What have you been reading lately?

NottaSackville

NottaSackville

Valinor
I've finished the first book in the Mistborn series by Brandon Sanderson and have moved on to book 2, The Well of Ascension. I'm definitely loving this series! I'm not entirely sure he gets his physics right when his mistborn are jumping all over the place, by hey, it is a FANTASY book, right? [;)]

Like many good series, the scope of the story is growing with each book. The first book was concerned with events primarily in a city - albeit a capital city of a large empire [it's hinted that this is the ONLY empire], while the second book appears to be branching out to events that encompass a much larger section of the empire.

A very good read!

How about you - what are you reading?

Notta
 
Reading Kings II. I’m vaguely trying to fit in the Fall of Numenor with the Fall of Israel. The kings of Israel are judged to be “evil” based upon their obedience to God. The kings of Numenor become corrupt by going against the will of the Valar. The kings of Israel construct “high places” for sacrifices to other gods. The kings of Numenor construct a 500 foot tall tower where those still faithful to the Elves are sacrificed to Melkor. As RD Nelson puts it in Sweeney’s commentaries, the book is basically theological literature in the form of history, which is an apt description of The Sil.
-Very highly recommended.

Timeless, by Gail Carriger. The final volume of the Parasol Protectorate. Alexia’s adventures are brought to a satisfactory close in the exotic setting of Egypt, but the possiblities of sequels featuring a pair of gay werewolve, a fashion disaster vampire queen, and/or a skin stealing girl child are left to tantalize the imagination. Not for long, though. Reportedly Carriger is already working on a new series, The Parasol Protectorate Abroad, the first volume being “Prudence” and the second one “Imprudence”. There are continuing hints of a larger world where supernatural beings are, er, “commonplace” and integrated into society. I’d especially like to see the stories behind the hints dropped about America.
-Highly recommended.

Lost Horizon, by James Hilton. Distinguished for being the first mass-produced paperback in America as well as originating the legend of Shangri-La. Mainly a book with a remarkably passive hero indulging in extended conversations with a head lama about how the world is going to heck in a handbasket (as indeed it was in 1933) and the only hope is the lifeboat of Shangri-La (and its docile hardworking peasants. So much for high ideals.) Definitely a period piece with a few delightful snipes at the British Foreign Office of the time as opposed to depressing attitudes towards females by the supposed enlightened. That said, the book's descriptions are rather soothing
-Recommended if you don’t mind long periods of inaction interspersed with longer periods of conversation.
 
According to this alternate history, vampires are indeed in America. I enjoyed it. And the historical facts are supposed to be accurate, as far as real events in American history.
I can hardly wait for the movie!
 
A reader found bits of errant code in the Kindle version of a short-story collection, so I've been ferreting out the (expletive deleted) bits, one by one. Of course they do NOT show up in my Word file. Nor in the printed version of the book. Nor in the....

Well, I'm somewhere between irritated and frustrated and ready to send Bill Gates a howler to pass on to his Word minions. (If anyone cares, what happened was that every time I used the keyboard shortcut for an em-dash instead of the insert menu on the tool bar, it put in some bit of coding that the Kindle software read as 3/4. So you had sentences reading, for example, "I opened my umbrella3/4it was a rainy day3/4and set out for the shop.")

[mad]

Other than that, having been away from home two weekends in a row means that the magazines have stacked up again---the new Time, the new British Heritage, the new Smithsonian, and a copy of Mystery Scene I was given at last week's convention.
 
This is one of Louisa May Alcott's adult novels, but not a melodrama like some of her others. OK, a little bit of a melodrama, but it was actually mostly pretty realistic. It's the story of a young woman in about 1850 who is living on a farm with her aunt and uncle and decides she needs to make her own way in the world. So she sets out to find work. Her first job is as a maid. In that job she makes friends with an escaped slave, who is treated with dignity and respect, not only by the author but also by the character. Then she becomes a governess, but flees when the children's uncle makes advances. She becomes a seamstress, but loses her job over her friendship with a former prostitute. And so on. The Civil War comes into her life and she enlists as an army nurse (something the author did, so it's very much from her own experience.) At one point she considers suicide. And the ending is bittersweet.

It's so opposite from the Jane Austen sort of novel, where the heroine's only career option is to find a suitable husband. Christy, the feminist heroine with the surprisingly modern-sounding name, does find a husband, but that's four chapters from the end and there's a lot more story after that.

I had never heard of this novel before; it came in a $.99 Kindle collection of the complete works of Louisa May Alcott. You can also get it for free here: http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/4770

I really loved this story, but it's very different from her books for children.
 
with one of my stories. I forgot that I had put in a starting and ending date for my own record, and had hidden the text (or so I thought.) It didn't show up on screen or in the print version, but it was there in the e-book and it took a while to figure out where it had come from and how to get it out of there.

Anyway, now that you know what happened, you can do a Replace All and fix them all at once. I've had to do that with e-books too. One thing that took me forever to figure out was that Word files don't translate very well into Kindle formatting, especially the paragraphs. I finally found out in their FAQs that I needed to save my files as "Web page filtered" and that magically fixed it.

I know you work with a publisher, but I have to do all my own formatting, and there's always something new to screw up.
 
I didn't get very far with The Mists of Avalon. I think I'm just in the wrong mood for epics. But I picked up another diet memoir instead.
 
But Word, sigh, is industry standard, never mind the glitches that happen with Kindle, Web Page, Filtered, or no Web Page, Filtered!

I have my own e-rights so have been doing my own formatting, and oh yes, it's been an adventure. Unfortunately, in this case, Replace All did nothing---I had to find each problematic em-dash and replace it manually. (Womanually?) Fortunately, there were only four out of the twelve stories in the collection that had the problem.

Awhile back I sent in a couple of novels that looked clean but still had the editor's Track Changes on them, all grouped together at the end of the book! I don't know how many people got those versions, until someone tipped me off. Now I know to strip out all the coding and start over again.

Brave new cyber-world. [shocked]
 
A reread and going fairly slow as I'm doing them in order from the library... On Brother Odd

Enjoyable but sometimes it reminds me of those challenges where you're given a list of things you must include in your story... Koontz list includes a Russian librarian who is the son of an assasin, a nun with a tattoo, a white dog, a blizzard and quantum physics.
 
She taught me to use it on her old computer back in the 1980s on her old Morrow computer, which ran on 5 1/4 inch floppies and didn't use DOS. I'd be typing in the study and yell "How do you save a file, Mom?" and she'd hollar back from the kitchen "Hit..." whatever it was. I don't think it was the Cntl-S that's listed now. I haven't used Wordperfect since about 1990. But that brings back some fun memories. She used that computer for twenty years.
 
but struggling. I'm not really fond of "political dystopia" fictional books. (I do read real-life accounts with interest.) She kept the political situation in the background for the first book, but it's front and center now, and my problem is that it sounds like pretty much all the other fictional oppressive bureaucracies headed by a monomaniac dictator with lots of faceless, cruel henchmen to do his dirty work.
 
And did you have a green-screen monitor, and dot-matrix printer?

It was such a big technological leap, jumping from IBM Selectric typewriter to an Apple IIe where you could type and correct right there on a screen before anything printed out - and you could store what you'd written and retrieve it from those floppies!

Hers lasted 20 years? They just don't make them like that anymore...sigh...
 
By the end, she had to go to a guy who collected antique computer parts to get printer ribbons. But it lasted about as long as her ability to type lasted.
 
by Robin Brande. Dernwyn recommended it last week, and I immediately got it on my kindle and read it that day. This is a young-adult book about a girl in a fundamentalist mega-church who is bullied by the pastor and the congregation for "squealing" to the gay victim of their bullying and writing him a letter of support after he attempts suicide. As a result he sues the church, and the girl is in trouble at school and at home. But she also meets some new friends in school and her horizon widens.

I found the book gripping and a page-turner, but I was a little let down by the ending. It felt like there was a chapter missing, with so much of the conflict left unresolved. I know that's the way of life sometimes, but I had to write the conclusion in my head. Other than that, a great read.
 
to have a last chapter which shows her parents finding warm acceptance in a new church home, and all of them getting together with her friends' families.

I'm having a hard time deciding which Nutmeg nominee to read next. There's Wendy Van Draanen's The Running Dream, about a high-school runner who loses her leg in an accident - and who learns to run again. Linda Sue Park's A Long Walk to Water, which follows two lives in the Sudan, one present and one about 30 years ago, and how the boy in the earlier story grew up to influence the life of a girl living now - based on a true story. Andy Mulligan's Trash, a mystery set in the dumps of Brazil and the youth who survive there. Polly Shulman's The Grimm Legacy, in which the fantasy world collides with the "real" world.

That's just half of the YA group; and we can't keep our copies of the Intermediate level nominees on the shelves. I love seeing how enthused the kids are about reading - and books! [heart]
 
I really wanted to know whether she ever got together with that puppy.

Of the books you described, the first one sounds the most interesting to me.
 
But I finally had to give it up when I upgraded to a newer computer some years ago---and since then, I've upgraded to an even newer one. But I've always bought the latest iteration of WordPerfect to go with the new computer, since I find it easier to use in every day writing and composition. For one thing, you make an em-dash simply by typing ---, which WP changes to an em-dash. No having to go to the tool bar menu. The Find function is a lot smoother, too.

When it comes to editing, though, I like Word's Track Changes.

I've never even tried formatting anything for paper or e-publication with WordPerfect, since no place I deal with uses it. So I don't know whether it would be any less of a headache than Word is.
 
The audio performance was excellent, and it's such a wonderful story. I loved it.

Trollope's characters are so vivid, and I found myself admiring even the ones I disliked. Even Mrs. Proudie got a thumbs up from me on a couple of occasions. And as shallow and vain as La Signorina Madeline Vesey-Neroni is, by the end of the book I found myself being quite fond of her.

Not Mr. Slope, though. He started out odious, ended up odious, and was odious in between and all the way through.
 
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