Zoë's 2015 Challenge

Well, I haven't even started the process of sorting through threads in the new group, but I think it's time to start my own since I actually finished a book today (surprise!). I've been really stressed out lately, which is having an affect on my reading. But hopefully that will get better as the year goes on and various things get accomplished. I hope I can look back at this time next year and say that I managed to get married, complete a dissertation draft, and find time for a marathon as well. Then I'll sleep for a long time.

Books read:

January
1. A Practical Wedding by Meg Keene
2. The Alloy of Law by Brandon Sanderson
3. All Who Go Do Not Return by Shulem Deen
4. Clockwork Prince by Cassandra Clare
5. Clockwork Princess by Cassandra Clare
6. The Girl with All the Gifts by M. R. Carey
7. On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City by Alice Goffman
8. Sophocles I: Antigone, Oedipus the King, Oedipus at Colonus by Sophocles
9. Curtsies & Conspiracies by Gail Carriger

February
10. Café in Berlin by André Klein
11. Waistcoats & Weaponry by Gail Carriger
12. Dune by Frank Herbert
13. Mord am Morgen by André Klein
14. Ferien in Frankfurt by André Klein
15. Karneval in Köln by André Klein
16. Momente in München by André Klein
17. Die Dritte Hand by André Klein
SS: Mitosis by Brandon Sanderson
18. Ungifted by Gordon Korman
19. Boston Strong by Casey Sherman and Dave Wedge

March
20. Firefight by Brandon Sanderson
21. Not a Drop to Drink by Mindy McGinnis
22. A Museum Once Forgotten: Rebirth of the John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art by John Wetenhall

April
23. Des Spielers Tod by André Klein
24. Cinder by Marissa Meyer
25. Zum Bärenhaus by André Klein
26. Scarlet by Marissa Meyer
27. Cress by Marissa Meyer

May
28. The Ice Dragon by George R.R. Martin

1. A Practical Wedding by Meg Keene

This is a book that I bought last August, but of course I only managed to finish it now, two months before the wedding. There's definitely a lot of useful advice here, some that's applicable even beyond wedding planning. I particularly liked her idea of making a list of the things you care about, and revisiting it throughout the process to make sure that your efforts are devoted to what actually matters. That led me to put a lot more thought than usual into New Year's resolutions this year, so hopefully I can focus more on what matters in general.

Hopefully I'll be able to get several more off-the-shelf books read in the first few months of the year, before their shininess wears off completely. I know this always gets harder as the year goes on.

Well it's about time.

find time for a marathon as well
This one seems a bit self-inflicted...

Happy New Year!

>3 qebo: Well, it doesn't take nearly as much time overall if you don't train properly :P

Happy New Year to you too!

Zoë's back!

Only a week late :D

Huzzah for Zoe! Wishing you all the best for the forthcoming nuptials. :)

Here you are!! Better late than never... Welcome back to the fray(s).

Welcome back and Happy New Year, Zoë!

Hey, Zoe! Glad to see you finally made it over here from BGG! Lol

Hi, Zoe!!

I remember the summer that I finished and defended my dissertation, graduated, got a job, got married and moved. So, yeah, best of luck to you and focus on all that sleeping you'll get to do when you're finished. Ha!

Thank you all for stopping by!

Haha, Stasia, I'm still at my parents' house for another few days while Mark is back in New York, so that means (almost) no board games for a little while. Of course, I still have some reviews to write and microbadges to purchase.... ;)

Amber, I'm glad to hear that someone else has survived this before! And it sounds like your schedule was even crazier and more compressed. I'm really looking forward to the nine months after the wedding when I can finish my dissertation in peace.

Hi Zoe! *Hugs* :)

>13 Ape: *Hugs*!

Congrats on the upcoming wedding Zoe! So exciting and yes of course a lot of work, but so exciting! :D

Heyyyyy-oh, getting married - woot! I'm also trying to dig through 75ers and find both folks I "know" and folks whose reading might be influential to me. Having taken some time off from the challenge, I'm still getting my people-bearings back, but being a long-time LT-er, I'd know your (username)face anywhere. Happy reading in 2015 :)

Thank you!

I'm glad I'm not the only one still trying to get organized in this group :)

I realized that I forgot to save a space for book acquisitions, too, so I'll have to move my first book down into some other message once I start buying things. (Or perhaps more precisely, once I actually have in my possession all the books that I got sent to New York over the holidays :P )

2. The Alloy of Law by Brandon Sanderson

I've enjoyed lots of Sanderson's other books, but put off reading this one because it's part of the extended Mistborn series, and the first Mistborn trilogy is my least favourite. I haven't even read the third book. But eventually someone told me that I didn't need to read that one first, and so I moved on to The Alloy of Law, set about 300 yeas after that trilogy and with completely different characters. It's a shorter standalone novel, and not as bleak as the earlier ones.

The setting is really interesting: it's a steampunk-type world, like our nineteenth century, where electricity has just been invented and trains are a major form of transportation. But there's magic, Sanderson's innovative systems of Allomancy and Ferruchemy. And the protagonists (who have a fun and humorous side) are sort of like western sheriffs, gunslinging "lawkeepers" who are more comfortable in the dangerous Roughs than in the big city with all its comforts. So it's a combination of different genres, which meant I could count it as a genre bender for the bingo in the 2015 Category Challenge.

So, I'd been meaning to read this book for ages, but it was only last year that someone told me I didn't have to read Mistborn 3 first, and then I was further driven to action by Sanderson's announcement a couple of months ago that he's written not one, but two more novels with these characters, due for release this October and next January. And then the immediate impetus to read the book came when I saw that his newest Reckoners book had just been released on January 6, but the library didn't have that one available, so I went with this other Sanderson book instead. Also, it's Steampunk month in the 2015 Category Challenge, so this was perfect. I needed something quick to feel like I was making progress.

Anyway, I'm really glad I read this book; it was quick and enjoyable, and I wish I didn't have to wait until October for the next one! Fortunately I do have a few other unread Sanderson books to keep me occupied in the meantime.

Hi Zoe,

See you in March! :D

Happy New Thread! Glad you enjoyed The Alloy of Law -- I liked it, but not as much as the first Mistborn trilogy (guess we are of differing opinions on that one). :-)

>19 SqueakyChu: Yay! :D

>20 foggidawn: Thank you! I think I just have a very low tolerance for bad things happening in books, and even though I'm pretty sure Brandon Sanderson always comes up with a happy ending at last, it was taking too long to get there in the other Mistborn books.

Thanks for reminding me that I really DID like the first Mistborn book, I just didn't know if I was ready to commit to the others. I have that plus the entire Wheel of Time series from my "mom" who loves to send books, and I've just been putting them off. Time to revisit, I suppose :)

(and sorry for the identity crisis - only the second time I've accidentally mixed up work and play on here!)

>23 kgriffith: I read maybe the first seven Wheel of Time books (as many as were out at the time), and enjoyed them, but then never got around to continuing with the series. And now that I'd have to start over from scratch, it does seem sort of overwhelming. Maybe one day.

At least I've learned my lesson and am trying to wait until more of Sanderson's huge series has been written before I get started.

I've been working my way through the Wheel of Time series as well. It is a major time commitment and something I look forward to checking off my list as completed!

Madeline, take note! I think you would like this book:



3. All Who Go Do Not Return by Shulem Deen

I finished this book a couple of days ago, but I haven't been able to stop thinking about it since. This is the memoir of a man expelled from his ultra-Orthodox Hasidic community on the grounds of heresy. New Square is a village about an hour north of Manhattan, where children are raised speaking Yiddish, teenagers enter arranged marriages after meeting their future spouses for only minutes, people reach their wedding day having no idea what they're supposed to do in the bedroom, and families are huge because birth control is forbidden and sex is mandated on a certain number of days each week. Secular education is minimal, but young men have an extremely thorough understanding of Talmudic law, which covers topics like how much to pay if your ox gores a pregnant cow. Employment prospects are dim, so reliance on government aid is very high, and that includes outright fraud when the legitimate programs are insufficient. Raising enormous families is expensive.

Shulem Deen came from a different ultra-Orthodox community, but was drawn to New Square by the power of its communal events. He was uncomfortable with his arranged marriage, but went along with it because that was what was expected, and soon had five children. Meanwhile, he gradually found himself getting more and more interested in the forbidden world outside: books, movies, television, the internet. The description of his first visit to a public library is pretty great. His wife resisted at every step, but Deen continued to bring more and more forbidden secular media into their home, and gradually stopped observing and believing in the old traditions.

As the book built to its inevitable climax and Deen's expulsion from the community, I found myself throughly caught up in his story.

SPOILERS

It was easy to lose sight of the fact that this is non-fiction, and that it doesn't automatically come with a happy ending. I was happy to read about Deen's successes, like his self-taught computer programming skills that allowed him to obtain a real job, and even his ultimate realization that he couldn't continue living a life that he didn't believe in.

But the Hasidic community won a significant victory in the end. When Deen and his wife amicably divorced, they agreed that the children would be able to visit him, and this happened frequently, on both weeknights and weekends. They talked frequently about the children's daily lives. And then suddenly his ex-wife cut off all contact and took him to court to severely limit his visiting rights. The children too were turned against him, so that his two oldest daughters chose not to visit even for the few hours every other month that were permitted. There was talk of how the Hasidic community would win the fight by wearing him down financially and emotionally, and they succeeded at this. Cut off from his children, Deen was miserable, and while he was eventually able to carry on with his life, his children were never restored to him. Years later, he heard secondhand about the marriage of his 18-year-old daughter.

This is apparently not unusual: reading up about it afterward, I found cases where mothers who left Hasidic communities also had their children removed from them, on the grounds of inadequate religious observance. One such mother committed suicide a couple of years ago. Before reading this, I don't think I had really grasped the impact of elected judges on the US justice system. The Hasidic communities are powerful voting blocks, which means that they can effectively determine the law, and individuals who end up on the wrong side have no legal recourse. I had no idea that children could be taken away from their parents because the parents weren't religious enough. So that was pretty disturbing. At the same time, it increased the impact of Deen's book, and made it that much more worthwhile to read.

I would have liked to see a happy ending, where Deen's integration into mainstream society didn't come at such a very high personal cost. But this is a memoir, not a novel, and it's that much stronger for its reflection of reality.

>26 _Zoe_: I think I'd like it too. BB.

>27 qebo: *evil laughter*

Can anyone recommend other books about people leaving insular religious communities? I remember Madeline talking about Unorthodox in the past, but I'm sure there are many more.

>28 _Zoe_: One I read a few years ago is Growing Up Amish by Ira Wagler (who left Amish communities in Iowa and Indiana only to end up in Lancaster PA). Not great literature, but informative. (My review here: http://www.librarything.com/review/80222243 .)

>29 qebo: Thanks! That was really helpful for its Amazon recommendations page, too, leading me to lots of other books about leaving the Amish. All Who Go Do Not Return was only generating recommendations for other books about leaving Hasidic communities.

I'm not sure if this is of interest, I leap over the wall, and Through the Narrow Gate - both describe leaving religious communities (convents) after many years.

Maybe too obvious but Oranges are not the only fruit describes leaving a Pentecostal community in the North of England, although in her memoir Why be Happy When you can be Normal Winterson stresses that Oranges is fiction.

>31 charl08: Thank you! I had no idea Karen Armstrong had spent time in a convent.

Zoe, try The Children Act - your review made me think of it immediately. Adding All Who Go to my wishlist - sounds fascinating.

I Am Hutterite has been circulating like crazy in my library, Zoe, and would definitely fit your area of interest.

So many great suggestions! Thank you, everyone :D

I've been putting off reading The Alloy of Law. It's been on my nook for over a year. Perhaps this will be the nudge I need to get to it.

>32 _Zoe_: Armstrong's first book was about her life in and out of the convent and her related diagnosis of eplipsy, which seems to cause not a few people to feel as if they are having religious visions. I think it was called The Staircase - I must look now.

Ah, yes: The Spiral Staircase: My Climb out of Darkness. It created quite a sensation and made her a very known figure almost overnight.

Of course, I haven't read it yet. Sigh.

>36 Morphidae: I hope you do read and enjoy it!

>37 ffortsa: Thanks, that's super interesting. I've added it to the wish list :)

I've never actually read any of her books, but I've always meant to. I had never even heard of this one, though.

4. Clockwork Prince by Cassandra Clare

I have really mixed feelings about this book and this author. I really enjoyed her first Shadowhunters trilogy, so I was excited to hear she was writing a steampunk trilogy set in that same world about a hundred years earlier. But I was disappointed in Clockwork Angel when I read it almost four years ago, so I never got around to continuing with the trilogy. I didn't even remember much about the first book, or what problems I'd had with it. So I spent at least the first 50 pages of Clockwork Prince just trying to remember what was going on.

Overall, it was a decent read, and I needed something light to take on a tiring planning trip. But it felt a bit longer than necessary (taking something like six days to read), and I just wasn't wowed. And yet the ending introduced enough interesting new elements that I do want to read the next one to find out what happens. Hmm.

I did find Will much more likable than he was in the last one, but I'm still not a big fan of love triangles in general; I find them sort of sad and unpleasant because they're obviously going to go badly for someone. Although I wonder if Clare is actually going to try to have it both ways in this case, since one of the people involved is in the process of dying.

Anyway, besides my ambiguity about the book itself, I always wonder whether I should avoid Clare's work in general, since she sounds like a pretty horrible person. Before being published, she wrote popular Harry Potter fan fiction that plagiarized a lot from other works, so there's the idea that she leveraged that plagiarism into her successful writing career. And she reportedly goes after her critics online, getting one tumblr taken down for plagiarism when it quoted passages of her work in order to object to elements of slut-shaming etc. (Of course, I wonder about tumblr's role here; criticism should fall under fair use, but it doesn't surprise me at all that no one really cares to defend fair use in the face of a cease-and-desist order.) I have only the vaguest familiarity with all these issues, but I can't think of any other authors who have such persistently negative stories about them circulating over the long term. So I don't know. Clare isn't my favourite author, and I don't see myself buying any of her books, but I'll probably continue to borrow them from the library on occasion.

I have her Shadowhunters trilogy sitting on my TBR shelves and I've been meaning to read it at some point. I stopped buying YA books and just using the library so that solves my dilemma of not wanting to support a not nice person. I wonder how truth are in the rumours circulating about her...

>40 jolerie: I think the plagiarism at least is pretty well-documented, but I have no idea about the rest.

The whole discussion about fan fiction is interesting, though. I've heard that the characters in her first Shadowhunters trilogy are pretty much the same characters from her Harry Potter fanfic, meaning they're based on Harry Potter characters. But I don't actually find them very similar to Harry Potter characters at all, because she had apparently already taken them in a very different direction in the fanfic. So that kind of borrowing doesn't really bother me, though other people complain about it, whereas the actual borrowing of significant passages of text from other authors (which she has apparently also done) seems much more problematic.

>39 _Zoe_: I know how the triangle turns out. :P

>42 MickyFine: Hehe. I think I'll have to read on sooner rather than later—maybe I'll know by the end of this weekend ;)

>41 _Zoe_: I think the 'sampling' done in the music industry is distorting our understanding of plagiarism. The musicians can't exactly footnote the sample, and depend on fans to recognize the sound. But in literature, other rules should still apply. People only seem to get it when it's their work that is 'sampled'.

>44 ffortsa: That's an interesting thought about music sampling. I generally pay much less attention to music than to text, so it's not something that had even occurred to me.

5. Clockwork Princess by Cassandra Clare

Well, I still have mixed thoughts about this one. On the one hand, I was obviously sufficiently invested in the story that I picked up the next book immediately. And it was apparently more engaging than Clockwork Prince because I read it in half the time. But I still feel like it was too long. How many times do we need to be told (and shown) that Bridget sings gloomy songs? I'm not sure why so much time was dedicated to a completely flat character with no personality or development. The wrap-up also felt really over-extended; there were probably another 100 pages after the resolution of the main conflict. Was it really necessary to make sure every important female character gets thoroughly paired off?

And of course, then there's the resolution of the love triangle. I like Jem, and I had initially hoped that he could have a happy ending. I'm always annoyed when the nice guy gets neglected for the guy who's deliberately obnoxious (but of course, really sweet underneath). But it still felt like a bit much to resolve the love triangle by having Tessa cycle through the guys in succession. It would have been one thing if Jem had actually died, allowing Tessa to move on—his apparent death was powerful and moving. But having him just conveniently go away, to return a hundred years later after Tessa has lived out a full and happy life with Will? I'm not sure. I'm not sufficiently invested in the story to feel super strongly about it either way, but I do feel like the epilogue was sort of weak. On the other hand, a part of me still likes a happy ended no matter how farfetched it is.

There were also other details that didn't quite seem to work. For example, the preface is all about the important ceremony that takes place when a young Shadowhunter receives their initial marks. And then Cecily comes to the Institute and isn't fully committed to becoming a Shadowhunter, at least initially, and there's certainly no mention of a formal ceremony. But after a fight, they're suddenly drawing iratzes on her, no big deal. Or there's the fact that the Consul's character has changed completely—I thought he was working for Mortmain, his behaviour was so crazy—but there was no mention of that in the end.

Basically, I think I have to accept this book for what it is: a light read that's not a great work of literature. It has significant flaws, but it's still very readable, and kept me entertained on a flight and while I was too exhausted to read anything heavier. Not every book is going to be a five-star read, and I don't regret the time I spent on this one. I'll probably read more of Cassandra Clare's work at some point.

>46 _Zoe_: I've always viewed Clare's books as fluffy fun that I can read through at a ridiculously fast pace. Glad they pulled you through a flight. :)

6. The Girl With All the Gifts by M. R. Carey

This is a really compelling post-apocalyptic novel that could probably be described as a thriller, but the action only really gets underway about a third of the way in. The first part is even more interesting, when we meet Melanie, a girl at an unusual school where the children are strapped into chairs during the day and locked into cells at night. She doesn't know much about the world outside, but she's eager to learn. And I love books about children with unusual upbringings trying to come to terms with the wider world; Room and The Incorrigible Children of Ashton Place both come to mind.

If you want to go into this book completely unspoiled, don't even look at the tag cloud on the work page. But I knew the big secret going in, and it didn't ruin the book for me at all; I actually think I may have enjoyed it more because of that knowledge.

Also, I should note that I don't normally enjoy books of that genre at all (i.e., zombies), but Melanie's intriguing perspective made it completely different. Despite all the action, this book was really about the characters.

I meant to say, The Girl With All the Gifts is probably the one book that I would have bought over the summer if the Hachette dispute hadn't made it unavailable on Amazon (or at least, unavailable in the usual quick and discounted way). Instead I put it out of my mind for a while and got it from the library a couple of days ago. I would have been happy to own it.

>48 _Zoe_: After your reivew, I've moved it from my Maybe collection up to my LT Recommended collection. It sounds quite fun.

>50 Morphidae: Oh, I'm glad! I can't remember the last book I read so quickly. It does deal with some serious issues, so it's not entirely a light read, but it's super interesting and manages to maintain a pretty optimistic tone even in the face of some horrible events.

Yay! I'm glad you liked TGWATG even though that is not your usual genre :-)

7. On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City by Alice Goffman

This is a work of ethnography, whose author, a middle-class white student, spent years living in a poor black neighbourhood in an attempt to understand what life was like for people in a very different world. It's generated a lot of controversy, including accusations of focusing too much on the criminal elements and treating the community as a source of dramatic entertainment for outsiders, or something along those lines.

But I found it really informative and worth reading, especially in light of recent events in Ferguson, Staten Island, etc.—lots of poor black people are getting killed by the police for no good reason, and the police are getting away with it. I didn't know nearly enough about the interactions of the criminal justice system with poor black communities, so I feel like I learned a lot from this book. There's mention of how young children get entangled in the criminal justice system, like one boy who's maybe 11 and is riding in a car with his older brother; it turns out the car is stolen, so the 11-year-old is treated as an accomplice to a crime and the process begins. There's also discussion of how police threaten and intimidate women to make them inform on their sons, brothers, or boyfriends: in poor neighbourhoods, where living conditions aren't always great, it's easy to say that their homes are unacceptable and threaten to take away their children, or just arrest the women themselves for various secondary crimes like obstructing justice etc. There are plenty of violent police raids. The pressure to inform creates an atmosphere of distrust and rips apart the social fabric; men who are wanted by the police have to make a habit of being unpredictable, not letting anyone know where they'll be at a given time, and so on. I also had no idea just how many types of warrants there are for various offenses: besides actually committing crimes, people are often wanted for things like not paying court fees. And men who often have multiple warrants out for their arrest can't take advantage of basic services like medical care; showing up at the hospital when they've suffered a serious injury or their partner is about to give birth can result in arrest, so it's often too risky.

So there's lots of thought-provoking material here, and I feel like I learned a lot about a world that was completely unfamiliar to me. My only complaint is the organization of the book in thematic sections; the lack of a continuous narrative made it easy to set the book down, so I didn't read it straight through, and I often found myself wanting to read more about Alice herself and her place in this world. But there's a lengthy afterword where she does talk more about her own experiences, which was also really interesting. She had taken her project so far that she avoided any media that her friends in the neighbourhood weren't also reading or watching, with the result that she had trouble interacting with people in graduate school after missing out on years of typical undergrad experiences. She had developed a fear of young-ish white men with short hair—i.e., people who could potentially be police officers—which made it difficult to interact with some of her professors. Etc.

I'm glad I read this one.

>52 norabelle414: I knew I would :). I was sold after reading a brief excerpt somewhere last year.

Now I wonder whether there are other similar books that I'd also like, but I suspect that one is unique.

>53 _Zoe_: Do post your review in the official place...

>55 qebo: Done :)

Hi Zoe - really liked your review of Alice Goffman's book. I'm trying not to buy books so was kind of resigned to not reading it as the library don't have it. Found a talk she gave on youtube, and she's compelling. Have asked the library to order it (they won't always, but fingers crossed!). Thanks for the review.

>57 charl08: Thanks! I admire your resolve in not buying books. I hope your library will be able to get this one.

>53 _Zoe_: I remember Goffman's father's books from college - I still have them - about how people present themselves in their everyday life. Very interesting close observation of behavior. I may put Alice's book on my list.

>59 ffortsa: Oh, she's that Goffman. The name hadn't registered.

>60 qebo: Yeah, I looked her up. I guess she went into the family business.

I think Alice Goffman mentioned that it was her father's influence that both inspired and emboldened her to do this extreme form of research, and that made her family consider it a reasonable thing to do and support her project.

Meanwhile, I've also seen critics say that it was only her father's reputation that made her book as successful as it was. Possibly, but I think it's well worth reading on its own merits. I've never read any of her father's work.

8. Sophocles I: Antigone, Oedipus the King, Oedipus at Colonus by Sophocles

There was a time when I was ambitious and arrogant, and thought that I should only read Greek literature in the original Greek. But despite years of study, reading Greek never became as easy as reading French, and the result is that I just haven't read most of the major classics. It's past time to fix that, and I was inspired to pick up this book in particular by the HistoryCAT's monthly themes of myths and legends in the time before 1 CE. Plus, there's a bingo square for a book where prophecies or portents are part of the plot, and Oedipus the King is pretty much the canonical example of that sort of plot.

I had read Antigone before, in Greek, and it was a semester-long undertaking where I was so focused on understanding the language that I couldn't really appreciate the plot. I hadn't read Oedipus the King or Oedipus at Colonus. In all cases, I was very pleasantly surprised by how readable these works are in a modern English translation. The three plays are have three different translators—Elizabeth Wyckoff, David Grene, and Robert Fitzgerald respectively—and I was happy with all of them.

This is part of a series of translations of the complete Greek tragedies, and I'll definitely be reading more of them in the future. The book contains a helpful introduction that's informative but not too long, and I also really appreciate the glossary at the back of all the people and places that appear in the plays. There are only minimal notes, about textual issues and cases where the translation isn't quite literal, but that was okay. It was nice to just read the plays straight through without worrying about all the details, for a change.

I just realized that I hadn't looked at RSI since October.

ETA: Although I think I did actually see a few individual threads, since LT constantly forgets my Talk settings and shows everything.

>48 _Zoe_:: I really enjoyed The Girl With All the Gifts when I received it for an ER book. Like you, it is not my usual genre, but I felt like there was more to it than what I would expect for that type of book. I happened to look at the tag cloud before I read it too.

Hi Zoe

Congratulations on all these major events that will be happening in this next year! I wish you all good things!

There was a time when I was ambitious and arrogant, and thought that I should only read Greek literature in the original Greek

Oh, yes... I've been there... and it's only in the past few years that I've come around to admitting that it isn't going to happen so I should just read the damn plays that I want to read. :P

>65 jayde1599: I first heard about the book on ER too, and was sad when I didn't win it. Fortunately, libraries!

>66 Whisper1: Thanks, Linda! I hope you have an excellent year as well, and fingers crossed that it will be pain-free after your surgery.

>67 dk_phoenix: It's reassuring to hear that I'm not the only one :D

Ah, supervisor issues.

"I have no idea what's happening with your project."
"Do you want me to send you everything I've written?"
"No, I only want to read finished things."

Even classicists don't always read the stuff in the original Greek, you know. Just sayin'.

*grins*

Good on you for wanting to go all Greek. I barely can read English properly at the best of times, so I don't stray too far from it..ha!

>69 _Zoe_: PHD Comics was a great source of cathartic laughter when I was in grad school. If you haven't discovered it already, I highly suggest it. However, be warned it is an excellent source of procrastination.

>70 scaifea: I wish there had been more emphasis on that idea when I was doing my classics degrees. I had only one single course (on Plato) where we read the whole work in translation in addition to the small sections that we read in the original. I could have learned so much more if that had been the norm rather than the exception....

>71 jolerie: Hehe, I'm not very good at reading English either! I'm so much slower than most people here.

>72 MickyFine: I always enjoy PhD comics when I see them, but for some reason I never seek them out myself. I should do something about that :)

9. Curtsies and Conspiracies by Gail Carriger

I had enjoyed Carriger's Parasol Protectorate in the past, but wasn't wowed with the first Finishing School book, so I never got around to continuing with the series. This month's CAT gave me the extra push I needed, though I almost got distracted with other books.

Again, I wasn't really impressed with the beginning of this book; it was almost too precious and cutesy, with all the overly clever names—I appreciate a book that doesn't take itself too seriously, but it sometimes felt like this one didn't take itself seriously enough. Eventually, though, I did get caught up in the plot, so I'll probably continue with the next book in the series. If steampunk month were a bit longer, I think I'd actually pick it up immediately, but as it is, I don't know when I'll find the time.

One highlight of the book was the brief appearance of Lord Akeldama. I'm looking forward to reading Carriger's first Prudence book in a couple of months.

January in Review

For once I actually managed to read a reasonable number of books in a month! I don't think there was a single month last year when I even reached the 75-book target of seven books (well, 6.25), so it was really encouraging to read nine in January.

It helped that I've been taking a break from ARCs, so almost all the books I read had been tested by other people and had more chance of being good. Also, the new year and new reading challenges always inspire me; I read four books for the SFFCAT in the Category Challenge group, and one book for the HistoryCAT, and filled in a bunch of books on my bingo card. If the rest of the year can continue like this (which admittedly seems somewhat unlikely), I'll be very happy.

LibraryThing Excitement

I'm suddenly more optimistic about LT development than I have been in a long time, thanks to Tim's dramatic and unacknowledged change of heart about incorporating ratings in recommendations. He's always argued that ratings are useless, so the LT recommendations would consistently suggest books that were almost universally agreed to be bad. But apparently that's changing now.

I haven't wanted to celebrate too much, especially in that thread, because there's still time for the anti-rating people to change his mind. But it's pretty exciting :)

>75 _Zoe_: Never know what random thing they might be working on... Glad you're optimistic. I have more than enough books already and don't pay attention to recommendations. :-)

>76 qebo: I don't really need more recommendations either :). But I think there's broader significance in the fact that Tim can eventually change long-established but ill-founded opinions ;)

Maybe we'll get proper wishlist separation one day! (Not that I need an LT wishlist either; that ship sailed long ago. Still, it's the principle of the thing.)

>77 _Zoe_: What else do you want him to change his mind about?

>79 _Zoe_: Well, there's the idea that they can't show OPD at the top of the work page unless they also show the date of our personal copies.... And the idea that talking about "read-ness" is "an impoverished way to see your books—the way people see books who aren't fundamentally book lovers, let alone collectors." And whatever his opposition was to tracking feature requests. And the CK short form. I'm sure there's more, too.

>79 _Zoe_: tracking feature requests
This I would like. Though it seems every time the issue is raised, the same half dozen people chime in.

>79 _Zoe_: Don't forget adding books based on LT data instead of external data :-)

>75 _Zoe_: I'm surprised...pleasantly. I thought he was hide-bound in his opinions.

Now, finally, at long last, after much adversity, that wonderful magnum opus The Late Great Planet Earth may achieve its rightful place in the universe.... ;-)

>81 norabelle414: Oh, yes! Maybe we can have generic editions one day.

>82 TadAD: Yup, I'm very pleasantly surprised too.

And impressed to see that there exists a book with so many members and such a low rating!

>82 TadAD: The Late Great Planet Earth
Love your review. :-)

10. Café in Berlin by André Klein

This is one of those books that's maybe too short to count, since it's less than a hundred pages long and I read it in under an hour. However, it's in German, so that makes up for everything else. It's described as "10 short stories for beginners", and they're definitely short—each story is maybe three pages of relatively large text with generous line-spacing, followed by a page of vocabulary and then five comprehension questions.

But the stories are also entertaining, and I'm glad I read them. This is a book intended for adult beginners, with a focus on humour. Dino has just moved to Berlin from Sicily, and is dealing with the various issues of unsettled youth: he plans to get a job, but that requires a knowledge of German, and his German classes are boring; in the meantime, his successful brother is sending him money every month and his mother thinks he works at a bank. Cooking might be a good idea, but he lives with three other guys and their fridge is like a black hole; food just seems to disappear, though no one will admit responsibility. So he goes out to the closest pizza place, where the food is mediocre but cheap. He goes to watch a boring artsy film with a pretty girl, but then she claims not to have a cell phone and doesn't respond to emails; when they run into each other again by chance, she's quick to blame her spam filter. And so on.

Basically, this was an amusing and enjoyable read, despite being too short. It's been surprisingly difficult to find accessible German reading material that's still interesting; I did like my dual-language edition of Grimm's fairy tales, but when I tried reading other fairy tales they weren't particularly exciting. So I'd be happy to continue with this series, except I can't really justify the $10 cost for such a short book. I'd probably have to go with the $3 Kindle editions instead, and I'm not generally a big fan of ebooks. On the other hand, that would give me something to do with my slow-shipping credits on Amazon.

The same author has also written some easy mysteries that are supposed to be slightly more advanced than this series, so I'm going to try one of those and see how it goes.

>85 _Zoe_: However, it's in German, so that makes up for everything else.
You get to set your own rules regardless, but this one's persuasive.

>86 qebo: :)



11. Waistcoats & Weaponry by Gail Carriger

I really like reading series books in close succession, when I'm already caught up in the story and don't have to think too hard about what to read next. I also needed something light while fighting off a cold. So this was the perfect read, and I enjoyed it much more than the last one. I was still slightly annoyed about Sophronia's relationships with Felix and Soap, but it didn't really affect my overall enjoyment, and I was satisfied with the ending. So I'm definitely looking forward to the next book in this series, which I think is coming out in November. And of course, Prudence in just over a month now!

>87 _Zoe_: I keep forgetting that this one is out. Eventually...

>87 _Zoe_: >88 MickyFine: I liked it better than the first two.

>87 _Zoe_: Julie was reading the series that started with Soulless (the Parasol something or other????). She enjoyed them. Are these related? Are they as enjoyable? If so, I'll clue her in that there's another series as I don't think she's aware of that.

>88 MickyFine: It's definitely worth reading!

>89 Morphidae: I'm glad someone else felt the same way :). This makes me optimistic for Carriger's future writing.

>90 TadAD: Yes, the Finishing School books are set in the same world, maybe 20 years earlier, so we get to see some of the familiar characters as children/teenagers. They're YA, though, so they don't have quite as much depth. I had mixed feelings about the first two, but really liked the third one, so I'll definitely be reading the fourth when it comes out. I'd say it's worth trying Etiquette & Espionage and seeing what she thinks.

Oh, I realized I forgot to mention one thing about the Finishing School books that drives me crazy: the so-called Latin motto, "ut acerbus terminus", "to the bitter end". This seems to have been created by looking up individual words in the dictionary, with no consideration of whether they actually fit together to produce the intended meaning.

I was reminded of it this morning when reading another article about the people in Vermont objecting to a Latin motto on anti-immigrant grounds.

>92 _Zoe_: Do you mean to tell me that Latinos don't speak Latin???

I have Curtsies and Conspiracies home from the library now in an effort to get caught up in the series. Maybe I will actually get it read at some point!

Thanks for the recommendation of The Girl with all the Gifts. Hopefully my local library will get a copy eventually.

>93 norabelle414: I know, it's shocking! The connection seemed so obvious.

>94 alcottacre: I've found that the Finishing School books are great to read when I don't have a lot of time or energy for reading, so I hope you'll be able to fit them in around your schoolwork. And it's definitely worth suggesting The Girl with All the Gifts to your library.

Note to self, I still need to read the Parasol Protectorate series. Are the Finishing school books unrelated or are they connected in some way?

>96 jolerie: They're related; they're set in the same world maybe 20 years before the Parasol Protectorate, so they include some familiar characters as children/teenagers (or adults, in the case of supernaturals). But they can be read completely independently.

12. Dune by Frank Herbert

It's Classics month in the Category Challenge SFFCAT, so I finally managed to read this book that I should have read ages ago. And it was good, though I think my expectations were slightly inflated, because I didn't think it was the Best Book Ever. But I definitely want to read the next one, which is supposed to be much worse, so maybe that one will exceed my expectations?

I actually wanted to request both the second and the third from the library, optimistically. But the third is in offsite storage. Which is all well and good, except for some reason offsite storage books can't be checked out; they get delivered to the library and you have to read them in the library. Uh, no thanks. So I requested an ILL copy instead. The inefficiency is sort of ridiculous.

>98 _Zoe_: That one's sitting on a shelf, picked up as a maybe-I-should-try-this at the grocery store IIRC. Longer than I want to take on just now.

>99 qebo: Yup, I was actually surprised by the length. I took a break in the middle to read Waistcoats & Weaponry when I needed something lighter.

But it was actually *slightly* shorter than it appeared, since there was a glossary (and several appendices) at the back. I wish novels with relevant back material would note it at the beginning, because I never think to flip to the back. I thought the book was perfectly comprehensible even without the glossary, but it still would have been nice to know that it existed.

I have Dune on my TBR mountain as well. I will try to curb my expectation because it has be tooted as the best SF ever.

>98 _Zoe_: & >101 jolerie: It's certainly not the Best Book Ever. Whether it's the Best SF Book Ever is a matter of opinion.

Keep in mind that a lot of its mystique comes from the early years. In the mid-1960s SF was finally emerging from the rather pulp-oriented days of its youth. Dune was a major departure from that and so garnered a lot of, "Wow!"

It's the first—and one of only 23—SF novel that won both the major awards and I would argue it's definitely better than several on that list but maybe only equal with some others. So, is it the best SF book? Arguable and either answer is fine.

As for the second and third, Zoë, Dune Messiah is okay although I don't think it's as good as Dune. Imo, Children of Dune takes the first step on the long slide into utter mediocrity that is the hallmark of the series as a whole.

I think maybe I'd be happier with a term like "most important" that gives more weight to the historical significance. But at some level, of course, it doesn't really matter. I'm always glad to read a good book even if it's not destined to be an all-time favourite for me.

It's always hard to decide how far to follow a series that's descending into mediocrity. I've already concluded that I won't touch any of the books written by Herbert's son, but as for Herbert himself, I'll probably keep going for a little while anyway.

The thing is, with Dune and sequels it's not so much "descending into mediocrity" as "falling off a very high cliff". With the continuations by Herbert's son it's "and then starts digging once it hits bottom", from everything I've heard. (I only read Dune Messiah and maybe half of the next one, myself.)

Yeah, I've looked at the ratings and noted the extremely sharp drop-off between Dune's 4.3 (which I interpret as "really exceptional") and Dune Messiah's 3.68 (which I interpret as "low end of average"). I think I'm sufficiently invested in the characters to pick up at least one more book, even if it is mediocre, but I'm certainly not committed to seeing it out to the bitter end.

13. Mord am Morgen (Murder in the Morning) by André Klein

Another super-short German book; again, I'm listing it anyway because it's German. I didn't find the story as entertaining as the last one I read, and there were a few issues that annoyed me enough that I wrote a long Amazon review about it, so I'll just copy that here:

I first came across André Klein’s work in Café in Berlin, a collection of very short German stories that follow the hapless and entertaining Dino as he tries to make his way in Berlin. I really enjoyed Dino’s adventures, but I wanted something a bit longer and more difficult. Fortunately, I found that Klein had written another series of books, beginning with Mord am Morgen, and intended for “intermediate and advanced students” as opposed to Café in Berlin’s audience of “beginners”. This sounded perfect. I liked the idea of a longer continuous narrative, and I figured it would be good for me to read something a bit more challenging.

Unfortunately, Mord am Morgen didn’t quite live up to my expectations, for a variety of reasons. First, while the story is “longer” in the sense that it is a continuous narrative rather than vignettes that can be read in any order, it’s not actually longer overall; I still read the whole book in about an hour. Second, while the sentences are probably more difficult, a lot of the increased difficulty just comes from the significant reduction in vocabulary provided at the end of each section. This is not very helpful. It was frustrating to see all the empty space on the page where there could have been useful words. It’s true that I could still follow the story without the additional vocabulary, but I missed having the extra learning tool. And it deterred me from checking the vocabulary at all, because more often than not the word I was looking for wasn't there.

My main problem with this book, though, is that some of the questions at the ends of the sections are just flat-out bad. In Café in Berlin, the questions were comprehension-based, testing whether you understood what had happened in the passage you just read. Probably 75% of the Mord am Morgen questions follow this approach, and those questions are fine. But there are also questions that just test outside knowledge, which is completely unhelpful and annoying. For example, at one point the detective goes into a bar and orders “red and white fries”. There’s no further discussion of it, so it doesn’t make sense to ask in the comprehension questions what exactly that means. I happened to know from Café in Berlin that it referred to fries with ketchup and mayonnaise, and you’d have a pretty good chance of guessing that based on the colors, but it could conceivably refer to fries from Austria or fries made from a special kind of potato. The important point is that figuring out the answer to the question has absolutely nothing to do with reading the preceding story, and that’s bad. If you asked me out of nowhere what “red and white fries” were, and gave me a choice of those three options, I’d have just as much chance of guessing as I would if I’d actually read the story.

Other bad questions deal with synonyms: “Which word is not a synonym for this one?” Well, one of those words actually appeared in the story, but I have no way of deciding between the other two unless I happen to know the words already. Again, not helpful as a follow-up to the story. Then there were the questions that just didn’t match the story exactly: we read that an event happened “around 1:30”, so we choose “1:24” as an answer, because it’s obviously not 10 or 4. Or when someone gets shot in the leg, that’s apparently equivalent to the foot, because it’s definitely not the arm or the shoulder. Awkward. Finally, there were occasional questions about word order (“Which word order is incorrect?”), which I don’t think is really appropriate in a book that doesn’t have any discussion of grammar. And again, these were questions that didn’t depend on reading the preceding section; I could answer them just as well without reading it at all. Basically, it seems like not a lot of thought went into coming up with questions that were pedagogically appropriate as follow-ups to the reading passages.

So, this may seem like a lot of criticism, but at the end of the day this book still has one huge thing going for it: I don’t know of any others that serve the same purpose. You’d think there would be plenty of demand for easy-reading stories with accompanying vocabulary, intended for language learners at various stages of the process, but I can’t seem to find any. I do have some dual-language books, but that’s not quite the same thing. And I have a book of fairy tales probably intended for children, but it’s not as interesting. So despite the flaws of this book, I’ll probably continue on with the series, just because there’s no alternative. And for beginners, I’d definitely recommend Klein’s Dino stories, starting with Café in Berlin.

So, Amazon keeps offering these $1 ebook credits for choosing slow shipping. And they're having a Valentine's Day sale on Kindles. And I want to keep reading those short German stories, but not at the paperback cost. The result is that I finally gave in and ordered a Kindle after all these years.

I first got a Kobo five years ago when I was travelling to Africa for three weeks, and it definitely served its purpose then, but I never really took up e-reading as a general thing. I found Adobe Digital Editions sort of annoying, and libraries didn't have great e-book selections, and it just seemed like more hassle than it was worth.

Needless to say, things have changed in the past five years, and Amazon was more user-friendly from the outset. So I'm optimistic. Even with library books, the things that I want to read are often more readily available electronically than in paper form. I just hope I won't start reading terrible books just because they're free.

And in other exciting book news, I ordered another bookcase a couple of days ago. It will be nice to get all the books off the floor for a couple of months at least :D

>107 _Zoe_: for a couple of months
Yeah, keep that bar low.

Awesome on getting a new Kindle and a new bookcase! Any gifting book related is always fun. When I organized all my books and ended up with half of one bookcase left empty...I thought, well, now I've got so much space to put my new purchases. This should last a while. I think its maybe been a year and now the books are back on the floor....ha!

JIm and I have been rearranging the livingroom, using my press-pole bookshelf standards (how I wish I could find more!). Right now we have bookshelves on most of a 17 foot wall, with a break for the TV. As Suzanne remarked, I should be reported for empty shelves, but that's just because books are in boxes and the bedroom, etc. When we finally finish, we will have a library wall in the livingroom, and I'm sure still some books in the bedroom.

and we both have Kindles, tablets, iPods, etc. etc. And there's always the library.

>107 _Zoe_: Is it a Kindle Fire? Because otherwise (at least in Canada) you're not going to be able to get library ebooks onto it. :(

>108 qebo: There may be a reason why I haven't been listing my acquisitions for the year....

>109 jolerie: It's amazing how shelf space always seems to disappear so quickly. We bought a huge Expedit for storing board games last January, and it was only half full, but now it's overflowing :/

>110 ffortsa: Yup, I've been trying to get most of my light fiction from the library, but even the heavier reference books seem to consume the space so quickly. And of course, there's the impending Book Disaster, when one day my parents decide that they're tired of storing all the books that don't fit in a Manhattan apartment.... Hopefully by that point I'll have either an office or a larger home, or both.

>111 MickyFine: Well, I have at least a year and a half more in the US, so hopefully I'll get my money's worth in that time. And maybe in the meantime Canada will catch up to the US in ebook lending....

>112 _Zoe_: It's the publishers not the libraries.

>113 MickyFine: Hmm, I wonder what their reasoning is? I remain optimistic that they'll follow the US publishers eventually.

14. Ferien in Frankfurt by André Klein

Well, maybe I'm throwing my numbers off, because I keep reading these tiny German books. But I can always do another count without them at some point.

In the meantime, I was happy to continue with Dino's story via my new Kindle. Thanks to the slow-shipping credits, I could get this book for free rather than the usual $2.99, and that's certainly a huge improvement over the $7.99 paper price! It's definitely less convenient to read on the Kindle because there's vocabulary at the end of each section (two or three pages after the text), so I was constantly paging back and forth, but maybe I'll eventually figure out a better way to do it (I know I can jump to specific sections, but that seems like just as much effort as just flipping a few pages). The upside is that I was much less eager to check the vocabulary, so that led to a smoother reading experience, and I could figure out most of the important stuff from context anyway. But I'm curious to see how this will work when I read the next mystery in that series, because I was definitely relying on the vocabulary much more heavily there.

Possibly one day I'll also figure out how to get a German-English dictionary on the Kindle, because the default German-German dictionary is not the most helpful here.

Anyway, the story itself was less entertaining than Café in Berlin, but I'm still happy to be reading any easy German that I can find.

And in LibraryThing problems, I need to figure out what's going on with this author, but I can't be bothered at the moment. There seem to be two different author pages based on how the accent was typed, and it's possible that there actually are two different authors with this name, but in that case the works are all mingled and the authors aren't properly divided. So that's a project for another day.

Oh, I can see that this Kindle is going to be dangerous. So hard to resist the daily deals. All the Finishing School books are on sale for $1.99 each, and I really don't need to buy them because I just read them. But they're cheap!

>116 _Zoe_: Cheap on Nook too; I checked after Roni posted on the daily deal thread. So I bought them. I'm sure this'll suck me in to the next installment at full price.

>117 qebo: Oh, yes, I can see that I'll have to start paying more attention to that thread now. Bah.

15. Karneval in Köln (Carnival in Cologne) by André Klein
16. Momente in München (Moments in Munich) by André Klein

Well, I've now finished with this author's first series of tiny German books. I enjoyed the third one more than the second, while the fourth was pretty forgettable. This is probably to be expected just based on the topics: I think Carnival is interesting, while I have almost no interest in Octoberfest.

I'm both glad that I read these and glad that I got the ebook versions of the last three, so that I could pay $2.99 each rather than $7.99 each. For savings like that, I could definitely handle the inconvenience of flipping back and forth to the vocabulary page.

Reading super-easy foreign language books for adults is really satisfying. I'll be continuing on with Klein's detective series after this, and if he writes any more of this Dino series I'll read those as well.

>106 _Zoe_: You’d think there would be plenty of demand for easy-reading stories with accompanying vocabulary, intended for language learners at various stages of the process, but I can’t seem to find any.

Yes - they have the equivalent in English in my local library, but this kind of thing easily accessible in a range of languages would be great. I was reading international newspapers on the kindle to get this for a while, but that gets expensive.

>120 charl08: Oh, I should probably look for newspapers or blogs or something. I'm sure I could find more material online. But for some reason I prefer books, no matter how short and easy they are.

Meanwhile, another benefit of the Kindle is that I can now read the various short stories that popular authors often public exclusively in electronic format. These won't get counted toward my yearly total, but I'll list them here anyway:



Short Story: Mitosis by Brandon Sanderson

Set in Sanderson's Reckoner's world after the events of Steelheart, this is the story of what happens when another malevolent Epic comes to Newcago. I'm planning to read Firefight soon (waiting on a hold from the library), so this was the perfect refresher on the world and the events of the first book. It was enjoyable in its own right, too.

I borrowed this one from the public library, and I was really impressed with how smooth and easy the whole process was. I know there are various concerns about how libraries have integrated with Amazon for Kindle borrowing, but from an end user perspective, it's pretty great. I'm not particularly concerned about Amazon knowing more about what books I read since they already have a huge amount of information about that anyway, and I'm happy that I don't have to deal with Adobe Digital Editions.

>121 _Zoe_: I didn't know that SS existed. I enjoyed Steelheart and Firefight and was resigned to the year's hiatus until the next one. I'll find a copy of this to hold me over.

>112 _Zoe_: Well, at 35 pages, I'm not sure how much it will do to tide you over, but I hope you enjoy it!

>121 _Zoe_: Years ago the head of Sun Microsystems announced that we had no privacy anymore, and we should get over it.

We have to watch how the data is used, as Amazon does not necessarily have the honor of public librarians, who have in the past stood up to requests for such reading lists. If we can enforce the anonymity of usage, it would be reassuring. It's bad enough that Amazon thinks it can recommend based on prior purchases, but that is the way of commerce these days, from supermarkets to cars.

It occurs to me that we could join the Amazon 'library' and then 'borrow' all sorts of books that we don't read, just to screw up their marketing!

I guess I just figure that Amazon already has so much data about my reading and purchasing habits that the addition of some fraction of my library borrowing doesn't really make much difference. Would I be upset if they published a list of all my purchases? Of course. Would I be significantly more upset if they published a list of all my purchases and also my Kindle library checkouts? No, I think it would be about the same. Basically, I've already decided to trust Amazon, for better or worse.

Also, I actually find that their recommendations can be helpful ;)

>125 _Zoe_: Where "helpful" may be of more benefit to Amazon than to me, since they don't care whether I ever actually read what I buy.

>126 qebo: Yup, that's true. But I like discovering interesting new books to read, even if I have way too many already.

>125 _Zoe_: Yes, unfortunately, it's inevitable. So all we can do is make sure we don't end up in a totalitarian state where someone might actually be interested in this data!

>128 ffortsa: If only I were confident that we could prevent it!

Meanwhile, you were all right about Dune Messiah, of course. 67 pages in, it's not really holding my attention and the hoped-for visits with old friends have been minimal and not very pleasant. I'll probably finish it anyway, unless it drags so much that I have to return it to the library before I'm done. But I'll definitely think twice before picking up another one.

17. Die Dritte Hand (The Third Hand) by André Klein

I just realized I hadn't posted abut this book, which I actually read before Mitosis. As I'm sure you can tell, it's another of the tiny German books in the series I've been reading. This is the second of the author's mystery books, and I thought it was much better than the first. There was a dramatic starting scene when a young couple encountered a severed hand in the water, and I actually found myself caught up in the story and eager to read on. (In the previous book, I didn't particularly care who the dead body belonged to.) I still didn't find the resolution the most satisfying, but I was satisfied with the book overall.

18. Ungifted by Gordon Korman

Gordon Korman was one of my favourite childhood authors; I loved his hilarious McDonald Hall books about the ridiculous exploits of a group of boarding school students. So I don't know how he could go so horribly, horribly wrong here.

The premise is fine, and promises room for amusement: a troublemaker is called to the office, where the superintendent writes down his name on whatever paper happens to be at hand—in this case, the list of students who have qualified for the gifted program.

And then the awful stereotyping begins. The students at the gifted school are not like normal human beings at all. They have no social skills or non-academic interests, no creativity, no imagination. Many of them just want to be normal; one dreams of attending a school dance (because of course, gifted schools don't have dances), and the most brilliant one is trying to get kicked out of the gifted school completely.

The curriculum makes no sense. As the teachers try to figure out what Donovan is doing there, they acknowledge that students can be gifted in different ways, stronger in some areas than others. The obvious corollary would be that even some of the gifted students are only "average" in certain subjects, and yet still manage to take those classes and be fine. But Donovan finds all of his classes completely beyond him, failing all the math and science courses outright and barely passing social studies despite putting in a huge effort. The idea throughout is that gifted students are completely different from others, working on a completely different level in all ways, and it's just not true.

This is supposed to be a sort of heartwarming story—Donovan comes to appreciate the gifted students, and they come to appreciate him—but in order to make the point that they complement each other, Korman has to rely on the idea that they're completely different to begin with.

And to add one other stupid element, there's a major story line about a sick dog who just turns out to be pregnant. Various people spend time worrying that the dog is dying, but somehow no one thinks to take her to the vet. Um....

So then I had to read other reviews of Ungifted, and was happy to see that the top reviews on Amazon are negative. But I read one review on a blog that was rather infuriating:

Some folks need to get a grip. The book is FICTION. It is a work of the author's imagination. It's the author's job to create a world where we are willing to suspend disbelief. Are all "gifted" kids dweebs like in the book? No. Would there be a kid who didn't know anything about Youtube? Maybe, but doubtful. Etc.

Really, people think it's okay to propagate inaccurate negative stereotypes about groups because it's fiction? I'd be curious to hear that reviewer's thoughts about a book that perpetuated all the worst stereotypes about women, blacks, etc.

>132 _Zoe_:

I've seen plenty of people brush away complaints about lack of representation of women and minorities, or stereotyped representation, with the same "it's fiction". Or "it's only one book", each and every time the complaints are made on a hundred book. (We had this happen here on LT, in the Science Fiction Fans group, with people recommending a steady diet of sexist 1950s fare for Tim's kid.)

As far as getting upset about a review that thoroughly misses the point: http://xkcd.com/386/

>133 lorax: I have to admit, lack of representation of women etc. doesn't bother me nearly as much as stereotypical representation. I'd much rather read a book about a group of men than a book about a group of women who are completely helpless and unable to get by until a man steps in to save them (which is basically what Ungifted was, but with gifted students instead of women).

That comic seems to appear in my life with disconcerting frequency :). Life would be much easier if people were never wrong on the internet.

Meanwhile, I wonder if anything will ever come of that old poll about opening up Science Fiction Fans to non-members.

>134 _Zoe_:

I don't think anyone was opposed to it, but the group is owned by bluetyson, and he's not really active. A number of people have sent him profile messages on the issue, but nothing ever came of it. (I believe I messaged him as well, but he deleted it, and it was before I knew that any party to a conversation could unilaterally delete it for both participants, so I didn't save a copy.)

>135 lorax: Yeah, the poll seemed pretty favourable, so maybe he'll get around to it one day. Thanks for trying, anyway :)

Or maybe one day I'll read enough science fiction and decide to label myself an official fan. It was interesting to look at that thread and try to remember what SF I enjoyed as a child. Definitely Bruce Coville (My Teacher Is an Alien etc.), which other people mentioned there too. Monica Hughes' The Keeper of the Isis Light left a strong impression as well. The Giver, of course, which always reminds me of Tuck Everlasting too, as a big-ideas speculative fiction book even if it's not science fiction.

I know very little about contemporary children's books, but I'd recommend Paolo Bacigalupi's Zombie Baseball Beatdown. It's apparently not considered science fiction, at least based on the tags, but I think it probably should be. Poor food safety standards in a corporate meatpacking factory lead to cows becoming zombies.

>131 _Zoe_: I haven't read that one, but in my opinion, Korman's earliest work was his best. He's never managed to top the zany craziness of the Macdonald Hall books and his other early books.

>137 foggidawn: Yup, I completely agree. It's interesting that the earlier stuff isn't nearly as popular.

Question: Do people really judge a wedding by whether it provides all the expected forms of alcohol, even if the bride and groom themselves don't like alcohol?

We're planning to do our toast with a mocktail that we'll actually drink, rather than with champagne that we wouldn't drink. We'll still have unlimited wine and beer at the bar.

But apparently people need champagne to celebrate, so we need to fit this in somewhere as well. True or false?

This is an afternoon tea reception, so most people will presumably be drinking tea as well. And it's preceded by three hours of open bar (wine and beer) at the informal hors d'oeurvres/lunch.

>139 _Zoe_: People are going to judge a wedding no matter what, unfortunately. Do what makes you happy, and screw everyone else.

If beer and wine is available then there is absolutely no reason you need to have champagne as well. You're being very generous to have alcohol in the first place since either of you like it. The toast is specifically about you two and your marriage, and I think it's awesome that you want to have a mocktail which is more representative of your marriage than champagne would be.

>140 norabelle414: Thank you for saying exactly what I wanted to hear :D

>139 _Zoe_: This is why people elope. Too much anxiety planning for everyone else’s expectations. People who need champagne to celebrate have misconstrued the concept.

I agree with Nora. People are going to judge no matter what, you do what's good for you. In fact, I wish I could write exactly what she said, because I also think that you're being very, very generous offering unlimited alcohol at a wedding when neither of you drink. You've gone above and beyond what you need to do.

LTers are the best :). Thank you all.

>140 norabelle414: Amen, sister friend!

In other exciting potential LT developments: https://www.librarything.com/topic/58632

I agree! Do what you want, not what other's expect of you. It's your day. Enjoy it! :D

>139 _Zoe_: Just seconding Nora's answer. My thoughts exactly, and I couldn't say it better.

>139 _Zoe_: But apparently people need champagne to celebrate, so we need to fit this in somewhere as well. True or false?

False. 80% of the champagne at a wedding is left in the glasses. (At least, that's my informal observation after a lot of years of weddings.) So, most people are probably right with you in not drinking it.

Have what you want and let everyone else realize that it's about the people—especially two of the people—and everything else is just window dressing.

Late to the party, but.

People who are going to criticize are going to find a reason, so don't worry about them. If neither of you drink you're being more than accommodating by having beer and wine (especially for an afternoon event), and a mocktail toast will allow others who for one reason or another don't drink to fully participate rather than awkwardly raising water when everyone else has bubbly.

(I mean, I'm the last person to talk about wedding planning, since we had fewer than 20 guests at ours and planned it in a couple months - we knew we had a deadline. But what you need to have a wedding are two people who want to get married {1}, a license, an officiant, and witnesses. Anything else is purely optional.)

{1} Further restrictions on this aspect are dependent on local jurisdiction. :-)

>149 TadAD: Thanks! I'm glad to hear another voice in agreement :)



19. Boston Strong: A City's Triumph over Tragedy by Casey Sherman and Dave Wedge

This is an ER book that I actually managed to read as soon as I got it, which is always a minor victory. Books that don't get read soon after acquisition are at risk of getting lost in the massive TBR pile.

I enjoy books about running and books about disaster survival, so books about the Boston marathon bombing obvious catch my eye for several reasons. Last year I read Stronger, a memoir of one of the survivors that describes his efforts to deal with the loss of both legs.

Boston Strong takes a much broader look at the events of that day, rather than focusing on the perspective of one individual. It covers lots of different people who were affected by the bombings, including wounded spectators, politicians, and police officers, as well as discussing the bombers themselves.

There are so many different people whose backstories are described in so much detail that the book actually took a while to get started, and I sometimes felt like it was bogged down in unnecessary facts about people who were still just names. It was interesting to read the backstories of familiar people, but I can count on my fingers the number of names that I recognized going in (basically, the four people who were killed, the guy in the famous picture who lost both his legs, and the Tsarnaev brothers). It was less interesting to read detailed backstories of, say, a 38-year-old spectator on her way to the city. Before telling us anything about what happened to this woman at the event, we learn her parents' names and professions (and the year when her mother retired), how long her parents have been married, her childhood hobbies, the factors that went into her choice of college (she wanted to go away from home to North Carolina, but her parents wanted her to stay close, so she ended up going to college in Massachusetts), the fact that she didn't love her college experience because her then-boyfriend was back at home in a different city, how she lived with her parents for a while after college to save money (even the name of their street is mentioned), and her career history (first an accounting firm, then a small industrial design firm, then a job that made her travel a lot, and finally a position as a labor relations manager). These didn't feel like carefully-selected details that would make us appreciate who this woman was; it was more like the authors just recorded every detail they had.

But eventually marathon day arrived, and the narrative at that point became extremely compelling. I stayed up too late reading on two separate nights, absorbed first in the account of the marathon day and then in the account of the events in Watertown a few days later. I actually found that the book was most successful as an action story, although the subtitle of "a city's triumph over tragedy" suggests that one of the primary goals was to inspire with stories of the city's resilience. For an uplifting story of flourishing in the face of adversity, though, I think Stronger is a better read, because an individual memoir creates a more personal connection. Also, Stronger entirely avoids all the political issues that sometimes made Boston Strong a slightly uncomfortable read for me. Boston Strong is obviously focused on the rah-rah USA message rather than on political analysis, which is appropriate for a book about surviving a terrorist attack, but that sometimes shaded slightly too much into rah-rah US foreign policy for my liking.

It was more than three-quarters of the way into the book when the authors reproduced the text of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev's statement in the boat, which included the following lines: "The US government is killing our innocent civilians but most of you already know that. As a (illegible) I can't stand to see such evil go unpunished, we Muslims are one body, you hurt one you hurt us all.... Stop killing our innocent people and we will stop." Seeing that statement made it a bit harder for me to maintain the absolute black-and-white perspective needed to appreciate the narrative, because while of course terrorism is horrible, I also think that killing thousands of civilians in military campaigns is horrible. So later in the book, when I read lines from encouraging speeches, like the vice president saying that "America will never ever, ever stand down," I couldn't help wondering what that meant in a broader political context.

I know I'm not supposed to be thinking about those things; it's easier to appreciate the story as one of "ideological war" (in the authors' words), with radical Islam on one side and American freedom on the other. Or, better yet, to focus on the individual victims, because it's easy to side with them wholeheartedly. I think that's why I was more satisfied with my read of Stronger, because there's absolutely no ambiguity about Jeff Bauman's innocence; I could root for him absolutely without any of these awkward questions about broader issues. Boston Strong tries to focus on the victims as well, but by covering the events more broadly, it can also bring the reader face-to-face with some uncomfortable questions. Or maybe that's just me.

February in Review









Well, this was a sort of strange month. The list of things read looks long (at least, by my standards), but it only includes four full-length books. Still, there's lots to be happy about: I read Dune at last; I spent a good amount of time on German; and I actually read an ER book as soon as it arrived. I'm also glad to have caught up on Carriger's Finishing School series before her latest book (in a different series) is released this month.

But I'm absolutely exhausted at this point. The combination of a German supervisor who thinks that I should pretty much be working on my dissertation 24/7 (yes, I was working on Christmas morning), plus trying to finish up wedding stuff without letting it take any time, is basically overwhelming. It's entirely counterproductive to try to work without pause on the dissertation anyway, because I ultimately lose days to mental exhaustion rather than scheduled breaks anyway, but unfortunately it's not something where my opinion really has any weight. At least the wedding planning will be over in a few weeks.

>17 _Zoe_:

So cool! You're reading books in German!!

>140 norabelle414: Do what makes you happy, and screw everyone else.

Ditto from me! I'll even drink a mocktail here at home on the day of your wedding! :D

My daughter warned me years ago that she is not going to have a wedding. She now remains in a state of seemingly permanent engagement! :) She is also not going to attend her graduation. I support whatever makes her the happiest.

I am so excited for you newlyweds-to-be!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

>153 SqueakyChu: If you want to work on your German, I would definitely recommend those books!

>154 SqueakyChu: Aww, it makes me happy to think of you drinking a mocktail for our wedding day :D. I hope you'll take a photo!

And Jordana's a smart one! I somehow had no idea how much trouble wedding planning would be. We even tried to eliminate unnecessary components, like most decorations, but the list of things to do still seems almost endless.

I just read an interesting article about someone who resolved last year to read only books by non-white authors. It seems like a worthy goal, and I'm not sure I could do it, even excluding academic books. And that's a bit troubling.

>156 _Zoe_: Did you see this bug report, which refers to a new group with a similar goal?

>157 qebo: Oh, that does look interesting, thanks for pointing it out!

I'm strangely reluctant to start new challenges in the middle of the year, but I think I'll follow along and request an invitation eventually.

Although reading the existing discussion, I feel like I'm almost too uninformed to join in, which of course doesn't really make sense when the whole purpose is to become more informed.

>156 _Zoe_: It would be hard to get by reading only non-white authors, though I guess I could do it for a year. With a LOT of dedication to the cause, that is.

I'm not sure I have that much dedication...too many other plans for the year.

Well, you can read white women! Or white gay men! Or white trans* or genderqueer people of any description. I suspect my own list will lean pretty heavily on white women, to be honest.

And you don't have to go cold turkey, I'm not. (I started the group.)

>156 _Zoe_: I've been thinking about tracking the diversity of my reading for a while. I came across the definitions stumbling block and I really should get over it and come up with a 'best efforts' attempt. I'm not big on using the 'white male' category because I think defining by skin colour isn't the whole story - especially if you read a lot of translated lit (which I do, although not as much as I should!) where a white male author may be from a hugely different culture and therefore, potentially could equally contribute to the diversity of the reading spread. I also think that social diversity has a big role to play - there are a lot of middle class writers out there (including those of different gender and skin colour) which doesn't breed a diversity of experience/background. I just don't know enough about authors' real lives to know about sexuality, or sometimes even gender (I kid you not, I muddle up male and female authors with ambiguous names let alone the more complex gender identities). If it isn't in the author bio or I haven't come across discussion about it, I usually haven't looked deeper. I guess that means that I'm being carried along by publication-bias, which would make me a good candidate for paying more attention to how I read. I think I probably need to pick one goal and stop looking at the big picture because, once I looked back over my reading, I realised (even with the translated lit, women writers and other categories) there are a lot of 'white men' in there.

>157 qebo: (and on) This looks to be an interesting approach. I like the idea of addressing the publication / review bias that favours certain groups, even if I'm a bit hesitant about how authors are categorised (as >162 klarusu: has already pointed out). Will start counting rough categories on my thread I think, as a starting point.

My initial thought was that "white women" would be too easy for me to include in any sort of challenge, but when I did a rough count of my authors last year it was still less than 50% female. I'll have to see if that's different when I count only fiction.

>162 klarusu: I agree that I don't know enough about authors' lives. I'm hoping to piggy-back on other people doing similar challenges next year, and get ideas from them, or else from lists. I love lists.

>164 _Zoe_: In my best Austen-esque accent 'One can never have enough lists'.

>165 klarusu: :D

Gah, the NYPL holds system drives me crazy.

It might seem reasonable that they don't let you renew a book if there are any holds on it. But they don't pull the holds right away. So if there are 3 holds and 46 copies sitting on the shelf, the book can't be renewed. Blah.

>167 _Zoe_: That is bizarre. My experience is that if there are enough free copies to fill holds the catalogue will allow renewals.

>157 qebo: & ff: Leaving aside the difficulties identified by others of figuring out which authors do not fit into the "straight white cisgender male", the definition in the first line seems unfortunately loose. One could read Harlequin romances for an entire year—avoiding the few(?) written by men—and be a stellar participant per rules without following the spirit, I think.

Lorax's amendment that it's about increasing the fraction of non-default authors (or any other variation you choose) seems to capture the essence in a better way, imo.

I don't know the percentage of my reading is that is non-default. LT says 33.47% of my total books are by women so strictly the number would have to be higher since some of the rest are not straight. However, I have a hard time thinking of J.K. Rowling, et al. as something terrifically outside the mainstream. On the other hand, I read a decent amount in translation and I'm with Claire that many of these have a definite aura of non-default to me. Maybe 30% is the real number by whatever criteria lurk in my brain?

I think that's a challenge where I might lurk rather than join in. Although, come to think of it, maybe I need to do some categorization on my own and figure out where I might stretch some reading.

Edit: This was interesting enough I had to build a spreadsheet for calculating it. :-D

>167 _Zoe_: My library system does it the same way. Even if there are books available, it sometimes takes a few days for the holds to clear so I can renew a book.

Well, it's some consolation to hear that my library isn't the only one. But it does remind me why it's not a good idea to take out more than the couple of books that I'm about to read immediately. I think I'm going to end up paying a few days' worth of fines rather than making a whole other trip to the library.



20. Firefight by Brandon Sanderson

This is the second book in Sanderson's Reckoners series, and my reaction to it was pretty similar to the first: I thought it was pretty slow to get started (lots of action scenes that didn't really do much for me in terms of plot or characters), but it picked up at the end and left me wishing that the next one were available already.

There were still plenty of aspects that I found dissatisfying, though: lack of communication among the main characters causing problems and just generally making the book less interesting—I love Sanderson's world-building, and I don't want to be held back from understanding more about what's happening just because the protagonist's companions are extremely secretive—and general lack of analysis about the situation. Even when David is a member of the Reckoners, it's expected that Prof will just make all the decisions and everyone will listen to him, but I want to read about the factors involved in the decision-making, not just the results. It doesn't help that Prof is supposed to be really smart etc., but fixates on one specific theory about what the enemy wants, without considering other possibilities, so everything just goes badly. And of course, he's completely blind when it comes to Megan too. And then Regalia is involved in all sorts of mysterious things, like communicating with Calamity and increasing the power of other Epics, but David just kills her in a fit of rage without trying to get information from her first! Argh. There was just way too much information that was known but not communicated effectively, and that makes for a frustrating read. But again, this is partly because Sanderson has created such an interesting world to begin with, and I want to know how it works.

Steelheart was not my favourite Sanderson book to begin with, and Firefight confirms my feelings about the series, but "not my favourite Sanderson" is still much better than a lot of other books out there. So of course I'll be reading on eagerly as soon as the next one comes out, but I'm more excited about the Wax and Wayne books that are coming in the interim.

There's some interesting discussion in the New York Times today about whether online friendships can be real friendships. I don't really understand how this is a question. The main defense of non-online friendships seems to be that there's more risk of being awkward and uncomfortable in person, which makes those relationships somehow more authentic and better.

>171 _Zoe_: "We can present ourselves as we wish to be. We can edit and retouch our words."
Of course this _never_ happens in meatspace where people are wholly authentic at all times.

I don't really understand how this is a question.
Yeah, me neither.

Actually, looking at my wedding invite list, I'd say that purely in-person friendships are the least likely to last. The people who I've remained in touch with over the years tend to be the ones who have also moved away from Toronto and understand that a friendship can be maintained even with only a couple of face-to-face encounters each year, whereas people who stayed all their lives in the Toronto area (where they have plenty of other friends, of course) seem more inclined to an out of sight, out of mind approach.

>174 _Zoe_: I would bet that Sherry Turkle has an international network of friends.

>167 _Zoe_: That would drive me crazy! I put books on hold at my local library all the time.

>174 _Zoe_:

The people who I've remained in touch with over the years tend to be the ones who have also moved away from Toronto and understand that a friendship can be maintained even with only a couple of face-to-face encounters each year,

Some of my most dear friend are those whom I rarely see, but, when I do, it's as if no time has passed at all - even though in reality it's been many, many years.

It's interesting how some folks can tolerate long-distance friendships very well and others not at all; if you aren't part of their daily life, they can't deal with you. It's often quite surprising too, which people are tolerant. For years we were kind of half in Philly and half here in Vermont and some friends in both places weren't a bit bothered, others were ALWAYS bothered by it.

21. Not a Drop to Drink by Mindy McGinnis

I had heard good things about this YA post-apocalyptic novel, so I picked it up because it's end of the world month in the category challenge. And it was definitely a decent read, but reaching the end, I feel more compelled to compile a list of its faults than sing its praises. There may be some spoilers, though I'll mark the more serious ones.

1. This is a YA novel, which obviously means that there has to be a romance element. So of course Lynn has to fall in love with the second male she's ever met in her life (the first one being excluded from consideration because he's too old). Her interest is immediate, before they really know each other at all. Blah.

2. A major plot hole: Lynn has been trained to defend herself all her life, only gradually getting past her mother's injunction to kill any stranger on sight, and lives in the basement of her house because it's much easier to defend than the upstairs: the windows are smaller, there's only one entrance, etc. So what happens when a group of hostile strangers arrives at the house? Lynn immediately declares the situation hopeless, puts down her rifle, and goes outside with her hands up. Um....

3. And the plot hole continues: These strangers are the sort of people who capture a woman they find walking on the side of the road, rape her and keep her prisoner. So of course when they want to get another woman, and everyone comes out in surrender without any weapons, they offer a trade of one woman for the other instead of just taking them both. Because they're nice guys like that.

4. That other major plot point also seemed sort of contrived: Lynn and her mother are super-cautious about everything; see earlier point about shooting strangers on sight without asking questions. Water is conserved obsessively. All precautions are taken. But packs of coyotes roaming in the backyard? No big deal; don't want to waste a bullet on those. Not even the really big one. Instead, it's probably a good idea to go outside with a bunch of raw meat. And now Lynn's mother is dead, an important event for moving the plot along

5. Something different! This is supposed to be a post-apocalyptic world, but we don't really learn a lot about the world itself or how it makes people behave. At first, it seems like the water shortage has imposed savagery on everyone and created an extreme need for survival. But as the story progresses, it becomes apparent that it's actually just Lynn's mother's paranoia enforcing that crazy behaviour; the water shortage isn't quite so dire that it's necessary to kill everyone who passes by to ensure your own survival. And so it turns out that the story is actually *not* about the extremes necessary to ensure survival in a post-apocalyptic world, but about overcoming the crazy survival focus instilled by an obsessive mother and learning to be more open to other people after all. So the world-building is actually sort of secondary. I was really surprised to learn that there was still a big city nearby where people had to pay excessively for water, and the population was limited by a one-child policy, but life could otherwise maintain some semblance of normality. I think I'd rather have been reading about that city, and the people forced to flee from it (for example, when refusing to terminate a second pregnancy), than about Lynn's situation that was only partially brought about by external constraints.

That said, there were parts of the story that I did enjoy, particularly the way Lynn came to care for a young child and open herself up more generally. It just wasn't so much the post-apocalyptic story that I was hoping for.

And a note for anyone who cares: as YA books go, this one sure had a lot of profanity. I guess it contributes to the gritty feel?

Tamora Pierce has a redesigned website, and it's really... not good. It looks like it was created by an amateur in the 1990s.

Am I going crazy? Maybe my browser is broken?

http://www.tamora-pierce.com/

>180 _Zoe_: Hmm, yeah, the text is rather unspiffy, and the wavy background... whoever let that go public has under-40 eyes.

>180 _Zoe_: Yuck. I agree with you. Not impressed.

>180 _Zoe_:

No, you're spot-on. It looks like a Geocities page. I half expected to see that little "under construction" graphic (remember those?)

>180 _Zoe_: Mmmm not impressed either. Why the random links in the top right corner, and a bunch of others underneath various titles? I thought they were going to be about the books, but they're... not. Very confusing design.

>180 _Zoe_: Oh my gosh. That is just nasty. Maybe the author did it herself? Wouldn't surprise me.

Congratulations!

Congratulations!! Hope the wedding went splendidly. (Have I got the week right??)

Thank you all for confirming that I'm not crazy/suffering from a broken browser with regards to that website! I'm really curious about how a design like that could go live. Maybe you're right, Morphy, that the author did it herself.

And thank you for the congratulations! Yes, you got the week right :D. Here are a few preliminary photos:

Gorgeous!

Beautiful! I love the dress and the flowers. And sunshine, no less :-)

I think you could have smiled a bit more. ;)

oh, you look lovely. Congratulations!

Your wedding looks just perfect. Warmest congratulations to you and Mark!

Congratulations! I love the dress, and the bouquet. It looks like you had perfect weather, too.

Glad you stayed off LibraryThing long enough to get married. Congratulations!

Congrats, and thanks for sharing the photos - you look lovely!

>191 Morphidae: perhaps just a bit more... ;)

Congratulations! May you be blessed with many happy years together!

Oh, you look so gorgeous!! Love those photos!

Congratulations, you look so happy.

Congratulations Zoe. Just beautiful . . .

Thank you all!

At the very beginning of the day the photographer would sometimes ask me for small smiles for certain photos, but she very quickly gave that up as a lost cause :D

And we were definitely very lucky with the weather!

I've actually met quite a lot of my online friends in person, and there are some people I sadly think I'll never meet, but even online they're very dear to me. I've known quite a lot of them for more than 10 years/ I was terribly sad last month when someone I played Bejeweled Blitz with on Facebook died - he had fairly recently been diagnosed with terminal cancer, but even so he went shockingly fast, and he was actually slightly younger than me. But I was touched that his sister and partner seem to really appreciate all the posts from complete strangers on his FB page (neither of them play BB).

When another online friend (who I met a couple of times) was dying last summer her local friend posted online updates on her FB page. Sylvia had recently made contact via the internet with a daughter she had given up for adoption, and at the end her friend Melissa and a daughter she had brought up were with her in person, and her other daughter was with them as it were via an Iphone app.

FB is also quite useful for getting and keeping in touch with RL friends, and even family - I have quite a lot of relatives in New Zealand, and one of my cousins and his family are in Boston, Massachusetts.

Congratulations, Zoe! You look gorgeous and both of you look so happy. :)

Congratulations to you and Mark, Zoë!

Love the wedding photos, Zoe! Thanks for sharing them. Congratulations to you both!

Congrats! Those are some great pics!

Congrats Zoe on your special day. You look absolutely beautiful!! :D

Thank you all!

And I hope I can be forgiven for posting one more photo.... We just got a sneak peek of this one from our professional photographer, and I'm really excited :D

>208 _Zoe_: Oh, do post many more. What very cool trees!

I see you’ve renewed enthusiasm for RSIs. Marriage has made you optimistic.

>209 qebo: Haha, it was actually Kristi saying that she was going through the RSIs and making a list, so we should bump any we care about.

And at this rate, I'll have to request a higher number of photos in our member galleries....

>210 _Zoe_: Ahem: http://www.librarything.com/topic/189411#5108027

Heh, well that's convenient :D

>208 _Zoe_: Brilliant! See, I knew the photographer would work out OK in the end ;-)

>188 _Zoe_: Congratulations on a beautiful wedding. Is this the first LT marriage? You two make a great-looking couple…and you have just doubled the size of your libraries!!!

...not to mention the number of their board games! ;)

Hey! When I got married, we doubled the size of our LP* collection?

* I know. What's an LP? :)

>213 klarusu: Yup, you were right! The ridiculous thing is that we ended up going with the photographer I had liked originally. We managed to limit ourselves to the 8-hour package rather than sliding down the slippery slope to 12 hours of coverage, and that was actually perfect; we were ready to rest a bit by the end anyway.

>214 Donna828: Thank you! I don't know if it really counts as an LT marriage since Mark didn't start using LT until after we met, but we've definitely increased our book collection considerably :). And games, as Madeline points out! Our game collections weren't previously optimized for two players....

>215 SqueakyChu: Don't worry, my father has an extensive collection of 78s, so I do have some awareness of old records ;). He would tell me that vinyl is too modern and shellac is the way to go.

22. A Museum Once Forgotten: Rebirth of the John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art by John Wetenhall

I wasn't able to get a lot of reading done on the wedding trip, and then developed a horrible cold immediately after, so I don't have much to report for the past couple of weeks. But I did read this super-short book about the museum where we had our wedding, which had apparently fallen into serious disrepair before being restored about ten years ago. It was interesting to get a glimpse of some of the logistical challenges and funding issues involved in running a museum, including an arrangement with a university that enabled fund-matching for donations but almost resulted in a huge sum of money earmarked for restoration being redirected to other university expenses.

Sadly, I pretty much destroyed the book at the airport while trying to jam my laptop back into an over-stuffed backpack after security. Blah.

Maybe you could find a university to find more fund-matching for the purchase of another book. ;)

Chag Pesach Sameach to you, Mark, and your families!

>218 SqueakyChu: Hehe, an excellent plan. Chag Pesech Sameach!

The other reason my reading has been slow is because I'm not really enjoying my current book, which I started at least two weeks ago. I've been trying to read more classic SF this year, and Isaac Asimov's Foundation books are always near the top of the best-of lists. But I wish I had known going in that Foundation was not actually written as a novel; it's just a collection of five connected short stories/novellas set over an extended period of time. What this means is that there's pretty much no character development; the focus instead is on clever long-term political machinations, and it's hard to care when I have pretty much no connection to any of the people involved. This book is so highly regarded that I'll finish it, but I really wish I were done already.

Also, I think I said before that I wasn't hugely bothered by the absence of important female characters in novels, but this one just takes it to ridiculous extremes. I don't think one single female has made an appearance anywhere in the book so far, and it's not as if the cast of characters is small. Just one more thing to be irritated about.

I life book without females is a sad one indeed. :(

I don't actually think Foundation is all that good.

It was very important at the time, to be sure. But that time was 1953. The absence of female characters almost doesn't matter since there's a near-total absence of characters altogether; the people are just there to do what the plot wants them to.

Yes, if your purpose is to gain an understanding of the history of the SF field it's a must-read, no question about it. But if it's to actually read good SF by the standards of 2015? Skip it.

Happy Easter, Zoe!

>219 _Zoe_: & >221 lorax: I read Foundation first time many years ago and remember being quite caught by it but I returned to it last year and had to give it up for lost. I just really didn't care that much about what was going on and it was a lot like reading through treacle. I'm not sure why I enjoyed it so much all those years ago, though.

>221 lorax: >223 klarusu: Well, in a way it's reassuring to hear that other people also don't consider Foundation an enjoyable read by today's standards, so thank you for that! But it's also sort of discouraging to hear that it's not just me. And apparently I can't trust the LT ratings for relatively recent classics that people might have read and enjoyed when they were somewhat newer—I would normally expect a book with a 4-star rating to be at least an average read. Blah. Which other classic science fiction novels should I consider skipping, and which would you say are still enjoyable today?

Meanwhile, I *still* haven't finished Foundation. I only have about 50 pages left, so I'm determined to get through it eventually. But I'm a bit resentful about how much reading time it's cost me, because I end up doing something else when I'm not enjoying my current book, and so I seem to have missed out on almost a month of reading. I finally decided just to pick up something else for my flight yesterday evening, and it was sort of amazing to be absorbed in a book again, to read for hours at a time and stay up too late at night because I couldn't put it down. Yay, Cinder! Review (or at least mini review) to come.

23. Des Spielers Tod (The Player's Death) by André Klein

Another of the tiny German mystery books, this one with a very misleading cover. I expected something about board games, but the victim actually died in an internet café, which was so disappointing that I set the book aside for several weeks. Still, it was more appealing than Foundation (and reading it was more productive, too), so I finished it eventually.

These are really not great murder mysteries; they seem to focus as much on the detectives' mundane issues (one has trouble with computers, while one has trouble reading maps; the one who's bad at computers is posting personal ads) as on coming up with a compelling mystery. This one in particular features one of the dumbest criminals ever, who's known for his hatred of the victim in an online group, and has said there that he wants to kill him, and then uses the same screen name to post on a site for purchasing poisons. (Sorry, spoilers.... but there's really no tension surrounding the means of death).

Anyway, these stories are reliable, and so I keep reading them, but it will probably be a good thing when I get to the end of the series and have to put in the effort to find something else.

24. Cinder by Marissa Meyer

This book was a breath of fresh air after so many weeks of slogging through Foundation. Characters! Plot! I picked it up for Fairy Tale month in the SFFCAT, because it's a retelling of Cinderella (and I've been meaning to read it for ages). It's one of the most creative retellings that I've ever read, because it uses the classic story as inspiration while going in a completely different direction. The book is set in the future and Cinder is a cyborg, for starters. Cyborgs are basically second-class citizens, which is why Cinder's guardian can treat her so badly. But there are all sorts of elements that aren't related to Cinderella at all, like a plague epidemic and tensions with the ruler of the moon, and it makes for a really compelling story overall. I stayed up way too late reading and finished it within 24 hours.

I've seen this book described as dystopian, but I'm not sure I buy it. There's overcrowding in the city and bad treatment of cyborgs, but that's about it. The ruler (and love interest) is thoroughly good, and there's no suggestion that the system of government should be changed. Maybe later books that shift the focus to the moon and its evil ruler will seem more dystopian.

I'm glad you found a good palate cleanser, Zoe. Those are always nice after a slog of a read.

>224 _Zoe_:

I would say to skip all of Asimov and Heinlein. The latter is more likely to be extremely polarizing since there are still circles in which he's regarded as God. Bradbury's definitely worth reading, and I'd say that from Clarke Rendezvous with Rama is readable with the right expectations (i.e. don't expect much in the way of character or plot - it's a setting set-piece but a good one.) Avoid the sequels at all costs. Dune holds up well, again, avoid the sequels.

I think with the Classics of SF people are often rating them based on their recollections of having read them when they were 12. So it's not even that people may have read them when they were newer so much as that they read them when they were less critical. (I mean, Foundation is more than 60 years old now. There aren't going to be too many Thingamabrarians who read that when it was new.)

You'd probably have better luck asking me about specific titles rather than relying on the random ones I can think of at the moment.

>227 MickyFine: Thanks! It really was an amazing relief to realize that I'm still actually capable of reading. I keep putting Foundation aside after 10-15 pages.

>228 lorax: Thank you! I'll definitely be avoiding Asimov after this, and it's very helpful to know that Heinlein can be skipped too, especially since he keeps turning up on all the lists. I've mostly been looking at the Locus Magazine All-Centuries Poll Results for ideas about what books are important and worth reading, but I'm hoping they can actually be enjoyable too.

That's a good point about younger, less critical readers too. I had been thinking that a book read even 25 years after it was written might still feel relatively fresh, but I think you're probably right that the age of the reader is even more important. I'm always reluctant to re-read books that I really enjoyed in the past.

And now I'm inspired to look at the 20th-century list and see which 10 books I'm most inclined to read next, so that I can hear all the bad things from everyone before wading in :). But first, I think I'll go through and list all the ones I have read, in order of how much I liked them, just for myself.... Yay, lists!

Books Read from Locus 20th Century SF Novel List (from most liked to least liked)
Flowers for Algernon
Brave New World
Doomsday Book
Dune
Ender's Game
A Wrinkle in Time
Day of the Triffids
1984
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
Cryptonomicon
Fahrenheit 451
Foundation (still... not... finished....)

Books to Read Next
The Handmaid's Tale
The Sparrow
The Left Hand of Darkness
The Martian Chronicles
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
Slaughterhouse Five
A Canticle for Leibowitz
Speaker for the Dead
Hyperion
The Mote in God's Eye

I'm definitely making an effort to prioritize newer ones now....

Also, this really made me wish for a full List feature, including discussion threads on individual items.

Oooh, The Sparrow! Slaughterhouse Five! A Canticle for Leibowitz! You've got some amazing reading ahead of you...

>231 scaifea: Yay, that's what I like to hear!

But if anyone thinks some of the books on that list should be skipped, please tell me now!

I will admit to not having read Day of the Triffids or Do Androids Dream.... The others are all probably worthwhile, though I don't remember enough about Mote to say for certain.

The Orson Scott Card books are a bit of a quandary for me. I did enjoy them when I read them, before I knew about OSC's homophobia and perhaps before he had gone quite so far off the deep end on that issue. I'm never going to reread them because my opinion now would be so colored by what I know of him.

You may want to have The Fall of Hyperion on hand when you finish Hyperion, which ends rather abruptly.

I'm with >233 lorax: on Orson Scott Card; the Ender books are *amazing* and I read the long before I found out about his stance on social and political things. Now, his intolerance bothers me lots and I won't buy his stuff anymore. Pity, because those Ender books are so, so good.

>233 lorax: & >234 scaifea: I really hate it when an author you enjoy turns out to be objectionable. I'm exactly the same with Orson Scott Card. I read the Ender books in the early 90s and they became books that I 'carried with me' as favourites (for whatever reason). Once I found out about Card's outlook on life and opinions, it was like a book divorce. I still have the old copies but I don't think I'd be able to disentangle my dislike of Card from my reading of the books (neither would I necessarily want to). That said, I did enjoy them for a long while and Speaker for the Dead was my favourite.

Yeah, I'm never sure what to do about authors who have horrible political views. My basic approach is to avoid buying their books or supporting their new books more generally, but I think it's okay to read their older books from the library.

And thank you very much for the warning about Hyperion! Cliffhangers drive me crazy, so I'll be sure to have the sequel ready.

The Mote in God's Eye is a throwback to "hard science" science fiction - and yet its not.

In the middle of building a world like ours that spans solar systems he has a lot of sneaky fun about social mores and politics.

(Perhaps in the future we will find that some form or aristicracy leading up to a monarchy is the best way to keep things together in far flung empires.)

But "Mote" fools you - its also a very cunning sociological treatise about races that are territorial, trapped on a single planet, and sex mad.

I don't need to tell you that when a sci-fi writer creates an alien race, he's really talking about us.

But reader beware: The (human) characters and by and large stick figures and some are blatant caricatures.

But for the puzzle these authors present and (sort of) solve) I would give it a serious try.

Martian Chronicles is short stories -science fiction as art story. Not totally successful. Worth a try.

the left hand of darkness is a moody little book about sex roles. I loved it but why not go for Joanna Russ The Female Man instead? (though Jo can be strident sometimes)

do androids dream of electric sheep is a good book but the Dick I always push on people is The Man in the High Castle. Or sometimes The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldrich . One of these I am going to force my F2F book group to read it.

a canticle for Leibowitz is wordy dystopian sci-fi. Some people find it funny. We do not invite those people a second time.

If you haven't read Slaughterhouse five go read it now. It's amazing.

and why not Cliff Simak's Way Station ?

All right office I'll go quietly no need to poke me.

Oops Judy sent me over to the thread because you were puzzled about Asimov and Foundation.

Listen when Dr A wrote and published the stories that make up "Foundation" the story that followed it in the greasy little pulp magazine was something like "Bat Masterson, Space Marshall" or "The Skyscraper that flew away to Mars">

So give Asimov his due as a trailblazer and then admit that the trail he blazed is now a six lane highway.

>237 magicians_nephew: I *loved* A Canticle for Leibowitz although I most definitely didn't find it funny. Am I invited back?
And I completely agree about Way Station - one of the best books I've every read. Ever.

>238 magicians_nephew:

Nobody's disputing Asimov's status, or that of Foundation specifically, as a trailblazer and a vitally important part of the history of SF.

That's not the question; the question was, is it a good piece of SF by the standards of 2015?

Oh, as for Hyperion, I should add that one of its sections, "The Scholar's Tale", is one of the most heartbreaking things I've ever read. (And I think that now, as a parent, there is no way I could possibly get through it without breaking down entirely.) You may not want to read that part in public.

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep is fantastic, and The Handmaid's Tale is a must! I've owned a copy of A Canticle for Leibowitz for years...I should definitely get to that soon. (Maybe in another few years.)

...I still haven't read Slaughterhouse Five as well. *Sigh* Toooooo many books.

Thank you all for the thoughts on these books! So much to consider.

It was interesting when choosing books from the list to see that there weren't that many that I really wanted to read right now; I struggled a bit to get to 10. The good news is that that means I may reach the end of my project to read books from the list sooner than expected, if not in the way I'd expected.

Meanwhile, I just came across an old article from the Guardian that could be tangentially related to a discussion of science fiction: Why Great Novels Don't Get Noticed Now. The basic premise is that "great" novels are literary novels, which have trouble selling because people don't want to read serious books.

I found myself vaguely annoyed by this article. I think readability is an important criterion for a novel, and I don't appreciate the idea that serious reading equals modern literary fiction. If I want to read something worthy and serious, or "thoughtful and philosophical", there are many better contenders than a novel written in English last year.

>243 _Zoe_: There was an interesting discussion of science fiction literature on 'On the Media' today. You might want to check out the podcast. The Sad Puppy Takeover

Arthur Chu was the guest and his opinions of the 'Sad Puppies' and their ilk are worth listening too. Voting for the Hugo Awards is easily gamed, and they were gamed by a very right-wing reactionary publisher, his audience and his lousy stable of authors. A cautionary tale of why we shouldn't automatically revere the winners of these awards.

I do think science fiction readers are always a little defensive about the genre. ("Space ships and ray guns and bug eyed monsters - who reads that crap?")

So the community is always quick - sometimes too quick - to latch onto a Doris Lessing or a Salmon Rushdie and claim them as "science fiction" and point and say "See! It's really serious literature too!". Or it's not.

The hijacking of the Hugo award voting is a shame but its a tempest in a very small teapot. The good books will still get read.

243: I didn't read the whole article, was the whole point of it to promote the book? Ugh.

On the topic of literary vs. non-literary, do people really make their decisions based on that? I've never heard anyone in my life say "I was going to buy this book but I heard it was literary, so I changed my mind." I've heard people say things about classics, because the language can be dense, but I don't think I've ever heard any say that about a recently-published book.

On a similar topic, I do so hate when people make assumptions about certain genre's being more "literary" than others. As someone who listens to metal music, I frequently hear people say things like "It's just noise" and "the musicians have no talent or skill." This is just a display of ignorance, in reality there are plenty of musicians that play highly technical songs, and "noise" is relative. There are plenty of bands who play gratuitously simplistic "noise" as well, my point is a genre doesn't determine the complexity of the music. Country music could be represented by country/pop with extremely simplistic music in the same way a country/folk band could have incredibly fast and technical acoustics behind it. The same is true for any genre.

The same is true for books as well, you can't classify an entire genre as "literary" or "nonliterary," in reality the complexity of a novel is unrelated to the theme, so a science fiction novel can just be space/alien action and suspense, or it could be deeply intellectual and intricate.

I'm sure I'm preaching to the choir here, but it irritates me when people make suppositions like that about entire genres.

>246 Ape:

I've not heard that particular formulation.

I think "literary" means different things to different people, though. To me "literary" is a genre like any other, and while any genre can have excellent prose and characterization, literary requires good prose and a focus on character (not the same thing as good characterization), while plot is optional. A deeply intellectual and intricate science fiction novel is still science fiction, and this is where a lot of tension arises, when SF fans perceive fans of literary fiction as trying to "steal" well-written SF when the lit-fic fans say "This is not SF, it's well-written."

I personally do not care for most of the genre of modern literary fiction that views plot as unnecessary or even passe. This doesn't mean I don't value good prose, but that one particular genre is not to my taste. There are exceptions, of course, but clearly the critics raving about, for instance, Netherland saw things in it I didn't. And that's a matter of taste, not of intelligence. (There even was an interesting character in that one, which could have redeemed a plotless novel, but the main character was duller than dull, and there's not much you can do to make me like a novel with no plot and boring characters.)

literary requires good prose and a focus on character.

Can't that happen with a sci-fi backdrop and still count as a science fiction novel? I haven't read it yet, but I remember reading the summary for a novel that was about a man stuck in a space station of some sort orbiting earth, with no way of escaping, and he is left in isolation, to contemplate earth. Like I said, I haven't read it, but if it was plotless and focused on prose and character, where the man spends the entire novel in introspection, would that not be...literary science fiction?

>248 Ape:

Did you actually read my whole post, or just that sentence?

Yes, of course you can have good prose and a focus on character in a SF novel, but that is AN SF NOVEL, a literary SF novel if you want, not a novel in the "literary fiction" genre. I think we're agreeing vehemently here.

I read at leasr 2 other sentences, but found them too agreeable to be acknowledged