Thoughts about something I’ve recently read.
Not one, but two! Variety reports that George R. R. Martin’s books in the Song of ice and Fire series will become an HBO series, with A Game of Thrones being the entire first season. And SciFi.com has the news that Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age: Or, a Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer will be a miniseries. Very cool. As if I didn’t have enough to record already… (Gawd, I wrote “tape” there, dating myself…)
So I finished reading these books ages ago. Kristen was kind enough to do all the legwork of getting the links and pics in place here, and get the post ready for me to fill in the actual review content. And then I didn’t do it. I mean, these books were part of the same pile as the last book review set I did! So I read them all well over a month ago.
Better late than never, right? So here we go.
The first book in this set was Ellen Kushner‘s excellent Swordspoint. It was a wonderful tale of a world where bravoes lived by the sword and fought for the amusement of petty nobles, and a single duelist, the astounding St. Vier, was the pinnacle of the art of the sword. Then came the somewhat less good The Fall of The Kings, set in the same world but much earlier, laying the groundwork for the world of the first book. Somehow more muddled and less satisfying, less full of panache really, it didn’t work as well. Now comes a third book, The Privilege of the Sword, and it’s a return to form in many ways — the tale of a young girl who is brought to the capital not as a debutante, but by her mad uncle (a returning character from Swordspoint) to learn to handle the sword. It still has the flavor of decadence and the surprising sweetness of the other books, but the young and ornery protagonist helps quite a lot to make it a lighter and less involved tale than the last book. If you liked Swordspoint (and really, most fantasy fans should have at least read it) I suspect you’ll like this one too.
I just dug into LibraryThing a little bit. I am sorely tempted to spend the $25 on a lifetime membership. I maxed out the free 200 book entries already by just tossing the first few hundred items in my Amazon “purchased” list at it. (Turns out that I have bought 1209 individual items from Amazon. I had never checked that number before. Hmm. Then again, I have been doing all my Xmas shopping on Amazon for years).
Anyway, here’s my profile, and my catalog is here, based on that very limited sample. Gee, I’m even tempted to buy the CueCat they sell so I can scan the books here. 😛
I’ve let this slide for so long that I have two review posts to do, instead of one. So let’s just launch into it, shall we? This batch is everything that isn’t SF and F, basically, though I snuck some comics and even a genuine graphic novel into the mix.
Everyone knows Dar Williams as a singer/songwriter. That is, if they move in the right circles, anyway. If you don’t, I’d suggest starting at The Honesty Room and going forward from there. But like that other New England singer/songwriter who writes books, Williams writes prose on occasion. Most specifically, she’s written two books for teens about a precocious girl named Amalee, who has been raised by her father and his very eclectic set of friends. I found both books pretty charming, with Amalee an interesting character. Great kids’ lit? Probably not. Will I keep buying them? Yeah. They’re well-written, have Dar’s trademark sense of humor about them, and the character strokes are strong. In this one, Amalee decides to make a movie as a result of getting to meet her grandmother for the first time. Perhaps the best part of the book is the way that the long-dead emotional undercurrents about her late mother are brought forward mostly through what the supporting cast doesn’t say; they all knew her, and have been keeping secrets about her until they felt that Amalee was ready to hear them.
OK, so that TouchGraph tool is addictive. This time, I used it to find the core books of game development. I started with my own book, of course, and worked outwards. For every new book that popped up, I double-clicked it to expand its links as well, unless it wasn’t actually a game related book in some fashion.
I then went through and color-coded regions of the graph, because it was interesting to me to see where things overlapped and where they didn’t. In the small version here, it can be hard to see some of the regions — I didn’t label them all. But in the big version you can see the many categories I imposed. 🙂
Some things I thought were interesting:
Game studies and serious games, however marginalized it may have seemed over on the blogosphere graph, is well-represented in the publishing world.
