Thursday, August 07, 2008

Note to Self

Dear me,

Next time you are in Powell's and see volumes 3 and 4 of the series of books you've brought to bring along on your trip sitting on the shelf...remember what it was like to go from Borders to Borders on a futile hunt for number 3, okay?

No love,
Me

For the record, I have an interesting relationships with Stephen Baxter's books.  I was first introduced to him while reading a collaboration he did with the late Sir Arthur C. Clarke, and quickly sought out more.  I read The Time Ships in...oh, within a day and a half or so (having not yet read The Time Machine, to which it is the only authorized sequel).

I now own the majority of his books.

(Also, can I just say that I love the way that page is laid out?  Separated by series, with the books' covers shown in series order below?  Awesome, Mr. Baxter or webmaster.)

The funny thing is, I often have to start a book two or three times to be sucked in.  Once I am, I'm left devouring whole books in a matter of hours -- but that doesn't always happen on the first attempt.

That's what happened with book 1 of the series I referenced above.  I'd read part of Emperor but stopped -- which is funny, because I've currently been on the look-out for good alternate history fiction.

Note "good."  That's, apparently, more difficult than it seems.

Anyway, on the trip, I started reading Emperor one night when we stopped kind of early.  By the end of the trip, I was two third of the way through book 2, and began to look for book 3.

Yeah, every store I went to had book 4...but no book three.

It's now been ordered from Amazon, but still...

2 comments:

Amie said...

I don't know if it's your style even a little, but have you read The Memory Keepers Daughter? I just finished it and thought of you all the way through.

SpooWriter said...

I've heard of it, but I'm very leery of books about people with disabilities -- the few I've read have been either overly saccharine, present the person as...they go to either extreme. Either the person is a model for the "survivor" thing or those around the person are viewed as awesome for "sacrificing" for their child.

Which is not to say I'm not, in general, attracted to what some might call disability "fiction." I was a huge fan of Reasonable Doubts, for instance. But I prefer the disability to be simply part of the person.

Pardon the sci-fi reference, but the best example I can think of was Geordi on Star Trek. He mostly just went about his life and happened to be blind.

I don't know if that all made sense, but what I'm getting at is -- if I'm going to read something or watch something that has a character with a disability of some kind, I prefer it not to be an "issue" movie and simply an aspect of their character.

Not that there's a lot of that, unfortunately.

Maybe someday I'll write it....

And now it occurs to me that this very well could have been its own post. ;-)