I’m stoked.
Category: Books
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Don't You Hate it When…
…you purchase a book you’ve already read?
I bought Singularity Sky by Charles Stross with Christmas gift-card money. I brought it home and set it aside for when I was done with the other books I was reading. A few nights ago, I picked it up, started reading, and immediately said (out loud), “awww crap.”
Oops. I guess I should read the first page of every book I buy from now on.
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Book Reviews redux
19 book reviews on the 14th of January. 315 pages per book(taken from the Amazon.com statistics, which admittedly, contain blank pages and title pages, etc.) 5,984 pages in one day. I’m impressed, as always, by Ms. Harriet Klausner.
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Young Adult Fiction
Sometimes I’m suprised after reading a book that it was classified as “Young Adult” literature. Retrospectively, I shouldn’t be because the subject matter usually deals with a young person overcoming obstacles or coming of age, etc. The Belgariad, Harry Potter, Eragon, etc., have all entertained me to the point where I would recommend them to anybody, not just young adults.
This blog entry has some amusing answers to the question, “What is Young Adult literature?”
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Why You Shouldn't Recommend Books
I have given up taking book recommendations from the masses. I am a quick reader, but I won’t read things if I don’t like them, or if they don’t entertain me. I have developed opinions about novels over the course of my reading career and I don’t like to force a novel past my eyes. I haven’t read past the first chapter of Moby Dick, and probably never will. I did not particularly like Neuromancer. Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle is horribly long-winded and if I wasn’t already hooked by his other books, I never would have gotten past the third chapter. The Jungle put me to sleep, depressed. Yet there are books I love that I know would make people scratch their heads and wonder what I was smoking.
Recently there was a call from Pharyngula to recommend Science Fiction books for young readers. The conclusion I drew from reading the responses was that it was a bell-shaped distribution ranging from crazy to excellent. Most of the responses (in my opinion, of course) were reasonable, while some steered people away from (imo) good books and others steered people toward bad ones. The final decision: Mass Book Recommendations are utterly useless. Or maybe udderly useless as you get stampeded toward the mainstream (Of course, there are some excellent books that everyone has read. “Exception to every rule,” and all that).
I am personally of the opinion, as evidenced in the Harriet Klausner post, that you should take a book recommendation with a large grain of salt until you and the reviewer develop a relationship. I have friends whose book taste I know and vice versa. I don’t feel like I’m leading them astray when I tell them “read this, don’t read that.” Likewise, there are a few professional reviewers that I trust to accurately predict my enjoyment of a book (there are those reviewers whom I can trust to hate anything I’d like, too, which is an accurate prediction.)
Of course, you shouldn’t depend on anyone’s judgement for reading. Not mine, not your brother’s, not the NY Times, not anybody! You should merely pick something up and read it. If you don’t like it, move on. That’s a great way to review books!
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Harriet Klausner
You learn new things every day. Not necessarily useful things, but things. Possibly, these various items may pop up in a bar quiz someday. I can only hope.
Today’s thing is Harriet Klausner. This was clued to me by one of SFSignal’s various tidbit posts. This post lists a comment train that has been continuing for over 3 years now and is quite educational.
Harriet Klausner is Amazon.com’s #1 reviewer. “She” has reviewed more books than anyone else. As of today, she has written 12,939 reviews in almost the exact same format (three paragraph summation with a 4 or 5 star rating). This woman is either a front for a large set of people or someone who might possibly be lying to us.
I base this on the following data, drawn from Amazon’s list of her reviewed books.
- She reviewed 19 books on December 10 2006
- 59 books on December 9 2006
- 3 on December 8
- 1 on December 7
- 1 on December 6
- 15 on Decmber 3
- 10 on December 2
I gave up at this point. I went to page 99 intending to find the date of the last review on that page. Then I decided to make sure I counted all the reviews done that day. I ended up on page 106! The date was August 2, 2006. Checking all of the August 2 pages, it ends up that 102(!) reviews were published that day.
So, if I do my math right, between August 2 and December 26 we have 146 days. Over the course of that time “Harriet Klausner” has posted 7.27 reviews per day. But, let us not discount what she said in her Wired interview.
Klausner, for one, has a day job to supplement her income. She works as a paid columnist in two national magazines, Porthole Cruise Magazine and Affaire de Coeur.
Also
She never deliberately criticizes an author and she doesn’t accept gifts or money when writing about a book.
So, here’s a woman with a day job, who never deliberately criticizes authors, yet (from not-so-random-sampling by yours truly and through affirmations by others) never gives less than 4 stars on Amazon, and reviews 7.27 books per day. The first ten books in her reviewed list as of today, the 26th of December, averaged 423 pages. So she reads and reviews 3075 pages every single day, including weekends, while holding down a paying job, and presumably reading the first 50 pages of at least the occasional novel she does not like. Let’s be generous and reverse Sturgeon’s Law and call 90% of the novels she reads good and the last 10% crap. That leaves us with a grand total of 3113 pages per day every day all year long.
She must be keeping bandage companies in business with all of her paper cuts.
This is a bunch of crap. No one can honestly, ethically, review this many books every day and have more to say that banal generalities that we can get from the book jacket. If she is telling the truth and does read this much, I have no need to read her stuff; it will be trite and useless to me. If she is not telling the truth and has a team behind the name, then why don’t they publish better reviews? Read some if you don’t believe me…
I have nothing deep to say about this, other than it reinforces my belief that you cannot trust book reviews or reviewers unless you actually know the person who did the reviewing.
While paging through her listing of reviewed books, I noticed that one of them was a book of photography. I might be able to believe she can speed read her way through 3113 pages, but a book of photography is not a novel. It would require a different mindset to “speedread.” Yes, I realize it’s only one book, but it’s proof of principle. My principle.
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Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows!
J.K. Rowling has named book 7!
I object, though. When I read this bbc article it said, “The announcement was made on the writer’s official website.” I immediately (we’re talking nanoseconds, here) went to the official website and found…nothing. Just her update from the 19th.
Hmmmm…
Maybe it got retracted? Maybe BBC jumped the gun? Who knows. There’s a title and that’s awesome.
I’m curious about the title. “Hallows” usually referes to samhain/halloween/all hallows eve. I wonder [dum dum dum] if something critical and important will happen on halloween? It would be unusual for her book to end on halloween, but we’ll see. She might throw the school-year idea out the window, but then Harry still needs time to track down the remaining horcruxes.
For more of my idle speculation, go here.
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Peter Jackson = LotR? Maybe…
Three times in 12 hours, I’ve been spammed by a Save The Lord of the Rings post relating that only Peter Jackson could possibly do a movie based on The Hobbit.
Obviously this took a bit of time to ramp up, because, as you can see from this website it’s been a week since The Announcement Of Impending Doom, that Peter Jackson will not be directing The Hobbit, according to New Line Cinema.
Now, frankly, I don’t care about the spat between Jackson and New Line. They’ll figure it out, I’m sure. What I’m more concerned with is the assumption that only Peter Jackson has the vision, skill, knowledge, chutzpah, to do another Tolkien-based film. The underlying base to that assumption is that Jackson had the vision, skill, knowledge, chutzpah to do the first set of films. I personally don’t think he did that great a job holding to the vision of Tolkien.
Oh, I’ll be one of the first to stand up and say that he produced three epic awe-inspiring, legend-setting, fan-base-swooning movies. They were cinematographic triumphs! As long as you don’t care about the various travesties he rendered unto J. R. R. Tolkien and his masterwork.
As an avowed Tolkien afficionado, I liked The Fellowship of the Ring; I disliked The Two Towers; I despised The Return of the King. I acknowledge that there are corners that must be cut to turn LotR into a movie that is watchable in less than 15 parts, but some of the libertys taken were over the top. Peter Jackson entirely slew the character of Faramir, a crime that is unforgivable. The intransigence of Elrond was all wrong and the appearance of the elves at Helm’s Deep nearly killed me. Then of course, there was the entire Return of the King which had so little resemblance to the actual story, it doesn’t even bear mentioning.
[sigh] Deep breaths…
Back to the Question that everyone seems to be assuming the answer to: Is Peter Jackson the only person who could direct The Hobbit? I don’t think so. He did a ground-breaking series of movies, but The Hobbit won’t be the same, and studios won’t need to be shown that it will make money. So, if it doesn’t work out between New Line and Peter Jackson, I’m not going to wail. I’m going to expect them to go out and find someone who loves the books as much as Peter Jackson does, with their own vision, and make a great movie.
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Excellent Website
Cleaning out the “to be posted” file…
I’ve spent the past week or so perusing the pages on this website. Most are strangely amusing. My favorite quote, found on the page of Astronomically Unlikely is:
…if all-natural organic free-range babies are the perfect ingredient for tentacle lotion…
Originally, I was punted over by way of SFSignal and I ended up on the SF Chronophysics page which details exhaustively the types of time travel you run into whilst reading Science Fiction and watching Star Trek (Bleha! on Star Trek’s time travel!).
A good time sink. I approve.