Book reviews

So that's basically something new I'm trying; I read an enormous amount of books, and it's only gotten worse since I got the Kindle Fire. Hoping to put these up fairly regularly, and the reviews will fall into one of two categories: Either books that aren't well known (or aren't well known nowadays), and/or are remarkably cheap, or even free, on Amazon's website. They'll inevitably be eBooks, as I buy nothing else nowadays, and there'll no doubt be a heavy bias towards sf and fantasy, as that tends to be the mainstay of what I read. I'm planning to keep the book reviews fairly short, and about as spoiler-free as is possible.

So, enjoy.

Short reviews: The Complete Works of HP Lovecraft

The Complete Works of H.P. Lovecraft
Note that there are several different versions available on Amazon of Lovecraft's works; the quality varies dramatically, some being badly formatted, even missing whole paragraphs, with little in the way of italics or indexing. The link to the one above is the best version I've found to date.

HP Lovecraft's work can come across  as a little dated; to jaded modern horror enthusiasts, his scares can seem somewhat insipid and cliched, especially in some of his shorter stories. His influence on modern horror writers cannot be denied though, with several masters of the craft openly acknowledging his works influence on theirs, among them being Stephen King, Clive Barker, John Carpenter, and comics writers such as Neil Gaiman and Alan Moore.

The collection above contains practically every story Lovecraft wrote. Over that length of time, naturally, there's some stinkers, and others which have dated badly, but some stand out as gems even now. Personally? I'd recommend the Color out of Space, the Shadow out of Time, The Shadow over Innsmouth, the Case of Charles Dexter Ward, and, of course, the Call of Cthulhu, the story which gave us his most famous character.

The price can't be beat; 99 cents for pretty much everything the man ever published, and worth much more just for the stories listed above.

Too many choices.

When I bought my first computer, it was something like 1983, and there were essentially two choices for the home market; the Commodore 64, or the Sinclair ZX Spectrum. As kids, these were the only two machines available that we gave a damn about anyhow; they had the games we wanted, regardless of how we'd wheedle our parents and suggest a computer would help immeasurably with our schoolwork. Sure, there were micros like the Amstrad CPC or the Acorn Electron around, but owning one of those would be social suicide in the playground.

When the next generation of home computers came round, there were again essentially two choices; the Atari ST, and the Commodore Amiga. Again,  there were other choices you might try, but at time Apples cost more than some nations GNPs (no change there, then. Ohh, what incredible satire), and IBM clones were still in their Cambrian era, and required more nursing and knowhow than most cars.

And so it continued. When Windows 95 dawned, there were a plethora of affordable PC Clones available, though they were so beige and indistinguishable that it didn't matter a damn which one you got. The major opposition was again Apple, and again they really were rather expensive in comparison.

I was actually making a point here, which is this:  I'm idly considering getting an Android tablet in the reasonably near future,  and the choices are simply overwhelming. I'm utterly at a loss as to where to even start looking; even finding a website that reviews what's out there is baffling,  as there's hundreds of the buggers, often giving conflicting reviews.

All I would want is something like the Kindle Fire.  I would actually be happy with the Kindle Fire,  if it offered anything for apps other than the bloody Amazon marketplace. I wouldn't mind the amazon marketplace if it had a tenth of the content the Android Market has.  And so on, and so on, back to the bad decision to climb down from the trees in the first place.

I homestly miss the days where your choices were limited,  sometimes. At least you could be an expert on the two or three options you had.


Edit: So I ended up with the Kindle Fire. Which is less limiting now that it allows you to sideload apps you own; with a little email jiggery-pokery, you can install pretty much anything. It's not what I'd think of as the perfect eBook reader, but it's several large steps towards such over the older Kindles.

Idle reflections

It's odd how at work, Black Friday has been quieter so far than yesterday, Thanksgiving. I dunno,  I think I just expected us to get less call volume on the day when traditionally most people spend time with their families,  than on the day dedicated to commercial greed and rampaging hordes armed with pepper spray trying to beat each other to that $10 discount.  Perhaps they're all tuckered out by the time my shift starts.  Or possibly have hit their credit limit.

Either way, I'm not complaining. The fact that I've been able to type this, on a soft keyboard no less,  speaks volumes as to how busy a day I've had.

A brief update

Faffing around with the cellphone, seeing how feasible it is to actually write something for the blog on here. So far, the answer appears to be "reasonably feasible ".

I always swore I wasn't remotely interested in having a cellphone that did much beyond make phone calls; I have to admit, now that Kit has lured me into using one,  it's taken over the role of backup brain/portable entertainment system my PDAs used to fill.

Typing, admittedly, is a royal pain in the arse, but it's still the best system I've seen on something this small. Internet anywhere is incredibly nice,  too.  About the only thing I don't use it for is actually making bloody phone calls...

The default topic for British people who haven't got anything to say

Bloody Weather.

Conversation about the weather is the last refuge of the unimaginative.

~Oscar Wilde 

It's finally starting to cool down around here. By 'cool down', of course, I mean it's merely around seventy Fahrenheit at 4am in the morning, as opposed to being some ridiculous figure in the nineties. Don't even ask about what it's like in the day. It being Missouri, of course, it's not merely hot, it's also humid as hell. Thinking of wearing dry clothes today? Well, think again!

For at least this week, however, it's going to be reasonably cool, perhaps in the high eighties, and there's even talk of actual rain this weekend. Thunderstorms! And not before bloody time, in my opinion.

The first thing a lot of people ask me what the biggest change is in moving to the US. Well, it's often the second thing, actually; usually they've got some question about the royal family, not realising I'm one of the huge majority of Britons who couldn't give a toss about the royal wedding, Princess Diana, etc. But getting back to the question of change, it really has to be the climate.

I was born, raised and lived for the first thirty-odd years of my life on an island which doesn't know what weather is, beyond 'light drizzle'. Occasionally we have a thunderstorm, but comparing them to the storms of the Midwest is like comparing a couple of AA batteries to a hydroelectric dam. Our summers are warm without being unreasonably so, our winters cold but not dangerously so; snow happens, but unless you're up a mountain somewhere or the depths of Scotland, you're going to be lucky if you get more than a couple of inches per year. Not that that doesn't mean the whole country grinds to a halt as soon as a few millimeters of snow accumulate, but still. When the local papers talk about blizzards hitting the UK, someone needs to remind them that a blizzard is when you can't find your car for three weeks.

"I say, what frightful weather. Back home for tea and crumpets"

In short, I'm basically a creature who's been moved out of its natural environment, like a penguin who's been dumped in the Sahara. Everyone here native-born has at least had a lifetime to acclimate to the perverse nature of the local climate, and furthermore are presumably bred from people who also got used to it. If Mr Darwin (not a terribly popular figure around here, admittedly) is to be listened to, local Missourians should be adapting to this horrible, 'roll 2d20 for weather' style meteorology they have round here.

Kit has mentioned that this has been an pretty hot summer as far as things go around here. This is good, because I'd hate to think this had been one of the more balmy years, and I only had worse to look forward to.

Still, I've got the Autumn Fall to look forward to. For the two weeks it lasts before we're having to hope they clear the snow off the roads by the morning again.

Absences

Well, it's been a while since I posted here. This is something I tend to feel guilty about from time to time. The longer it goes between posts, the more reluctant I become to post something, because I never quite know what to say after such an absence, and it slowly spirals downwards. Sometimes (like Livejournal), I eventually never come back at all.

I'm not even sure what I'm feeling back about; it's not like anyone but a handful of people read this blog. A very small handful, at that. I don't make my living doing this, much as I'd like to be, so it's not like I'm not bringing home the bacon.

Well, enough of that. It's about time I started posting when I feel like it, or when I have something to say. If there's an period where I don't write anything, it shouldn't be a source of angst and soul searching.

Right now, I don't have an awful lot to say, other than the guilt stops here, today.