanity of the plan, after all.

What surprises me is the backup I found the other day.  I was looking through my flash drive backups for something else entirely, and found a backup of nothing but my programming folder — which was, it should be noted, the only significant casualty to my flash drive dying earlier this month.  It was an up-to-the-day backup, too.

This borders on being a religious experience.  I think Great Cthulhu wants me to continue work on that roguelike.

In other news, life is pretty awesome.  Things are looking up in general; my kid is doing great (save for some acid reflux and colic), and has begun occasionally sleeping as much as four hours at a stretch.  (This is actually better for Kat than for me, as I sleep like the dead.  She doesn’t.)

And, I now have a signed copy of The Gathering Storm.  A friend of mine got it for me and shipped it down, for which I am now eternally indebted.  I’m reading the book now, and of course it’s great.  It also has me thinking.  See, Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson have a funny place in my writing/reading history: they’re the two writers who, more than any others, got me writing.

I’ve wanted to be a professional writer for a long, long time.  My earliest major writing project would have been when I was about ten, when I decided to write a sci-fi trilogy.  For years, that project (called Trikan) was the largest body of cohesive text I had managed to assemble.  (I’m looking it over now, and it’s . . . er, not as bad as I thought it would be, actually.  It’s also eight thousand words long.  Go, younger me.  But it’s still never seeing the light of day.)*

After Trikan, there was a lengthy period when I didn’t get any really significant writing done.  It was Robert Jordan’s The Wheel of Time that inspired me, the summer before I left for ASMSA, to get to work on a big project again.  That was when I started the project formerly known as The Storms of Heaven, and when I wrote most of the novella Ghost Ship — which astute readers (and people I’ve trapped in conversation long enough) may recognize as the work that formed the basis of Derelict.  If I hadn’t read The Wheel of Time then, there’s a pretty good chance these would never have gotten written.  It was a pretty influential work for me, to say the least.

Fast-forward to last year.  Having heard of Brandon Sanderson via his connection to The Wheel of Time, I picked up the books of his that were out at the time (Elantris and Mistborn: The Final Empire — I didn’t spring for The Well of Ascension until it came out in paperback.)  I read them.  I loved them.  And they inspired me to write again.  If I had to pick a single influence that got me started on Derelict in its full novelish glory, I would pick Brandon Sanderson.

I didn’t make these connections until recently — not as such, anyway.  The knowledge was there, in the back of my mind.  The reason it comes to mind now is because now I’m reading The Gathering Storm, which is by the two authors who have influenced and inspired me the most.

I wonder what’ll happen this time.

*Interestingly, the science vessel from which the characters of Trikan hail was named the Blue Star, and the salvage vessel from which the characters of Derelict hail is the Blue Star IV.  I was not aware of this, and to my knowledge wasn’t aware of it at the time that I wrote Ghost Ship.  Funny how the mind works.

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

Genre Supercolliding

Friday, October 2nd, 2009

I’m a big fan of science fiction, fantasy, and everything between or tangentially related to the above.  (I also rather like Dickens, and enjoyed reading The Great Gatsby and The Grapes of Wrath, lest anyone think I only read completely fantastical stuff.  Though now that I think about it, the sheer amount of coincidence in Great Expectations could almost qualify it as fantasy.  That’s not my point, though.)

One of my favorite things is genre busters.  I said the other day that I enjoy reading things that break out of the normal molds.  Well, not just reading.  One of the reasons I like anime (and manga) so much is because there’s a marked tendency to stray farther from the norm than we usually see in Western media.  A lot of this, I think, has to do with the fact that drawing a really cool vampire-demon-thing and drawing a regular person are much more similar, budgetarily speaking, than filming the same things.  And to be fair, it’s often not that they don’t conform, but that they conform to a different set of stereotypes and genres.

But where else can you enjoy a slice-of-life story on a terraformed Mars?  (Seriously, if you know, tell me.  There’s gotta be others, right?)  I read a lot of YA for the same reason — YA is a market in which genre-bending and outright genre-busting are generally well received.  I love the Pern books (though technically sci-fi, they have their share of fantasy tropes).  I love King’s Dark Tower series.

For the period of time that Dragon magazine ran with Polyhedron on the flipside, I had a subscription.  Every two months I would get Dragon in the mail and immediately ignore every single adventure in it, flipping it over to get to the Polyhedron mini-game.  The cancellation thereof was one of the great tragedies of my youth.  (Can I say that yet, or do I need to wait a few more years?)  The mini-games were great.  There were about a dozen of them in all, and they took the D20 rules I knew and loved and converted them into some wild, and fascinating, things.  A D20 update for Spelljammer.  Thunderball Rally, a 70s race-across-the-US (and blow up everything in your path) game.  Mecha Crusade.  Omega World, a Gamma World-inspired post-apocalypse game of doom.  I loved, and love, these, each and every one; to this day I occasionally pull these old troopers out when I want to run a one-shot.

And not just the one-shots that they’re designed for.  I prided myself on the ability to, on the spur of the moment, throw together a wildly disparate setting for a session or minicampaign from the various elements at my disposal.  I once ran a Spelljammer campaign using the vehicle modification rules from Thunderball Rally.  (Don’t ask me how.)  I ran post-apocalyptic D&D with mecha.  Call of Cthulhu racing games.  (The Thunderball Rally rules were a perennial favorite of mine because of the vehicle customization.  I’ve not before or since seen a better system in an RPG for tricking out your ride.  I know they’re out there, but humor me.)  Give me an hour, a spark of an idea, and my bookshelf, and I would pull rulesets from a half-dozen different sources to create a wildly experimental campaign of doom.  I loved that.  (Still do.  Shhh, it’s a secret.)

This is actually a lot of why I don’t like 4th edition D&D as much as 3rd — it’s not nearly as adaptable.  The sole fact that monsters use different rules than PCs again just breaks my heart.  In my Zosias games, the monster manual is really the Great Big Book o’ Races.  I almost wish I was joking.  Want to play a blink dog paladin?  Sure, it worked pretty well last time.  Awakened horse fighter?  That guy had great potential, pity the campaign never carried on.  The saving grace of my ability to run the game is that I do the same thing for NPCs.  Amnesic green dragon dreamwalker?  Great.

I’ve got more and more coherent things to say on the subject, but I’ll save that for another day.  For now, over and out.

Current Music: Avril Lavigne, Sk8tr Boi, and Alice in Chains, Them Bones, on loop.

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment »

So that’s what it is

Friday, September 25th, 2009

Jo Walton has a nifty article up at Tor.com discussing the almost-dead gothic romance genre.  It’s fascinating and well worth a read.  For years, Mary Stewart’s Touch Not the Cat has held a place on my favorites shelf, and now I finally know what genre it is.

It’s kind of neat to look back and see genres that have disappeared or almost disappeared from modern shelves.  I’m generally a big fan of stuff that mixes genres or pushes genre boundaries, and I like it when things break free of the normal constraints.  So wandering across a whole new genre is kind of cool, in its own way.

Current Music: Red Hot Chili Peppers, Snow (Hey Oh).

Tags: , ,
Posted in Uncategorized | 2 Comments »

The Forgotten Beasts of Eld

Wednesday, June 24th, 2009

I mentioned a while ago that I was reading The Forgotten Beasts of Eld, by Patricia A. McKillip.  Well, I still am, partially because of all the other stuff I’m reading — I read a few pages now and again, but I’m basically reading it on the side.

Well, until now.

At the end of the sixth chapter, some hundred and sixty pages into the paperback, I just read one of the most marvelously tense scenes I can remember reading in a while.  I’d say more, but, well, I’m afraid of spoilers.

Reading the book has been something of an odd experience for me.  I’m enjoying it, don’t get me wrong, but despite my having no particular expectations regarding it, it’s not what I expected.  Most of this, I think, is the prose.  The book started out with a very fairy-tale feel to me, but at some point — I’m not exactly when — slipped into the lyrical prose I’m now enjoying.  The methods of characterization are odd to me in some way I haven’t yet defined, but while the initial characterization felt weak to me, now that I’m deeper into the book the characters feel deeper to me than I’d expected.  Well, mainly the protagonist, to be fair: but the beasts (is it a spoiler to say that The Forgotten Beasts of Eld contains beasts?) have an almost elemental quality to their personalities.

I haven’t finished this book yet, but I know I’ll be watching for more by McKillip (and she’s written quite a few of them).  Certainly I anticipate re-reading this one a couple of times to study the storytelling in it.

UPDATE: Having paused just long enough for the preceding blog post, I then proceeded to finish the book.  . . . Wow.  I am reminded of why I bother reading random books of which I know nothing: occasionally, I find one like this.

Tags: ,
Posted in reading | 2 Comments »

Robert Asprin’s MythAdventures books

Thursday, June 11th, 2009

I’m currently reading the MythAdventures books by Robert Asprin (Another Fine Myth, Myth Conceptions, etcetera).  I’ve read the first half dozen or so before, and with the addition of a missing volume to my library (courtesy of the same kind fellow who originally hooked me up with the rest) I’m now reading the series again, in anticipation for getting farther this time.  I like these books — I really like them — so I thought I’d offer a quick mini-review.

The Good:

-Easy to get into, familiar fantasty but with plenty of unique elements.

-Great characters.

-Funny fantasy that manages to have an engaging plot while still keeping me laughing.  The books are chock-full of hilarious turns of phrase and chunks of dialog, and some of those chapter quotes positively kill me.

-Reasonably bite-size books, but plenty of them.

-Generally upbeat.

The Bad:

-Since the books are written in first-person, my mind is still set there when I sit down to write, and I have a confused few seconds while I remember that I’m writing third-person.

-Obsessively reading the books cuts into my sleep time, sometimes rather harshly.

Right, I think that about does it. Good night!

Tags: ,
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

What I’m Reading

Wednesday, June 3rd, 2009

For a long while, I didn’t get a lot of reading done.  This made me a bit sad.  When I was younger, I was that kid that always had two or three books on my person.  But for a while now, it’s seemed like I just don’t have the time to read that I used to.

There are a lot of reasons for that.  For starters there’s work.  While this is arguably analagous to school, the fact remains that I can’t finish my work early and read for half an hour most class periods.  Instead I read the ten minutes or so I have left on break after I finish eating.  Then there’s working on the novel, which takes a lot of time, especially when I’m having trouble forcing the words out.  There’s my daily webcomic checks — which take a minimum of an hour, as I read . . . I don’t even know the count anymore.  Over forty webcomics that I check daily.  That counts as reading, but what I’m really talking about is novels.  Finally there’s gaming — pencil-and-paper RPGs and a variety of video games.  A lot of fun, and I don’t regret the video games — but I’ve missed that time when I’d blow through four novels, minimum, in a week.

Slowly but surely, I’m getting back there.  I finished Seeker rather quickly, through the simple expedient of not sleeping, eating, or using the Internet until I did so.  And I’m reading five books right now, which makes me happy.  So here’s the list:

Making Money, by Terry Pratchett.  This is the main one right now, and I already mentioned it’s one of my new ones.  Very good.

The Forgotten Beasts of Eld, by Patricia A. McKillip.  I know nothing about this book.  It’s one of the ones I picked up on a recent thrift store raid, and I’ve only just started it.

Relativity, by Albert Einstein.  I’m about two-thirds of the way through.  It should come as no surprise that this makes for rather dense reading, but Einstein was (*ahem*) a genius, and this carries over to his writing.  The material is very well presented, and much easier to understand than I had been led to expect.

The Songs of Distant Earth, by Arthur C. Clarke.  This has always been one of my favorite Clarke books.  I’m rereading it, and about a quarter of the way in.

Dracula, by Bram Stoker.  Another re-read, but this one is presented in a rather nifty format: since it is an epistolary novel (that is, composed of assorted letters, journal entries, etcetera), one Whitney Sorrow had the clever idea of posting it piece by piece on the dates of the entries so that it can be experienced in real time.  Check it out.

So why am I reading these all at once?  Well, because I feel like it.  Sometimes I feel like reading a bit of Clarke.  Sometimes I’m in a humorous mood, or a mood to be cheered up, and I read Pratchett.  Sometimes I’m in the mood to get a mild headache, and I read Einstein.  I also strew the books about in several places, so that when I feel like reading I just pick up the closest one.  And Dracula, of course, I read as it comes out.

Before I sign off, let me add one last word about Arthur C. Clarke.  The man was a genius, and just how much this is true struck me on this read-through of The Songs of Distant Earth.  It’s been a while since I read any of his work, and I was reminded of why he’s one of my favorites.

If you have a copy of the aforementioned book handy, flip it open to the first page and check out that opening sentence.  (If you don’t, don’t worry, I’m about to quote it.  Telling you to flip it open anyway is my way of tricking you into reading it.)  It really struck me this time through.

“Even before the boat came through the reef, Mirissa could tell that Brant was angry.”

How much do we learn about the book from this sentence alone?  We already have two characters, and a hint of their personalities and relationship.  We have a bit about the setting — we’re waterside, boating is apparently not uncommon to these characters, and the presence of a reef suggests an island location.  (That may be because I don’t know much about coastlines, though.)  Regardless, it’s impressive.

And on that note — I bid you all well.

Tags:
Posted in Life | No Comments »

New books!

Monday, June 1st, 2009

Saturday my wife and I made a Barnes & Noble run.  I meant to blog about it at the time — I really did — but I started reading one of them first, and, well, I made it to work but that was about it.

The first book I got was Jack McDevitt’s Seeker, which I had never heard of.  That’s the one that kindly informed me, Saturday night, that I would not be doing anything nonessential until I finished it.  I bought it based on the cover quote, from Stephen King: “The logical heir to Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke.”  That’s the kind of recommendation I can get behind.  Seeker is a wonderful book, set in my favorite type of sci-fi world — a far-future setting in which mankind is spread across the stars.  I’d say more about it, but what I’ve said already pushes my spoiler limit.  I am, shall we say, really funny about spoilers.

Which brings us to the second book I got, Terry Pratchett’s Making Money, which I am now reading.  If I had realized buying it that Making Money was a direct sequel to Going Postal, I would have bought that instead.  Pratchett is one of the authors I’ve neglected the thorough reading of in the past; I was only recently introduced to him via Monstrous Regiment, and I was delighted to find that it stood very well on its own.  Making Money does as well, but even so it is a testament to Pratchett’s skill as a storyteller that I didn’t immediately put it down until I got a copy of Going Postal.  The fact that it shows the same characters and refers occasionally to events from its prequel would normally cause me to do so in a hurry, but Pratchett’s skill overcomes my obsessive need to avoid spoilers at all costs.  Overall, I’m quite enjoying the book.

Since I mentioned them in both previous paragraphs, I’ll say a few more words about  spoilers.  I dislike them, and I consider a lot of things spoilers — or at least spoiler-ish — that most people wouldn’t.  When I say I’m picky about spoilers, I really mean it.  I avoid reading back cover copy whenever possible for books and movies.  My ideal situation, going into a book, movie, or series, is walking in blind with no idea of what I’m in for.  I love that.

I had more that I meant to say, but I think I’ll leave off there for now.  In summary: I heartily recommend McDevitt’s Seeker, and I will be looking for more of his work.  Pratchett is an amazing storyteller, but read Going Postal before Making Money if you don’t like spoilers.  Finally, I really, really don’t like spoilers.

Live long and prosper.

Tags: ,
Posted in Life | No Comments »