Category Archives: Ebooks

In which I #amreading about the history of fingerprinting…

  By Alyx Dellamonica | March 8, 2013 - 10:00 am | ,
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keep readingI am currently more than halfway through Suspect Identities: A History of Fingerprinting and Criminal Identification, by Simon A. Cole. The title’s pretty self-explanatory, I think.

This is research for the trilogy set on Stormwrack, the same world where “Among the Silvering Herd” takes place, and
I’ve learned a lot. I’ve learned that early uses of fingerprinting tended to center around colonizing nations trying to tell their individual subjects apart (they thought all those non-white folks they were dominating looked alike!) I also learned how much of the early development of this technology was less about gathering fingerprints–either directly from individuals or in the form of latent prints on crime scenes–and more about generating a reliable filing system so that you could match the things.

I’d been craving a good non-fiction read and this has definitely delivered.

Here’s a short quote…

J. Edgar Hoover would reminisce fondly about the days when “too many law-enforcement officers were men of low intelligence, some of low morals, and, indeed, of a low opinion for anyone who sought to make science his aid and his standby in the pursuit of a criminal.”

Other books, so far this year –

1. The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2012, edited by Dan Ariely and Tim Folger
2. Throne of the Crescent Moon, by Saladin Ahmed
3. The Cat’s Table, by Michael Ondaatje
4. The Daughter of Time, by Josephine Tey (I read this partly because of the discovery of Richard the III’s bones and partly because of the Jo Walton essay “How can this be so gripping?”

Short Stories
“About Fairies,” Pat Murphy

Reading in 2012 – the whole shebang (#amreading)

  By Alyx Dellamonica | January 3, 2013 - 11:22 am | , ,
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Here’s all the books and many of the short stories I read in 2012

1. The Swerve: How the World Became Modern, by Stephen Greenblatt
2. Among Others, by Jo Walton
3. Atlantic: Great Sea Battles, Heroic Discoveries, Titanic Storms, and a Vast Ocean of a Million Stories, by Simon Winchester
4. Stone Spring by Stephen Baxter
5. Kat, Incorrigible (Unladylike Adventures of Kat Stephenson), by Stephanie Burgis
6. Remote, by Donn Cortez
7.The Pattern Scars by Caitlin Sweet
8. one awesome draft novel by a dear friend
9. Property of a Lady, by Sarah Rayne
10. Hark a Vagrant by Kate Beaton
11. Black Blade Blues, by J.A. Pitt
12. Redshirts, by John Scalzi
13. Broken Harbour, by Tana French
14. Sharp Objects, by Gillian Flynn
15. Are you My Mother? By Alison Bechdel
16. The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins
17. Catching Fire, by Suzanne Collins
18. Mockingjay, by Suzanne Collins
19. On Conan Doyle or The Whole Art of Storytelling, by Michael Dirda
20. Falling Angel, by William Hjortsberg
21. Between two Fires, by Christopher Buehlman
22. Black Diamonds; The Rise and Fall of an English Dynasty, by Catherine Bailey
23. The Warlock’s Curse, by M.K. Hobson
24. Little Star, by John Ajvide Lindqvist
25. Gone Girl, by Gillian Flynn
26. The Keeper of Lost Causes, by Jussi Adler-Olsen
27. The Sin Eater, by Sarah Rayne
28. How to Archer, by Sterling Archer

Short Stories (there were others; I’m just getting into this habit).
“Men Who Would Drown,” by Elizabeth Fama
“Six Months, Three Days,” by Charlie Jane Anders
“Nell,” by Karen Hesse (http://www.tor.com/stories/2012/09/nell)
“How to Make a Triffid” by Kelly Lagor (http://www.tor.com/stories/2012/11/how-to-make-a-triffid)
“Your Final Apocalypse,” Sandra McDonald, Clarksworld
“A Scandal in Bohemia,” Arthur Conan Doyle

Rereads
Faithful Place, by Tana French
Into Thin Air, by Jon Krakauer
Broken Harbour, by Tana French

This probably isn’t rocket science to any of you…

  By Alyx Dellamonica | November 9, 2012 - 9:51 am | , , ,
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But since I started reading a lot of e-books, I stopped posting a lot of text fragments. It has taken me this long to figure out that I can highlight the good bit, hit SHARE, choose Twitter, and DM myself the frickin’ text I want without having to retype it.

So here, the successful experiment, from Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl:

I am not interested in being set up. I need to be ambushed, caught unawares, like some sort of feral love-jackal.

I chose it because it’s like the humor, and because it reminds me of the state a friend was in some years ago. She’s engaged now, so ha!

As I rebuild this prose-collecting habit, you’ll be seeing more of these. With longer notes. In the meantime, happy weekend.

I #amWriting, amReading, amRithmetic

  By Alyx Dellamonica | October 24, 2012 - 9:00 am | , , , ,
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Sometimes I can get through a book without ever having to print up a manuscript and make hard notes. Not so with the current book, though. I’ve run it off, divided it into five separate hundred-ish page segments, and am most of the way through a pink pen edit. This is not a sekrit publishing technical term. It just means that the next edit will be a green or blue or possibly orange pen edit. I am hoping to only read it this way twice, as the story came together pretty delightfully once the scribbling commenced.

Work in progress: DAUGHTER OF NO NATION

And speaking of delightful, I am now about 70% of the way through my shiny advance copy of M.K. Hobson’s heartrending steampunk novel The Warlock’s Curse, which will be available to the general public so very soon. This novel is the follow-up to the Nebula nominated The Native Star and its sequel The Hidden Goddess. I won’t say anything more about it until I’ve read that last 30%, except for this: damn you, Mary, you’ve gone and made me all emo! Those sodas at your Orycon launch party better be amazing! And also: guys, this is a superfun novel.

Instead of #amreading, here’s what I’m teaching in the fall…

  By Alyx Dellamonica | August 22, 2012 - 10:00 am | , , ,
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Last week I read all three of Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games books. It may have been too much of the same thing at once, and maybe I’ll have more to say about them once some time has passed. I also reread Into Thin Air, by Jon Krakauer, but I’ve almost certainly written about that before.

Instead of treating you to semi-coherent Peeta/Gale mumblings or some variation on Wow, I sure don’t have what it takes to be a high-altitude climber!, I will tell you that my next UCLA extension course is Novel III, it starts on October 3rd, and there’s a discount available to people who sign up before the 24th. Here’s the description from the course catalog:

For those with a minimum of 50 pages of a novel-in-progress, this workshop guides you to generate at least 50 new pages as well as learn essential self-editing techniques, with the instructor and peers reviewing each participant’s project in detail. Refinements of character, structure, emotional content, and the development of the writer’s voice also are explored. The goal is to produce a substantial portion of your novel.

You can check out the syllabus here. (It’s subject to minor changes only.)

Or, if you’d rather, here’s a newsflash: the trees know that autumn’s on the way.
Autumn leaves in sun

I #AmReading, but for how long?

  By Alyx Dellamonica | July 4, 2012 - 9:55 am | , , , ,
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Happy Fourth of July, U.S. Friends!

I am about a third of the way into The House of Wisdom: How the Arabs Transformed Western Civilization and have only just reached the first gory corpse in Patrick O’Brian’s Red Rain.

Neither book is completely doing it for me: The House of Wisdom is good, but I seem to be absorbing it in small chunks. I feel predisposed to extreme pickiness, to feeling dissatisfaction with the books I’m tackling. I’m not sure there’s much wrong with them, but we definitely aren’t playing well together.

I’ll note that this all started well before I started busily bustin’ words for my WriteAThon commitment. On which note, some braggage:

Tuesday – 1,464 for a total of 28,887
Monday – 1,146 for a total of 27,423
Sunday- 850 words, total of 26,277
Saturday – 1,280 words total of 25,427

Sponsor me here! Win naming rights to stuff on Stormwrack! The number of donors in the pool tripled this week, but the odds of winning the draw are still excellent!)

Okay, back to my point, which is books. Reading for pleasure. The delights of the written word. What has been working for me, in terms of reading, is some of the stuff on the ever-delightful Longreads–I read a good piece on a tornado that ripped through Moscow, Ohio, and a New Yorker article about how having pots of money (or even thinking about it) can affect a person’s capacity for empathy or generosity.

So yay Longreads, and all that, but I am still struggling to sink into a good book-length work, fiction or non-fiction, that I haven’t already read. Has this ever happened to any of you?

Squid story ahoy! And a #BuffyRewatch!

  By Alyx Dellamonica | July 3, 2012 - 1:19 pm | , , ,
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New Fiction! My story “The Sweet Spot,” is available now in the e-book version of Lightspeed magazine, and can be downloaded along with the rest of the issue, here. The story’s release date on the site is July 17th, and I’ll definitely be doing one of my short story intros about it between now and then.

Lightspeed_26_July_2012

For now I’ll tell you that the story is about the childhood of Ruthless Gerrickle, from “The Town on Blighted Sea,” and, in case you’re following this universe of mine at all, it’s about the beginning of the Battle of Oahu.

This week’s Buffy rewatch on Tor.com covers the S3 episode “Helpless.”

And also I #amreading some things…

  By Alyx Dellamonica | April 30, 2012 - 10:15 am | , ,
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Many many things. I finished Remote awhile ago–as I am greedy, I found myself telling Donn Cortez I wished it had gone on longer–and I’ve joined Pinterest but haven’t really figured it out yet.
I’ve also read a novella James Patrick Kelly kindly sent me, “Men are Trouble“. This came about because I was writing an article about gender in SF and fantasy, and trying to remember the title of his short story, “Lovestory.” So, in that way we all have now I’d thrown a query out to the Twitternets and had an answer, from Jim himself, in 24 hours. We got to talking about gender and science fiction and he mentioned his other gender stuff, in particular this novella.
So. “Men are Trouble.” It’s a near-future hardboiled detective story. There are aliens in it, aliens who–it’s apparent early on–came to Earth to help humanity pull itself out of the environmental and economic hole we’re currently digging ourselves into. And who, as part of their tough love program, disappeared every single man in the world. Jim wanted to know what I thought, and I’m sure he’d be interested in your reaction, too.
What did I think? The obvious effect of removing the male sex from the population, in this story, certainly isn’t to disappear human conflict or power struggles. It brings a couple things into the light: intergenerational friction between women, and the aliens’ failure to understand that simply wiping out guys (and, presumably, transwomen) isn’t the answer. The story and the culture he creates is very true to human behavior.
It’s a terrific story, and I’m still thinking about it a week later.
I also couldn’t help but compare it to James Alan Gardner’s “A Clean Sweep with All the Trimmings,” which is also feminist in its sensibility and a hardboiled. And, just a little, to my favorite hardboiled ever, Nicola Griffith’s Aud series which opens with Blue Place. The trio makes me wonder what it is about the hard-boiled that makes it such a good lens for stories about gender inequality. Or are all genres equally good for this, and it’s just that I’ve been exposed to these three excellent examples.
Changing pace, I’ve moved on to Caitlin Sweet’s The Pattern Scars, which is lovely and dark and intriguing, and which is also on the Prix Aurora Ballot, by the way. It’s beautifully put together on a sentence-by-sentence level and is well worth close attention.

Food for brain and belly

  By Alyx Dellamonica | March 28, 2012 - 9:51 am | , , ,
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I am slowing down on To Each Their Darkness, because it’s less about writing so far, and more about a whole lot of films I haven’t seen. I plan to keep inching through it–so far, it’s had two absolutely harrowing anecdotes that do genuinely touch on the subject of darkness–but I’ll move at a slower pace.
I will also slip away, behind its back, to start up with a book I’ve been waiting for forever, even before I knew it was finally getting written. It’s called Remote, it’s by Donn Cortez, and speaking of darkness, it’s the sequel to a truly horrific novel called The Closer, which in addition to being one of the spookiest thrillers I’ve ever had the privilege to read, is set in East Vancouver, and features big parts of my backyard terrain, including Bon’s Cafe and the annual Parade of Lost Souls.
The Closer has one of the best final lines of any novel I’ve ever read. I won’t excerpt it… it only makes sense in context. But I assure you, it’s killer.
I don’t know anyone else who’s read it… it’s so dark, it falls outside what most of my friends prefer. It’s like Dexter dialed up. Anyone know it?
So I am keen to see where the story goes next.
And while I’m talking books, Elizabeth Bear’s Range of Ghosts is out! I reviewed it extensively here, and recommend it wholeheartedly.

In food news, I’ve finally made the pumpkin peanut soup recipe posted by Badger, from Vegan on the Cheap. It was nummy delicious.

Here, there, everywhere!

  By Alyx Dellamonica | March 20, 2012 - 9:39 am | , , , ,
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Save the date, local peeps! There are now three short weeks to April 10th and the release of Blue Magic in trade paperback and electronic editions. If you’re here in Vancouver, there will be a launch on April 19th at the UBC Bookstore downtown, 800 Robson Street, 7:30 p.m. I’ll read, there will be at least one prize draw, and I’m working on getting in a special guest artist. Come one, come all!

In other news–if it’s Tuesday, Buffy must be in retrograde. I mean danger. Or is that Dawn? My rewatch of “Ted” and “Bad Eggs” is up at Tor.com.

Speaking of Buffy, my fellow BtVS fans and good friends Lizben gave me this fabulous Buffy TeeFury t-shirt on the weekend, by way of a belated birthday present. Isn’t it awesome?

All Imported-45