Shades Of Gray / Jackie Kessler and Caitlin Kittredge
When last we left Jet and Iridium at the end of Black And White, they had defeated double agent Night but had also destroyed a transmitter run by…
Last week one of the book world’s outrages was Amazon going after independent stores by offering $5 off an order for using their price check app on a mobile phone inside an independent store. No, it’s not a very nice thing. Authors and book bloggers are almost universally pissed. But you know who isn’t pissed? Amazon customers, who are growing in number every day. Amazon offers a lot features, unprecedented selection, and best in business pricing. It’s pretty hard to compete with that. Most of the responses to this promotion strike me as pretty unproductive. It’s not that they are wrong, it’s that the retorts aren’t going to get people…
I’ve periodically posted link round-ups on bookish topics, but I’m finding that format doesn’t really work for me. That’s mostly workflow related, not content related. I like the idea of posting links that I find interesting because I see a lot of content that doesn’t seem to make the rounds. What I’d like to do is post the links with a bit of commentary as I find them. I’m not quite sure what format and venue would work best. Here’s what I’m considering: Google+ Read Irresponsibly has a Google+ page, and I’ve been posting some links there. I think the format there works really really well for links. There are…
James Nicoll ran some numbers on the numbers of male and female authors in the last five years of each of the major Year’s Best Collections. I am aggregating his numbers here in one place as he spread them across several posts, and I like to have one place to view and compare. He also has a few posts counting comparable numbers for discontinued year’s best series. Following are the tables and links: Gardner Dozois: TitleTotalMaleFemale Twenty-Eighth Annual Collection33249 Twenty-Seventh Annual Collection32257 Twenty-Sixth Annual Collection30228 Twenty-Fifth Annual Collection32248 Twenty-Fourth Annual Collection2821½6½ David Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer: TitleTotalMaleFemale Year’s Best SF 1621156 Year’s Best SF 1524168 Year’s Best SF 1421138 Year’s…
Michael Sears and Stanley Trollip form the writing team of Michael Stanley. They are native South Africans and are writing crime fiction series set in Botswana. Unlike the more famous one set in Botswana, the Detective Kubu series are police procedurals rather than cozies. LibraryThing’s EarlyReviewers had copies, so I grabbed one. Detective Kubu’s real name is David Bengu, but due to his size has received the Kubu nickname. That’s a Botswanan word for hippopotamus, though I don’t recall if the authors ever said which language the word comes from. This is the third book in the series, though he doesn’t make an immediate appearance. The murder happens at the…
Welcome to my buying guide for 2011, also known as my annual best read of 2011 list. I like calling these buying guides because that’s what most of the Best Books of 2011 lists really are. They come out now so that a business (Amazon, B&N, etc.) can talk customers into buying stuff for Christmas. This is one of the few times of the year where I’m going to get specifically promotional about books. I think you should read these books. These are not books published in 2011. They are books I read since Thanksgiving last year. In fact, one of them won’t be out until January. In no particular…
Jonathan Wood wrote Notes on the Dissection of an Imaginary Beetle (link is non-working; hopefully E.V. will get migrated over soon) which appeared in in Electric Velocipede’s Winter 2008 issue. I thought the story deserved to be in a Year’s Best anthology of some sort. Used to be when a reader found something good they would search for books that author had written. That happens still, but these days I more often find their blog or Twitter account and follow them. When they talk up their next project, if it sounds like something I would enjoy I will then pick it up. Mr. Wood’s book No Hero was on sale…
Scandalous Women might be the first non-fiction blog-to-book project I’ve read. I grabbed this at a fundraising table at WisCon in May. It’s a series of short biographies of scandalous women throughout history. Elizabeth Kerri Mahon notes in her introduction that most This Day In History bits cover men predominantly. Her stated goal with the blog and book is to reclaim history, one woman at a time. All the included women caused a scandal, a commotion, they bumped up against the status quo. The obvious thing about a patriarchal society is that pretty much any woman who did anything before recent times was bound to piss people off and cause…
If you remember my review of the previous book in this series, you’ll remember I had a eureka moment that ruined the book for me. I didn’t identify that as what was bothering me until after I’d read Revenge Of The Spellmans. I held off on reviewing this to let the sentiment pass, but I still wasn’t particularly thrilled with the book. For those who haven’t read any of the series, the Spellmans are a family of private investigators. The schtick is that they have shenanigans mostly involving loving antagonism and mutual investigations of each other. Izzy Spellman is the main character. Her parents run the business, her sister Rae…
Reading, unlike sports, is not an inherently social activity. The words exist in the book. The brain consumes them. Much of the social activity surrounding reading happens before and after the fact: discussions about reading among people who read. Author readings are somewhat social but are usually just a different mode of delivering the words. A few days ago I copied an idea I’ve seen promoted in The Stranger. I invited my Facebook friends (all people I know in real life, it’s just that some of my actual friends don’t use Facebook) to join me for an evening of reading together. We take over a coffee shop and read and…
I hold a grudge against the term sci-fi. The term came to mean bad space-ship alien stuff. Though sometimes I read that sort of thing, I prefer higher quality books. I didn’t like that my science fiction got tainted by the crap that people called sci-fi. My dander really gets up when I see people refer to books as not science fiction because they are good. So I have a little bit of sympathy for Margaret Atwood wanting to distance herself from science fiction. She claims to prefer the term speculative fiction because the stuff in her books can actually happen, they just haven’t happened yet. She also claims that…