The Shadows on My Wall Don't Sleep

Kris finally talked me into it. I loaded up my account quickly using the importer and my physical books entered at LibraryThing (those that had ISBNs anyway) and a list of my ebooks that I managed to figure out how to get Calibre to spit out for me (again, those with ISBNs). Between those and the account set up pages of "oh, you like this genre, have you read any of these?" which went on for ages I have a lot of books in there, and I know I'll probably be expanding that when I visit my family and browse the shelves there to remind me of all the books I've read and forgotten.

Before we get to my first review on the site (which is not impressive as reviews go, I'm not much for detail) here's a run down of the Goodreads rating system:
★☆☆☆☆ 1 star "I didn't like it"
★★☆☆☆ 2 stars "It was okay"
★★★☆☆ 3 stars "I liked it"
★★★★☆ 4 stars "I really liked it"
★★★★★ 5 stars "It was amazing"

As a result of this system most of what I read and like ends up with 3 stars. Things I re-read generally end up with 4, and only a very few things get 5 stars. So don't think a 3 star rating from me means it's a bad or even "just mediocre" story, it's something I liked but probably won't re-read any time soon.


The Chinese Maze Murders: A Judge Dee Mystery by Robert van Gulik

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


Unlike modern western mysteries where the detective has one case to solve in the course of the story, Judge Dee solves several, mostly unrelated, cases. As a result the feel of the story is more "slice of life" than "dramatic event", which I enjoyed.

Potential readers should be aware that the story does reflect the culture of the times, both that of the writer and that of Judge Dee. There is a lot of casual violence in the day to day life of the characters, torture is a valid way to obtain confessions, and any executions will be detailed at the end. The violence is not glorified, it's just what happens, but if someone is flayed until their bones are exposed you will know it.

View all my reviews

Any of my journaling friends over there? I joined mostly to try to get around the lameness of the library section of Ravelry (no go, it won't add books that aren't already in the Ravelry database) and now I'm stuck with a lonely account.

I'm going to limit myself to adding books I can physically put my hands on (as opposed to ebooks and things that are currently one thousand miles away) so my inventory there will be skewed away from fiction but maybe it won't be too boring for other people to browse.

I got tired of dealing with web interfaces for posting to my other journals so I finally got around to setting up Semagic to post to them as well as here. This post is mostly to see if it works.

As for the free ebooks, take a look at Wowio. It's restricted to US residents (probably some odd legal issue) and registration is free but you do have to verify you are a US citizen. Since I'm not about to give them my SSN (who would?!) or a creditcard number for that I used the "ISP email address" method. It took them about eight hours to verify my address (possibly because I applied in the wee hours of the morning) but it was painless. You can download up to five books a day so I blew my quota today on the first five chapters of Inverloch. :)

My erratic drawing skills are out to get me.

I've been playing around with Word, figuring out how to print things in signatures ("book format") and to do that I needed something substantial, and because I don't want to waste paper, something that is finished and that I will actually read. So I grabbed an old Daria fanfic that I've read a few times and dumped it into Word. It was a good choice because it actually had a lot of endnotes, which I changed to footnotes. I might as well learn a few new things about Word (and this version of Word, which is newer than what I had been using on my old machine) while I'm at it, right?

What does this have to do with my drawing skills? Well my book is going to need a cover of course. I don't like any of the existing fanart for the story so I figured I'd just scribble something in PSP. I did start something with vectors and it was sort of cool but it was really taking too long so I saved it off to work on at some later date (a few years from now most likely) and grabbed the old tractor feed printer paper and a colored pencil.

And drew something I really like.

Dammit.

So I scanned a copy (red pencil scans pretty well in greyscale) and saved that off. Just in case I decide to rework it later like I do my usual stuff. Now I either ink the original sketch and do my usual color job or I try digitally painting the original sketch (paint, not color, as in no outlines) or both.

All of which is a lot more work than my original "toss of a sketch and use that for the cover" intent.

And, just to top things off, this is one of those black on black on black on black images. Daria's normally dark auburn hair was dyed "greenish black" with white streaks in the story, the wings and dress are black, with black feathers and beads and such. Please insert my normal "I hate working with shades of black" bitchfest here, thanks.

1. Total number of books I own:
If "own" can be interpreted to "bought" then I have to count the 3000 (+/- a few hundred) paperbacks that my mother and brother are holding hostage in Massachusetts. ;> They're communally owned, though I was the one that actually bought over 95% of them. (And my brother and I will likely have battles when the time comes to divide them up, I want all the Nortons but he wants at least one of her series. There may be some negotiation over getting them duplicated somehow.)

Now for books actually in my vicinity... I guesstimate another hundred or two.

2. The Last Book I Bought:
Erf. I've been broke so long that it's been a while. I think the last bunch (I never buy just one book, unless I'm buying in the airport) included books 4 and 5 of the Harry Dresden series by Jim Butcher and The Service of the Sword (Honor Harrington anthology).

3. The Last Book I Read:
Well I tried to read a book on reincarnation which billed itself as the best book on the subject that I'd read in this lifetime... my next lifetime had better have better books on the subject. I guess the last one I completed was Death Masks, the 5th Harry Dresden book.

I think at 55 chapters (with one more in the works) The Best Defense by joisbishmyoga qualifies as a book. I read the whole thing through again (for the 4th or 5th time) last weekend.

4. 5 Books that mean a lot to me:
This would be a lot easier if it said "that I like a lot"....

The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien - Mom read this to me so often that eventually when I asked her to read it to me again she suggested that I read it myself. I think this is the first non-children's book that I read myself.

The Dragonriders of Pern by Anne McCaffrey- The books (it's a trilogy, and I should include the Harper Hall trilogy here as well) I read after I exhausted every horse book in the library.

Witch World by Andre Norton - What I read after Dragonriders and the start of my Andre Norton obsession. I find Gates fascinating, and Ms. Norton wrote a lot of books with Gates, not just the Witch World series.

Flanker's Tale by William J. Rogers (hafoc) - How often do you get to read a series of five novels as they are written? I really should read the current edit, it's been a few years and I know he's made a lot of changes since the last time I read it. It has Gates. :)

Sargasso of Space by Andre Norton - Really, I should say "The Solar Queen Series". This is the one series that I know my brother and I are going to go head to head over when the time comes to divide the book collection. Maybe by then the whole series will have been republished (several of the books have been already, but not all of them).

Tag 5 people and have them (refuse to?) put this in their journal:
Most of my friends have already done this meme, someone I name is sure to have done it.
morganalilith
toy_dragon
dewhitton
chrissawyer
toshirodragon

Via athelind and hafoc

1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open the book to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the next 3 sentences on your blog along with these instructions.
5. Don’t you dare dig for that “cool” or “intellectual” book in your closet! I know you were thinking about it! Just pick up whatever is closest.

A cell phone rested on the counter beside a pad of hotel stationary. A woman appeared in the window dressed in a long gown of dark silk, and picked up the cell phone. She answered it without speaking and a moment later said, "I'm sorry. You've the wrong number."

Given that Andre Norton passed away today I wish that had been one of her books. Unfortunately "my" Norton collection is in the possession of my mother (who started it) and is therefore about one thousand miles away.

Andre Norton's Witch World books were what I read after finishing all the horse books in the local library. To this day those books influence how magic presents itself in my own worlds. My taste in science fantasy is undoubtedly the result of reading (and re-reading) dozens of her works. Beyond the magic of Witch World she created the magic of the Thassa (Moonsinger books), the Wyverns of Warlock, that of Simsa (a Forerunner born thousands of years after her race vanished from history), and several more that I can't recall without glancing at her titles. Her Free Traders often discovered long lost races and vanished civilizations, some even found the latest sanctuary of the People Under the Hills. People and animals often communicated as equals (Beast Master series most notably).

I think what I enjoyed most though was that she write so many different series and standalone novels that all fit into one universe spread over time and space. The Moonsinger partnered with a Free Trader and found the new land of Fairy at some point after the crew of the Solar Queen opened trade with the Salariki and before the Patrol was overrun and forced to the fringe of the galaxy, rediscovering the legendary home of the human race. Magic and starships weren't mutually exclusive and the animals on some frontier planet might just be the degenerate descendants of an advanced civilization.

1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open the book to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.
5. Don't search around and look for the "coolest" book you can find. Do what's actually next to you.

"If none of the specifiers BOTH, LEADING, or TRAILING are given, BOTH is assumed."

Okay, found this through a post by dewhitton but for this snarky comment you really don't need to hunt down this Amazon.com review by Anne Rice. I'm going to quote the relevant portion here:

And no, I have no intention of allowing any editor ever to distort, cut, or otherwise mutilate sentences that I have edited and re-edited, and organized and polished myself.

So the scene in Interview With a Vampire where a black woman is described both as beautiful and as if carved from diorite* is all Anne's fault and I don't get to blame an editor for not catching that horrendous blunder? I literally tossed the book aside and ignored it (more than 300 pages into the book at that point) for three weeks over that one word.

*For the non-geologists, diorite is a coarse-grained, black and white rock. It's speckled. A dalmatian could be carved from diorite, not a beautiful black woman. If she needed a rock to use in the description she could have used basalt or gabbro or obsidian or onyx (to name a few). The first three are all usually black, onyx is actually more often striped but people are used to thinking of it as black due to its use in jewelry.