Category Archives: Books

Books by others; whatever I’m reading.

Chi Chi Chitastic

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Kelly and I went to our first SF community event Wednesday night, a ChiSeries reading featuring Guy Gavriel Kay, E.L. Chen, Jim Munroe and Leon Rooke. The monthly readings are held at The Augusta House, a pub conveniently near our place, and we met a few people I’ve known for years in a cyberspace way (I tend to forget that some of these friends of mine are people I’ve never actually looked in the face.)

One of the night’s unexpected delights was hearing the music of Kari Maaren. She is an amazing filk lyricist (Badger and Fearless, I suspect you will heart her bigtime, if you don’t already). Her The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy song, “43,” made me howl with laughter. And there’s this:

We slipped out at about nine-thirty, so very late by our ridiculous up-at-dawn standards, and walked home. It felt as though it might have been the first time–in almost a month!–that we’ve been out after dark. The pubs were just getting lively, filling up with crowds of people keen to watch hockey and socialize.

It was a warm and humid night, full of sights and cheer, an altogether magical walk.

I #amreading (though slowly) – Eighty Days

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I have probably mentioned this before, but when I was a tween, the Scholastic Book Order club was pretty much the highlight of my school existence. Every month they’d send out a two page book catalog, printed on newsprint, and I would pore over it, trying to figure out which two or three books I would order.

The next phase involved the wheedling of cash from my mother. I can remember very specifically the feeling of walking to school with the actual form clutched in my hand. It about the size of a postcard and printed on newsprint, and I would wrap it around the quarters and dimes with which I was going to pay for the treasure.

Until the recent move-related cull, I still had a few of those books: Ann Rivkin’s Mystery of Disaster Island, and The Forgotten Door by Alexander Key, to name two.

One of the Scholastic books I didn’t retain into adulthood was a biography of Nellie Bly, and it was absolutely one of my favorites. Nellie was an intrepid girl reporter who worked for Joseph Pulitzer, and the book told about how she went undercover at an insane asylum for women–writing an expose on its cruelties–before capping off her career with a ’round the world race to prove that Jules Verne’s Around the World in 80 Days trip was a possible thing.

Another magazine sent a competing reporter, so halfway around the journey she found out she was in a race with Elizabeth Bisland.

So. Not long ago my good friend Keph posted about Eighty Days: Nellie Bly and Elizabeth Bisland’s History-Making Race Around the World on Facebook and I immediately grabbed it up. It is as gratifying and intriguing as I expected. Nellie and Elizabeth were remarkably different women whose lives had intriguing similarities: they bumped up against the same feminist issues in very different ways.

On a barely-relevant note – I am now living within blocks of the Scholastic building. This is, for me, rather like living on the front lawn of the Taj Mahal or the Vatican.

In which I #amreading about the history of fingerprinting…

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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

Delicious prose crumbs

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It has been awhile since I posted a text fragment, but I loved this little bit of The Daughter of Time by Josephine Tey. If you want a few good reasons to read this novel, Jo Walton makes the case here. I will merely add it’s one of the few things I’ve read that reminds me of Connie Willis.

Every schoolboy turned over the final page of Richard III with relief, because now at last the Wars of the Roses were over and they could get on to the Tudors, who were dull but easy to follow.

Book Trailer and Giveaway: @lvoisin’s The Watcher

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I had the good fortune to get to read Lisa Voisin’s first novel, The Watcher, in my capacity as a writing teacher, and I was so pleased when I heard she’d sold it to Inkspell Press. Now there’s a book trailer–so have a look!

The Watcher is a YA paranormal romance. Here’s a snippet of the description from the author’s site:

Millennia ago, he fell from heaven for her. Can he face her without falling again?

Fascinated with ancient civilizations, seventeen-year-old Mia Crawford dreams of becoming an archaeologist. She also dreams of wings–soft and silent like snow–and somebody trying to steal them.


Finally, you may wish to note that Lisa has a giveaway going on her blog right now.