4500 Pages of Short Stories

For my Adam Smith sanity break, I decided to read some of the free short stories published in "The Stories: Five Years of Original Fiction on Tor.com". I tweeted about one of the stories that the collection was 5000 pages, but with the font set to the smallest size, it is only 4572 pages in the Apple eBook reader. So I've read over 1/5, 900 pages. There is a lot of fill around the stories tho: a cover art page (nice!); title page; DRM verbiage page; and a TOC. After the stories, for the established writers there's a listing of their work; for the newer writers, there were several 1-3 chapter previews of their novels. Still, this is great free content, thanks Tor! It winds up being 150 stories, alphabetically arranged by author's last name, and I've read 33 so far.

I'd read a few of the stories already. All have been pretty strong, except for one by a YA author which did seem a bit juvenile. Favorites:

• "Six Months, Three Days", by Charlie Jane Anders. "The man who can see the future has a date with the woman who can see many possible futures." Fun and games playing with prescience. The author is apparently transgender, so maybe she has seen the dating scene from both sides?
  
• "The Girl Who Sand Rose Madder", by Elizabeth Bear. I'd read this before. For those of you wondering how Keith Richards keeps going.
  
• "The Final Now", by Gregory Benford. "Great Sky River" by Benford would definitely be in my list of top SF of all time. This is a nice, quirky (if theistic) look at the history of the universe. His "Grace Immaculate" story in the collection also has theistic overtones, whazzup widdat?
  
• "A Window or a Small Box", by Jedediah Berry was I think my favorite story so far. An engaged couple, possible with cold feet, wind up in a totally odd parallel world -- maybe a variant of Pepperland. Adventures ensue. I ordered his novel "The Manual of Detection", which is apparently a fantastic, alternate-reality detective novel.
  
• "TVA Baby", by Terry Bisson. A totally off-the-walls, WTF story.
  
• "The Ruined Queen of Harvest World", by Damien Broderick. Nicely mythic and sure of itself. Apparently Mr. Broderick has been writing Sci-Fi in Australia for decades. I ordered a collection of his short stories.
  

Before going back to "Wealth of Nations", I'm clearing the magazine stack for February. The newest issue of "Technology Review" has on it's cover "Buy Fresh, Buy GMO". I think I will probably use this to do some pro-GMO tweets and FB postings. There's too much superstitious peasant anti-GMO sentiment out there.

10 Books

Hmmm, a friend on Facebook did a post of "10 books that have stayed with me" and tagged 10 people, of which I was 1, and asked us to do likewise. Man, hard to do. But seems like a fun mental exercise, to actually go back over my whole life and list books. I'll do these in rough chronological order by when I read them. Well, here goes:

1. D'Aulaires' Book of Norse Myths, Ingri d'Aulaire
   
2. A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens
   
3. The Count of Monte Cristo, Alexander Dumas
   
4. The Catcher in the Rye, J. D. Salinger
   
5. 1984, George Orwell
   
6. The Viking, Edison Marshall
   
7. The Stars My Destination, Alfred Bester
   
8. Dune, Frank Herbert
   
9. The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, Julian Jaynes
   
10. Guns, Germs, and Steel, Jared Diamond
    

Huhn, kind of an odd list, but given the "don't overthink it" directions, I'll stick with it.

Reading

Just got back from the library, picked up 4 books. A new Dan Simmons, woo-hoo! The prior time I was there I only got into the B's before I had 2 books to read. Those were:

• "Not Less Than Gods (The Company)", by Kage Baker. I think I've read most of Ms. Baker's Company stories. They're OK, semi-immortal superhero types are usually fun. This one is set in the 19th century, and kinds of twists itself around to get some steampunk thrown in. An OK read.
  
• "The Sunborn", by Gregory Benford (2006). A sequel to "The Martian Race", which I enjoyed. Surprised I missed this, I normally keep up with Benford. This is a good read, with interesting ideas about non-CHON-based life forms.
  

I finished these while we were on a 4 day trip to Philadelphia for the wedding of an old, good friend of my youngest. She and I performed "Our Love Is Here To Stay". After six weeks of practicing on an electric guitar, all that the band there had was flattops. So lots of flubs chasing the flattop around my belly, but Christie sang beautifully, and the song was rich in emotional content and was very well received. That song was the last written by George Gershwin before his death. It first was used in a "Goldwyn Follies" movie in 1938. But it then got recycled as the main love theme of "An American In Paris" in 1951.

So on the flight home it was back to ebooks on the iPad.

• "An Unexpected Twist", by Andy Borowitz. A whimsical short story about a near death experience that was a $0.99 kindle special. A quick and sweet read. He is very funny on Twitter (@BorowitzReport), and "The Borowitz Report" is a regular feature in Funny Times.
  
• "The ChristWire Handbook". Based on a web site that satirizes fundamentalist christians so well that people didn't realize that it was a satire. I read the first two chapters, very funny. Probably read more in the future. This would make a good bathroom book -- I guess at some point there will be cheap tablets on the back of every toilet?!?!? This kindle book was a father's day gift from my oldest daughter - thanks!
  
• "Religion for Atheists: A non-believers guide to the uses of religion", by Alain de Botton, who is a Swiss writer and philosopher living in Britain. I read the first chapter, disagreed with most of his premises and assumptions, and decided not to proceed further. I don't think we need religion for handling funerals, weddings or childbirth. I have been to totally non-religious versions of all of these and they work much better without having to artificially inject god into them. I did see a chapter named Community, and in raising our children without religion, I did miss the community that I had growing up, although we did have neighbors and the church of soccer. I will probably try the book again in the future. Also a gift from my oldest daughter.
  
• "In Her Name: Omnibus" by Michael R. Hicks. Apparently three novels, "Empire", "Confederation", and "Final Battle", published as one ebook. Looks like it was $5.99 and I probably bought it based on the recommendation of some other sci fi author I follow. I almost put it down after the first page due to bad sentence structure. But it was the only thing I had to read on the plane, so I kept on. Not too bad really, it keeps you turning its 700 pages. Epic space opera, human confederation vs blue female warrior race of a 100,000 year old empire. Almost fantasy in that their empress has powers that are basically godlike. Oh, and the race is sexually compatible with humans -- so the "Avatar" movie fans will be into the blue warrior chicks -- who have upper and lower fangs for the vampire fans! Unfortunately as well, I believe it is showing "The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo" effect -- it has rape scenes, which I'd just as soon not have in my comic books. The ending of the book was really bad tho. It was like "OK, long enough, we're outta here!" What should have been at least several pages explanation of what was going on was instead a couple of shortish paragraphs. I guess I will rate it a solid "meh".
  

Reading

Nice that being down to one job, I'm getting to read again. I need to remember that this blog is my exocortex and keep track of it here. I still follow my algorithm: no starting a book until the magazine stack is clear. The magazine stack is deemed clear when the most recent issue of "Wired" has been read.

So anyway, read on the iPad in Kindle format, "The Clockwork Rocket", by Greg Egan. Egan's physics, math, and computer science chops are scary good. Here I think maybe a little too much so. The exercise of setting a novel in an alternate universe in which the laws of physics are different -- the speed of light is a function of its frequency -- seems to be perhaps a bit too conceptual of an exercise. Like conceptual music winds up being not quite music, this winds up maybe not quite a story. But, actually, you do get involved in the plot and care about the characters. 3 stars.

Then read, based on a recommendation from Charlie Stross's blog, a $0.99 kindle special, "Child of Fire: A Twenty Palaces Novel", by Harry Connolly. Very noir, the central character is a thug who works for a secret society of stone-cold killers who take out magic users -- they are of course magic users themselves. Reminded me of the one Jim Butcher novel I read. Good comic book level material, lots of action and gore, worth the $0.99.

So I then bought the 2nd book in the series for $3.99, "Game of Cages: A Twenty Palaces Novel". About the same level of quality. The 3rd one is out in a couple of weeks, I'll be there. 3 stars for both.

One thing I like about the kindle book format is that these have under "Book Extras" a numbered list of the books in the series. How convenient! Several times I have had a problem, particularly with mystery/detective series, keeping track of what I have and haven't read. This should definitely help.

Next read in hardcover Charlie Stross's latest "Rule 34". I have a lot of his stuff in hardcover, so I will stick with that for a while longer. (Dan Simmons is another one I will do that way). I had thought that maybe Charlie was losing his edge, but this novel is right up there. The central characters are members of basically the Meme Police. The overall concepts of the novel are bizarre but scarily credible. 4 stars. BTW, Rule 34 of the Internet states that "If it exists, there is porn of it. No exceptions".

Finally, finished "Moxyland", by Lauren Beukes a couple of days ago. Near future South African cyperpunk. Somewhat existential (i.e., not a real strong narrative story arc), but great concepts. Yet another dystopia which stands out for the many different and new ways The Man has figured out how to stick it to us. 4 stars.

Maybe music tomorrow. Easier to catch up with that since it all comes through my iTunes client. Of course, most of my books, kindle or not, come through amazon, so my purchase history was used as source for this post. So even if I forget to enter in my exocortex, my friendly vendor remembers for me.

A New Heuristic

I think I have formulated a new heuristic for selecting reading material: avoid add-ons to an existing popular corpus. I just finished "The Children of Hurin", by J.R.R. Tolkien (and his son Christopher). Not as disjointed as "The Silmarillion", but very stilted in its narrative style. Not quite sure what the moral was. The bad guy (Sauron's old boss) curses the family of the main characters, curse seems to work pretty well ?!?!?

I also read two of the follow-up Dune trilogies. Really schlocky. Not that I don't mind schlock -- I still read graphic novels (aka comic books) -- but there's schlock, and then there's schlock. One thing that made most of Frank Herbert's novels so good what that, under the covers, they were about evolution. Completely lost in the follow-ups -- of which there are now two more. Also, they were prequels, which seem to obsess in making sure to fill any questions that one might have had in the originals. So you wind up with checking things off a list rather then getting a decent narrative.