Daily Thoughst 12/23/2009

art piece at title page of William Blake, painter and poet by Richard Garnett Publisher: London, Seeley 1895

Daily Thoughts 12/23/2009

Article Forget Ebooks Future of the Book Far More Interesting http://bit.ly/5aEiiY . This reminds me of two trends I have seen in books. The first is the multimedia tablet released by Sports Illustrated which is designed to look like a magazine. The other is the ability to put in a quarter inch thick video screen into a magazine. It is not hard to include thin devices for sound as well.

I remember picking up singing greeting cards. There are also fairly thin electronic ink screens that can put on books as well. When you buy childrens books, they often include push buttons for short songs on the side of the books. These are put out by Disney and Sesame Street. It seems like children will begin expecting to have music and eventually short video clips inside their books.

Things are changing very quickly both in the medium of physical books and online books. I can already see a lot of changes. For example, when I picked up the book Leviathan by Scott Westerfeld it is now being advertised with Youtube video clips as well as being promoted with blog giveaways.

Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters

I have been reading Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters by Jane Austen and Ben H. Winters. There is a considerable difference between this book and Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. Ben H. Winters makes allusions to creatures from the sea, crawling horrors, shipwrecked sailors, pirates, mermaids, undersea divers, and gentleman adventurers. It seems that he is using images from H.P. Lovecraft, Daniel Defoe, Jules Verne, and H. Rider Haggard to lampoon Jane Austen. These authors are more contemporary to Jane Austen than zombie novels and ninjas.

There are some subtle and not so subtle cracks at the genteel literary romance. This makes the novel extremely outrageous at points and very funny. It is easy to miss some of the literary allusions. For example I just realized that the orangutan in the novel named Pierre is a joke on Pierre Boulle's Planet of the Apes.

Things are going smoothly with the shifting in the storage area. They have moved everything up to the letter R. Also, upstairs, the library aides are slowly shifting the collection to make room for the paperbacks to be moved to a new location.

I started weeding again in the 800s. A lot of books have been coming in from our year end order. I am looking forward to seeing the art books which are coming in as well as the graphic novels.

The Red Wolf Conspiracy by Robert V.S. Redick

The Red Wolf Conspiracy by Robert V.S. Redick

This is a wonderfully written fantasy novel. What sets this novel apart is that it is not just big men with swords and wizards. Everything in it from the pipe smoking woman with a red talking cat to the giant ancient magical sailing ship where most of the story resides is beautifully described. The details of the characters are very well done. For example the villains don't just fight and cast magic; they deceive, poison, bully, steal, and enslave.

The heros are quite intriguing, a tarboy (child which mends sales and ropes on ships) named Pazel with a gift for tongues, an intelligent rat, an ambassadors daughter and her bodyguard, and a wizard in the body of a mink. They face many trials from a villainous conspiracy whch is trying to start a war and disguising it as an attempt at peace.

The writing makes the escape into another world seamless. I especially like the creatures in the story, like the ixchel; tiny men who are treated like rats, and the flickermen; men who light up like fireflies and steal children into slavery.

This is a very entertaining story that is intelligently thought out. I look forward to reading the next book in the trilogy which comes out in 2010. If you want an fantasy novel that will keep you up late at night reading this is one of them.