All things Books and Reading thread - 2017

[Mamanyt1953]

There will eventually be an entire wall of them, and possibly a few more in other rooms.  I have a LOT of books, and will be getting a LOT more!  And I just keep books that I know I will want to re-read.  I got SO tired of getting rid of books, then two years later jonesing for a particular book and buying it again.  Thank goodness, I know when I read something if it is a keeper, or a donate.  For instance, I keep ALL of my Charlaine Harris books (she has several series), but the Mary Daheim books I read and donate.  I like then a lot, but I won't want to buy another copy to re-read next year!

 

[Winchester]

Nice @Mamanyt1953. I assume the shelves are adjustable?  I could do with a bunch of them, too. Unfortunately, we don't have any spare walls to place the bookcases anymore. I love books.

FWIW, I highly recommend two of the three books I recently read: The Occupied and Seventh Plague. Both of them are excellent. While I do like Patricia Cornwell and her characters, she tends to drone on quite a bit and then I lose interest. I'm about 3/4 way through Seventh Plague now.  I like James Rollins.

 

[Mamanyt1953]

The center shelf is NOT adjustable, but the others are.  Thank goodness.  SO...today I will finish my Daheim books.  I was planning on starting the three James Pattesons I have  waiting, but the mailman just came with my copy of Tad William's "Tailchaser's Song," and I HAVE TO READ THAT FIRST!!!  It is an older book, but one that escaped my attention the first time around.  It is about a cat, of course, Fritta Tailchaser, and is full of cat mythology (not mythology about cats, but the mythology OF cats, by cats), adventure, cat gods, and that odd creature, M'an.  

 

[boney girl dad]

Sometimes I find myself reading stuff I should have read when I was younger.
The last four I've read:
The Sea Faries L. Frank Baum
The Seawolf Jack London
Grimm's Fairy Tales Wilhelm Grimm
Life and Times of Col. Daniel Boone
Cecil B Hartley

 

[Margret]

In January of 2001, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (AKA F&SF) published a story by Richard Chwedyk named "The Measure of All Things."  It was set in a future world in which a company named ToyCo had "manufactured" miniature dinosaurs (called "saurs") as "bio-toys."  The saurs were supposed to have limited intelligence (just enough to recognize what mood a child was in and spout a joke when the child needs cheering up, and to understand and use basic English), be totally infertile, and to live no longer than three years.  They were marketed not as pets, but as toys.  Children did all the things to them that they do to toys.  They performed surgery.  They abandoned them.  They threw them around.  All the things that their parents would have stopped had they thought of the saurs as living beings rather than toys, but ToyCo had gone to great lengths to convince everyone that they weren't "really" alive.  The result was that a great many saurs ended up dead, and those that survived were horribly damaged.  Eventually court cases were brought and the saurs were recognized for the sentient creatures they were.  A home was established for saur survivors in an old Victorian mansion in a rural area outside of a large city, and "The Measure of All Things" is about the saurs who live in that home, along with Tom Groverton, the caretaker who lives with them, and Dr. Margaret Pagliotti, the doctor who visits each week to take care of them.

In August of 2002, F&SF published a sequel, "Bronte's Egg," in which it turns out that the saurs  aren't infertile (we already knew that their natural lifespan was greater than three years and that they're fully sapient), and ToyCo begins attempting to get DNA samples from them, to find out where they went wrong.

In the Oct./Nov. 2004 issue of F&SF we got "In Tibor's Cardboard Castle," which introduces us to some of the saurs we hadn't yet met, including Preston, who writes best-selling novels under the pen name of Ellis Lawrence, and Tibor and Geraldine, who seem to have some abilities that go way beyond anything we would normally expect even from humans.  And PetCo finds out that if they ever enter the grounds of the home without permission, bad things will happen to their equipment.

And in the Sept./Oct. 2010 issue of F&SF we got "Orfy," where we lose one of the saurs to old age.

A few years back I wrote a fan letter to Mr. Chwedyk, and one result of this is that I recently received a notice from him that a new saur story is out: "The Man Who Put the Bomp," in the March/April issue of F&SF.

It's a long time since I was a regular subscriber, so I went looking for a single issue and found out that they cost $8.99 each, more if you have to pay local tax.  A year's subscription (six issues), however, costs only $30, so I now have a year's subscription to F&SF.  An electronic subscription is available either through Amazon, for Kindle, or through a website named Weightless Books (https://weightlessbooks.com/).  Weightless supplies eBooks in mobi (Kindle), ePub (Nook, Kobo, iPad, Google, etc.), and pdf formats, and doesn't use DRM.

Mr. Chwedyk also informed me that he is currently looking for a publisher for his first saur book, which will contain the five saur stories that have been written to date, plus some connecting material that should give us more information about how ToyCo has come to know about such things as Bronte's egg (now daughter, Guinivere), a detail that the saurs and their protectors have not released to the press.  The tentative title for the book is One Big Place: The Book of Saurs.  And, after providing Mr. Chwedyk with a link to this thread I have received his permission to share this information with you.  (He was quite impressed, BTW.)

As for these stories, I strongly recommend them.  The saurs are loveable, their protectors are admirable, the villains are real, and, to quote Randall Garrett, in his "Review in Verse" of Isaac Asimov's The Caves of Steel,

Now the plot begins to thicken, as it should;

It's the thickening in plots that makes them good.

Each of these stories is readable on its own, though I highly recommend the entire series.  I say this primarily because it can be difficult to find the earlier stories.  This will cease to be a problem if a publisher can be found for the book.  Also, Mr. Chwedyk assures me that his desire to publish One Big Place in book format should not be taken to mean that this is the end of the series; more are in the works.

Margret

 

[Mia6]

The story sound amazing!

 

[Primula]

Just finished Outer Dark. An amazing book by Cormac McCarthy.

 

[catspaw66]

@Margret, I'm in for a copy. Be sure to let us know when it comes out, please.

 

[Margret]

@Margret, I'm in for a copy. Be sure to let us know when it comes out, please.

Absolutely!

This series is a natural for the denizens of TCS; the saurs remind me a lot of cats.  No fur, but they definitely have cattitude!  Incidentally, it might also be a good idea to "follow" Richard Chwedyk on BookBub.  That way you'll automatically be informed any time he comes out with a new book (though they won't tell you about novellas in F&SF, unfortunately).

Margret

 

[Mamanyt1953]

@Margret   I want a copy of that, too!  You'll have to write Mr. Chwedyk and let him know that you now have a group breathlessly awaiting that compilation book!

 

[Mia6]

2017 Most Anticipated Book to Screen Adaptations

https://www.goodreads.com/blog/show...etter&utm_campaign=2017-04&utm_content=fblog1

 

[Margret]

Well, I still haven't "nooted" my Nook Color (and I do still want to), but the other night I broke the DRM on my favorite Kindle books, converted them to ePub format, and sideloaded them to the Micro SD card on the Nook.

Note: "DRM" stands for "Digital Rights Management." It's the encryption that various eBook sellers add to books so they can keep you from pirating their books and giving away (or selling) copies. And a Supreme Court ruling last year made it perfectly legal (in the U.S.) to break the DRM on your books so that you can migrate them to different devices. The key is that you're not stealing the book, you're just making it easier to read. Breaking DRM for the purpose of piracy is still illegal. What I did counts as "fair use" under U.S. copyright law.​

The process wasn't perfect; my Kindle copy of To Say Nothing of the Dog, by Connie Willis, for instance, must be read in portrait orientation on the Nook, or lines disappear. I suspect that I need to twiddle the conversion settings in Calibre. However, I now have To Say Nothing of the Dog and The Winds of Marble Arch (a Connie Willis story collection); The Chronicles of Master Li and Number Ten Ox (a compendium of Bridge of Birds, The Story of The Stone, and Eight Skilled Gentlemen, by Barry Hughart -- marvelous books); Kai Lung's Golden Hours and The Wallet of Kai Lung, by Ernest Bramah (you should be able to find these on Project Gutenberg, I think); two stories by Mel Gilden involving a character we met in Harry Newberry and the Raiders of the Red Drink; Mythology 101, by Jody Lynn Nye; Tales from the Perilous Realm, by J.R.R. Tolkien, which includes the hilarious story "Farmer Giles of Ham"; Bad Grrlz' Guide to Reality, by Pat Murphy (a compendium of Wild Angel and Adventures in Time and Space with Max Merriwell); Snuff and Small Gods (two Discworld novels that I haven't read yet); three Midnight Louis books by Carole Nelson Douglas; four of Laurie R. King's Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes novels, plus a short story; three Star Trek novels; "Gorilla, My Dreams" (an Uplift Universe story by David Brin); two Liaden Universe novels by Sharon Lee and Steve Miller; three No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency novels by Alexander McCall Smith; and several books about health and fitness, all on the Nook Color where they're easy to read and to take along with me.

Problems with this technique:

1. It's impossible to tell which book is which just from the file name in the Kindle Content directory. You have to import everything to Calibre and sort out what is what there. Unfortunately, this takes up a lot of unnecessary disk space, because Calibre copies everything to its directory. The best work-around is to delete any books you don't want to export from the laptop before importing to Calibre.
2. You end up taking up further disk space on the laptop when you save the books to epub format for sideloading.
3. It's labor intensive.

The primary advantage is that these books end up on the Micro SD card on the Nook, which has a good deal more room than internal memory.

Margret

 

[Mamanyt1953]

LOL...I have NO CLUE what you are talking about! I know you did something to an e-reader, but beyond that, I'm clueless! Whatever it was, and whatever you did, I'm glad it worked.

 

[Margret]

LOL...I have NO CLUE what you are talking about! I know you did something to an e-reader, but beyond that, I'm clueless! Whatever it was, and whatever you did, I'm glad it worked.

My eReader is a Nook Color. Before I bought it I had bought quite a few ebooks from Amazon, for Kindle. I don't have a Kindle, but Amazon has a free "Kindle for PC" reader that I use to read these books on the laptop. I would prefer to have them on the Nook, but I can't (currently) install Kindle for Android on the Nook, and Amazon "protected" many of these books with something called DRM to make it impossible to read them except with a Kindle, or Kindle app, that's registered to me. (Officially this is to prevent me from making copies of the books and giving them to you so you don't have to buy them from Amazon. However, it's also intended to make me dependent on their eReader so that I'll actually buy a Kindle from them and then buy my ebooks only from Amazon. The first concern is legitimate, though it's insulting to their readers to assume that we're book thieves. The second concern is a really annoying marketing strategy.)

What I did was to break the DRM protection on the books, and then convert them to a format the Nook likes and install them on the Nook. Until recently, the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (Digital Millennium Copyright Act - Wikipedia) made it a criminal offense to do this, but last year the Supreme Court said that they can't apply the DMCA that way, because it's not a copyright violation to transfer a book to a different device, as long as you got the book legally and aren't transferring it to someone else's device. It's always been obvious that copyright law was never meant to be applied this way, but that doesn't generaly deter the government. Therfore, the tool I used to break DRM wasn't readily available until after the Supreme Court made this expicit; the people who wrote it could have ended up in prison if they had released it earlier.

Does that make it any more clear?

Margret

 

[Winchester]

Excellent job, Margret! I'm so glad you were able to work it out for you. I'm really happy you did it. And BTW, I'm really curious about The Measure of All Things, too. It sounds fascinating, esp that the saurs have that same cattitude!

Lately I've been reading a bunch of the free books I've been downloading from Freebooksy. Some of them are pretty good; others....ahhh, not so much.

From my Nook:
Taboo: CSI Reilly Steel - Casey Hill (this is actually pretty good) I'm reading this now
Heavens to Betsy (An Emily Romantic Mystery) - Pamela Fagan Hutchins
Saving Grace - Pamela Fagan Hutchins
Sweet Masterpiece - Connie Shelton

From the Kindle:
Gossip to the Grave - John Burke I'm reading this now
Strawberry Cupcake and Murder - Ann S. Marie
The Haunting of Winchester Mansion - Alexandria Clarke

 

[bodester413]

I'm about 3/4 of the way through Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky. Very cool book. I've been trying to get back into scifi lately. I'm glad I decided to get this one.

 

[Primula]

Just finished Misty Copeland's autobiography. She's the black ballerina who has become a superstar at American Ballet Theater. Good book.

 

[Mamanyt1953]

Margret Yes. Marginally. Well, pretty darned clear, actually. Thank you.
I'm reading one of the Joe Grey books right now, but am taking a break to mop the living room (an all-day affair what with moving the furniture twice).

 

[Margret]

I ran into this article yesterday and immediately thought of posting it here: Old books actually smell like chocolate and coffee

Margret

 

[Mamanyt1953]

WOW! That would explain why I love used book shops. I did not realize that.