Recently read: Game of Cages by Harry Connolly; City of Fire by Lawrence Yep; Bayou Moon by Ilona Andrews. Am now laughing my head off at Harry's original title for Game of Cages, Everybody Loves Blue Dog, as I get it now and it's hysterical. Completely not good as the final title, but very very funny.

New Plan! I have a lot of very cool books in the house which I am not reading because I buy them and then get distracted by the latest hold to arrive at the library for me, and so on. My New Plan is to read one book I've already bought and have sitting on my bookshelves for every book that I bring home (including from the bookstore and the library). I'm experiencing Total Fail in this department so far, but I have hopes that it might catch on.

I have, because I Love My Husband, and he is experiencing general lifesuck, given him first crack at I Shall Wear Midnight by Terry Pratchett. He was reading it in the bath, earlier in the evening. The book did not hit water, nor did water hit it. My husband still lives. Did I say that I Love him? I must.

I've been working in the bookstore (one day a week) for about three months now, and it is a Good Thing. I'd forgotten how much I like recommending books to people, talking away about this or that with that boingboingboing...read this! feeling of fun. I'm starting to get my book-selling feet under me again...it's been a long time since I worked in the bookstore and I was feeling that I had missed out on all the trends of the last seven to ten years, but it's getting better. Now I can tell myself that my reading at home is work-related, which it is, really, because how else can I recommend books but by reading as many as possible? I love having a justification beyond simple greedy book lust.

And how are you?

We went to visit my mother at Christmas, at her house in [city I no longer live in]. My mother has at least six IKEA bookcases of my books in her basement, as I didn't bring most of them with me when I moved to Toronto about sixteen years ago. I had originally intended to store them for a couple of years, while I did my grad work, but life intervened and they are still there. My mother is patient.

Every time I go to visit her, though, I bring a few back home. This time, I filled three bags full of books that I'd been thinking I'd like to reread, but only had room for one bag (the car was as full as it could be with books, presents, necessaries, and one guitar, and the guitar had precedence over the books. It's a 1963 Gibson; there is no way it's not coming with me). I'm rereading the Jhereg series, inspired to give the later books another go after papersky wrote some thoughts about them on the Tor website, and found all my copies except for Yendi. I have no idea why that one in particular is missing... I also found my Fafherd and the Grey Mouser books, and my six-volume Elric reprints from the 1980s. Last year, I put aside six boxes of paperbacks and other books for selling, but haven't sold them yet; the space I cleared still isn't anywhere near enough for the books I had before, let alone the books I brought back home, but that's beside the point.

Going home and browsing through my old bookshelves is like being able to take home anything I want from a bookstore I like, and intensely nostalgic at the same time. I think I'd save a good deal of money if I "went shopping" at my mom's more often...

I've been getting more reading done in the last few months than I did last year at this date. As of the end of last month, I've read 38 books so far this year, which means that I'm more than on target for the 50-book-a-year challenge. Yay! This makes me very very happy.

I've been enjoying the books that I've been reading, too. I'm working my way through the Merchant Princes series by Charles Stross (1 and 2 down, 3 under way) and started the Mercy Thompson books by Patricia Briggs (totally fluffy, totally tasty), finished a Meg Cabot novel (Boy Meets Girl) and read Michelle Sagara's new Cast novel (Cast in Silence).

The second Mercy Thompson book just came into the library for me, and I'm going to use it as a very tasty carrot to help me to finish off a project sitting on my desk.

Reading makes me happy. Obvious, but still worth performing a happy dance over occasionally.

I've been looking into the differences between romance, literature, and women's commercial fiction, and was wondering if anyone out there has any opinions on the matter. Yes, women's commercial fiction is a horribly vague category, but there are a lot of books sold using this term as a marketing category. I do believe, as well, that there are certain conventions in women's commercial fiction (e.g., the heroine must be, somehow, better off at the end than at the beginning), but would be interested in knowing what other people think that they might be.

The ratio of books acquired to books read is still out of whack, but it was my birthday last month and that always throws things off.

( Read more... )

who can be moved by matters greater than publishing...and that even an economics professor can be an incurable romantic.

I can tell you right now that the editors and production department had *so much fun* with this.


http://www.publishersweekly.com/article/CA6645753.html?rssid=192

Every once in a while, I'll buy a book on impulse instead of dutifully noting the title down in my notebook for when I go to the library or to avoid making that impulse purchase. When I do yield to this particular impulse, I generally read the book in two days or less, and the book in question is almost always different than what I usually read in some way. Sometimes I'm lucky, and sometimes I get that slightly sick feeling like I've just eaten too much candy. I bought David Gilmour's The Film Club as I was almost out of the store yesterday, I'm finished now, and I'm feeling the second much more than the first.

Gilmour was a film critic for the CBC, and I quite enjoyed his film reviews when they were on. I had heard a little about the book beforehand, and knew that it was a focused memoir. Gilmour's son Jesse, when he was 16, dropped out of school and spent the next three years living with Gilmour and his wife rent free, with pocket money and no requirements other than he watch three films a week with his dad. I'm not going to comment on the choice Gilmour made to allow his son to drop out; it's not my kid, not my life, not my situation. I do have two small boys, however, and I confess that I was curious about the book on that level in that I suppose that I'm already scouting for information and ideas for when they reach that age and I may be dealing with the same sorts of problems. Also, for a large portion of the book, they even lived in my neighbourhood, which gives it some more immediacy.

Be that as it may, I feel somewhat cranky about the book, to the extent that I will be passing it along soon rather than keep it. I'm cranky just looking at the cover on the radiator by my chair, which isn't all that good, and I'm trying to figure out why. A lot of great movies are discussed in passing, which is good, and Gilmour dishes a little about some of the directors and actors he's interviewed, which is not as much bitchy fun as it should have been. The first big problem is that Jesse remains a cypher to me throughout the book. I am not sure what he's all about, and I don't think that Gilmour knows either. To his credit, he just wants to connect with his son in any way he can, but the boy is opaque. Also, and here I think is the crux of it, I just don't like Gilmour that much. He's judgmental, a bit juvenile in some places, and I'm not sure if he didn't convey the interesting bits of what was a rather interesting and brave experiment very well or if there wasn't enough material to make it most of the book (it's about 256 pages). He also reveals an enormous amount of very personal detail about his son's girlfriends, and while the first does sound like a total piece of work, I still think that a lack of perspective or balance turns the book into a hatchet job on a girl who can't fight back, and is clearly identified. I was jarred by his identifying the girlfriends by name from the beginning (there is no disclaimer about changed names, if he did decide to mask them even lightly), and can't but think that this was wrong of him.

I'm still picking at this, as you can probably tell, but while I enjoyed thinking about certain films, and am glad that Jesse a) has a first-class film education and b) pulled his life back together, in large part thanks to his patient and creative parents, I think that Gilmour's neglect of the positions and feelings of others is a serious flaw in the book. Not that you should listen to me; a quick look at Amazon shows that a lot of people think I'm wrong. But I can say, without a doubt, that something didn't work for me here.

Ah...you know, I think that I just figured it out: this is a guy's book for other guys. I wasn't really meant to get in there in the first place.

Book meme!

Grab the nearest book. Open the book to page 56. Find the fifth sentence. Post the text of the next two to five sentences in your journal/blog along with these instructions.

Don’t dig for your favorite book or something cool, pick the closest.

From page 56 of Editing Canadian English, 2nd edition, prepare to be enlightened:

"4.30 The system of the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) uses no symbols but rather a three-letter code preceding the figure: two letters identify the country and the third the currency type. For example:

CAD Canadian dollar
GBP British pound
CHF Swiss franc

A Web search for 'ISO 4217 currency codes' will yield complete lists."

Sexy, isn't it?

It's been a great year so far for buying books, but much less awesome for reading them (work, kids, 17 other options). I'm not going to make my 50+ in a year for the first time ever, I think. Rather than mope about it, however, let's move on. In September, I rifled through a number of books, but only succeeded in finishing Chalice by Robin McKinley, and A Few Seconds of Panic: A 5-Foot-8, 170-Pound, 43-Year-Old Sportswriter Plays in the NFL by Stefan Fatsis. Chalice was a comfortable, lovely read, and a bit more on A Few Seconds of Panic in a moment.

Bought:
( Read more... )

oyceter and rachelmanija have been discussing the top five worst books they've ever read. I normally don't like to bitch about bad books (life's too short), but there have been a few books that I've wanted to scrub from my brain.

I've read a lot of bad books in my time--badly written, badly plotted, and even vaguely unpleasant--because a bad book can be better than no book or I didn't know any better, and I've learned my lesson; or there was a test. Most of them I've forgotten, and moved on from. Some, however, have stuck in my head and have continued to annoy me. In no particular order are:

1. The Mayor of Casterbridge by Thomas Hardy. I think that this was the first book or author that I ever developed a true animus for. The main character is unpleasant, it is true, but this unpleasantness is crushed underfoot, relentlessly, by Hardy's use of deus ex machina, ensuring that horror, bleakness, and total ruin must occur just when the character's doing something good or right with his life. There is no redemption; only punishment when one dares to find happiness after error. I had to read it for Grade 12 English. The horror. The horror.
2. Apaches by Lorenzo Carcaterra. Very early on, there is a gratuitous, graphic child rape scene that I wish I'd never read. Book abandoned, but not soon enough.
3. Little People by Tom Holt. I'm tossing this one in for my husband, who recently gave it to me and told me that it could leave the house and he would not mind at all. Please understand that he is a packrat of the first order, and so this is rather damning. I am given to understand that the payoff at the end is cheap and unfair, and leaves a very bad taste in the reader's mouth after the lead up.
4. Piers Anthony. I know, we all pick on him, but after Firefly, he particularly deserves it.
5. Sexual Personae, by Camille Paglia. A book that I have repeatedly wanted to throw against a wall, despite several tries to make it through. Chthonic, all-consuming mother goddesses vs Apollonian, creative male sun deities without which we'd be stuck in stagnant, uncreative darkness. Where do I start? However, I understood right away where Elizabeth Hand mined her ideas for Waking the Moon, which I didn't dislike as a novel.

An honorable mention, of a sort, goes to The Stone Angel by Margaret Laurence. I had to read this book for Grade 13 English (that dates me, somewhat), and hate hate hated it at the time. To grossly oversimplify the plot,it is the story of Hagar Shipley, a woman who, through her own stubborn pride, locks herself emotionally from those she loves, and makes a general hash of it.

The problem with the book was, despite how much I detested the main character, I kept arguing with her in my head. For years, as I kept the book on my shelf instead of selling it. Slowly, because I can be dense sometimes, it dawned on me that I was doing so because Laurence had written her *that well*. God damn it. So, while I can't say that I'll ever love the book, I respect it and Laurence for the strength of the character that she created.