BookViewCafe.com conquers Europe as science fiction author and memoirist, Chris Dolley, joins the team. Originally from the UK, but now living in France, Dolley has had two SF novels (Resonance and Shift) published by Baen. Currently he is working on a true crime memoir based on his own experience of having to track down the thief who stole his identity and life savings when he moved to France. He describes it as “A Year in Provence with Miss Marple and Gerald Durrell.”

For his debut, Dolley will be offering the first episode of Resonance, serialized especially for BVC. He will also be blogging on the topic of romance -- sheep style, and posting his spam email story -- Nigerian Tuna Spam -- which begins: I'm Fluffy the favourite kitten of the late president of Nigeria...

Visit Dolley’s bookshelf at BookViewCafe.com: http://www.bookviewcafe.com/Chris-Dolley-Bookshelf/

Watch for future offerings from Dolley on Saturdays at http://www.bookviewcafe.com.

BookViewCafe.com Welcomes Sarah Smith

This week Book View Café embraces author Sarah Smith into the fold. Smith has written the modern standalone Chasing Shakespeares (about the Shakespeare authorship controversy), and three historical mysteries: The Vanished Child, The Knowledge of Water, and A Citizen of the Country.  The Vanished Child and The Knowledge of Water were named New York Times Notable Books of the Year. Smith's historical mysteries have been published in twelve languages and in the UK, and have reached bestseller status in the US and internationally. Chasing Shakespeares has been made into a play, and The Vanished Child has been optioned for film.

Book View Cafe is launching Smith with her science fiction short story, “Seeing the Edge.” “Seeing the Edge” the first of a group of stories published together as Future Boston. It tells the story of Boston from 1988 to 2100, during which time the city sinks and aliens eventually discover it.

Visit Sarah Smith’s bookshelf at BookViewCafe.com: http://www.bookviewcafe.com/index.php/Sarah-Smith/

Watch for Smith’s Future Boston installments on Thursdays at http://www.bookviewcafe.com

If you're part of the reading and writing and Internet community, you've heard about the Amazon.com problem.  If you haven't, short version is that Amazon removed the Sales Rank feature from almost all books that contain Gay/Lesbian/Bisexual/Transgender content.  At first they claimed it was because of the "adult content" of such books (except they also excluded HEATHER HAS TWO MOMMIES, a children's picture book), and then they claimed it was a glitch (terrbily specific glitch, if you ask me), and now they're claiming they're working on fixing it, whatever "it" is.  The trouble with this is that the books became excluded from Amazon's search function, making it almost impossible to find (and buy) them.

Various people are howling conspiracy, prejudice, and homphobia.

Me, I think they seriously fucked up.  I think it was meant to be a bit of code that filtered out erotic or other adult content so people could search for books on, say, vampires without getting erotic vampire stories (of which there are a large number).  I think whoever programmed the filter made an enormous error, released the new filter into Amazon's little search engine last February (when some people started noticing their books were excluded), and the filter grew more and more aggressive, excluding more and more books until it finally Got Noticed.

I watched the whole thing explode on Twitter.  It was like watching a few snowflakes turn into a blizzard.

See, I can't imagine Amazon doing this on purpose.  They exist to sell books.  Why would they deliberately exclude an entire section of their catalog just now, especially since they've sold such books for years and years and years?  And especially when they would have to know it would create a PR fiasco?

And since it came to a head over Easter, when no one in real authority was on duty over at Amazon, it was handled stupidly and poorly by people who didn't know what was going on once customers, writers, and activists started to complain.

Was Amazon at fault?  Yes.  Was Amazon stupid?  Yes.  Do they deserve the bad Internet press?  Absolutely.  The situation should never have been allowed to happen in the first place, and the dumb-asses have earned every shred of approbation. 

Do they deserve the chance to fix it?  Yes.  And they better move fast.

At least my books haven't been affected.  Yet.

As I recall, Amazon loaded up the first Kindle with a bunch of free books and newspapers and magazines.  They don't do that with the second one.  It came empty, and there were no offers of free books.

I played with it for a while.  It took a bit to figure out how the bookmarks work, but it have it now.  I haven't gone into playing with the text (making notes, selecting text, etc.).  That'll come later, I'm sure.

I downloaded two books.  One thing I like about the Kindle is that it lies flat.  I can use it while I'm eating.  Paperback books (and a great number of hardbacks) don't lie flat and are hard to use at the table, but the Kindle doesn't have that problem.

I'm liking it so far.

I set down Kathy Reichs's BARE BONES, the book on which on the TV show BONES is based and which has the Interrupted Vacation trope.  Reasons?

--I couldn't suspend enough disbelief.  Temperance, the main character, gets via e-mail several photos of herself going about her daily business.  The photos have her in rifle sights, and the caption is "Back Off!" She is rather upset by this.  So what happens next?  Her Perfect Boyfriend (the only who happily set aside their long-planned vacation) LEAVES TOWN.  That's right.  He leaves town.  Why?  Because his mother and his brother are having a spat and he has to go mediate.  This is so far out of character for him, my jaw actually dropped when I hit this section.

--More disbelief.  Temperance shows these photos, which clearly say someone is training a RIFLE on her whenever she leaves her house, to the police, and ALL the police offer to do is drive by her house more often.  That's it.  Nothing else.  Not one person offers to use the photos to triangulate the position of the photographer or otherwise track down who sent them, despite the fact that this series is supposed to be all about forensic investigation.  The supposedly smart cops don't even say, "Maybe you should stay inside, away from windows.  And while we're at it, here's a Kevlar vest.  If you must go outside, WEAR IT, you idiot."

--Yet more disbelief: Temperance attends at dinner party a couple hours after she gets said death threats, and not once does she think about the incident.  She's put it completely out of her mind.  This despite the fact that a couple chapters earlier, she's so unable to separate her work from her private life that she breaks into tears in her Perfect Boyfriend's arms because the particulars of a case have upset her.  WTF?

--Reichs is AWFUL at characterization.  A character who is supposed to be annoying really IS annoying, in that you start hating to read about him.  An expert on birds turns out to be--surprise!--bird-like herself.  An expert on bears turns out to be--oh, can it be?--bear-like!  This sort of cheating is usually found in the work of beginners who think they're being clever.  Reichs (and her editor) should know better.

--The author's dialogue is thoroughly realistic.  Completely.  Totally.  And I mean that in a bad way.  Her dialogue is everyday, dull, and pedestrian.  It completely lacks any hint of snap, sparkle, or anything resembling color.  It's extremely easy to lose track of the characters because they all talk alike, despite the fact that we have characters from Virginia, Boston, Washington D.C., and Canada.  The closest she comes to interesting dialogue is when Perfect Boyfriend (the Canadian character) unsuccessfly tries to imitate cowboy slang, and it falls totally, utterly, embarrassingly flat.  Reichs apparently went to great lengths to have her characters talk "realistically," and totally missed the fact that realistic speech makes for dull reading.

So glad I got this one from the library.  It would have been a total waste of money.

I'm reading BARE BONES, one of the books in the series that the TV show BONES is based on. The book is decent, and makes rather better reading than the Kay Scarpetta books. (I stopped reading the Scarpetta books because all the main characters are always angry at each other, and it really grinds you down.)
However, this particular BONES book makes use of a trope that I hate: the Interrupted Vacation.

 

( Read more... )

The BBC Book List meme is a little erroneous.  I found the original BBC post, and they didn't say anywhere on their site that I could find that the average person has read six of the hundred books.  And some books appear twice.  HAMLET is part of THE COMPLETE WORKS OF SHAKESPEARE and THE LION, THE WITCH, AND THE WARDROBE is part of THE CHRONICLES OF NARNIA, so you get double credit of you've read them.

But it's still kind of fun.  I've read 33 of the books all the way through and six of them partway through.
( My List . . . )

A lot of my students are reading Stephanie Meyer's TWILIGHT books, and I decided to take a look at the first one in the series, see what all the fuss was about.  The way everyone talks, they'd discovered the next Harry Potter.

Nnnnope.

Now I should say that Stephanie Meyer has certainly hit a nerve.  Go her!  I'm insanely jealous.  But I'm definitely not the audience for this book.  It's clearly a girly girl's girl girl girly girl book for girly girls.  The pages slosh with estrogen.  If that's what you want, you're all set, but the novel utterly lacks universal appeal.  I'm about two-thirds of the way through it, and I don't know if I'll finish.  I've only gotten this far out of a perverse desire to see what everyone else sees in the series.

Let's be clear here--this book is part of the vampire romance sub-genre, and it never manages to be more than that.  The book is completely standard, filled with tired old tropes.

( Spoilerish Comments Behind the Cut )

Like I said--a girly girl girl's girl book for girly girls.  If that turns you on, the series will send you into vampire bad-boy heaven.  The rest of us are better off re-reading Harry Potter.

In the mail today came a package that was clearly a book.  I hadn't ordered one, and my first thought was that it was a Phillip K. Dick mistake--I still get the occasional SF paperback in the mail from people who think I'm still a PKD Award judge--but it turned to be a copy of Shadows Return by Lynn Flewelling.

This wasn't likely to be a PKD mistake--the book is fantasy, and PKD is for science fiction.  No note or card.  What on earth?

I'd been meaning to buy this book for quite some time.  It hit the stores while I was in Ireland.  I'd read Lynn's(otterdance) other Rhiminee books and liked them a lot, and was happy to hear there was going to be a fourth book about Alec and Seregil.  I hadn't gotten around to buying it, though.

The return address said it came from Lynn herself.  This was even more of a puzzle.  I know Lynn only slightly, certainly not well enough for her to send me a copy of her latest novel, and there was no note saying "For your Nebula consideration" or anything like that.

I flipped to the title page.  It was autographed, and a handwritten note added, "To Steven, From Traci Castleberry and . . . " with an arrow zipping down to Lynn's autograph.  Ah ha!

Thanks, tcastleb!  This is wonderful!  Going to start reading this one next.

--Steven

Well, this is kinda cool!

Torquere Press is an on-line publisher of erotica.  However, they also do non-erotic romance stuff, too.  In celebration of California's decision to legalize same-sex marriage, they've decided to put out a bunch of short stories with same-sex marriage and romance as the central focus.  Half the royalties will be donated to the Human Rights Campaign Fund's fight to keep same-sex marriage legal in California.

At any rate, I've been invited to submit a Silent Empire story.  Cool!  I've never actually explored in print the machinations that finally brought Kendi and Ben together, or of the early stages in their stormy on-again, off-again relationship.  I have reams of notes and a lot of mental information, but most of it never got into print.  Now I have the chance to explore a little of it.

And it's nice to write about Kendi again, however briefly.

Watch this space for details!

The Spiderwick books arrived. Aran likes them--we're reading them aloud, a chapter a day--but Mackie's interest comes and goes.  Sasha shows no interest.

Aran asked Kala plaintively, "Can I read these on my own?"

"Of course," she said.

I'm generally not a fan of stampeding to the bookstore to get a book based on a hit movie.  I'm usually good at finding books on my own, thanks.  But now that I have two children who aren't strong readers and third who is just learning to read, I'm shifting ground and using movies to draw the boys into reading more.  They all liked THE SPIDERWICK CHRONICLES movie.  I looked up the books on-line and read a preview.  They look very much like something both Aran and Sasha could get into, reading level-wise, and they know the story, making it easier for them to follow.  So I ordered the set.  We'll see what happens.

Okay, I knew it was going to be bad, but I had to go see JUMPER.

Yeah, I'm going to compare it to the book.  I know you have to take movies on their own terms because they're a different medium, but this time it's germaine.
 
We all had high hopes for this movie.  See, JUMPER wasn't written by Michael Crichton or Stephen King or one of those other seven-figure, NEW YORK TIMES best-selling authors whose books get made into movies as a matter of course. JUMPER is firmly part of the science fiction ghetto.  It was sold only in the SF section.  No one outside the SF community had heard of Steven Gould, the author.  It was really great having a book written by One Of Us getting done as a big-budget movie.  "Look!" we could shout.  "There's more to SF than Michael Crichton!"
 
When hopes climb high, the disappointment smashes us equally low.

As you know, Bob, the film's been getting wretched reviews, and deservedly so.  The problem is in all the crap they added to it.  It was stupid to add a plot with a group of people (who inexplicably call themselves Paladins) who hunt down people who can teleport, and was obviously thrown in to have an excuse for battle scenes.  And to make room for this stuff, they removed everything from the book that made the story good.

In the movie, Davy is an asshole.  Sorry, but there's no other to put it. He starts off with a voice-over narrating his mid-teen years in which he says, "I started out as a chump like you."  Great way to get the audience on your side, guys!  There's a brief moment when Davy is bullied in high school and he becomes sympathetic, but the moment his powers surface, that goes away.  We pop ahead eight years, and we see Davy-the-asshole again.  He jumps around the world, stealing what he wants, using his power to pick up women, deliberately ignoring people in danger who need his help, and generally living the life of a sybarite.  This could still be done sympathetically, but Hayden Christensen keeps a smirk on his face and a sneer his voice the entire time.  He (literally, in one case) looks down on everyone else in the world, and you want to slap him.  When Roland the Paladin shows up and beats the tar out of Davy, I was ready to cheer.  It was like watching a brat get a much-deserved spanking.

Then we have Millie the Girlfriend.  In the movie, Millie is a nothing.  She is pure damsel in distress.  She does untie Davy once when he's trapped and can't teleport, but that's it.  She adds nothing to the film, and the makeup and clothing designers made her look like trailer trash, for some reason. her and Davy's relationship is thoroughly unbelievable, completely lacking in chemistry, and it's clear she's only there so Davy can save her.

Davy's father is the main villain in the book (for the first half of it, anyway), and he is nasty and horrible and scary.  In the movie, he's a dud. You can't even tell whether Davy runs away from him in a fit of teenage pique or because Dad is abusive.  The character is murky and unclear and poorly done, unlike the novel.

And boy, do we have plot holes.  In the movie, Davy teleports in and out of crowded places AND NO ONE SEEMS TO NOTICE OR CARE.  It's the stupidest thing.  He teleports from one end of a crowded pub to another, but no one sees. He pops in and out of airport security lines, and no one bats an eye. He teleports someone to an emergency room, and his arrival creates a big dent in the floor and sends hospital equipment flying, but there's no follow-up to this (and you never find out what happens to the character--does he live or die?).  Griffin, another jumper, teleports cars, vans, and buses around, but no one seems to notice this, either.  (Exactly what happened to the driver of the London bus Griffin teleports to the Egyptian desert?)

The stupidest, most asinine bit of all was the change in Davy's mother.  In both the novel and the movie, Davy's mother abandons her husband and son when Davy is five.  In the book, we learn she flees her husband's alcoholism and abuse, but she isn't emotionally strong enough to take Davy with her. Eventually, Davy tracks her down and tries to reconcile with her, but an unexpected tragedy interferes.  It's a major part of the book's plot.  In the movie, Davy's mother is only briefly mentioned and we learn at the very end (in order to set up a sequel) that she's a Paladin who will now be hunting Davy down.  If the moviemakers were waiting for gasps of shock, they were disappointed--it wasn't shocking, it was stupid, and the audience sat in silence during the scene.

The screenwriters took everything out of the book that gave the story heart. Davy was one of the most sympathetic characters I've ever read in my life. That disappeared.  His developing relationship with Millie was well-drawn and sweet and realistic.  That disappeared.  His feelings of abandonment and attempts to reconcile with his mother made for fascinating character development.  That disappeared.  Davy's fights with the FBI agents who were trying to capture him and force him to work for them were suspensful and action-filled.  Those disappeared.  What we got instead was a new plot full of holes driven by unsympathetic characters.

It was sad and horrifying to watch such butchery.  Judged alone or against the book, this movie loses.