10 Books.

So, this thing has been going around on the tweetbook, wherein you ante up your ten “defining/influential” books, from your life. Given how much I read (a lot. Everything. The cereal box if there’s nothing else) this has been flipped my way a few times. And I gotta say, I like the idea. There are books that stick with you. They don’t necessarily teach you anything, but they may settle around moments in your life, realizations, or just be books that really got you. THis is actually a kind of thing I talk about: I’ve talked previously about some of the formative Young Adult lit I read, and that has stuck with me. You’ll see some crossover with that list, for sure.

So, this is mine.

1. The Lord of the Rings/The Hobbit – J.R.R. Tolkien

Pretty self-explanatory there. I mean, I’m a fantasy guy, right? But the thing is, my dad read these to me, when I was very young, AND used the “proper” (and they’ll always be the proper) voices: thick, exaggerated Yorkshire accents (that’s my background, btw). And I’ll never forget that. It also fixed my love-affair with epic fantasy, right at the start of my life, and had a big part in turning me into the voracious reader that I am. That experience showed me the way a book can be in your head, not just visually, but audibly.

2. The Adventurous Four/ The Famous Five / The Secret Seven – Enid Blighton

British kids adventure stories. Kids solving crimes. Books written for kids with kid-themes but serious adult overtones. The Adventurous Four especially, set during World War II, properly set me on a life of reading thrillers; the Five and Seven set me down the road of crime stories. I had all of them. Actually, let me correct that. I STILL have all of them, secreted away to be passed on at an appropriate time. Also, thoroughly and completely British, as I am. Given the modern criticism of the books, I will definitely have to re-read them before passing them along, but they’re definitely formative for me, and I turned out ok.

3. The Hitchhiker’s GUide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams

Another Brit! Go figure, right? This is another one I read with my dad: this time, found on a shelf in a rented house in the South of France, on holiday, when I was probably nine or ten years old. And as you can probably guess from the first two books on this list, one of those that cemented a love for not only science-fiction, but dry, caustic, black humour. It’s partly on the back of Douglas Adams Hitchhikers series that I fell for Monty Python, and continue to read things like Terry Pratchett, Robert Asprin (check out Phule’s Company, and Robert Rankin (check out The Hollow Chocolate Bunnies of the Apocalypse.

4. Watership Down by Richard Adams

This was the first book I was told I wasn’t ALLOWED to read. I was in grade 5 (first year in Canada) and it was in the “young adult” section of the school library. WHich was, honestly, a stupid thing to have, in a school that only went to grade 5. I had to get permission to read it. To this day, it’s a hell of a book, and it really, really shouldn’t be. it’s about RABBITS, for god’s sake. British rabbits, at that. But it’s a phenomenal story, with brilliant characters in it. And an ending that STILL makes the room all dusty. You can write about anything, and make it interesting, if you want to. This was the one that proved it. It’s basically an urban-fantasy story and… yeah. I love this book. I’ve worn out three paperbacks re-reading it over the years, and even my hardcover has a broken spine from the same. And I never manage to damage hardcovers. As for the story, the world-buiding (something that comes up with fantasy writers a lot) is particularly stunning: it’s not something I clued into when I was ten, but today, the complexity and completeness of the world that Adams’ created absolutely boggles me, and is obviously a huge part of why this one has stuck with me: invented mythology, social order, language, everything is there. The depth, based on the volume of writing, is at least equal to Tolkien’s “Middle Earth”.

FYI, the movie has basically NOTHING to do with the book, except that it’s about rabbits. And they have the same names. Well, “nothing” isn’t particularly accurate, but there’s significant changes, so… read the book. It’s far, far better than the movie.

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I just realized, all my authors so far are British. It’s not going to end that way, but… hunh. How about that?

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5. Stephen King. Tough to call out one book: More like “most of the books”.

IT was the first book (at thirteen) that I put down due to content. I got to Stan’s suicide and was just “whoooo, no”. (It took me a couple of tries to get through James Herbert’s “The Dark” but that was later. The Stand: epic post-apocalyptic fiction. All of the Dark Tower: epic high-fantasy. I really just love pretty much everything King has written.

If, however, I have to pick one, it’s… none of the above. The Bachman Books is my pick. Specifically, on the strength of Rage and The Long Walk: The Long Walk is one of the finest pieces of writing I’ve ever read. It’s a study in character development and nothing else at all. If you’ve not read it, get to it.

6. FutureTrack5 – Robert Westall

Basically, everything I said in the YA post I linked to above still applies. I still love this one for it being the first “almost an adult” book. I’m pretty sure that this is the book that jumpstarted me into post-apocalyptic dystopian lit: yes, even before I got into Orwell. I really loved this book in its day: to the point that I’ve not re-read it in the last fifteen years, because I’m scared that it won’t be good anymore. One day, I will: because it may be better now, than it was then, just due to perspective. But either way, I can’t un-read it, once I do reread it. SOooo, still, I wait.

7. Helter Skelter

This is the only non-fiction that really jumped on me early on. It terrified me too: much like watching “Nightmare on Elm St”, I didn’t sleep properly for a few days after reading it. This swas the one that piqued my curiosity for true-crime. I still love these kinds of books… in moderation. And with the lights on. Every bit as terrifying as anything Stephen King ever wrote, maybe more so, being as it happened.

8. Illegal Aliensby Nick Pollotta and Phil Foglio.

There is no reason this one should be on the list, except that… I love it. I really do. It’s not especially well written, it’s a bit of a one-trick pony. It is, stylistically, trying (and failing) to be Douglas Adams. But in that failure, it becomes something of its own, and there’s a good story in there, too. It’s funny, and strangely, surprisingly compelling. And I’ve replaced the paperback twice, and recently bought the ebook, too. I just keep coming back to it. It’s fun and mindless, and I love it.

9. Shakespeare.

You know, you’re not even getting a link. If you don’t, and haven’t, read and loved Shakespeare, get out of here. Seriously. You’re not really into reading if you don’t have a favorite Shakespeare piece. I BITE MY THUMB AT YOU, SIR.

10. The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame.

We’re finishing off with a fifth Brit: I didn’t even read it the first time: my family had these audio cassettes (and “Flash Gordon”) in the car as we drove around Europe when I was a kid. The voice characterization, the madness, the … just everything. This is one of those kids books that is so, totally, completely for adults. Except that it isn’t. I can’t read it without hearing Kenneth Grahame’s voices in my head. It is completely MAD. And I really do love it.

That’s it. That’s my ten. I always say more than I mean to, and lets face it, that’s more than ten (obviously). There’s a lot of mentions, and I could easily add another two or three dozen as “honorably mentions”, especially if I got into my new favorites.

Books, of the “Young Adult” kind.

Young Adult, is, I’m assuming, a tough write.

You’ve gotta cross that barrier. the one where it’s still technically for kids, you can’t go too far with language, violence, sex, the works. But at the same time, if you dumb it down too much, you’re not writing Young Adult, you’re writing children’s lit. Now, I like Children’s Lit, but CL and YA (as I’ll refer to them from here on out, because I’m lazy, fuck) are not the same thing.

Why am I talking about this?

Blame Chuck Wendig. Again. That damn blog of his always gets me thinking.

When I was a Young Adult (and I consider that basically fourteen to eighteen: which is the other problem with “YA” and keeping it in that groove. There’s a HELL of a lot going on with you between fourteen and eighteen, and it’s almost definitely not the same as what’s going on with everyone else, or at the same speed, so.. fuck? how do you WRITE appropriately for such a potentially broad audience? I digress) I consumed EVERYTHING. I still do, but at the time, my small-ish-town library had a pretty strict policy on who could sign out what, and I was not of the who that could sign out adult-classified books.

Which sucked.

Especially as the YA section was MAYBE a dozen shelves (two stacks, side-by-side, six shelves each), and not everything appealed to me, and I read quickly.

So, I ended up re-reading a lot, until my folks put a tag on my Library card saying I was allowed to sign out anything I wanted. By then, however, I was working part-time, and a good portion of my paychecks went to books and comics, where I had no restrictions based on age).

Again, I digress.

I re-read a ton. And that’s kind of when you find your favorites.

I don’t know why FutureTrack 5 became one of mine.

(That’s actually the cover I remember, not the re-release: and I don’t want the paperback. I desperately want to find a copy of the Library edition/original hardcover).

I don’t know if it would have the same appeal to me today, at thirty-nine, either: Whether it would stand up. I’m certain I’ve blogged about FutureTrack 5 before, too, I just can’t remember where. I think I was probably nineteen the last time I read it. Maybe younger. And I remember a desperately bloody, dystopian story. And yeah, there were literary boobs in it. And I read THOSE scenes carefully. HEY, I was sixteen, what do you expect?

It’s the first book my mind flashes to, and the bar I hold all other YA lit to when I read it.

And I do still read YA. There’s some fantastic story-telling in the YA world that gets passed over (some, like, say, Hunger Games hits a societal chord. Some CL books become YA. Harry Potter, I’m looking at you.)

So, now we get to the grist of it. I have RECOMMENDATIONS. YA is tough, for sure. That balancing act of not getting too brutal or too ‘adult’ (for lack of a better word at this moment) versus keeping the interest of a more-varied-than-normal group of near-adults.

1] Harry Potter I think this one is obvious. Ridiculously so. The characters grew with the readers, which is nearly perfect. But, you can still go back and re-read, because you know what’s coming. There’s all the adolescent awkwardness and confusion, but no isssues with language or actual sexual content, but people die. And they don’t come back. It’s a YA win, and there’s a reason the serious sold a bajillion books, and was credited with getting kids to read again.

2] As also mentioned before: Hunger Games. No language, no overt sexuality, but still, all the ‘stuff’ that goes along with being that age. Death is a real thing, not just for the games themselves, but because that’s what happens around yoU: the developing adult fears of the surroundings show really well. And no punches are pulled in terms of “reality”: the Good Guys don’t always win.

3] Futuretrack 5 Obviously. It’s another dystopia, much more bleak than Hunger Games, but there’s hope: I do have to read it again, but I remember a brightness, a sense of future starting to appear at one point in the book. At the same time, there is overt sexuality, and violence, and death. I’d recommend it, but only for the mature/older YA reader.

4] Scott Sigler’s GFL series. The “GFL” is “Galactic Football League”. The series follows the career of Quentin Barnes, and his coming-of-age as he gets off a backwater world, with a rigid structure, and has to evaluate, and re-evaluate, the world around him in his own terms of his own learned bigotries, and his own so-called truths. Light on language, mid-level on violence, and epic in terms of football and alien action.

5] The Hobbit / Lord of the Rings. No need to say much here. I firmly believe that, by age fifteen, pretty much everyone should have read these. If you haven’t. GET OUT. I don’t care if you liked them, you should have read ’em. Because the kids in your life almost definitely will. Go read them now, no matter how old you are. Go on. We’ll wait.

6] The Narnia Books by C.S.Lewis, because NARNIA. I know, I’ve said it already, and I’ll probably say it again. If you’ve NOT read these… just go read ’em. I don’t care how old you are, these are FUN.

7] Pretty much anything by Monica Hughes, but for me, I always loved Crisis on Conshelf Ten, but Hunter in the Dark was great, as were a multitude of others.

8] Absolute classic: Tom Swift. I’m still trying to remember which of these I read: there’s more than a hundred of them. I read ’em around… 1985? I guess? And they were fun stories. Very typically “adventure stories for boys”, and I’m pretty sure they were Third series.

9] Watership Down: Ostensibly, it’s about rabbits. It’s pretty heavy, emotionally though, and it’s definitely a ‘cusp’ read: I read it at thirteen, but parents might not want to have their kids into it until later on. I know my grade school made my parents give me a note saying that I was allowed to read it, even though it was in the school library. This is, to this day, still one of my favorite books. It builds a mythos, and maintains it brilliantly the whole way through. And the last ten pages KILL ME every time.

10] Geoffrey Trease, but again, mostly Bows Against The Barons: YA historical fiction, set in medieval and rennaissance time frames. I read this one on my own, and I can’t remember why.. but the Shakespeare-set story, Cue for Treason was assigned in my grade nine class. A long, long time agao.

11] Lord of the Flies Again, HEAVY SHIT here. But definitely some of the good stuff as far as YA goes. If you don’t know what I’m talking about? Go read it.

12] Holy CRAP, I almost forgot about Gordon Korman and the McDonald Hall books! I love these for so, so many reasons. they’re irreverent, and funny, and well-paced, and honestly, they’re National Lampoon adventures for fourteen-year-olds. They’re brilliant.

There’s tons more, honestly. Some of it’s YA on the twelve-to-fifteen end of things, some of it’s … well, honestly, it’s heavy enough in its topics to not only cover the fifteen-to-eighteen level, but will keep adults entertained over and over. As you can tell, even as a kid I was heavy on the Fantasy and Sci-Fi.

More? Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird, anything by Enid Blyton, but personally, I always favoured The Adventurous Four. It didn’t stop me buying every single Famous Five and Secret Seven though.

If there’s a more modern sci-fi fan at that age? The Robotech books to keep ’em going. The Robotech/Macross story still holds up really well. I’d take Stephen King’s “Silver Bullet” or “Eyes of the Dragon” over “Twillight” or “Sookie Stackhouse” any day of the week, then or now. Your mileage may vary, because, and I don’t know if it’s weird or not, my dad had me reading Tolkien and Douglas Adams (The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy specifically) before I was ten, and introduced me to Piers Anthony’s Xanth books by the time I was eleven. I was always a reader, I may have mentioned that, and I devoured everything I could find.

Seriously, I could keep going. There’s great worth in “young adult” fiction, for both the young adults they’re intended for, and for the so-called adults they become.

I’ll shut up now.

Go read some YA, already!

So. Many. Books. To. Read.

It’s summer again, and weirdly, I read more in summer than winter.

In winter, I settle down to read and well, it’s dark outside, and it’s warm inside, and maybe there’s a fire going, and the lights are dim, and then I’m asleep after six pages.

In summer, though, i’ll get up with the dog on Saturday morning, get a coffee, and go sit in the dawn sun on the deck and read for two hours. Even more so since we cut cable (and went to just netflix/huluplus). And I’m a junkie too, so, you know. I’ve always kinda “kept track” of what I was reading, mostly by blogging about it. So, this year, because I always miss things, I figured I’d do the Good Reads thing, and specifically, their “reading challenge”.

I’ll be honest, I don’t CARE if I hit a hundred books (my goal as set). But, I do like keeping track of what I’ve read, and approximately when. So, a defined one year period with a goal, that actually helps me a bit.

So, this is MY YEAR.

Ok, so that’s out of the way.

Right now, there’s a lot of cool stuff out there. So, here’s what I’m looking forward to.

1] S.M.Stirling – Lord of Mountains Ok, I’m almost done this one, but I love the world that Stirling has created. I highly recommend going back to the start of the series if you’ve not read any of ’em.

2] Lauren Beukes – The Shining Girls: I read Zoo city recently (I got it as part of the Humble Reading Bundle, actually) and now I must have more. I can’t wait for Shining Girls to become available. And because North Americans are the last ones to get access to it? Yeah, torrents were tempting. I didn’t: I’ve got lots to read in the meantime, but damn… yeah, tempting. You should probably follow @LaurenBuekes on twitter, too. She’s super active, and wickedly smart.

3] Chuck Wendig’s Unclean Spirits. I’ll admit, I pretty much get anything @ChuckWendig puts out right now.

4] The Blue Blazes by Chuck Wendig. See what I mean?

5] Joe Hill’s NOS4A2. I’m totally diggin’ Joe Hill. He’s another one (and this is a trend for me, for sure) who is super active and engaging on Twitter (@Joe_Hill FYI). On top of that, I can highly recommend Horns and the Locke & Key graphic novel series. I can’t wait for Nos4A2.

6] Stephen King’s Dr. Sleep. Because Stephen King, and I’m a HUGE fanboy. It’s not even worth talking about.

7] Matt Wallace’s Delve. Grabbed that on Kindle a week or so ago, and definitely looking forward to it. Again, another loud SOB on twitter: @mattFNwallace

And, finally,

8] Jonathan Maberry’s latest Joe Ledger book, Extinction Machine came as part of my amazon order last week, and again, it’s another one that just “gets a pass”. I don’t always dig everything that Maberry writes, but the Joe Ledger series hits my buttons apparently.

So, that’s a good week or two of reading for me, I guess.

I’m still working through the huge Zombies: A Compendium of the Living Dead, but that’s my “at work for breaks” book, because shortstories.

Sadly, I actually have a lot more than that. Book Nerd, through and through. But those are the ones I’m most looking forward to: the top of the pile, so to speak.

[BOOKS] Here’s the Problem, Well Illustrated.

I’m currently reading a fantastic zombie compilation. It’s fine. This post isn’t about zombies. Totally safe. Trust me.

So, Yeah, I’m reading The Living Dead 2 ed. John Joseph Adams. Highly recommend it so far, and, it’s $6.99 at Chapters.ca in store, in the bargain bins, and you just can’t beat that for summer reading.

However.

I just came across a particular story, Reluctance by Cherie Priest. Now, obviously, these are all shortstories, which means even if I don’t like it, I’ll finish it. Short stories, at the very, very least, are a great way to find new authors. And in this case, how could I resist? An alternate history world where the Civil War has dragged on for twenty years, and led to massive steampunk innovation? And Zombies?

Seriously.

So, read the story, and I gotta say, I love it. Which means the first thing I did was jump on Kindle, and go looking for some of the other stuff in that world. Specifically, BoneShaker

Which is where my irritation with the industry raised its head again.

Paperback: $11.97
Kindle: $12.56

Wait, WHAT?

Keep in mind, this is a four-year old book now, too. But, it shouldn’t be cheaper for me to order physical, dead-tree editions (I can get the first three in the series, Boneshaker, Clementine, and Dreadnaught for $38, with free shipping) cheaper than the electronic, make-a-copy-and-sell-it-with-no-additional-overhead versions.

That’s fucking dumb.

I’ll probably eventually acquire this series. I dig it a lot. But if the ebook pricing was more realistic, that’d already be a sale. or possibly several sales.

And this isn’t an abnormal situation. I ran into the same thing a little while back with a book review on MotherJones. I thought it looked neat, so I hopped on amazon to check the pricing.

Hardcover: $16.43
Kindle: $17.95

Oh. Heh. I tagged that link about six weeks ago. In that time, the hardcover price has dropped to $15.45. WHICH MAKES THE DISPARITY EVEN WORSE.

[BOOKS] The Wheel Turns.

In 1990, I was seventeen. I worked part-time at A&P, and, because it was a union-run grocery store, it was ridiculous money for a seventeen-year-old in 1990. $13.85/hour, to stock shelves, and talk to customers. (Top wage, but it didn’t take long to get there). I worked a few night shifts ($2/hr premium) and, basically, I was making full-time money, on part-time hours (my previous job was a cook @ KFC, for $4.25/hr). At seventeen, I could work about twenty hours a week, and put two hundred bucks in my pocket. Given that I didn’t have any expenses beyond beer (not that, at seventeen, I EVER bought beer) at $18 a two-four, and gas ($0.38/L in Canuckbucks). I still lived at home, it was the summer of Grade 11, and well, I had time on my hands.

So, I was down at the mall, bored, because the arcade had closed that year. Now, I’ve always been a reader, so it wasn’t unusual to find me looking over the meager offerings of the Milton Mall’s tiny SmithsBooks. And, while I stuck to what I knew a lot of the time, something caught my eye: a big, tradepaperback.

The Eye of the World

I sat in the pool at my parents place, in a rubber raft, that afteroon, in July. I got sunburnt, I drank a… fizzy beverage… or three, and read it cover-to-cover. I was hooked.

Fast forward ten years, and the series, what was supposed to be six books, is now nine books, and looks like it’s going to end up somewhere between thirteen and fifteen books. They’re being published by the pound, in the great tradition of Stephen King, but unlike King’s books, they’re not fucking going anywhere anymore. That brilliant story was getting lost in the interpersonal details, politics, and basic travel and day-to-day doldrums. I get that it’s an epic story, but do we really need that kind of…? I don’t even know what.

It was at that point that I started buying them as bargain books. I wasn’t really looking forward to the next one, and the one after that anymore. I needed to read ’em, I had to know how it all ended (once a junkie, always a junkie, yeah?) but I wasn’t enthused. I was buying and reading them to get by, I wasn’t enjoying my hit anymore.

And then, in 2005, Jordan died. And there were a lot of rumours that it was done, the story wouldn’t get finished. Which, considering we were at book ten of a supposedly-six-book series, kind of a pisser for the readers. Then it got announced that Brendan Sanderson would be filling in for the last ‘book’ (ended up split into three, due to length) with Jordan’s notes to work from.

Where am I going with this?

oh, yeah.

So, like I said, having been less than enamoured of the kind of “late middle quartet” of books, I’d pretty much planned to wait, and buy the last two in bargain books. I figured, not going to waste my money. And then Knife of Dreams was actually not bad. It seemed that Sanderson had gotten into it in a big way, and, being new to the series in terms of writing, was moving things along.

I still didn’t pick up Towers of Midnight. Again, figured, might as well wait for bargain books.

And two weeks ago, the final book, A Memory of Light was released. And still, I’m all “I’ll wait for the hardcover to hit bargain books”.

Until, this happened on Twitter:

And this happened on facebook:

So, one order to Amazon.ca later, I got those two final books, Towers of Midnight and A Memory of Light for about twenty-one bucks each. Sanderson, in the great tradition of Jordan, is finishing the series “by the pound”. They are, respectively, 864 and 912 pages long.

But with endorsements like the above, it’s hard not to be excited about them.

You’ll probably hear what I think of ’em over the next few weeks.

Readin’ and readin’.

I made a mistake. I ended up in Chapters, in the discount section. So, of course, I ended up with three new hard covers.

Two are staples: David Drake, adn Raymond E. Feist. The other, however, was a bit of a “hummm. that looks neat”.

And for five bucks, I can’t turn that down.

So, I came home with Mike Carey’s Dead Men’s Boots.

So far, at about a hundred pages in, I dig it. It’s a little bit classically British. It’s a little bit urban fantasy. It’s a little bit Harry Dresden.

Ok, it’s actually a lot Harry Dresden.

Which is fine by me.

What I didn’t expect, as it stands alone very well, is that this is book three in a series (currently five books) staring Felix Castor.

So far, I can really recommend this one if you dig the Dresden Files, Sandman Slim kind of gritty urban fantasy. Good stuff.

Readin’, Readin’, and Readin’.

Seems to be that time of year when people talk about what they plan on reading for the year. I generally can’t think that far ahead, but what the hell. I always know I’ve got a few “must hit” books coming into my heap, and I can generally talk about some of the stuff I’ve been reading in the last little while, too.

I’ve been spending more and more time with my kindle app on both the phone and tablet. There’s a plethora of great writers who give away their books in promotions to get themselves some press, or price it in the “I don’t have to think much about buying this” bracket of $0.99. I’ve read a ton of these guys and girls in the last six months, including: M.A. Rogers – Chivalry is Undead, Matt Hults – HUSK, Benjamin Kane Etheridge – Bottled Abyss, C.L. Bevill – Bubba and the Dead Woman, John Urbancik – Dark Walker, Chris F. Holm – Dead Harvest, Christa Faust – Hoodtown, Pip Ballantine/Tee Morris – The Janus Affair, A Ministry of Peculiar Occurances novel, and Mandy DeGeit – She Makes Me Smile, and I’ve bought more than that. Those are the ones that stuck with me, primarily though, and I’ll recommend each of ’em. I’ve just not had time to read ’em all yet.

What’s waiting in the (Kindle)wings?

Robert Swartwood’s “Man of Wax Trilogy”, Chuck Wendig’s BlackBirds and Mockingbird, Nathan Robinson’s Starers,

I paid a still fair full-price for a few ebooks too: very specifically, Jake Bible’s Apex Trilogy, composed (or, depcompsed, depending on your zombie/mech perspective), DeadMech, The Americans, and Metal & Ash

You can also get, for $0.99/month, the monthly Fantasy & Science Fiction, Extended edition, which is a great sampler and a fantastic place to figure out some new authors (or, find old authors you’ve not read before) within the genre.

If you’re STILL looking for affordable reading material, I highly recommend keeping an eye on the humble bundle. I managed to snag the Humble Ebook bundle a few months ago, for twelve bucks, and included in that was Dunkin the Vampire Slayer, Zoo City, and Old Man’s war (Greg Crites, Lauren Beukes, and John Scalzi, respectively), along with about fifteen other nifty little pieces, including two of the Penny Arcade ebook compilations.

After that, we get to the “real books”. And, weirdly, I’m starting my year with two pieces of non-fiction.

Visit Sunny Chernobyl

Engines of Change: A History of the American Dream in Fifteen Cars

I also want to reread The Hobbit, now I’ve just seen the first movie (which I enjoyed).

The fifth book of Scott Sigler’s GFL series will be coming out in the late summer/early fall, and I will be getting that on pre-order when it hits.

I still have this stack of books next to the bed, too.

I do try to keep GoodReads updated, but I do forget. I have an easier time with physical books, oddly, because I can just scan the barcodes, where I have to go searching for titles and authors from ebooks. Kindle, Kobo, here’s an idea: put a goodreads link the software, while you’re busy linking ot social media, mmm’kay? If you’re going to have ONE social media hook-up in your software, it should be goodreads, not facebook or twitter.

Even if you’ve never read anything on a device before, I recommend grabbing any one of the apps, either market-specific, like Kindle or Kobo, or open-format, like Aldiko. Personally, I use a combination of Kindle and Aldiko. I love the convenience and ease of the Kindle/amazon marketplace, but I do buy from other retailers, like AngryRobotbooks, and while you can add your files to the appropriate folder on the Kindle app, I like keeping them seperate. In fact, I want a way to download and archive the .mobi files that Kindle uses, to store. I don’t THINK Kindle’s going anywhere, but I bought ’em, and they’re mine. Dammit. Oh, and through the power of the internet, here’s the how, approximately.

Oh, e-Self-publishing Doesn’t Work?

“The Fifty Shades of Grey trilogy first emerged in the e-book format, where it found massive success. A bidding war amid traditional publishers soon followed.”

That’s the most important sentence in that article, as far as I’m concerned. Proof-positive that you can self-publish electronically, and then have the ‘old regime’ fight over the rights to your work.

It’s not my type of book, I’m not likely to read it, but good on E.L James for making the new way work for her.