asterroc | Entries tagged with books

I want to write a compare-and-contrast essay about the following three serieses:

The Wheel of Time by Robert Jordan (I have read through “A Feast for Crows”), Wikipedia
A Song of Ice and Fire by George R. R. Martin (I have read through “Knife of Dreams”), Wikipedia
The Sword of Truth by Terry Goodkind (I have read all but the prequel, and don’t care if that’s spoiled for me), Wikipedia

I shall start said essay here, and who knows if I'll ever finish it. All three are considered epic fantasy serieses, and yet they are VERY different from each other. I have listed them in order of how much I like them, most to least. As mentioned above, I have not yet finished either the Wheel of Time or A Song of Ice and Fire and would appreciate an attempt to reduce spoilers for those I haven’t read (though I won’t get too upset at accidental spoilers since they’ve been out for forever). I cannot promise either this post or the comments will be spoiler-free; if you wish to reduce spoilers in responses to your own comments, I recommend specifying what you’ve read through in your comment. Oh, and please forgive any misspellings of characters’ names or places, I’ve read most of these in audiobook format. Feel free to correct me.

( Cut for length )

So yeah. This isn’t a real essay so I don’t need a real conclusion. :) Go read The Wheel of Time if you haven't already.
Originally posted on Dreamwidth.

comments there. Comment here or there.

Anne McCaffrey was my first introduction to Sci-Fan, or at least the first one that stuck in my memory. Lessa and the Rowen were role models for me, showing me strong women who didn't let men stand in their way. Damia working through her pregnancies instead of being forced into some protective feminine seclusion, continuing to work alongside her husband as they raised their children together, this was the norm. Even Menolly's situation was shown as being a throwback to an older and worse time when men didn't think girl children were worth anything, a backwards and backwater way of thinking. I didn't need to be a feminist in my youth because McCaffrey showed me that it was completely normal for women to work alongside men.

And I knew I had finally come of age as a feminist when Kristin Bjornsen's meek acquiescence, nay welcoming, of her own date rape disgusted me and made me turn away from McCaffrey's works.

For a short period of time. I cannot stay away from her works forever. She is -was- the product of a more backwards age, and like Menolly she was always struggling to leave it in her writing. I hope for her sake that she has found a better and fairer place.

Originally posted on Dreamwidth.

comments there. Comment here or there.

NPR 100 SF/F Books meme: bold the ones you've read, italics the ones you intend to read, underline series/books you've read part of, and strike the ones you never intend to read.

Things in parentheses are my commentary, including P if I read it in Print format or A for Audio format. P/A indicates I started the series in Print and finished in Audio, or A/P for the other way. P+A indicates I first read it in Print format, and later reread in Audio.

For 62 out of 100, I have either read all or some of the series.

( The list )

Originally posted on Dreamwidth.

comments there. Comment here or there.

I am currently listening to an unabridged audiobook¹ of Frank Herbert's Dune with a full cast doing the different characters. I am wondering about the editorial/production choice to have a full cast, and about the claim of unabridged.

The conversations as read have very little "Paul said," "Jessica replied" sort of commentary. They tend to be only what the individual people actually said. For example, if Jessica were and Paul were talking about his homework over breakfast, and Leto walked in in the middle of it...

"So did you finish your homework last night?"
"Very quickly, it was just algebra."
"And what did you learn from it?"
"If you drop a book from the top of a building, its motion is governed by a quadratic equation."
"That isn't what I was taught, since you also have to take air friction into account."
"But you can simplify the equations if you make the assumption that there isn't any air friction."
"And we haven't gotten up to air friction yet."²

In the audio book, since there are three different readers for the lines said by Paul, Jessica, and Leto, it is obvious who said what, but there aren't any "Leto walked into the conversation and commented that..." that in a print version of the book would indicate who said what in a long exchange, or if three people are involved in the conversation. Is this lack of "Paul said" actually in the original text, or was there an editorial decision to remove those? If the original text did not include any "Paul said"s, that would explain the production choice to have a cast.

And while I'm asking, is there a name for doing "Paul said"s, or for not doing them?

¹The production is copyright 2007 Audio Renaissance, and narrated by a cast listed on Audible.com as Scott Brick, Orlagh Cassidy, Euan Morton,and Simon Vance, but possibly including more.
²In case you're curious, my intent here was for the speakers to be JPJPLJP, though the last L and J could be swapped and still have it make sense.

I just started the audiobook of "The Giver" by Lois Lowry, and I'm nearly done, it's a short and enthralling read. It's aimed at young adult readers, but it's really secretly hard Sci-Fi / speculative fiction in the grand style of old: it proposes a future setting and explores how people (in this case an 11-year-old boy) would react within that setting.

calzephyr77 I think it was you that liked YA and wanted to read more SF; this one is definitely worth the (short) read. The audiobook production tries to enhance things by adding ambience music; I recommend the print version instead.

Edit: I didn't realize that this book had been out forever, so it didn't occur to me that there might be spoilers in the comments. There are, though not horrible ones as of yet. Just don't read the comments if you don't want to be spoiled.

I've decided I hate preachy religious books that masquerade as fiction. "Left Behind" and "Summer's Path" are two examples.

"Left Behind" I read a year or two ago because I felt it was an important cultural work, and might help me understand the mind of the evangelist. The premise is that one day half of the world's population disappears suddenly, leaving behind their clothing and all worldly goods, and the remaining people slowly come to the realization that they have missed the Rapture. While I do feel that witnessing something like this would be compelling, the manner in which the main characters become converted is unrealistic. Right after the rapture happens the main character and his college-aged daughter are skeptical and confused about the disappearance of the mother and baby brother. Then the father attends a sermon and suddenly sees the light. He takes his daughter to the priest and she suddenly sees the light as well. Mere exposure to The Holy Word is all it takes for them to suddenly become utterly converted.

"Summer's Path" I am reading the audiobook b/c Audible.com gave it away for free and I thought it was fantasy. I was deceived - it's New Age pseudo-Christian evangelism. The main character is dying of terminal cancer and contemplating suicide (this book is not for the triggery) when he meets a non-denominational angel who offers to take over his body for him. The main character only passingly wonders if the angel is an alien body snatcher, and never wonders whether it's a devil instead because the angel tells him to "trust his feelings". The book is now devolving into preaching about how all physical ills are caused by not being in touch with your emotions, and depression is caused by suppressing your physical sensations. No that doesn't make any sense to me either. The main character (now in the body of a dog) is currently sitting in a car with some New Age hippies (who keep calling the angel now in the main character's body a hippie, ironically) who are guiding him in connecting with his inner energy source, and of course he believes it as soon as he hears about it and is able to do it on the first try.

Yeah, if religion really worked that way - all you needed was to be exposed to the One True Religion to suddenly convert - then just about everyone in the world would have come to the same One True Religion by now.

Dear Librivox,

If a volunteer reader refers to it as "Libraryvox," chances are she's not going to do any better reading the rest of Frankenstein.

No loves,

Me

----

Dear Librivox Volunteer Readers,

If you can't read through an entire chapter without stumbling, use an editor. If you can't use an editor, or if you can't read through an entire sentence without stumbling, read to children at a local library instead reading to discriminating adults via Librivox.

No Loves,

Me

(P.S. I understand that dyslexia is a real disability. That doesn't mean that I want to listen to the product of your dyslexia rather than listening to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, or, The Modern Prometheus.)

I used to think when I was younger that Anne McCaffrey was a feminist writer. This might have been partially due to the fact that I viewed my mother as a feminist and she was the one who started me on the Dragonriders of Pern series when I was still in elementary school. It was probably due more to my early notions of what feminism entailed: McCaffrey was a woman, and her books contained a lot of strong women characters who bucked the norm. What I failed to see that the time was that while they bucked aspects of the norm, they did not fight against the gender stratification of their societies, and all of McCaffrey's societies were gender stratified.

And "Freedom's Choice" fits neatly into this trend of hers. "Choice" is the second in the 4-novel Catteni series - I've only read the first two so far, but I'm a glutton for punishment and do intend to read the rest. The main character Kris Bjornsen is a strong woman fighting against the slavery of mankind by an alien race. She takes on a role advising the first leader of the involuntary colonists dropped onto an unknown planet by the enslaving race, and then continues to serve the colony as a scout.

Where the series takes its sharp turn from feminism is when Kris is informed that the leadership has decided (while she was out scouting) to start pregnancy rosters whereby all women in the colony would take turns bearing children. Kris's response is a petulant whine that she doesn't want to have children, or at least to put off childbearing for years (her friend implies this is selfish, and tells her Kris's name was put at the bottom of the list because of her value to the colony), or concern that she will not be a good mother (this problem too has been solved, with creches where unwilling incubators can drop off the babies after birth and never have anything else to do with them, though it's never indicated that anyone actually does this). McCaffrey blows off Kris's concerns as being childish and irresponsible; nobody ever takes them seriously, not even Kris's alien lover (who because of being a different species could never be the father of a child of Kris).

Kris goes along with the program in the end, never outright objecting to the leadership at all. In the end though, the reason she goes along with the program is even worse (IMO) than the program itself. After rebuffing dozens of men trying to get in her pants with the excuse that it's for breeding purposes, Kris is date-raped while drunk. She excuses it to herself as "oh, I was just drunk," and yet she never tells anyone else (not even her lover), when she learns she is pregnant she is embarrassed and then enraged that one of her "friends" reveals it to everyone (and even tries to attack the "friend" and has to be held back), and moreover Kris doesn't even reveal to her rapist that he is the father - if that isn't a clear sign that the sex was NOT a good thing, I don't know what is. And to make it clear that Kris's rape was a good thing and her distaste for it a bad thing, at the end of the book McCaffrey has an omnipotent race appear and reveal to Kris's rapist that the child is his, and he offers to help care for the child when she has to go on another scouting mission. Kris is filled with a benevolent glow and realizes the childishness of her past actions.

Because we all know that a woman doing anything other than meekly submitting to a culture that promotes women as vessels for men's seed is just childish.

How did I *ever* think McCaffrey a feminist? I kinda want to reread the Pern series now, but am afraid to do so (what with the dragons' rape flights and all).

Time to boycott Amazon.com . They've decided to delist factual and useful books on homosexuality from their internal search engine, calling them "adult themed," so that "ex-gay" books show up on searches before other books on homosexuality. For example, the book "Heather Has Two Mommies" does exist on Amazon.com in both the original edition and the 10th anniversary edition, however it does not show up when you search all of Amazon on the title and only the 10th anniversary edition shows when you search on the title under Books only. You also will not find the book's sales rank anywhere on either edition's page (do a Find on the page for "rank" or "sales rank"), as opposed to on the page for another random book.

More details and about what's going on, including an explanation of how the sales rank is being misrepresented or deleted entirely, are on

rosefox's blog linky linky here. And just to clarify, Amazon does say it is their own choice to filter on "adult themes", not the choice of some database they are buying into.

Edit: I have submitted the following letter (identifying information redacted) to Amazon.com's Customer Service online, and will be looking up their mailing address and sending another copy on school stationary. Feel free to copy or modify for your own letter.

I recently heard about Amazon's policy to derank books on homosexuality and remove them from the search results. I am very disappointed in this policy and will no longer be purchasing from Amazon, unless this policy is revoked. In addition, my influence extends beyond my own dollar, as I am informing my friends and family of this new hateful policy.

I am also a faculty at a community college (subject, school, and location redacted). Every year I have hundreds of students, and in the past I have recommend that they can purchase their textbooks for cheaper than the college bookstore by buying them on Amazon.com. Some of the goals of a college education is for students to broaden their horizons, and to learn to see the world from different points of view. In order to achieve this goal, we must all have access to as much information as possible. Amazon's policy to selectively blacklist certain topics that one portion of the population finds offensive is in direct opposition to the goals of a college education. Therefore I cannot in good conscience recommend Amazon to my college students as a source for textbooks. Until Amazon changes this policy, I will no longer be recommending Amazon to my students but instead will recommend competitors BN.com and Powells.com .

Edit: According to Publisher's Weekly, Amazon is backpedaling and claiming it's all just a glitch, but they do not appear to be making any efforts to fix said glitch. Searching on Heather Has Two Mommies still doesn't turn up the book, the book itself still has no rank listed, and a site-wide search on "homosexuality" still turns up ex-gay propaganda bullshit. I also haven't seen anything about Amazon's comment elsewhere - like on Amazon. I'll start listening to Amazon's comments when they start actually doing something about them.

Edit: Amazon is emailing everyone who emailed them to say it's an error.

From Amazon:

Amazon.com Customer Service to me
2:05 AM (4 hours ago)

Hello,

Thanks for contacting us. We recently discovered a glitch in our systems and it's being fixed.

Thanks again for contacting us. We hope to see you again soon.

Please let us know if this e-mail resolved your question:

If yes, click here:

If not, click here:

Please note: this e-mail was sent from an address that cannot accept incoming e-mail.

To contact us about an unrelated issue, please visit the Help section of our web site.

Best regards,

Mehul Damera
Amazon.com
We're Building Earth's Most Customer-Centric Company
[link removed, I don't want to give them traffic right now]

I clicked on "No, it's not resolved" and wrote:

Sending an email to say "we're working on fixing this problem" without providing any evidence of said work is frustrating. I hope that I am informed when this is actually fixed, because it is not fixed as of yet and I still intend to boycott Amazon until it is.

Also, you have lost a lot of reputation from this supposed glitch. I do not see how this could be just a glitch, and I feel that you simply are not owning up to a deliberate bias that turned out to cost the company money, so instead you're pretending it never happened. Fess up, get a press release out, and spend a week featuring books on homosexuality on the front page: that would build good will in the LGBT/ally community and show that it really was in error.

( Cut for spoilers )

seekingferret will be interested to know that, as predicted, I don't actually much mind "Sense and Sensibility" (that is, the writing style) in audiobook format. I'm on Chapter 9 right now, and while I will admit that the first two chapters with their plethora of characters were a bit confusing, but when I've done Jane Austen books in the past I found them ridiculously dry and boring. While some of the change may come from increasing maturity on my part, I really do think most of the difference is the audiobook format. If an audiobook is slightly dry, I can tune out and listen with half an ear, doing something else like washing dishes or knitting, and come back in when it gets more interesting.

This particular production (the male Libravox narrator) leaves a bit to be desired, in that it's distributed as a podcast (so my iPod stops at the end of each installation, which is a chapter, around every 10-15 minutes), each "episode" starts with a 30-second boilerplate, and the narrator's voice is relatively toneless, but it is not bad - in fact I would call it a couple small steps above tolerable.

So, I don't much mind the writing style (though I probably would not choose a repeat of this author, I can definitely get through this book), but I have to say the content is somewhat boring. It's a pre-women's lib. soap opera. Maybe it'll get better, we'll see.

Started reading "The Forever War" by Joe Haldeman (traditional print book), and it is reaffirming my love of older science fiction / speculative fiction.

( A few comments about the first 50 pages of the book; I don't think they're spoilers, but you might. )

Yoinked from

kadath

According to the Science Fiction Book Club, these are the 50 most significant SF & Fantasy Books of the last 50 Years, 1953-2002. Bold the ones you've read, strike the ones you hated, italicize the ones you couldn't get through, asterisks for the ones you loved (more asterisks, more love), exclamation points for the ones you own.

1. The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien
2. The Foundation Trilogy by Isaac Asimov
3. Dune by Frank Herbert
4. Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein
5. A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. LeGuin! (previously owned, don't know where it is now)
6. Neuromancer by William Gibson
7. Childhood's End by Arthur C. Clarke (hm, I might have read it, I forget)
8. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep by Philip K. Dick (I need to read this one)
9. ~~The Mists of Avalon by Marion Zimmer Bradley~~
10. Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury*
11. The Book of the New Sun by Gene Wolfe
12. A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller, Jr. (I might have read)
13. The Caves of Steel by Isaac Asimov (might have read?)
14. Children of the Atom by Wilmar Shiras
15. Cities in Flight by James Blish
16. The Colour of Magic by Terry Pratchett (I don't think I've read anything by him, strangely)
17. Dangerous Visions edited by Harlan Ellison
18. Deathbird Stories by Harlan Ellison
19. The Demolished Man by Alfred Bester
20. Dhalgren by Samuel R. Delany
21. Dragonflight by Anne McCaffrey! (enjoyed it, but wouldn't say I loved it)
22. Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card*! (still one of my faves, though the rest of the series I'm mixed on)
23. The First Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever by Stephen R. Donaldson
24. The Forever War by Joe Haldeman
25. Gateway by Frederik Pohl
26. Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone by J.K. Rowling (the main thing I liked about this was that it gets kids reading)
27. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams*!
28. I Am Legend by Richard Matheson*! (just recently, on audiobook)
29. Interview with the Vampire by Anne Rice (I think my mom owned it)
30. The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin (I think I disliked? I forget)
31. Little, Big by John Crowley
32. Lord of Light by Roger Zelazny
33. The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick
34. Mission of Gravity by Hal Clement
35. More Than Human by Theodore Sturgeon
36. The Rediscovery of Man by Cordwainer Smith
37. On the Beach by Nevil Shute
38. Rendezvous with Rama by Arthur C. Clarke* (I can't remember much of it, but I liked it then)
39. Ringworld by Larry Niven* (OMG yes! I love anything Niven)
40. Rogue Moon by Algis Budrys
41. ~~The Silmarillion by J.R.R. Tolkien~~ (way too tedious)
42. Slaughterhouse-5 by Kurt Vonnegut
43. Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson*! (own abridged audio, afterwards read full version in print)
44. Stand on Zanzibar by John Brunner
45. The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester
46. Starship Troopers by Robert A. Heinlein (much better than the movie)
47. Stormbringer by Michael Moorcock
48. ~~The Sword of Shannara by Terry Brooks~~ (the only way I got through this was I accidentally read the Elfstones first, and yet I have recently wanted to get back into the series.)
49. ~~Timescape by Gregory Benford~~ (read it for a class. science good, characters are 2-D cardboard cutouts)
50. To Your Scattered Bodies Go by Philip Jose Farmer

Just so you know, the Science Fiction Book Club is the one that keeps sending you unsolicited catalogs entirely full of Honor Harrington paperbacks, Star Wars hardcovers, and Stephen King, with half-naked women sprawled over dragons on the cover and an offer of a free pewter wizard figurine with club membership (see order form for details.)

Up until now I was worried that I would uncritically accept any book in audio format. I am sad to report that the most expensive one I've bought to date, Neal Stephenson's Quicksilver, is the one that proves me wrong.

Some Neal Stephenson books lend themselves well to audio format - I listened to Snow Crash before I read a print version of it. I should have known that Quicksilver, of a style akin to Cryptonomicon, would not. The large cast of characters and continual flashbacks do not work well in the audiobook format, where it is difficult to go back to things you might have missed previously. That alone would make me grumble, but I have gotten past it in the past - I listened to not only David Weber's Off Armageddon Reef, but the sequel By Schism Rent Asunder, political sci/fan with many warring kingdoms, most of whose names start with a C, and a cast of at least as many characters, whose names start primarily with Cs as well. So while not all books are ideal for audio format, I can get over that.

Add to that that this is the worst production I've heard yet. The primary narrator, Simon Prebble, could use lessons in enunciation, and rather than being quaint his British accent is obfuscating. Those two things together would lead me to be upset with this audiobook, and might or might not lead me to write a bad review.

The final straw that makes me irate enough to consider asking for my money back is the manner in which they executed the abridgment. When I audioread Snow Crash it was an abridged version as well, and while listening to it I never knew. I had no clue whatsoever where the abridgments were, and had it not been printed on the cover I would not have even known it was abridged. The editor's choice of what to remove had no impact whatsoever upon my listening experience. When I subsequently read the print version of the novel, I realized what had been omitted, and yes the editor's choices did affect the interpretation of the book, as the parts removed primarily related to the mystical aspects of the novel.

In this production, instead of seamlessly removing sections less central to the main plot, the editor chose to *summarize* sections of the novel. As in the narrator saying "a summary of pages 63-69 is as follows..." and "a summary of pages 84 to 149 is as follows..." Yes, in the first two chapters of the novel I've already had both of those. Yes 78 of the first 149 pages of the novel were removed. yes, that's more than 50%. If I wanted the fucking Cliffnotes, I would've bought that instead, and it wouldn't've cost me thirty bucks.

I want my money back.

Current Mood: angry

I finally got around to reading the 1954 post-apocalyptic novel by Richard Matheson upon which the 2007 film starring Will Smith was loosely based.

If you didn't want to read the spoilers below, my summary is that the novel's good in an entirely different way from the film.

( Spoilers for both the novel and movie herein )

Okay, that came out really lengthy. If you don't want to read the novel eventually, at least give the film's alternate ending a gander.

Anyone use online book trading services? Frugal Reader is one I just came across (you ship books to other members in exchange for books from others, paperbacks are 1 point, hardcovers 2 points, you pay shipping), and I've heard of another though I forget the name now (you get a monetary credit to your account each time you send in a book, each book is worth a different amount, I forget if you send directly to other members or to the webpage owners). Any of these any good? My questions include:

* Is it free?
* Can it print shipping labels?
* How fast is turnover of a book you list?
* How reliable is the shipping?
* How/when does it release your address to the shipper (if another human)?
* Does it do audiobooks?
* How does it value books?
* Can you unlist a book you own?
* What if you don't get the book?

I haven't ever read Ayn Rand, and I have no intention of doing so. However, I am told that the author of the series I am currently reading, Terry Goodkind, is heavily influenced by her works, and her concepts of "objectivism" and "enlightened self interest." Anyone care to explain these concepts to me in shorter form?

How favorite books correlate w/ SAT score, as compiled via Facebook

A long analysis of the Harry Potter series written by Orson Scott Card (free registration may be required). Card uses Snape in Book 6 (the review was written before Book 7 was released), as well as his progress throughout the series, to give further insight to Rowling's development as a writer, comparing Snape to Gollum, and other interesting ways of looking at the series from the point of view of a fellow author.

Here's a review of the series in the Boston Globe. It definitely contains spoilers, and I'm not sure I agree with the final punchline about exactly what Dust is, but it's worth reading. It focuses on just what about the series mainstream Christianity finds so subversive, and why, in fact, those things are actually pro-religion. Of course, entirely dismissing the fact that Pullman is a self-proclaimed atheist in the process, but still intriguing.

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