I own– understand that this is not an exaggeration– thousands of books. There are bookshelves in most of the rooms in the house; something like thirteen or fourteen full-size six-footers, and a couple of what are actually supposed to be high-capacity DVD racks that I discovered were the perfect size to shelve paperbacks. I love books, which is a distinct thing from loving reading. I do love to read, mind you, but I derive a distinct amount of pleasure from the book as a physical object. I’ve converted over to digital music easily; I never cared about the CD or the cassette tape as a thing. Books, on the other hand, are things, and their thingness– their physicality, if I want to use a word that a literate person might actually choose rather than a dumb-sounding word that I made up– is inseparable from the pleasure they give me by reading them.
I’m never, ever going to want to switch my library over to digital. Never. Never ever ever ever ever. I think ebooks are, by and large, stupid and horrible and I think the effect they’ve had on the publishing industry is terrible. I also don’t like– and this extends to MP3s as well– the notion that you don’t really own an ebook; you’re just getting to use it until your device craps out or somebody decides you don’t get to own it anymore, at which point they can just delete it from your device remotely and, well, didn’t you read the EULA?
Good luck deleting my books. Yes, yes, they can be lost if my house burns down, and there was the Great Dog Pissening of 2010 that lost me a couple of shelves’ worth of books, but I can literally count the number of books that I’ve lost or had destroyed in my entire life and still not get to fifty. Digital files disappear for any number of reasons all the goddamned time, and good luck getting insurance to replace files lost on your beep boops if your computer dies.
(Blah blah cloud computing yeah good point. BUT STILL.)
Enter Oyster.
Oyster is, effectively, Netflix for books. Or, the way I’m thinking about it, a digital library. $10 a month gets you access to their entire library, and they keep (I believe; my request for an invite hasn’t been honored yet) the last ten titles or so local on your phone/iPad so that you can be offline and still read.
I don’t use regular libraries very often– by which I mean “I haven’t set foot in a library in years”– because I like owning my shit. But I can easily imagine a universe in which putting $10 a month into Oyster helps me out in the long run, and not by decreasing the amount of money I spend on books– just by decreasing the amount I spend stupidly on books. This is not going to decrease my desire to own my books, but it *will* keep me from buying stuff as an experiment– or at least decrease how often I’m doing that– and ending up not liking it. I can be more flexible about new authors and new genres now in a way I wasn’t willing to before. And if I end up liking what I see, well, off to the bookstore (or, sadly, more likely, to Amazon) I go to get a physical copy.
This is waaaaaay better than spending $10 for a book that isn’t actually a book. Massively, hugely better. I have some questions about how royalties get to authors– I know services like Pandora generally claim to pay in terms of “exposure,” and that’s not worth a whole lot– but if previewing someone’s work on Oyster means I buy their hard copy books, I can’t imagine those authors complaining about it that often. Some people (most?) won’t be doing that, obviously, but I will. Which is gonna have to be good enough.
Briefly, because I feel like it– Benjamin Percy’s Red Moon is a well-written, gripping, engaging story that will absolutely enrage you if you know anything about the various struggles that people of color across the world have gone through in the last forever or so. As it turns out, every minority everywhere– racial, ethnic, religious, political, etcetera– were actually werewolves. Well, not so much; more like their lives are erased entirely in favor of “that actually happened to werewolves.” There is one black person in the book, mentioned briefly, and at the end a bunch of Mexicans inexplicably show up to menace the white main characters for a bit, but otherwise– the civil rights movement? Werewolves. The March on Washington? Werewolves. The Days of Rage, in Chicago in 1969? About werewolves. The Weathermen? A group of werewolves. Tahrir Square? Werewolves. Occupy fucking Wall Street? Werewolves. 9/11? Perpetrated by werewolves. Israel? In between Finland and Russia now; populated by werewolves. Geronimo? Was a werewolf, and not so much concerned about Native Americans.
And again, because I want to make sure this is clear: we’re not talking Buffy the Vampire Slayer-style “all these people were actually werewolves, but no one knows about it” werewolves. No; the human race has been perfectly aware of werewolves since something like the ninth century and the book simply erases every other minority group ever. The Days of Rage weren’t about Vietnam. They were about werewolves. The protests in Egypt were about how the government treated werewolves. The actual liberation struggles that happened in the real world that weren’t about werewolves, because werewolves don’t exist, are simply erased. The man has literally cleanly removed all minorities from history, except for that odd pack of radiation-loving Mexicans at the end of the book, and that makes as little sense as it sounds like it might make. People are going to focus on the terrorism and conclude that he’s using werewolves as a stand-in for Muslims; no, it’s far more systematic than that. Werewolves are all minorities everywhere, and those minorities basically no longer exist in his book.
Your enjoyment of this book will be predicated entirely on how capable you are of not noticing that that is happening. My gripes with the book are entirely political. Other than that, it’s a great read. But that’s kind of on the order of “Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you enjoy the play?” for me. Maybe not for you; I dunno.
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