3/18/2013- Gamers by Thomas K. Carpenter

I finally came across a book that's easy to summarize, which feels like quite an achievement. Gamers, by Thomas K. Carpenter, which I downloaded for free from Amazon.com, is a sci-fi YA novel and the first book in a series. It's about Gabby, an improbably brilliant young hacker who lives in a futuristic world in which life has been turned into a video game. Though she primarily uses her hacking skills to help her friends, rather than for selfish reasons, she becomes concerned upon discovering that the LGIE, a governing organization that keeps track of the game, has been digging around in her personal files. When Gabby decides to investigate this for herself, she discovers, ever so shockingly, that her lovely, idyllic life may not be all that it seems.

Snarkiness aside, I thought that Gamers was a fairly entertaining book. It's nothing that I'd go crazy recommending to people, but it wasn't a chore to read by any means. The characters were likable, the world that they lived in was well thought out and littered with references to old-school gaming, and the story was suspenseful enough that it was easy to keep picking up for a few minutes of reading. I did, however, think that it had a few major issues.

My first problem with Gamers, and probably my biggest one, is that I'd feel charitable saying that it was a bit derivative. I don't want my finger pointing to be too specific, but the last chunk of the novel is about a high stakes competition where the students at Gabby's school are forced to compete in a ruthless game, where the losers may be killed and the winners are given grand rewards. This game is created by a ruthless agent of the aforementioned LGIE, it forces, at several points, the students to fight one another, and the stealthy, antisocial girl is named after an animal. No mass audiences sit and watch the Final Raid, as it's called, but it makes parallels between Gamers and certain other series easy to draw.

I had a couple of smaller problems with Gamers, but neither of them were nearly as distracting. One of them was that there were a few errors with grammar and verb tense, but, for me,  those were only momentary issues. I also hated the cliffhanger of an ending, since, in the interest of getting people to continue with the series, it left absolutely nothing resolved. It's possible to end some aspects of a story while still keeping readers interested in the characters, but Gamers actively created new plot points in the last few pages of the book. It wasn't horrible, really, but it was frustrating.

Even though I may not seem to have the nicest things to say about Gamers, I did sort of like it. It wasn't boring, I didn't hate the characters, and, even though the vast majority of characters that lived there were doomed, the novel's world seemed fairly cool as far as dystopian societies go. If you're looking for a few hours worth of fluffy reading material that's appropriately perilous to the cast, you could certainly do worse than to read Gamers.

Showcase Sunday #1

Hello! The last meme type thing (though it seems a bit odd to call them that) on here was fun, so it seems reasonable enough to try another one! This one is called Showcase Sunday, and is hosted by the lovely blog Books, Biscuts, and Tea. In it, you're supposed to talk about all of the books that you accquired over the past week, whether they be physical books or eBooks. I'm going to cheat a little for this post, partially because I got a really cool book last Saturday and want to write about that. Also, if I counted the free eBooks that I racked up last week, both from special offers and public domain stuff, I would be working on this post for hours. Because of these things, I doubt if this will be a very good Showcase Sunday post. I've finished my introduction paragraph, though, so I might as well just go for it!

Drury Lane's Last Case, by Ellery Queen (which I know is a pseudonym), is the only book I took a photo of, because it's the only one that looks out of the ordinary. I got really excited about finding an old mystery novel at Goodwill, especially for $1.99, so I got it, despite the fact that it's in that plastic bag for a reason. It's in very readable condition, though, so as long as I keep it in that bag when I'm reading it, the whole thing should stay together. A few of the pages are coming out, but in chunks, so it's easy to deal with.

Sherlock Homes vs. Fantomas, by Pierre de Wattyne and Yorril Walker, was a Kindle purchase that I made to celebrate the fact that the University of Illinois Springfield raised no major objections to my attending grad school there. However, the fact that it's about both Sherlock Holmes and Fantomas meant that if I didn't get into their grad school, I would have purchased it to make myself feel better.

At the start of the month, I ordered a couple of used books from Amazon for a penny each, and the 18th Robotech book, The End of the Circle, is the one that showed up first. I heard it was a really strange attempt to tie up all of the loose ends that result from shoving three different TV shows together in order to create one, so I hope that, even if it doesn't end up making a lot of sense, it's at least entertaining.

Soulless, by Gail Carriger, is the last book on my list, and since I found it in a real life bookstore, I'm guessing that it's the least strange one to have on the list. I'd read about it before and thought that it sounded cool, though, since Victorian London and supernatural things are both cool, so I'm hoping it's good.

This week, I got far more books than usual, so I might try to keep track of the free eBooks that I get to include in a post next week. I'm done with this post for now, though, so I'm leaving this blog! Have a nice week, everyone!

3/4/2013- The Flash Gold Chronicles #2: Hunted by Lindsay Buroker

A few months ago, when I was sitting in the teacher's lounge and waiting for my next assignment on a very odd day of substitute teaching, I read Flash Gold by Lindsay Buroker, a steampunk novella that I'd found for free while browsing Amazon.com's bestseller lists. I'd just finished another free novella I'd found that was so bad it was a bit puzzling, so my expectations for Flash Gold were not remarkably high, but I was pleased to find that it was very enjoyable. It took me a while to get to it, but after that, I actually bothered to buy the second and third books in the series for my Kindle (which wasn't very expensive at all), leading me to believe that the author's making the first book available for free was an effective tactic.

Today, I finished reading The Flash Gold Chronicles #2: Hunted, which was, like the first book in the series, very entertaining. It wasn't hard to tell that this was the middle of a trilogy, since the plot with Kali, the main character, and her ex-boyfriend seems to wrap up conflicts introduced in the first book, and, as someone who has read books before, it seems obvious that the mysterious woman pursuing Kali is the set-up for the series' grand finale. It was still fun to read, though, with interesting dialogue, a lot of cool steampunk nonsense, and, though this is a slight spoiler, two likable main characters who don't waste too much time in actually admitting that they like each other. It reminds me a lot of the Spice and Wolf series in that it's about nice people traveling around and having adventures in a fantasy setting, not taking itself too seriously as it goes. So far, though, the Flash Gold books have been moving a lot faster, and where Spice and Wolf deals with politics and economics, the characters in Flash Gold deal with the much more immediate issues of bounty hunters and explosions.

Though I'm tempted to read the third Flash Gold book right now and finish off the whole series, I saw a really outdated YA novel about the perils of video gaming in the back of the library that I think I'm going to read instead. Despite my distraction, though, I am genuinely interested in seeing how the series ends and coming back here to type my opinions on it into the void.

2/22/2013- Maid for Me by Kat Lieu

Hello! I have some stuff to do over at my cross stitch blog, so I'm not going to write too much here today, but on Friday, I finished reading Maid for Me by Kat Lieu, which was a book too bizarre to just be ignored. Usually, I say that I don't know what to expect when I download a free Kindle book, but in the case of Maid for Me, that was only partially true. Both the cover and the description made it seem very anime-influenced, though the description made it sound like a cute and fluffy romantic comedy, and the cover, which showed an anime girl in her relatively conservative underwear standing next to a maid's uniform, made it seem a little like the kind of anime where a girl spends 26 episodes dropping things and bends over to pick them up a dozen times an episode. The book was free, so I figured that if it ended up being the latter, I'd figure it out within 10 pages and delete it with no risks taken.

Luckily, Maid for Me ended up being more of a romantic comedy type of story, though, in terms of anime, it was more like one of the weird OAVs that used to cost 3 dollars from the Right Stuf Bargain Bin than it was like the sort of series where people can stand around for 50 episodes and still not know who they want to go out with. It has a resilient leading lady with an improbable, but appropriately tragic back story, a pile of boys who think she's really fabulous despite her beaten-into-your-head lack of self-confidence, gambling, threats of bizarre ritualistic violence, and local politicians. It wasn't my favorite thing that I've read this year by a long shot, and I was irrationally bothered by a couple of comma errors that I found, but it was enthusiastically executed, self-referential, and, while it lasted, entertaining, if nothing else. I'm not sure if I'd recommend it to someone that didn't like anime, but, as a person who finished it and then though about how long it had been since I'd watched my VHS of Assemble Insert, it didn't seem like a wasted hour. If you'd also like to read Maid for Me, it's currently available on Amazon.com as both an eBook and a paperback, though currently, the eBook is 99 cents rather than free. It's really short and incredibly strange, and as someone who didn't despise the book or have a violently positive reaction to it, I think I'm in the minority, but if you think it sounds interesting, you may end up liking it.

1/25/2013- The Missing Link by Bryan Pedas and Brandon Meyers

Hello! I'm on my second of two days of subbing for high school and junior high band, which has been a lot less traumatic than I initially expected. That really has nothing to do with my post for today, though, as I just finished reading another book, called The Missing Link, by Bryan Pedas and Brandon Meyers. I have a habit of downloading free eBooks from Amazon.com and loading my Kindle with them before I forgot what it is that I downloaded and when I did it. Because of that, I cannot say with any certainty when it was that this book was free. Currently, though, it's $2.99, which also isn't a bad price.

It would take me ages to explain what goes on in The Missing Link, but to be overly simplistic about the whole thing, it's a novel split three ways between a bizarre takeoff on Alice in Wonderland, a pair of misfits road story, and a bunch of homeless people doing some post-apocalyptic demon fighting, all in the face of a worldwide Internet outage. I thought that it went on for way too long, with the chapters set in downtown Chicago occasionally feeling out of place, and at times, I suspect that four-letter words and bizarre comparative language that couldn't be comfortably quoted in polite company were being thrown around just for the sake of their presence. What The Missing Link did have going for it, however, is that it wasn't at all boring and constantly seemed creative. I can't say that I'd recommend it to everyone, and it won't end up on my all-time favorite books list, but it was interesting and, for quite a bit of it, entertaining. It also had several parts that I get the feeling will be very memorable, particularly the next time that my PC's virus protection decides that a game I've been playing for years has suddenly decided to launch the world's most ineffective attack on my computer.

If you have a solid attention span, spend a lot of time online, and aren't easily offended, The Missing Link might be worth checking out. Otherwise, you may want to find a book that's not tailored to such a wildly specific audience.

A Catch-Up Post for My Recent Reading

Hello! I have been remiss in posting here lately, so this is a little bit of a catch-up post. Since the last time that I posted here, I have been subbing a lot and reading a lot, so I have seven novels and novellas to write about. Because of the sheer amount of books I have to cover, I won't be writing all that much about any of them, but regardless of that, it should be a fairly long post.

Sakuri
Jacob Henzel
This was a book that I found for free on Amazon.com, though I think that it was a special offer that day, and then proceeded to read five or six months later. Though I haven't read any since starting this blog, I really like reading light novels, or usually fluffy Japanese novels that have four or five manga-style illustrations and sometimes get turned into anime. However, none of those have been quite as much like an anime as this Western novel was. To be fair, the sort of anime it resembles is an early to mid-90s hour long OAV, like they'd run on Friday nights on the Action Channel, right down to the quirky characters, gratuituous technobabble, bizarre sci-fi set pieces, and somewhat rushed ending with an odd and vaguely preachy last minute twist, but things could certainly be worse than that. Much like those OAVs, I can't say that this is one of the finest pieces of literature that I've read in my life, and I'm not sure that I'd recommend it to friends who weren't into that sort of anime, either. If Sakuri sounds like it would be up your alley, though, and you can get past a few typos in the Kindle edition, it's an entertaining novel.

The Vampyre: A Tale
John William Polidori
As I'm sitting here and trying to remember all of the stuff that I've read for the past couple of weeks, I am having a lot more trouble remembering this 19th century vampire novella than I am remembering the contemporary homage to sci-fi anime, which I don't think speaks well for the author, who happened to be Lord Byron's doctor. It isn't a bad story, really, but compared to a lot of other vampire stories, even from the 1800s, it's a little boring. It's still worth reading if you're interested in that sort of thing. Since it was the first story of its sort, it has some historical significance, and it's short enough that even if you do get a little bored, you'll be done with it soon. Plus, the foreword and afterword on the Project Gutenberg text of this, which are trying to convince the reader that Lord Byron probably isn't as awful as they've heard he is, are pretty interesting.

Monsters: A Bloody Love Story
S.M. Reine
This was a novella that I found for free on Amazon.com, and my second piece of Halloween reading. I think that the subtitle's classification of it as a love story may be misleading, since, despite the two leads having something of a romantic connection, it's more of an incredibly bloody action story. I certainly don't have any problem with that, and had read that it wasn't a mushy romance or anything of the sort in the largely positive on-site reviews, but I'm not entirely sure that it's a good thing to finish a book and be reminded more of Daybreakers than anything else in pop culture. Still, if you want to read a vampire story with a tough heroine and a vividly described de-gutting, I can't think of anything else that would fit that description.

Flash Gold: A Steampunk Novella
Lindsey Buroker
Like a lot of the other stuff I've been talking about today, this was a free novella that I'd downloaded from Amazon.com. I downloaded it the day that I bought my Kindle and, out of some inexplicable suspicion of free contemporary novels, didn't read it until just the other day. Since I'm not an expert on steampunk literature, I can't really compare Flash Gold to any other examples of the genre, but I can definitely say that it's the most charming novella that I've ever read in which a character has a bag of disembodied heads. It was interesting enough to make me want to read the rest of the series, which I suppose is the best thing that a free book can do, and, if you're also interested in reading it, it was still available for free as of last week.

Doctor Who: The Angel's Kiss
Justin Richards
When I'm doing a reading catch-up post on a blog and the most specifically targeted novel that I'm writing about is not the homage to 90s sci-fi anime, I feel like there may be a problem with my reading choices. Doctor Who: The Angel's Kiss is a fake pulp novel prequel to a book that the Doctor was reading in one episode of Doctor Who, starring a character from the show under a psudonym as she battles enemies from the show that the book never takes the time to explain. If you just read that description and thought, "Oooh, is that a book about River Song fighting the weeping angels?" and don't mind that it takes less than an hour to read, then my recommendation does not matter and you'll probably go and buy it anyway. If you are not a fan of Doctor Who, however, I don't see how this book would make any sense at all. At times, it's very good at emulating the style of pulp novels, and at the very least, it's not boring, but I can't say that I liked it all that much. I read the Kindle edition of this novel, available from Amazon.com.

Zaregoto: The Kubikiri Cycle
Ishin Nishio
Earlier in this post, I mentioned that I was a fan of light novels, which don't get translated into English and sold in stores that often, so when I see them for sale cheaply, I tend to buy and stockpile them, since it's a lot more practical to spend five dollars on a book to get my dork fix than it would be to pay 30 dollars for an anime DVD. Zaregoto: The Kubikiri Cycle was one of those impulse buys, and after my negative experiences with the Book Girl series, I didn't expect much from it. The first three-fourths of the novel, however, were very entertaining, and though the central murder mystery didn't seem to make much sense at all, it moved quickly, seemed to be well-translated, and was full of characters that were likable, interesting or both. In the last fourth of the book, however, things really seemed to stumble. The ending did not really make the murder mystery make a lot more sense, but the explanation of it and the detail that it goes into would make Sherlock Holmes walk into a room, smack the protagonist in the face, and tell him to get on with it so that the readers could get on with their lives. As if it weren't already plodding enough, the initial explanation of what happened is then followed by a second explanation of more stuff that happened and why everything in the first explanation was incorrect. At that point, I almost threw my copy of the book across the library I was sitting in and smacked my head against the desk. Zaregoto: The Kubikiri Cycle isn't a bad book, really, and I'm at least curious about the second novel in the series, but I have never read something that grinds itself to a complete halt quite like this does.

Miss Theodosia's Heartstrings
Annie Hamilton
In a case of complete whiplash, I followed all of the contemporary and not quite critically lauded sci-fi that I'd been reading with a 1916 romantic comedy, though I can't say that the writing quality of Miss Theodosia's Heartstrings was any better or worse than what I'd been reading before it. It does have some entertaining parts, and the lead couple in the novel, which is not a spoiler because it would be nearly impossible to read this and not expect them to get together, fits together very well. The fact that it is sugary enough to make you vomit and unapologetically decisive about what a woman's place is, however, right down to one character complaining that all modern women think about is trying to get their right to vote, makes it very difficult to recommend. If you would like to read it, though, I found it on Project Gutenberg.

I've finally caught up on writing about what I've read here, so I'm done posting for now! Currently, I'm in the middle of reading Evelina, or the History of a Young Lady's Entrance Into the World by Fanny Burney, so I'll probably write about that in the next few days. So far, it's very enjoyable, but in an 18th century novel, I never can tell what could happen to needlessly infuriate me and cause me to spend several paragraphs of text complaining about it.

Retro Gaming Tech and Turn of the Century Telephone Tech

Today, as it has been before, I've read two books to write about here, though they are fairly different. The first of these is The Genius Guide to Classic Videogames Hardware 01, which seems to have been largely put together by Retro Gamer magazine. I found it for less than five dollars on the Kindle store after getting all excited that I'd found a copy of Retro Gamer at a mall in the Quad Cities, which had led me to search the magazine's title on my Kindle. I was very happy by the book, which was a lengthy and exhaustive history of video games in the United Kingdom. As such, it wasn't always entirely applicable to American gamers, but not even the most obscure gaming systems were made to sound boring. I really enjoyed reading about all of the 8-bit computers in the early parts of the book, and though I was disappointed that they didn't tried to defend the quality of the titles available on the Virtual Boy, since that could have been fascinating, I was interested in what they had to say about the machine. I also would have liked to have read about the Neo Geo, but, since it was also an arcade system, I do understand why they didn't include it. They did write about the Neo Geo Pocket Color, however, which more than made up for it.

The other, completely dissimilar book that I just finished reading is The Story of a Doctor's Telephone: as Told by His Wife by Ellen M. Firebaugh. This book is by no means as preachy as Daisy: The Autobiography of a Cat, which had so many miserable and torturous images of animal abuse as a means of combating it that it was repetitive and difficult to get through, but if you come out of this book thinking that the author wanted everyone to drink, burn down the forests, and get diseases so their children go blind, you were probably not paying much attention. To be fair, for the most part, it's a quick read and an entertaining set of antecdotes about being a country doctor in Illinois in 1912. It's sort of cool to read about how people reacted to telephones when they were new inventions, and the medical information isn't boring, either. The didactic nature of much of the book gets really tedious in spots, though, and while I appreciate the structure of the novel, in which you hear about the doctor's various phone calls and what sorts of house calls they lead to, it doesn't hold up throughout the brief length of the book. The Story of a Doctor's Telephone isn't totally without interesting parts, so if you'd like to read it, too, the full text of the novel can be found for free at Project Gutenberg or Amazon.com.

I just started reading another book that I'm not sure if I'll get through called Excuse Me!, but whether I finish it or not, I'll be here to complain about it soon! Until then, I hope that all of you have a nice week and find lots of interesting things to read.