The Adventures of Goldilocks and Her Bears

I recently finished Steven Pinker's The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature. It was a fine book, once it got past a rather dreary (but academically required) first chapters that dealt with what he was arguing against.

Once I was done with it, I needed something a bit lighter, so I picked up Around the World in Eighty Days, which I had never read. That was fun!

I followed that up with a trilogy by Pamela Aidan that my grandmother gave me. It's Pride and Prejudice from Mr. Darcy's perspective, drawn out into three books (moo). Aidan did a reasonable job of mirroring P&P, but missed a bit in getting the social details right. It is, thankfully a romance, not porn (remember, I got it from my grandmother), but I'm sure it's much closer to what women wished men felt when falling in love than what actually goes through their minds.

We've been reading the kids books from my childhood library, which is pretty broad. Grandma, before she went batty, was a chiildren's librarian and gave me lots of great books when I was a kid. I am revisiting old friends, and the kids are having a ball, too. One thing stands out to me, though: more recent publications seem to be about TV and movie characters instead of independent stories and characters. Even older characters - Clifford, The Berenstein Bears - seem to be intent on milking the cash cow.

We just picked up The Little Engine That Could. I noticed something that interested me in the pronouns. The first engine, the one that broke down, was female. The ones who refuse to help are all male. The engine that could was a lovely feminine blue (remember that the blue=boy/pink=girl color assignment changed after WWII and this book was originally published in 1930). So, it's a bit of a girl-power book. Who knew?

Dover is haveing a 60% off sale online: http://store.doverpublications.com/by-subject-bargain-bin.html

The Half Price Books on Boscell at Auto Mall Parkway in Fremont (next to the giant Joann's, durn their eyes) is having a paper back clearance: $1 each or 10 for $5. I'm helping!

I'm going to start this book report off with a rant. No, wait, I have more than one rant.

Why is it that book publishers no longer put the number that book is in a series (e.g., Book 17 in the Milking the Cash Cow saga) on the cover or in the introductory pages? That is really starting to tick me off. If I pick up a book in a series, I want to start with the first. If I like it and return to the bookstore for the sequel, I want to know that I'm then picking up the second in the series. Not the third, not the fifth, the second.

I want this information to be easy to find. Putting the number on the cover is best. Including a list of "other books by the author" in the first couple of pages is almost sufficient, as long as you publish the titles of the series in order. Making me guess by including reviews of other books by the author (a practice I consider self-congratulatory masturbation) is not adequate for communicating this vital information. 

Labeling the books with the order would also mean that we could skip the paragraphs or pages of background information, which is, let's face it, boring as hell. Of course, if more authors (and publishers) could find it in their creative hearts to just write single stories instead of making everything into a trilogy or cash-cow series, then this would be a moot point. It has been a long time since I've found a sci-fi, fantasy, or mystery novel that was a stand-alone book. More authors should try them.

Speaking of boredom (and, incidentally, going back to the topic of self-congratulation), I really hate to see authors who have written good stuff get so full of themselves that they forget to listen to their editors. For instance, I think this is where David Weber is screwing up. His early works are pretty darn good. His recent stuff needs a good editor to pare out the extraneous crap.

When I skip ahead in a book out of boredom, I know that the author has not been listening to his editor. The last few Weber books I haven't just skipped ahead a couple of paragraphs. I've skipped chapters. This is not the mark of an engaging writer. This is the sign of a writer who doesn't consider his editor to be an ally in creating the best possible book. That's a real shame.

Finally, I think I may be done with Robin Hobb as an author. She is an incredibly talented writer (which I realize would normally be a reason to continue reading her works), but I've gotten tired of the way she always screws over the protagonists in her stories. I don't read fantasy for that. Gritty unpleasantness is what mysteries are for. I like fantasy to be a little shinier. Now, Hobb is no Terry Goodkind, who should have skipped the writing and just gotten therapy, but I just can't swing another screw-the-hero book. (I'm looking at you, too, George R. R. Martin.)