{"id":3489,"date":"2010-02-16T23:45:23","date_gmt":"2010-02-17T04:45:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/?p=3489"},"modified":"2010-02-17T00:46:11","modified_gmt":"2010-02-17T05:46:11","slug":"vaguely-book-related","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/2010\/02\/16\/vaguely-book-related\/","title":{"rendered":"Vaguely book-related"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>You know the drill: links with pithy comments.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Let&#8217;s start off this list with <a href=\"http:\/\/www.tor.com\/index.php?option=com_content&#038;view=blog&#038;id=58734\">Jo Walton costing me a pile of money<\/a>. I&#8217;ve mentioned before enjoying her Tor.com reviews, and finding significant alignment between her tastes and mine&#8230; so when she <a href=\"http:\/\/www.tor.com\/index.php?option=com_content&#038;view=blog&#038;id=58734\">reviews a series of spy novels<\/a> that I somehow <em>have never even heard of<\/em>, and makes them sound very interesting indeed, that&#8217;s going to get me interested in reading the books. Then when the comments support this almost universally, and include the fact that I&#8217;ll have to have read these in order to get all the in-jokes in the next of Charles Stross&#8217; Laundry books&#8230; well, let&#8217;s just say I&#8217;m going to have to track down a set of these books. Fortunately a mission like that, which once would have been a noticeable effort, has been reduced to the work of but a few minutes at the keyboard. Although I might just wait, since it looks like <a href=\"http:\/\/www.orionbooks.co.uk\/10169-0\/Author-Anthony-Price.htm\">Phoenix is starting to reprint them in July<\/a>. (And how is it that I&#8217;ve not previously heard of Price&#8211;it seems rather unlikely.)<\/li>\n<li>Generally speaking, I prefer print interviews and transcripts to video and\/or audio&#8211;I find I can take in the material faster, and in most cases that&#8217;s the key point. For some authors though, I like to try and get a better sense of their personality through the additional information you get via those other channels. This is generally why I enjoy <a href=\"http:\/\/www.bookotron.com\/agony\/index.html\">Rick Kleffel&#8217;s interviews<\/a>. Another example would be <a href=\"http:\/\/www.reddit.com\/r\/blog\/comments\/b039q\/author_peter_straub_answers_your_questions_and\/\">Peter Straub&#8217;s Youtube Q&#038;A session.<\/a> Or <a href=\"http:\/\/www.sffaudio.com\/?p=15939\">Lawrence Block doing a reading<\/a>. I&#8217;ll take the time to watch those.<\/li>\n<li>I believe I have made <a href=\"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/tag\/fred-phelps-blows-goats\/\">my feelings on Fred Phelps<\/a> and his brood pretty clear, so you can imagine how pleased I was to find a whole book on them, free online. There&#8217;s <a href=\"http:\/\/www.skeptictank.org\/hs\/atohate.htm\">some interesting back-story to why the book is currently public domain<\/a>, but since it is, you can have a look at <a href=\"http:\/\/www.addictedtohate.com\/\">Addicted To Hate<\/a>. You know, if you have a strong stomach. If you&#8217;re more of a video guy, I&#8217;m still recommending the piece Louis Theroux did&#8211;you can find it on youtube by searching for &#8220;<a href=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=bOrz5k0jWdU\">The Most Hated Family In America<\/a>&#8220;.<\/li>\n<li>I have distinct memories of reading The Merchant of Venice in high school English&#8211;and unlike rather a lot of Shakespeare I haven&#8217;t revisited it, or had  chance to interact with it as an adult. Even given that, I did find this piece about <a href=\"http:\/\/www.theamericanscholar.org\/shylock-my-students-and-me\/\">how teaching the play has changed over 30 years<\/a> for a particular instructor very insightful.<\/li>\n<li>In one of those weird bits of synchronicity, the link to that last article was immediately preceded in my RSS reader by a link to <a href=\"http:\/\/inkskratch.com\/blog\/thespian-thursdays-the-merchant-of-venice\">this<\/a>. Gifted Toronto artist Eric Kim has been doing two panel versions of The Bard&#8217;s works (&#8220;Thespian Thursdays&#8221;), and that&#8217;s his take on The Merchant. You should absolutely also check out Eric&#8217;s online web comic <a href=\"http:\/\/www.streta.txcomics.com\/\">Streta<\/a>. It starts off looking like it&#8217;s going to be a relationship story, and then right around page 5 things get nuts! Great fun so far, check it out.<\/li>\n<li>I&#8217;m not too impressed with the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2010\/02\/12\/world\/europe\/12germany.html?hpw\">it&#8217;s-not-plaigarism-it&#8217;s-remix-culture-you-don&#8217;t-understand-because-you&#8217;re-a-dinosaur<\/a> argument. First off, I have <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Escape_from_Noise\">Negativland albums that I&#8217;ve been regularly listening to<\/a> since before the person making the argument was conceived, and I am&#8211;right now, as I type this&#8211;listening to <a href=\"http:\/\/www.kleptones.com\/pages\/downloads_ud.html\">the Kleptones<\/a>, so don&#8217;t tell me I don&#8217;t get remix culture. Secondly, you know what one of the key characteristics of a remix is: that you don&#8217;t start by claiming it&#8217;s entirely an original work until you get caught sampling. Bah. Get off my lawn.<\/li>\n<li>Yeah, so they&#8217;re going to do <a href=\"http:\/\/www.slashfilm.com\/2010\/02\/11\/shocker-roland-emmerich-will-film-asimovs-foundation-trilogy-as-3d-mo-cap-epic\/\">a trilogy of movies adapting Asimov&#8217;s Foundation trilogy<\/a>&#8230; as 3D motion capture movies. Yes, that&#8217;s right&#8211;you will be able to see the predictably behaviour of statistically significant sets of humanity over time IN 3D. I predict a lot less talking than in the books, and many, many more exciting space battles.<\/li>\n<li>Hey look&#8211;<a href=\"http:\/\/billcrider.blogspot.com\/2010\/02\/forgotten-books-bullet-for-cinderella.html\">a free electronic version of one of John D. MacDonald&#8217;s pulp novels<\/a>. Have I mentioned my contention that JDM is the single finest storyteller produced by America in the last century?<\/li>\n<li>Hmmm. <a href=\"http:\/\/site.xavier.edu\/polt\/keeler\/\">Harry Stephen Keeler<\/a> seems to be <a href=\"http:\/\/twitter.com\/harryskeeler\/\">tweeting from beyond the grave<\/a>. You know about Keeler, right? Gaiman calls him &#8220;one of my very favourite authors in the world. Greatest bad writer, or worst great writer, of 20th century.&#8221; I wouldn&#8217;t go that far, but he&#8217;s sure fun to read&#8211;even in 140 character chunks.<\/li>\n<li>And finally, you writing process junkies&#8211;and you know who you are&#8211;might want to <a href=\"http:\/\/www.grahamjoyce.net\/blog\/2010\/02\/forty-days-you-wish.html\">watch Graham Joyce&#8217;s feed closely<\/a> for the next little while.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p class=\"excerpt\">You know the drill: links with pithy comments. Let&#8217;s start off this list with Jo Walton costing me a pile of money. I&#8217;ve mentioned before enjoying her Tor.com reviews, and finding significant alignment between her tastes and mine&#8230; so when she reviews a series of spy novels that I somehow have never even heard of, and makes them sound very&hellip; <a href=\"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/2010\/02\/16\/vaguely-book-related\/\">Read more &rarr;<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[8,12],"tags":[109,101,257,458,337,108,432,382,99,155],"class_list":["post-3489","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-linkapalooza","tag-adaptations","tag-aging","tag-authors","tag-books","tag-education","tag-fred-phelps-blows-goats","tag-john-d-macdonald","tag-science-fiction","tag-things-to-buy","tag-webcomics","xfolkentry"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5UQvw-Uh","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3489","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/13"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3489"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3489\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3493,"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3489\/revisions\/3493"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3489"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3489"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3489"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}