Always strive to learn something useful. --Sophocles

It released either today or just recently, and is typical in length with the recent Penric and Desdemona books. Usual platforms, including Kindle and Apple stores.

VERY good story! I'm about 60% or so through it, Russet finished it already but she had more time to read today than I did. I'm quite enjoying it, looking forward to the ending.

I think this is something like #14 in the series.

Kowal's Lady Astronaut series is, simply put, awesome. IMHO. The first book is The Calculating Stars, and it begins with a literal bang: a meteorite smacks into the ocean off the eastern seaboard of the USA. The resulting tidal wave and flooding completely destroys Washington, DC and tons of other areas.

The heroine of the story is a calculator, a woman who calculates (she later gets her hand on the first computers!). And she starts doing math, and realizes that this impact is going to invoke climate change on the scale of a nuclear winter. Her calculations are verified (gotta check, even if she is a genius) and thus the American Space Program begins - in 1952!

Excellent read, I found it difficult to put down and burned through all three books in very little time. And it found serious appreciation: "The Lady Astronaut Universe is Apollo-era science fiction that sprang to life with Mary Robinette Kowal's Hugo-award winning novelette "The Lady Astronaut of Mars." The first novel in the series, The Calculating Stars, is one of only 18 books to win the Hugo, Nebula, and Locus awards."

The series is currently a trilogy of novels plus some short stories. This book, expected July '25, is an additional nine stories (or more, depending on how far the Kickstarter goes!) and is also sort of a 'get excitement going' for the next novel, due March or May next year.

The initial goal of $30,000 was exceeded in hours, they've almost doubled it with over a thousand backers.

$10 will get you the PDF of the book, more will get you more (how profound!) up to an including a weekend in Space Camp!

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/mary-robinette/silent-spaces

EDIT: fixed URL

A UK artist purposely sought out 6,000 copies of the Dan Brown book. He started the project several years ago when he heard the local Oxfam shop (an Oxford College charity/thrift shop) was no longer accepting copies of the book because they had so many copies. David Shrigley, noted UK artist, took the books, had them pulped, then reprinted George Orwell's 1984! He also included a piece of artwork. They're being sold to support Oxfam at 500 pounds each in a limited edition of 1250 copies.

George Orwell died 70 years ago and his work is now in the public domain in the UK.

https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-67218454

Amongst Our Weapons is the title, cover art has not yet been revealed. *sigh*

Love the title! Wonderful little Monty Python Spanish Inquisition callback. As my wife said, NO ONE expects a Newtonian practitioner!

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/647346/amongst-our-weapons-by-ben-aaronovitch/


Here is Ben speaking with actor Kobna Holdbrook-Smith, who narrates the audiobooks of the series, as they travel on a... river of London. I haven't watched it yet as I am at work. Should prove interesting.




Now I just have to make sure my wife doesn't buy the Kindle version before I can get the Apple ebook version! I hate buying it twice. I can easily break the DRM on the latter, not as easy on Kindles.

As I have mentioned before, I run interlibrary loan (ILL) at the library at which I work, a branch campus university library. And perhaps my favorite borrowers that I like to provide service to are prisons. Interestingly, I only seem to receive requests from New Mexico prisons. I mean, I'd send books to any library - I ship items all around the country, I've sent them to the Harvard Medical Library, I've sent books to Thailand and England. But when it comes to prisons, I only get requests from NM.

Curious.

I know that when it comes to borrowing, my system weighs in favor of New Mexico libraries that carry what I'm looking for (physically shorter means normally faster delivery), but I can expand that to search literally around the world. Every library that participates in ILL has their entire inventory (catalog) uploaded to a database in Ohio for central searching for borrowing and lending purposes.

Anyway, prisons have one restriction: they can only take softcover. Paperback and trade paperback. Because hardback cardboard can be made into shivs! Now, aside from a prisoner getting into trouble for having a shiv, they'd also lose their library borrowing privileges for damaging a book! But who knows, maybe a cellmate would do the deed.

Back to the story.

Last week I had a request for a book. It's called Waiterrant, by the author The Waiter. It's a collection of blog posts that won an award. The anonymous blogger took a job as a waiter to help him through a tough patch, and that expected short-term period turned into a seven-year stretch. I subscribe to it through LJ and have enjoyed it for several years.

I had no idea that we had that book in our collection!

I was kind of overjoyed to find it on our shelves. I was also kind of surprised as it was in our cookbook section, and I've been through that section and missed it! No matter, we had the book, I pulled it, and took it back to my office for further processing.

And then it struck me. It's a hardback. And it was a prison that requested it.

I had to pass on the borrowing request and the request went to the next library in the search string. (A search string is a list of libraries that probably have the book on their shelves, they'll all receive the borrowing request in order until someone can fulfill the request or the last library passes, in which case the request is unfulfilled and the requesting library can tell the patron 'sorry, no can do' or they can do another request with different libraries)

Well, there was a somewhat sunnier side to this - I could look up The Waiter's blog and tell him that my library had his book! So I did! I told him of my joy at the serendipity of finding it here, and some of the other cool finds that I've discovered, and my sadness at not being able to send a copy to the prison and why.

He replied that if I send him my library's address, he'll send me a softcover that I can send to the prison!

WOW.

Now, I didn't ask for that, I was considering ordering a softcover. But he's going to send us one!

THAT IS SO AWESOME!

I replied this morning with our contact information. And just now I told my boss about it, she was pretty happy. Free books are a good thing - not that we'll take just any book! But since we already have this book in our collection, it clearly has been judged to have some merit by a previous selection process.

I wonder if he's going to sign it or otherwise personalize it?

I'm off tomorrow, but I'm going to call the prison Thursday morning.

EDIT: references to the Mises Institute removed: see bottom of post for reasons and alternative links

We, by Russian author Yevgeny Zamyatin.

“[Zamyatin’s] intuitive grasp of the irrational side of totalitarianism — human sacrifice, cruelty as an end in itself — makes [We] superior to Huxley’s [Brave New World].” —George Orwell

An inspiration for George Orwell’s 1984 and a precursor to the work of Philip K. Dick, Ayn Rand (Anthem), and Stanislaw Lem, We is a classic of dystopian science fiction ripe for rediscovery. Written in 1921 by the Russian revolutionary Yevgeny Zamyatin, this story of the thirtieth century is set in the One State, a society where all live for the collective good and individual freedom does not exist.

Although fiction, it is a story informed by the war communism of the Soviet Union, and was of course completely banned in Russia. But the collectivism is of a recognizable type, one that threatens every society in all times. To come to understand its features and markings is the benefit of the dystopian genre. The reality that dawns on the reader is that this seeming fiction is all-too real in our times.

The novel takes the form of the diary of state mathematician D-503, who, to his shock, experiences the most disruptive emotion imaginable: love for another human being.

At once satirical and sobering, We speaks to all who have suffered under repression of their personal, economic, and cultural freedom.

“One of the greatest novels of the twentieth century.” –Irving Howe

And free to download, as a PDF. It came up as a $2 ebook on my daily ebook newsletters, and my brain went 'if it was an inspiration for George Orwell, surely it isn't under copyright?' My brain then went 'It probably isn't under copyright and you should look him up on Wikipedia and Project Gutenberg, and STOP CALLING ME SHIRLEY!' The American, Canadian, and Australian Gutenbergs didn't have it, but his Wikipedia page had a link to the Mises site!

I like free stuff. And PDFs are supported by all ebook readers.

https://openlibrary.org/books/OL15196400M/We

https://monoskop.org/images/2/28/Zamyatin_Yevgeny_We_1972.pdf

Why Mises Institute was removed: As pointed out in the comments by Tiametschild, The Mises Institute is not an Austrian institution, it's an Alabama organization classified by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a Neo-Con group, which I will not support for obvious reasons. The Monoskop.org link will take you to a PDF scan of a paperback copy of the book.

https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/intelligence-report/2000/neo-confederates

This is really cool! Hernando Colón was a huge collector, he bought all sorts of books, not just Plato and high-brow stuff, so this will be quite an insight into books of the time. Obviously a lot of those books no longer exist, it will be interesting to see how many still do.

But the cool part is that it is HUGE - over 2,000 pages! And Hernando hired people to read all the books and write summaries! It's a descriptive catalog! And the photos in the catalog are gorgeous!

The book is in the process of being translated, and when done, it will be released publicly so anyone can read it. Should be quite interesting.

https://www.npr.org/2019/04/24/716600905/christopher-columbus-son-had-an-enormous-library-its-catalog-was-just-found

Saladin Ahmed's Engraved on the Eye, is available for a presumably short time, on Smashwords in ebook format. Presumably you must have a free Smashwords account, which I have.

The description from the site:
A medieval physician asked to do the impossible. A gun slinging Muslim wizard in the old West. A disgruntled super villain pining for prison reform. A cybernetic soldier who might or might not be receiving messages from God. These short stories have been nominated for the Nebula and Campbell awards, and reprinted in The Year’s Best Fantasy Anthologies.

https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/235678

07/09 Singularity Sky, Charles Stross
07/12 The Shockwave Rider, John Brunner
07/13 Top Secret Recipes, Todd Wilbur
07/14 Zen Flesh, Zen Bones, compiled by Paul Reps (rr)
07/15 The Tao of Pooh, Benjamin Hoff (rr)
07/17 Tao Te Ching
07/20 How to Travel with a Salmon, Umberto Eco
07/23 Mort (DW 4), Pratchett (rr)
07/23 Sourcery (DW 5), Pratchett (rr)
07/24 The Light Fantastic (DW 2), Pratchett (rr)
07/25 Equal Rites (DW 3), Pratchett (rr)
07/26 Wyrd Sisters (DW 6), Pratchett (rr)
07/27 Eric (DW 9), Pratchett (rr)
07/30 Pyramids (DW 7), Pratchett (rr)

08/03 Moving Pictures (DW 10), Pratchett (rr)
08/11 Snow Crash, Neil Stephenson (rr~)
08/15 Reaper Man (DW 11), Pratchett (rr)
08/20 Witches Abroad (DW 12), Pratchett (rr)
08/22 Small Gods (DW 13), Pratchett (rr)

09/02 Lords and Ladies (DW 14), Pratchett (rr)
09/06 Men at Arms (DW 15), Pratchett (rr)
09/08 Soul Music (DW 16), Pratchett (rr)
09/12 Interesting Times (DW 17), Pratchett (rr)
09/20 Maskerade (DW 18), Pratchett (rr)
09/24 Feet of Clay (DW 19), Pratchett (rr)

These 25 plus the previous 36 brings me up to 61 as of the end of September, so well beyond one a week average. Pratchetts are quick reads, that helps a lot, it's easy to knock off two or three a week if I'm not otherwise very busy.

HUGE amount of re-reads, mainly because I started re-reading my Terry Pratchett cannon in June and continued. Of 25 books read, none were physical and five were first-time reads with one, Snow Crash, being what I thought was a re-read but there was so much material that I didn’t recognize I think that I had never read the whole thing through. Most likely I read an excerpt in Analog Magazine or something.

The reason for the dive in to Buddhism is I had a dream that was crazy vivid and made for a really cool short story, but was set at a Buddhist temple. I’ve read two of those books before, so I re-read them and started reading some more. The story is still in progress and is far beyond short story length, in fact it’s forked and spun-off into a sort of origin story for the protagonist. It continues in fits and starts.

On to the comments! I’m going to change the order a bit so that the non-Discworld books are together, which only requires moving Snow Crash.
( Read more... )

Christopher Tolkien finished The Fall of Gondolin and it hit the shelves. Christopher is 93, and as many times as he's been through his father's notes in the last 4 decades, I can't imagine there's much in the way of further lost stories remaining.

JRR wrote this while in the hospital recovering from "trench fever" following the Battle of the Somme in WW I. Apparently he wrote multiple drafts, and Christopher compiled them in to this print edition.

The CNet link has an autoplay video, so be aware as you may want to kill it when the page finishes loading.

https://www.cnet.com/news/new-j-r-r-tolkien-book-fall-of-gondolin-echoes-lord-of-the-rings-battle/