Free to a good home

FOUND: TWO EBOOKS, FREE TO A GOOD HOME

Do you like to read? I will assume you do, since you are here, now, reading these words I am writing.

Do you like free reading material? I will further assume so, since you are reading these words, and have not given me any money (or at least, not lately).

Those two things being true or truish, I have two lovely Steampunk short stories for you to read. They are by good (or great) authors, and they are, as I mentioned, free.

The first is The Strange Case of Finley Jane, by Kady Cross. This prequel to her Steampunk Chronicles series (which is continued in The Girl in the Steel Corset) is a highly worthwhile bit of fiction: steamy and toothsome and full of potentiality. Kady Cross (better known as bestselling author Kathryn Smith) has crafted a tale of nefarious criminals, machine/human conflict, and a thoughtful exploration of what makes us truly human: form, or function?

The second is Clockwork Fagin, by the inimitable Cory Doctorow (activist, science fiction author and co-editor of the blog Boing Boing; you may have heard of it). In this tale, set in an alternate version of Canada, orphans use the puppet of a dead man to take control of their lives. The reference, Fagin, comes from Charles Dickens' classic tale Oliver Twist - and like the famous line of the title character of that story of an orphaned boy adrift in the world of the Industrial Revolution, we, too, want some more.

So there you have it. Two free ebooks in search of good homes. Maybe yours? You could do a lot worse than to take them in; goodness knows what might happen if you don't...

For me, it's Jane Austen

We had the list of books one should have read but probably avoided because they were assigned.  Now from Slate we have a series of authors, many of them quite good, talking about the books they absolutely can't read, thought were vastly overrated, or outright hate.  It's good stuff.  For me, as noted, it's Jane Austen: I've tried, but I can't get into her light prose of manners and obligations and so many pounds a year.  I just can't. I get why a lot of people like her (all right, I don't, but I know that a lot of people like her), but I cannot wrap my head around the idea of tearing through her collected works with anything but a grimace.

I've never read it, never wanted to, but now I kind of do

"On the Road, Jack Kerouac. I’m not going to sugarcoat it. This book is straight up terrible. It's a bunch of rambling about eating some sandwiches and driving around while eating sandwiches, and driving around, and then making some more sandwiches, which you will then eat while driving around. It is the universal favorite book of commitment-phobes. And please don't quote me that paragraph about how the only people for you are the mad ones who pop like roman candles. You know what’s better than a dude who pops like a roman candle? A dude who can keep it in his pants, rent his own apartment, and cook you something other than a sandwich once in a while."

From this post by Molly Shalgos on The Hairpin, a site I'd never heard of, but now, like On The Road after this horrible yet delightful blurb/takedown, want to read.

An Oldie but a Goodie

I read a lot of book reviews.  Not so much because I write, or because I'm curious about what people have to say about books, but because I work in a bookstore.  Whether I want to or not, I've got to find out something about some of the hundreds and thousands of books that appear every year.  Sometimes I can stand to read a book myself; occasionally I even enjoy it.  Most often I can gather information from what people say and what they're buying.  There are times, though, when the book review is all I have to run with, and let me say that this article, though it's a few years old, is still terribly correct about the process of reviewing.  Eschew, for instance, has probably been heard only once in my life, give or take, I would assume by someone trying to sound educated.  I may in fact have never heard it, though I have read it often enough in reviews and similar, but not often in actual prose.  And lyrical is often just a sloppy descriptor, one which suggests something that could be more clearly laid out by a good review.  And so on.  To read this makes one think about the process of reviewing, which is good, because we're going to start doing some of that here on the site, and it's best not to look too much the snob/windbag/fool when doing such things, right?

Concerning Reviews

"Few 21^st-century journalists can match the cool snark-power of this passage. Croker's rhetorical muscle and shrewdness shine through the formal idiom and manners of 200 years ago. This is nastiness at its most effulgent." The critic John Wilson Croker speaking about John Keats and supposedly contributing to the poet's death as a result.

The rest of the article lays out a few simple rules for reviewing which, I agree, are not often followed to the fullest.  Sometimes gloriously, as in the above. Read the whole thing.