That was essentially my reaction to walking into the Huntington Beach Central Library a few weeks ago (though it looks really nice), and I was reminded of it when I stumbled on this line in Lev Grossman’s The Magician’s Land. (No context for you.) Now I know why Katie laughed when I showed her the picture the day after she finished the book.
A few years back, Mysterious Galaxy, a San Diego bookstore specializing in mystery and science fiction, opened a second location in Redondo Beach. They recently decided to close the newer location and focus on the San Diego store and community events (they’re heavily involved in the local book and comics convention circuits), and held a giant sale to clear out inventory.
I have to admit I’m not terribly surprised. As much as I loved the place, the store was never particularly busy when I dropped in. Although to be honest, we’re part of the problem, since we only managed to visit a few times a year. Neither of us has nearly as much time to read as we used to, and we’re splitting our book purchases between print and digital along somewhat arbitrary lines these days. (I did make a point of using their affiliate account at Kobo, though.)
We went to the sale over the weekend, and found it amusing that of all the Wheel of Time novels remaining on the shelf, the only ones left aside from the final installment were The Path of Daggers, Winter’s Heart, and Crossroads of Twilight — a trio of books widely known for killing fans’ interest in the series. (Crossroads, in particular, is referred to jokingly as “Characters Show Up.”) Fortunately it picked up again with New Spring, a flashback novel focusing on a character who had vanished halfway through the series, set years before the first book. The next book in the main series, Knife of Dreams, turned out to be really good, making me wonder if Robert Jordan’s side trip to the past had re-energized and re-inspired him. The fact that the story picked up again so strongly before his death — before he was even diagnosed, IIRC — gave me a lot more confidence in the concluding trilogy finished by Brandon Sanderson. If that next book had been like Crossroads, I probably would have dropped the series right there.
Sorry I don’t have a new article on Reading Les Misérables this week. I took a break to read Robert J. Sawyer’s latest novel, Red Planet Blues. It’s a detective noir story set on a future Martian colony where people have perfected the art of transferring human minds into robot bodies. It’s expensive, but it also makes modern fingerprint, DNA and other biometric forensics useless, forcing investigators to fall back on good old-fashioned sleuthing. The colony itself is essentially a gold rush town, only instead of gold, people have gone to Mars seeking fossils of long-extinct Martian life.
Sawyer read an excerpt from the novel during his author spotlight at Chicon 7 last summer. It sounded like great fun, and it lives up to its promise.
Unless I get totally swamped, I should be back to Victor Hugo next week…well…probably. There’s a new Julie Czerneda book out, and I’m really tempted to read that now that I know it’s out. I don’t want to lose too much momentum on Les Mis, though.
While reading about Amazon’s purchase of GoodReads, I noticed a link to an article about e-book discovery that points out that a lot of people tend to explore multiple e-book stores. As someone who has done that, I’d like to comment on my experience.
I didn’t really start reading ebooks until I had a device I could use. I don’t like reading fiction on a desktop or laptop computer, and I don’t like reading it on a tiny phone. A couple of years back, Katie bought a Kindle 2, which is just about perfect for the base use case of reading a book from start to finish (though it’s a pain for much of anything else — I imagine the touch screen on the Paperwhite line is a huge improvement). My first serious eBook reading was on that dedicated device, which is linked to her account.
Since I bought a general-purpose tablet last summer, I’ve branched out a bit. I picked up a few books on Google Play because they gave me some store credit when I bought the Nexus 7. At the time, a local independent bookstore that I like, Mysterious Galaxy, had a deal with Google where they could get a cut of what I spent.
I bought other books on the Kindle store, sometimes because of price or special deals, sometimes because of selection. Sometimes I’d even deliberately choose Amazon because the site where I learned about the book had an affiliate link, and I knew I’d be helping to support them. Mostly, I just like the Kindle reader app better.
At the start of the year, Google Play ended their deal with IndieBound. The new choice for independent bookstores seems to be Kobo. I’ve bought a few books from there after linking my account with Mysterious Galaxy, but I still don’t like the reader app much, and the service just seems…well…pushy. I’ve had to turn off a lot of “features” in the app. I don’t want or need recommendations in my status bar, thank you very much. And I sure as heck don’t need “accomplishments” to encourage me to read more. You know what encourages me to read more? Having time to read.
The result is that between the two of us, we’ve got a small library of eBooks spread across two Kindle accounts, Google Play and Kobo…on two mutually exclusive devices. (And that’s not counting the reference books I’ve bought from O’Reilly and saved to Dropbox.)
OK, so it’s not a huge deal now, but as we buy more eBooks, it’s going to get harder to remember which book is on which account when trying to look something up or reread. We already have to discuss how to buy books that we’re both interested in reading.
I like having multiple sources to choose from. Selection, price, being able to support a third party, these are all things that you don’t necessarily get with a fully-siloed approach. But with the way eBooks are handled right now, it does add barriers to finding things.
I would prefer the way digital music purchases work: I can buy from anywhere, download a DRM-free file, and then put everything in one place. It doesn’t matter whether I bought the music from iTunes, Amazon, directly from the artist, or imported it from a CD. There’s no question of where to go when I want to listen to it. (Well, until they switch to an all-cloud-storage model, anyway. The cynical part of my brain wonders if this is the real goal behind that trend.)
On the plus side, since the libraries are searchable, and three of them are linked to the same device, it’s actually an improvement over the years we were living in a too-small apartment with 90% of our books in storage, and it was a question of finding which box they were in.
I found this funny review of Les Miserables (the book) [ack! link deleted!] on GoodReads via Kobo. It’s been 20 years since I read it myself, but it rings true.
…you will not read the abridged version. Don’t you dare. Don’t even think the word “abridged.” Yeah, I know, Victor Hugo frequently turns away from the main narrative to focus on side characters, historical events, religion, philosophy, and other subjects. That’s why this isn’t called “Jean Valjean’s Excellent Adventure.”
The review even mentions the Paris sewers. Because, really, it would have to.
The crazy thing is that, after seeing the movie, digging out my own review of the new stage version, and stumbling on this review of the book…I’m starting to consider re-reading the novel. Because obviously I have gobs of spare time and no new books to read. And at 1200 pages, it’s only 1 1/3 times as long as A Memory of Light! By page count, anyway. It’s not as if the Les Mis edition I have has tiny type, making those page counts not comparable. And it’s not as if Victor Hugo’s prose is that much denser than Robert Jordan, right?
*sigh*
If I do this, it’s going to take me months.
On the other hand, Katie suggested I could live-tweet the re-read. It would be slow, but hey, it could be interesting.
Hmm…
Update: I’m moving forward with the re-read and online commentary!
