A different version of print-on-demand publication sleaze: Ronald Cohn and Jesse Russel are listed as authors of more than 200,000 books in the Amazon and Indigo catalogues.  What these "books" actually consist of is print-on-demand trade paperbacks of Wikipedia articles.  You order a book, they print off the W'pedia article and bind it, and it ( Read more... )

Gimli: 'I don't wish to meet that old man at unawares without an argument ready to hand, that's all.  Let's go!'

Does that look wrong?  Or more precisely, sound wrong?

I enjoyed the audio book version of The Fellowship of the Ring quite a lot.  Reader Rob Inglis has a reasonable range of voices -- nowhere near Luke Daniels, who reads Kevin Hearne ( Read more... )

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I'm about half way through John Scalzi's Redshirts (one of my recurring filk themes!) and it has just occurred to me that
( Spoilers ahoy! )

I've recently been reminded about a book that I remember reading several times, borrowed from the library, when I was young: The Big Joke Game by Scott Corbett.  Now I'd like to read it again, and the Ottawa library doesn't have it and it's long out of print; used copies are quite expensive.  Do any of you happen to have a copy of it?
 

"In a media-saturated age, you can really start to resent the amount of information you absorb, despite your steadfast disinterest, about certain utterly unworthy subjects.  It's like the data equivalent of secondary smoke inhalation."

-- Christopher Brookmyre, Attack of the Unsinkable Rubber Ducks

I'm about 3/5 of the way through seanan_mcguire 's novel Feed.  It's very engaging; possibly too much so for me right now: it's aggravating my insomnia by crossing over with too many of my random thoughts, rather like the two viruses that started the whole mess in the story.

It occurs to me that George and Shaun don't date at all because they're genre-savvy.  By ( Read more... )

I've been meaning to mention these for a while; I think that a number of my friends will enjoy them.

Charles Stross has written a number of stories and novels about a guy named Bob Howard.  Bob works for the Laundry, a top-secret agency of the British government.  Its mandate is to prevent the incursion of tentacular/demonic monstrosities from other ( Read more... )

Jo Walton's excellent alternate-history novels Farthing and Ha'Penny have been remaindered by the Chapters chain -- hardcovers for $6.  A number of the local stores have them in stock in the "Bargains" areas; you can check availability on-line.  (The third novel in the so-called "Small Change" trilogy, Half a Crown, has been out for just over a ( Read more... )