6 Second Book Review: Everything Matters!
Everything Matters! by Ron Currie
“This deeply felt humanist fable asks one simple question: if you were born knowing the world would end in your lifetime, what in your life would matter the most?”
So, what would you do?
ConNooga 2016
I spent the weekend at ConNooga selling jewelry and having a delightful time. My best friend drove down from Kentucky to visit and help me out at my booth. I didn’t get a chance to get to any of the panels, but I did get to see some fantastic cosplay. Here are some of the best literary costumes that I saw:
Daenerys and Sansa from Game of Thrones
Harry Dresden from The Dresden Files
Howl from the Studio Ghibli adaptation of Howl’s Moving Castle
Genderbent Bilbo from The Hobbit (look at the amazing painting on the shoes!)
Missy Poppins (Dr. Who meets Mary Poppins)
Jon Snow and Ygritte from Game of Thrones
Post-apocalyptic Dorothy Gale
The Night Circus
It’s Tuesday, which means it’s time for a 6 second book review!
The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern
https://vine.co/v/ivergEhpeLp/embed/simple
Re-Read: Low Town by Daniel Polansky
I’m using the UK cover because that’s the edition I’m actually reading this time.
What I’m Reading: Low Town by Daniel Polansky (British title: The Straight Razor Cure)
Published: Doubleday, 2011
Read This: while waiting for a trouble with long legs and a short skirt to walk through your door.
Low Town is the first book in Daniel Polansky’s Low Town trilogy. The elevator pitch is that it’s a noir mystery set in a George R.R. Martin-style fantasy world.
The Warden was a soldier for half a decade in a war that devastated the world. He survived a battle where mages ripped holes in reality and won his Queen the war. Then he was an agent of the Black House, the grey-clad secret police. His fall from grace narrowly avoided a messy end in the very cells he used to oversee. Now he is a mid-level drug dealer in Low Town, the slums of the capitol.
He is slowly sliding into ruin when a young girl goes missing. It’s none of his business what the ultimate fate of the child is, but when he stumbles across her body he can’t remain detached.
Soon, Warden is embroiled in trying to solve a case that the Black House has declared closed, causing him to run up against his former colleagues. Add in some interested nobles and a very unsavory wizard and the Warden is suddenly fighting not just for his own life, but for the fate of Low Town itself.
I read this book back in 2011 when it came out here, but I never actually got around to reading the two sequels because they weren’t published here in the States for a long time. I eventually imported them, but never got around to finishing the series because, as you may remember, I have a ridiculous number of books about the house. I finally decided to finish out the series, but decided that I needed to go back and re-read the first book.
I’m really enjoying it. There are a number of parallels to World War I, that I had forgotten, so that is delightful to me. I really like WWI-based stories.
Knowing the ultimate resolution of the mystery is not at all spoiling my pleasure in reading the story. Luckily, it’s been long enough that I remember the broad strokes, but not the tiny details.
I’m really looking forward to finishing it up and moving onto the next two books. Polansky has crafted a very rich world that you want to go back to. There are funny moments and some really beautiful moments scattered through a very tense mystery.
[Warning: If you can’t deal with violence toward children, avoid this one!]
So I Went to See Deadpool
Last night was a trip to see Deadpool at my local theater with an IMax screen.
And it was amazing.
Now, let me start with this: They are NOT kidding about that R rating. Ignore the man with the Hello Kitty backpack and the occasional shots of a sullen teenage girl. This movie is not for:
A) Children. No, really. Don’t bring your kids. Go to the theater. Watch the movie. And then, if you’re that kind of parent/guardian (and my Dad was) let the kids watch it when it comes out on DVD/Blu ray, streaming service of your choice. But not in the theater.
B) People bothered by excessive, occasionally cartoon violence. Imagine that the things that happen in a Wile E. Coyote cartoon actually had physical consequences. It’s kind of like that.
C) People bothered by nudity, foul language, off-color jokes. And they are off-color. Some of them are probably offensive. I didn’t take offense, but I’m not in any of the target groups, so that doesn’t mean much.
The Deadpool in this movie seems to be a pretty good rendition of what I know about the character in comics. He doesn’t have any puppies or Hello Kitty bandaids, but he has an unending sense of humor, really great timing, and a playfulness that’s rarely seen in superhero movies. Ryan Reynolds does an amazing job. But we knew he would, that’s why we’ve been asking for a Deadpool movie since X-Men Orignis: Wolverine. And we got one. Wade Wilson is a little mean, a lot crazy, and also surprisingly sweet sometimes. You probably don’t want to actually date him, but you don’t worry about the woman who does.
Who, by the way, is played by the amazing Morena Baccarin. If you liked her in Firefly, you don’t have to worry. I’m pretty sure Vanessa and Inara would get along. Vanessa is not a damsel, even if she is both in distress and in a dress on occasion. She’s pretty awesome and just as weird as Wade/Deadpool. As he puts in in the Valentine’s Day trailer, “Your crazy matches my crazy,” which is the thing many of us hope for.
The other characters were also fun. I always like to see Colossus and then there was the character I knew nothing about; Negasonic Teenage Warhead. Wikipedia tells me that she’s a fairly minor character in the Marvel universe, who bears basically no resemblance to the girl on the screen. I’m surprisingly ok with that and I enjoyed Brianna Hildebrand in the part.
So, one thing to know going in, this is not a superhero movie. Yes, Deadpool has powers, but he is not a hero. He’ll tell you that himself. This is pretty much a revenge movie. Think Payback or Kill Bill, not Ironman. I feel like this is going to be the kind of movie you either love or hate. It’s not going to be easy to ride the fence on this one. I happen to come down on the side of love. From the opening credits to the post-credit scene, I loved it. There were moments I couldn’t watch because they squicked me out, but I’m ready to go back right now.
To Be Read
Here is one of the many, many, manyTBR piles:
What do you have lined up next?
House Read: The Devil’s Only Friend
What I’m Reading: The Devil’s Only Friend by Dan Wells
Published: Tor Books, 2015
Read This: when you’re somewhere safe and sunny.
John Wayne Cleaver is back after a two year publishing hiatus! When Dan finished I Don’t Want to Kill You we all thought that was probably the last we’d see of our favorite teenage sociopath. But, we got lucky, although, no one in the story world did…
John has teamed up with an FBI taskforce to hunt the demons he’s been battling through the first three books.
But the demons are fighting back. The Withered know that John is out there and that he’s killed three of them already. And now, they’re starting to work together to find him.
Brooke, the former girl of John’s dreams, is still in the picture as well. She has physically recovered from being possessed by the demon known as Nobody, but the experience has left her with all of the demon’s memories. No teenage girl is designed to deal with the sudden influx of tens of thousands of years of memories. Brooke is sometimes herself, sometimes Nobody, and sometimes one of the thousands of girls Nobody possessed and killed throughout the millennia. It’s terrible, but it also means that for the first time John and the FBI have someone on the inside.
Brooke can tell them who they are facing and what that demon’s powers are. But she has no answers when a demon who calles himself the Hunter starts to leave John letters on the bodies of his latest victims.
The Devil’s Only Friend is the first book in a new John Wayne Cleaver trilogy. Book two, Over Your Dead Body, comes out in May. The story moves very quickly and you don’t have much time to catch your breath. But then, neither does John. While this isn’t my favorite book in the series, I do think it’s a great start to a new series of stories. And it’s perfect timing as the film of I Am Not a Serial Killer is slated to be shown at South by Southwest this year!
John has lost basically everyone in his life except for Brooke. That puts him in a very interesting position, emotionally speaking. He is a diagnosed sociopath, so he doesn’t usually form emotional attachments to people, but nevertheless, he has lost people he cares about and is abruptly shoved into close and long term contact with an entire team. He is answerable to people for the first time in his demon hunting and that adds another level of tension to the story. As always, John is fighting himself and his own instincts as much as he is the demons that are hunting him.
Tidying
I’ve been trying to work on my goals for the year. One of them was to get rid of something every day. And another one was to have all the books on shelves by August. In pursuit of both of those goals I have been trying to organize my bookshelves and that means critically reviewing what is already on those shelves.
It turns out, I have an impressive number of books on my shelves that I don’t really need to have. These fall into a few categories:
ARCs of books that I’m probably never going to read, but they were free and I might want to read them someday. Right?- Reference books from school. I haven’t been in school in a very, very long time. Now, some of those books are just cool and others are handy to have for reference for writing. But, do I really need that Norton Anthology of English Literature from a class I didn’t even take? Especially when I’ve got Project Gutenberg, the bookstore I work at, the library, and all the other books on the shelves?
- Books I feel like I should read. They’re either classics, or IMPORTANT, or they’re on topics that I’m casually interested in and should therefore read a 350 page treatise on, or they were wildly popular and I feel like as a bookseller and generally opinionated person I should have an informed opinion.
- Then there is the set of books that I don’t have any idea how or why they ended up on my shelves.
What to do with the unwanted books?
I’m using a multi-prong approach to this problem. I’ve listed some on Amazon or Paperback Swap, just depending on what they are. I’ve got a stack to go to our Little Free Library, some stacks for friends, and then some for giveaways here on the blog.
What do you do with your unwanted books?
Speaking of giveaways, there is still plenty of time to enter my giveaway for a copy of Prudence by Gail Carriger!
Skullgarden Coloring Book
Adult coloring books are a huge thing right now. We couldn’t keep The Secret Garden or the colored pencil packs in stock at the bookstore over Christmas. I have several, one of which I bought on the strength of a single peacock illustration. And now, my friend Andy, the artistic genius behind Skullgarden, is Kickstarting a coloring book full of skulls and flowers and awesomeness.
The Kickstarter is fully funded, but there is still plenty of time to get in on the coloring book. $15 will get you the book, but there are great rewards at pretty much every level. There are 22 days left in the campaign, so there’s plenty of time to figure out exactly how much you’d like to chip in.
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/skullgarden/the-skullgarden-coloring-book/widget/video.html
The Wayback Machine
There was a very interesting discussion at work about changing tastes. I don’t think of myself as someone who reads much pure sci-fi; I read fantasy. That is what I read. But, that’s not exactly true anymore. That was true a long time ago, but I actually quite like sci-fi and I read it in a pretty regular mix with my other genres.
So, my coworker and I were discussing this and that led us to wondering if the us of ten or twenty years ago would actually like the books that were important to us now. I decided to look at the books I have on the Staff Picks and think about how the me from high school would have felt about them.
The Nick Harkaway Trifecta
I probably would have bounced off of Gone Away World at sixteen. The post-apocalyptic part would have worked, but I think I probably would have gotten thrown by the long flashback. Although, back then, before grad school had its way with me, I thought it was my divine calling to finish every (non-school) book that I started, so I most likely would have pressed on, but been whiny about it.
Angelmaker is important enough to me now that I got a giant tattoo based on it. I’m pretty sure that all the things I love about it now; the steampunk elements, the octogenarian super spy, the 1950’s doomsday devices, would all have appealed to me back then too. (Interesting fact, back in high school, I was positive that I would never get a tattoo. So, things change.)
I would have LOVED Tigerman. I was super into comics in high school, so a book that has this much to do with a boy’s love for comic books, combined with the general Nick Harkaway awesomeness would have worked really well for me. Although, I’m not sure I would have picked it up with the cover that it has. I probably would have by college, though.
Daniel Polansky’s Low Town is something of a puzzler. I read tons of mysteries in high school, but most of them were Agatha Christie novels or cozy mysteries like the Lillian Jackson Braun Cat Who mysteries. I didn’t really get into the noir novels until later. Although, I did always like the fashion, not that that would apply to a secondary world fantasy.
Shades of Milk and Honey is one of the only books on the list I can unequivaclly say I would absolutely have loved in high school. I read Jane Austen over and over again then. I didn’t know that you could combine Jane Austen and magic, but I would have knocked over my own mother to get to a book that did it.
Good Omens is the other book I can say with no hesitation that I would have loved. I can say this because I did love it back then. And, In fact, I had already loved Good Omens for years by the time I turned sixteen. I still have my original hardcover that my mom got me. So I should probably feel bad about the knocking her over thing from the previous blurb.
John Wayne Cleaver might have been too much for teenage me. I’m not really sure. On the one hand, I was a little gothlette and so a boy with all the psychological indications of being a sociopath might have seemed like a great sort of person to spend some quality time with. On the page! Even as a high school student, I wasn’t into dangerous boys in real life. I usually went for the Latin nerds and the D&D gamers over the guys who got in trouble.
Ghosts. Turn of the century San Francisco. A serial killer. I’m sure there were things I would have liked better… David Bowie in Labyrinth. Um… anything else? Oh! The Princess Bride. Cary Elwys in The Princess Bride. Howl’s Moving Castle. Not much else though. So, Delia’s Shadow would have make the cut too.
Overall, I think that my tastes haven’t changed that much although my perception of my tastes may have changed. I would have told you back then that I liked mysteries and fantasy novels and that was about it. Oh, and comic books. And yeah, fine, historical novels. And classics. But not anything else. Except some sci-fi, but not very much.
I think there are more things that I loved then that I probably wouldn’t like now more than there are things I like now and would have turned my nose up at then.
What about you? Are there books you love now that you don’t think you would have appreciated ten or twenty years ago?
Medusa's Library 
