Tag: libraries

It was this or a bigger house

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy, Reading6 Comments

I have all the books.

Wait.

I worry that what you heard was “I have a lot of books.”

I have all the books. Do you understand?

And, as you no doubt can tell, I have lots of other shit as well. And three other people live in this house! They have stuff too, even though nearly every single object you can see in these pictures is mine. Except the Pokéballs. Those are the boy’s.

This is the second house in a row where we have eventually decided to convert what was supposed to be the dining room into a library. I am absolutely out of places to put shit and I have been reading at a 175-books-a-year clip for the last couple of years. I still have some space on top of bookshelves, especially if I get rid of some of the statues and Legos (and the statues, honestly, may be on their way out soon) but one way or another I’m no more than two years away from needing to pile shit on the floors if something doesn’t change.

So yesterday, fearing an actual intervention, I ordered this:

along with a $12-a-month subscription to Kindle Unlimited. I’m thinking about instituting a rule that any book by a new author gets bought on digital first. Does that mean I won’t get those books in physical form? Not necessarily; as you can tell, I’m not just a reading enthusiast, I’m a book collector, and those two hobbies feed into each other in obvious and terrible ways. There will be books by new authors that I feel the need to own physically. But in most years at least 30% of my books are by authors new to me– this year, right now, it’s actually just over half. Surely this will end up saving me money as well as essential shelf space, right? That Dinniman book on the cover of the Kindle there is in one of those pictures in hardcover– on the white bookshelves, a couple shelves below the Wheel of Time books– but it was free on KU so I downloaded it anyway, to see if I lose my mind trying to read a thousand-page book on an e-reader. We’ll see.

We can’t move. We got our mortgage rate on this house before the economy exploded. We’ll never see this rate again. I’ve got to do something.

A review of an actual book

On By Luther M. SilerIn Geek, Reviews3 Comments

I’m a hundred percent certain I’ve talked about this before: my wife and I both love to read. I read a lot faster than she does, but we have fairly similar tastes in reading material for the most part, so she only very rarely actually buys books. Generally once she finishes something she’ll ask me what I’ve read recently that she’ll want to read, or just go looking through the bookshelves that are slowly taking over our entire house until something strikes her fancy, and then she’ll read that.

There is a critical difference between the two of us here, because while we are both readers, I am also a book collector and my wife very much is not. She has very gently suggested to me a couple of times that we might possibly have too many books. I do not recognize that as a legitimate state of existence. “Too many books” is, for me, quite simply not a thing.

Which brings me to a little dilemma I’m having with James Islington’s The Shadow of What Was Lost.

I don’t like the story. I am not enjoying reading this book. The reasons aren’t especially interesting and fall into my Don’t Shit on Books Unnecessarily policy; I’m just not enjoying it very much, 200 or so pages into its 700 or so page length, with two more volumes already concluding the trilogy that are available but I haven’t bought.

The problem is the actual book— not the story, not the part you’re supposed to, like, look at, but the actual physical object itself that you hold in your hands– is amazing, at least in the paperback edition. The pages and especially the cover just feel great, and the book is exactly the right size, and it even smells good, and I know from seeing them in bookstores that the entire trilogy looks great on a shelf. So much so, as a matter of fact, that I’m considering going ahead and ordering the rest of the series just so that I can touch them and so that they can be on my bookshelves together, effectively as art pieces and not as things that convey a story. I mean, would I ever read them? Will I even finish this one, or will I DNF it and move on to something I’ll enjoy reading more? Or will I just keep reading it so I can hold it for longer, because it’s so pleasant to have in the hand?

This is … not a thing my wife understands. As marital incompatibilities go, I’ll take it, believe me, but if I end up ordering the next couple of books I might have to find a way to put them somewhere she won’t find them. Not quite sure how that’s gonna work, but we’ll see what I can come up with.

In which I read locally

On By Luther M. SilerIn WritingLeave a comment

It’s kinda always the same booth picture, at this point; only the number of books I have on display changes.  I decided not to bring Searching for Malumba with me for this one, because despite the fact that every kid mentioned in the book is college-aged now (and I don’t use anyone’s real name) I still feel like keeping it from spreading too far out in the town I live and work in isn’t necessarily a bad thing.   And I sold more than enough books to make a nice little profit on 3 hours of sitting in my free booth.

I can stand to do more free author events, frankly.

 An interesting fact: after a couple of years of doing sci-fi and comic book cons, my last two events have both been specifically author events, and at both of them I’ve had more titles available than anyone in the room.  It was especially apparent at this one– there was no one else there who I saw who had more than three, and most people there had only one or two books. The really weird part to me was the number of people who, upon being told that my first book came out in 2014, expressed surprise at how I’d been able to write so fast as to have all those books out already.

And it’s like, damn, folks, I am slow.  I regularly go weeks without writing a word of fiction, because for whatever reason shit has to be straight in my head before it gets set down on paper.  How long have I been saying that the Skylights sequel is my next book, for God’s sake?  Hell, how many entire other books have I written while telling people that the Skylights sequel was next?  And yet I’m sitting there with twice as many books in front of me as anyone in the room, and I’m visibly one of the younger authors there, too.

Things I need to do before my next show:  I need some sort of thick cardstock-printed price placards to put in each of the front-facing books, preferably with some sort of “Like Lovecraft?  You’ll love Balremesh!” or “Like Scalzi? You’ll love Skylights!” text on them.  I also need a new banner or two, preferably something that folds down into its own stand, because my Skylights banner is starting to lean in a way that I don’t understand and can’t fix.   And my front-of-table banner (not used at this show) can probably stand to be updated, too.  No one knows what Prostetnic Publications is anyway so I need something other than just the logo.  I’m gonna have a lot to do over winter break, I think.  

I’ve got some time to worry about it, because right now I’m not signed up for anything else until next summer.  I tried to get into ConFusion, which is in January in Detroit, which was a communication clusterfuck so bad that by the time they told me I hadn’t passed the jury stage of things I didn’t even want to go any longer, and I found out about the Northwest Indiana Comic-Con, which is a one-day thing in February, but they were closed by the time I got to them too.  So if you hear about anything in the next couple of months, let me know, ‘k?  I don’t wanna wait six months until my next show.  

I’ve picked up three new Patrons over the last week or so, and just added a $100 goal to the site.  I’m getting close enough to the $50/month target that I can sorta see it from where we are, so I feel like a little more pushing and we might hit that, especially since I seem to be on a bit of a roll lately.  Remember, anyone pledging more than $2/month gets a new novel immediately, and I’m adding new content all the time– I’ve been working on a new short story over there, The Caretaker, that I ought to be finishing this weekend sometime.  It’s becoming a better deal all the time!  Join us!

In which I appear

On By Luther M. SilerIn Writing3 Comments

Sorry for the super last-minute notice (because I know y’all work your weekend schedules around what I’m doing), because I just found out about this event yesterday and they managed to fit me in anyway, but:  

I will be at the Read Local Author Fair at the main branch of the St. Joseph County Public Library THIS SATURDAY, from 1:30 PM to 4:30 PM.  I’ll have all of my books with me except for Searching for Malumba.  It’s a quick event, free to the public– as far as I know, you don’t even have to have a library card– and featuring a couple dozen other local authors in addition to me!  

(In fact, I got added so late, my name’s not even on the list.  I promise I’ll be there, though.)

If you are nearby you are commanded to come.  If you aren’t you are also commanded to come.  So I’ll see ALL OF YOU there, right?  

Oyster review, sorta: On libraries and ebooks, part 2

On By Luther M. SilerIn Reading, ReviewsLeave a comment

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It is surprisingly difficult to find a good-looking picture featuring oysters.

I got my invitation email for the Oyster app a couple of days ago.  If you don’t know what I’m talking about, check out both the link on the phrase “Oyster app” back there (man, is that how the Interwebs work?) or take a look at this post from last week.  They got my invite to me within a couple of days, so at least right now there’s no Mailbox-style queue of six million people in front of you when you try to sign up for the service.  It may get longer as/if they get more popular but right now it’s no big deal.

Signup was relatively quick and easy.  There’s no way to just do a trial run on the software– if you want to use it at all you have to pony up the $10 for the first month’s access– but at least signing up was relatively painless.  Once you’ve chosen a login (it used my email address; I don’t know if you can change that and do a username) and a password it prompts you to create a profile and offers to hook itself to your Facebook account.  I declined both opportunities, so right now all the program knows about me is my email address and password.  Oh, and my credit card number.  I don’t know what it tries to do for you if you hook it to Facebook; I don’t plan to find out.

At that point it takes you to a screen with maybe fifty or so books on it and asks you to choose five you want to read.  It’s pretty specific that it wants you to choose from those; I don’t think you can search yet.  I decided on one book that is on my Amazon wish list and is therefore likely to be purchased by me sooner or later (Time Reborn, by Lee Smolin) and four books that have crossed my radar at some point or another but that I’m not ever going to actually buy unless they’re great:  Life of Pi, by Yann Martel; Water for Elephants, by Sara Gruen; Rosemary’s Baby by Ira Levin and Game Change by John Heilemann.

I didn’t actually try to read any of them.

I decided the other day I wanted to reread Lord of the Flies.  After pawing through my bookshelves for a while I decided that I didn’t own it (I was pretty sure I didn’t, but figured it was worth looking) and figured that I’d use it as my first Oyster book when the app finally decided to let me download it.  So after it downloaded my first five books, I searched for Lord of the Flies.

It’s not available.

“Huh,” I thought, and looked through the first few pages of Rosemary’s Baby to see how the books actually looked.  You can choose a few different skins, change the text size, and change the brightness.  There’s no immediately obvious way to save the page you’re on, so I assume it autosaves that when you quit the application or switch books.  I closed it and downloaded it on my iPad (there’s no native iPad version but you can still use the iPhone version) and discovered that it does remember your books that you’ve downloaded but doesn’t actually save your page across apps.  While I won’t be doing much reading on my iPhone, even compared to the minimal use an ereader will get on the iPad, this is still a dumb omission.  There’s clearly some sort of cloud-based account saving going on somewhere or the second app would have no idea what books I had on the first one.  Page numbers should be included too.

And, other than opening it up to get author names for this post, I haven’t opened the app since.  Maybe if it had had LotF I might have read that by now; maybe not.  Clearly I still don’t like ebooks very much.

(This is why it’s “sorta” a review, by the way.)

As the weather gets colder I’m doing more and more of my grading at OtherJob, since there are fewer customers this time of year.  Our gradebook software basically demands that I have my laptop with me for this– there’s an app but it absolutely sucks and the spreadsheet style of the gradebook program kinda demands a laptop-sized screen.

My laptop is starting to shit out on me, and this is incredibly annoying.  I don’t understand how I can get four or five years out of a desktop easily but it’s a miracle if a laptop lasts longer than two or three.  I can afford a new laptop right now in the strictest sense of the word “afford” but it’s a really stupid idea and I don’t want to do it.  Do not do this to me, technology.  I’m not in the damn mood right now.