Category: Books

Books

“Holy shit, it’s Professor Marchuk! Run!”

Robert J. Sawyer‘s latest novel Quantum Night explores psychology and has me wondering if I’m a Q1, a Q2 or a Q3. Or maybe I’m sometimes one or another, depending on the time of the day and whether I’m wide awake or not. Right now I’m awfully tired and feel like I’m just going through the motions, much like a classical Q1 p-zed.

Jim Marchuk is a professor at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg who developed a procedure that determines whether someone is a psychopath or not. Because of this, he is asked to be an expert witness at a murderer’s trial in Georgia.

Jim travels to Georgia for the trial. Though he’s only there to explain his procedure, the prosecutor grills him about his past and he does not remember things that he should remember. When he returns to Canada, he discovers that he’s missing six months of his life.

Jim’s missing six months are the result of an experiment he took part in twenty years earlier. The experiment changed him from a fully conscious, thinking human being (Q3) to a mindless animation (Q1). Jim is determined to understand what had happened to him during those six months, and what had he done?

A good read and quite fun.

Books

She Wrote on Clay, by Shirley Graetz, is a historical novel. The story is set in Sippar, which was a city twenty miles southwest of where Baghdad is today, and takes places centuries Before Christ.

At the beginning, Iltani is a young girl who wants to be a scribe. Her father is a respected scribe and she is anxious to follow in his footsteps. In order to become a scribe, she needs to go to the gagû where she will learn the art and become a naditu.

So, Iltani gets to the gagû and settles in with her aunt who is a wealthy naditu. Iltani begins her education, but soon runs into trouble.

The story spans over several years. Iltani meets many challenges and secrets are revealed.

I thought it was good read. I looked up some things mentioned in the book because I wanted to know more about them. When I was younger, I wanted to be an archaeologist. Though that didn’t pan out, I still have an interest in ancient civilizations and I feel that this book put me in one.

Books

There’s lots of action in this new science fiction novel by Stephen Graham King. Soul’s Blood doesn’t begin with an explosion, but with a comfortable flow that leads to excitement. With rolling prose, Stephen settles you into the environment with ease and brings his characters alive.

Keene and Lexa-Blue are in the space shipping business. They haul merchandise through space from one port to another, but they also have a reputation for being very skilled fighters. Their ship is the Maverick Heart, but it’s more than just a ship. The Maverick Heart is also the body and mind of Vrick.

Think of Kitt from Knight Rider. Vrick is the ship. Ey thinks, ey talks, and ey helps Keene, Lexa-Blue and their friends. If Vrick was human, I imagine ey would wear a leather jacket and shades. Just like Kitt, Vrick is cool.

Keene’s former boyfriend, Daevin, is like the King of Brighter Light, a city state on another planet. Daevin wants Keene’s help in dealing with conflicts between two different cultures that don’t understand each other.

At first Keene is not so keen about helping Daevin, but eventually he agrees to, with Lexa-Blue and Vrick coming along. There is much conflict, a romance rekindles, friendships are made and mass destruction is witnessed.

Soul’s Blood was a fun read. I was impressed with the world building and I could relate to what some of the characters felt.

Books

Remember the HBO documentary Paradise Lost that aired back in the 90’s? Where three teenage boys were charged for the murder of three younger boys in West Memphis, Arkansas?

Damien Echols is one of the West Memphis Three. His book Life After Death tells about the crazy ordeal he experienced from the time he was arrested for murder to the time he was released from prison in 2011.

Despite the lack of evidence and questionable actions by the police, in 1994 Echols was sentenced to death. In Life After Death, he describes the corruption of the system and life behind bars. In August 2011, due to new evidence, Echols was released along with Jessie Misskelley and Jason Baldwin.

Life After Death is very well-written. I found it hard to put down. It’s also very educational.

Books

A decent novella by J. Kathleen Cheney. The Seer’s Choice: A Novella of the Golden City is set in Europe (I’m not sure if it’s England or Spain or some other country, but it’s definitely Europe.). The year is 1903, so you get that whole Victoria feel.

There are two point-of-view characters, Genoveva and Rafael. Both of them are police officers, but they’re part of a special unit. All the officers in the special unit are witches of sorts. Genoveva is a healer. She has the ability to heal people simply by laying her hands on them. Rafael is a seer and he can see the future, though his visions are not always clear.

A madman is stalking Genoveva. The madman has powers of his own that are apparently deadly. It is believed that he wants to hurt  Genoveva because of what her father did to his son years ago. Genoveva  and Rafael work together and try to capture the madman.

It was a fun read. A nice mystery-fantasy mix. I enjoyed the Victoria setting. Well done.

This song came to mind while I was writing the review:

 

Books

I don’t have a novel of my own coming out, but I’ve been shopping one around to agents and I’m almost done cleaning up another novel.  Not to mention a novel that I’m writing and a couple others that are finished rough drafts. Point is, I’ve been pretty productive in the last few years. I’ve been thinking about what I would do if one of my novels is published, because I want to be prepared ahead of time.

I found Michael Knost‘s Author’s Guide to Marketing With Teeth very helpful, and very encouraging. Also, it wasn’t boring. The book held my interest and was quite entertaining in places. I laughed out loud at the part where Mike was running in his astronaut Halloween costume. You’ll have to read the book if you want to know what that was all about.

I’m hard of hearing, to the degree that I can barely understand anyone when communicating with them in person. Often we just have to give up, because I can’t hear them. This is why I’ve been uncomfortable with the idea of doing book signings (I have been asked to participate in a book signing event for an anthology I’m published in.) and TV or radio interviews, or anything that would require me to hear what people are saying.

I felt like I was limited, that there are things that I just would not be able to do to promote my work. Although Mike didn’t have anything about hard of hearing or deaf people in Marketing With Teeth, some of the things he said has me considering some possibilities. I guess he opened my mind to the bigger picture.

As I read, I came up with ideas on how I could make book signings, radio and TV interviews, etc,  work out for me and everyone involved. I want to tell you all about these ideas, but I’ll do it in a separate blog entry.

The book covered things that I otherwise would not have thought of. I really liked the idea of letting my fictional characters write blog entries. That sounds like fun.  I might start doing that. It would give me more topics to blog about. I agree that blogging is a good way to build a platform. I try to keep a steady flow of entries, but often I just don’t know what to blog about.

In his interview, Kevin J. Anderson said he likes to talk about his work in progress. Talking about my work in progress is something I’ve always been uncertain about. On one hand, I feel that I want to, that it could be fun and spark interest in the project, as well as give me more topics to blog about. But on the other hand, I was never sure it was a good idea. In the last few years, I’ve been saying very little about my work in progress, refusing to even give the titles. Now I think I’m going to start opening up a bit about my projects.

And then there was Jonathan Maberry. Like me, Maberry writes several genres, so I felt that his advice was most appealing to me. He also admitted that he used to be  a negative person, which was one of my flaws too, and I still fall into that trap occasionally.

Mike asked Maberry, “What marketing mistakes have you made?” Maberry’s answer made me think I’m going to be okay. I’ve made some mistakes over the years. While they were not necessarily marketing mistakes, I often worry that my mistakes will effect my career. It was comforting to hear that Jonathan Maberry had made loads of mistakes himself and still managed to rise.

Also, Mike answered a question for me. One of my ideas is I would use book trailers to promote my work. However, I didn’t know how to go about having trailers made and what to expect. I’ve poked around the internet a bit, but never found very satisfying answers. Mike has had some pretty cool trailers made for his books and he would know what comes with the territory. I appreciate him answering my question. It was a well-detailed and satisfying answer.

I’ll keep Author’s Guide to Marketing With Teeth on hand so I can look to it when I need to.

Books

This was pretty fun. Rae Carson‘s latest novel Walk on Earth a Stranger is a real American adventure.

It’s 1849. Leah Westfall is fifteen years old. She lives in Georgia with her mother and father. She’s good with the rifle and hunts to feed her family, among other things that most girls in the area prefer not to do.

Leah also has a mysterious ability to find gold.This is the reason her family is well-to-do. It is a secret that hardly anyone knows. But Leah’s father had told her uncle Hiram the secret. In time Uncle Hiram murders her mother and father in order to claim everything that was theirs, including Leah.

When Leah figures out that it was her uncle who murdered her parents, she runs away, disguises herself as a boy and joins the California Gold Rush.

I thought Carson did an outstanding job in showing the hardships of those in the wagon train, crossing the country. I also really appreciated the respect she showed the natives through Leah’s eyes. Though many others in the wagon train were quite ignorant about the natives. At one point they went out of their way to slaughter and run off a herd of buffalo that a tribe was following, just to make things more difficult for the tribe. There were so many buffalo back then, seas of them, but ignorant people wiped them out.

Walk on Earth a Stranger is the first book of a new trilogy. I look forward to the second book.

Books

My friend Stephen Graham King wrote this book. Just Breathe: My Journey Through Cancer and Back is one of the clearest accounts on battling cancer that I’ve come across. But it’s more than just a story about battling cancer, it’s a story about Stephen’s life. We learn about his family, important events in his life, his romances and who Stephen is. Stephen is a friend of mine, but after reading this book, I feel like I know him better than I had before.

But though the book is about more than cancer, cancer is its primary focus. The writing was very easy to understand and the story held my interest. I learned so much from this book and now I have a better understanding of the scary and humiliating ordeal that cancer patients go through.

This is a book I recommend to people who want to understand what it’s like to be a cancer patient.

Books

Oh my, Fifty Shades of Shit. Not. Really, I didn’t think it was bad. It was silly in places, weird in other places, but otherwise I thought it was a decent book. Those who pay attention to me on Facebook might remember that I decided to read E.L. James‘ Fifty Shades of Grey because of all the negativity I was hearing about it. I mean, jeez, a lot of people seriously trash this book. They treat it like it’s the most horrible thing ever written. They insult people who admit they read and enjoyed the book. It’s just my opinion, but I think some of these people–not all of them, mind you–are fucking jerks.

No one should be ashamed of what they read. Read whatever you want. Don’t let anyone tell what you should and should not read. If you enjoyed a book, anyone who insults you over it is an asshole. Stories are subjective, same as any art. What one person enjoys, another person might hate. That’s understandable. But what’s not understandable is the amount of trash people are throwing at the author and the people who enjoyed the book. That’s bullshit, especially when the content of the book doesn’t even seem to be what all the negative reviews are claiming.

A lot of people say the book is badly written. But I don’t understand. Why do people say Fifty Shades is badly written? I read the whole book and I kept thinking “if this is bad writing, then all of your favorite authors owe you an apology for their badly written books.” The writing in Fifty Shades is no better or worse than the writing in any other book I’ve read that wasn’t self published.

Is it that the author doesn’t use very heavy prose, that she keeps the language pretty simple? Is that why people say the book is badly  written? If so, I’d hate to burst your bubble, but sometimes using simple prose makes it easier to read. I found Fifty Shades very easy to read. It had a comfortable, relaxing flow to it. How is that bad writing?

Or is it that Anastasia Steele’s thought process contains a lot of jeez, oh my, holy fuck-shit-cow? Is that why it’s badly written? If so, I don’t see why that’s a big deal. Every inch of this book is in Anastasia’s point of view and I found all those silly thoughts to be true to her character. I know people who seem to think the way she does, so I found all that realistic.

If there’s some other reason why so many people feel the book is badly written, I can’t put my finger on what it might be. I can see how the writing might not have worked for you, but I wouldn’t say it’s bad writing.

The story rolls in a way that makes me think of an Aaron Spelling soap opera.

Anastasia Steele seems to be a bit naïve, but she knows what she’s looking for in life, career and relationship-wise. She thinks for herself. She speaks her mind. She’s not an incredibly strong person and she doesn’t have the best self-esteem, but she makes her  own decisions much of the time. At least that’s what I saw.

I guess the biggest problem people are having with Fifty Shades is they feel it’s promoting rape culture. I really don’t think it is. I didn’t see it that way.

Yes. Christian Grey is a control freak. Yes, he’s also into BDSM. And he makes a contract full of rules that he would like Anastasia to follow. He’s pretty extreme about all this. Yes, he’s weird.

But he didn’t force her to do anything. He didn’t rape her. He talked her into letting him spank her and that stuff. But he let her decide what she was comfortable with and what she wasn’t. They were boyfriend-girlfriend. Christian was a jerk a lot, but he was also good to her too.

The book wasn’t all sex, sex, sex, spank, spank, spank. There was actually more to the story than that. Christian has a lot of issues, but he was aware of them. He even put in effort to be more of something Anastasia would be happy with, because he wanted their relationship to work. Anastasia was doing the same for him, trying to be something that would make him happy.

During most of the BDSM scenes, Christian did not hit her very hard. And he only did these things with her consent. Only at the end of the book, after he talked her into letting him do it, did he spank her hard. And you know what? She decided to leave him because of that. She realized that she wasn’t cut out for that kind of thing and decided she needed to leave.

How about that? Anastasia left Christian Grey and he let her go.

I think a lot of people read this book with a biased mindset. That they had already heard all the negativity about it before they read it for themselves and had already decided they weren’t going to like it. I say this because there are so many claims about this book that I didn’t see. I don’t know what these people are talking about.

Furthermore, this isn’t a story about you or anyone you know. It’s a story about Anastasia Steele and Christian Grey, who are fictional characters.. Whatever goes on between them, who gives a shit if it’s right or wrong, it’s just a story. What are y’all so pissed off about? You’re like the people who insist Santa Claus is white not black. It’s also interesting that the people who want to rid the world of Fifty Shades of Grey are the same people who get uppity about censorship.

All right, now, did I like Fifty Shades of Grey?

Eh, not as much as you were probably thinking. I read the whole book. I don’t see anything wrong  with it, but at the same time, I don’t feel very strongly about the story. I can see why it has done so well on the market. I think it deserves to be the best seller that it is. In some ways I did like it, but in other ways it was kind of boring. Not saying it was badly written, it just didn’t interest me much.

So, no, I probably won’t read the rest of the series.

I feel like there was more I wanted to say,  but I guess it slipped my mind.

Books

Probably everyone has seen the 1989 movie Field of Dreams, starring Kevin Costner, Amy Madigan, Gaby Hoffman, Ray Liotta and James Earl Jones. To me, Field of Dreams is one of the most powerful movies ever made. W.P. Kinsella wrote the novel Field of Dreams is based on. That novel is Shoeless Joe, which I read and reviewed last year. I love the book as much as I love the movie.

Shoeless Joe is Kinsella’s best known work, but he has written six other novels and, I hear, over two hundred short stories. The Essential W. P. Kinsella was released from Tachyon Publications in March. It’s four hundred pages of some of Kinsella’s best short stories.

Much of Kinsella’s work combines baseball and magic, as is the case with some of the stories in The Essential, but magic isn’t present in all of these stories and neither is baseball. Nonetheless, they are all magical in their own way.

Some of the stories were joyful and some were sad, all of them were convincing. Some took me through the struggles of minor league players hanging in there, trying to stay out of trouble, while waiting or hoping for the day they are called up to the Bigs. And there was a story about two retired Major League players living together in an apartment, one of them reuniting with his loved ones who died years ago.

And there were stories about divorced men finding love again. One such story ended on a sad note and was dedicated to Kinsella’s wife who died in 2012. I felt his pain while reading that one.

Kinsella has a gift for getting emotions across in his writing and every one of these stories, no matter the subject, was rich with emotions. I loved them all.