Category: Uncategorized

A Place So Foreign and Eight More by Cory Doctorow

Back when I was still swimming through Quicksilver, I would occasionally take a break from it and read some other things–my own version of short attention span, I suppose. One of the books I ambled through was Cory Doctorow’s short story collection, A Place So Foreign and Eight More. That aforementioned link, uniquely perhaps, allows for free download of 6 of the 9 short stories in the collection. He has good reason to do so.

In addition to being a science fiction writer, Cory Doctorow runs a (as far as I can tell) popular website called BoingBoing, which is one of my favorite of the weblog variety. He is also the Outreach Coordinator for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an organization devoted to advocating for the protection of individuals digital rights and freedoms on the internet, among other things. One of their basic assumptions (or beliefs) is that filesharing is not only not a bad thing–certainly not the demon which organizations such as the RIAA make it out to be–but a useful tool for promotion and distribution.

Doctorow put his money where his mouth was, making his first novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, available free to download. By all standards, this move was a resounding success and the novel sold very well. Just yesterday, he released his newest novel: Eastern Standard Tribe, also available as a free download.
Doctorow writes here about his reasoning for doing so, again:

Not (just) because I’m a swell guy, a big-hearted slob. Not because Tor is a run by addlepated dot-com refugees who have been sold some snake-oil about the e-book revolution. Because you — the readers, the slicers, dicers and copiers — hold in your collective action the secret of the future of publishing. Writers are a dime a dozen. Everybody’s got a novel in her or him. Readers are a precious commodity. You’ve got all the money and all the attention and you run the word-of-mouth network that marks the difference between a little book, soon forgotten, and a book that becomes a lasting piece of posterity for its author, changing the world in some meaningful way.

As you may have noticed, I’ve strayed fairly far afield from actually discussing the short story collection. I don’t really feel like writing much about them, but what I will do is point to the two stories which I enjoyed the most:
“Craphound”
“0wnz0red” (originally published on salon.com–there may be hoops to jump through to read it)

Doctorow gives an insane number of interviews or so it seems to me. I sort of wonder how he finds the time to get any writing done.

Anyway, if you feel like actually purchasing some of his stuff, you can find it here and here.

QUICKSILVER – Neal Stephenson

I finished reading Neal Stephenson’s Quicksilver sometime in early December, and it was quite a doozy (clocking in at 944 pages) to carry around on the bus for the three or so weeks that I was reading it.

I think I’ve put off writing about this book, because there is so much in it and I’m not really sure that anything that I might say could quite do it justice. Quicksilver covers a lot of ground: the Enlightenment; the Glorious Revolution; Jack Shaftoe’s vagabond adventures around Europe; Newton, Leibniz; Hooke and Pepys (among many others in the Royal Society); the origin of free-trading and the stock market; etc. etc. etc. It’s a vasty tome; a burbling stew; a feverish (hysterical?) historical epic. And, hey, I really liked it.

It’s true there were long stretches of the book where my eyes glazed over, the book resting heavily on my chest, and I had to put it down and read something shorter (and lighter!). But, it’s been quite some time since I’ve read anything this bold and daring. (The mind reels: Quicksilver is but 1 of 3 of Stephenson’s “Baroque Cycle”!) If you intimidated by 900+ page books, I’d steer clear of this one, though. Things bog down quite a bit around the 300 page mark or so, if I’m remembering correctly.

Some interesting related links:
A “wiki”-like site related to Quicksilver
Stephenson’s intentionally off-putting personal website
A long, rather interesting interview
Short and sweet interview
The official “Baroque Cycle” website, I think (flashbased)

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The Time Traveler’s Wife

So, here I am trolling through my thoughts about books that I read a couple of months ago. I finished The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger in early December, in hotel rooms and airport waiting rooms. It was a good book for that. I say that because the book is structured in a fluidly non-linear way, hopping higgledy-piggledy between the two protagonists and their place in time…

While attempting to answer the question: how would a relationship work unmoored from a linear, forward-moving time? A. Niffenegger deals with it well and the book largely succeeds on her deftly managing the potentially very confusing non-linear plotlines and the warmth and charm of her two principal characters.

As is not surprising, AN has plenty of charm herself, as you can read in this interview with her.

There were moments in the book where it rang false to me. These mostly having to do with the minor characters and occasionally Clare, the female narrator. There was a certain mushiness–for lack of a better word–to the writing at times that rubbed me the wrong way. Unfortunately, I don’t know how to describe it more exactly. (Being mushy myself, I suppose!)

Henry, the male narrator, is a brilliantly fleshed out character and is the linch-pin around which this whole novel revolves. His characterization was what made the novel work for me. Brilliant work for a first time novelist.

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