Free Books

[mrissa]

Okay, more free books, on the usual terms: preference goes to people in the immediate area and/or people I will likely see at an upcoming con, in this case World Fantasy in November. Beyond that, it's first-come, first-served.

Jodi Compton, Sympathy Between Humans. Mystery set in Minneapolis. Cop detective who does crazy things like growing as a person over the course of the book. Good stuff -- I just don't tend to reread any but my favorite mysteries.

Keith R. A. DeCandido, Dragon Precinct. Fantasy cop novel. Entertaining. Has several anti-MarySue elements.

Lee Harris, Murder in Alphabet City. Another cop-detective murder mystery, this one set in New York, so I can't tell you how accurate it is in its setting. Again, it was a fine read, but I don't reread most mysteries.

A. Lee Martinez, Gil's All Fright Diner. Comedy horror. Zombies, vampires, werewolves, the whole nine yards.

C.J. Ryan, Dexta. SF, far-future, distant-planet. Tripped my MarySue alarms like mad, but if you're less bothered by that, you may enjoy it.

Tad Williams, Otherland: City of Golden Shadows. VR novel. Apparently "the author reminded me of my best friend from kindergarten when I saw him at a con" is not a great recipe for picking my favorite books. This wasn't a bad book, just not my kind of thing, really.

Comments

[cadithial.livejournal.com]

I would like to read Dragon Precinct and Dexta. BTW: You all need to come over soon and browse the downstairs :)

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I will set those two aside for you.

I'm afraid we won't be staying long at your place if we do come over, due to issues discussed on a different thread this morning. But you're welcome to come over here at some point.

[laurel]

I'd be interested in Sympathy Between Humans.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I will add it to your pile. (Two is a pile, right?)

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I will set them aside for you. No one else snapped them up last time I offered, so I think they're yours.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Please e-mail me your snail-mail address so I can get this stuff packaged up and ready to send you.

Sadly, I don't know a lot about spec fic mysteries, either. Haven't run into all that many of them. Kate Wilhelm does some stuff that's borderline, but sometimes that's because she's doing mystic fudgy stuff with the science, which annoys me even though I love Kate Wilhelm. I used to be fond of Lawrence Block's Bernie Rhodenbarr mysteries, but he seems to have gone on autopilot with them in the last few. I enjoyed Rosemary Edghill's trilogy of witch mysteries, and I like Joseph Kanon's historical mysteries so far. (He started with Los Alamos, and I am a sucker for anything about the Manhattan Project.) dd_b lent me all the Brother Cadfael mysteries by Ellis Peters, and I liked those, too.

There are more on my library list -- I'll review them when I get to them.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Thanks! I was convinced that I had horrible handwriting for years, because my mom told me so. And she was convinced that I had horrible handwriting because my printing looks just like my dad's, and my dad's script is horrible, so clearly my script was horrible, too. Sigh. Eventually she saw my actual writing, and it doesn't look a thing like my dad's.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Many of the stylistic quirks of my dad's and my printing were developed independently for the same reasons. We cross our z's because we write or wrote a lot of equations and didn't want x + 2 and x + z to look alike. We have the little curl on the bottom of our lower-case t's so that 2tx wouldn't look like 2 + x. Etc. It's extremely efficient for rapidly writing distinguishable equations. And it's scary how much it looks alike: Dad gave me his old calc book, and when a page of worked problems fell out of it, I had to take a minute because I didn't remember working those problems.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

As a former lab TA, I can give you the sad assurance that this is not universal at the lower levels. "If I can't read it, I can't give it points!" I was such a mean, mean TA. Some of porphyrin's med students remember me from their Life Science Physics labs.

They would inform me that they really needed an A in lab to keep their GPA up for med school, and I would nod sympathetically through their little speeches and then say, "Well, you'd better do a good job on your lab reports, then, hadn't you?" And they would ask, "Is this going to be on the MCAT?" and I would say, "Do I look like someone who has to care what's on the MCAT?"

Meeeeean.

[alecaustin.livejournal.com]

The Otherland books are probably my least favorite examples of William's work (although I haven't read any of his more recent stuff). There was a sequence in book 3 where the world the characters are traversing was really cool, but that coolness was undercut by the whole cliched "trapped in a VR world" frame that surrounded it.

In case it's not already obvious, this is not a request for City of Golden Shadows. About the only use I see for that series is comparing it to the .hack// transmedia empire, which starts from a very similar premise.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I tried reading them because I started one of his BFFs and didn't like the beginning much at all. Is there one of them you think is better to start on than others, or is he not a favorite and this is just really really not a favorite?

[alecaustin.livejournal.com]

He's not really a favorite, although I tend to wobble on how well I liked the Dragonbone Chair series. He's got some neat ideas, but his pacing is *slooow*, and the big reveal in Otherland was actively stupid.

I'm told that his recent work has gotten better, but I have yet to check that out for myself. I suppose I ought to exercise my MIT Science Fiction Society privileges more, once I've got some uncommitted reading time.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

"Uncommitted reading time." I'm sorry, I'm not laughing at you, I'm laughing...um...because of you. Yah.

[alecaustin.livejournal.com]

I know. It's a fundamentally ludicrous phrase, and even more so in context (http://www.livejournal.com/users/alecaustin/33495.html).

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I had taken context into consideration, yes. *snrk*