Thanksgiving 2009 at the American Book Center: the spoils
As I did in 2008, 2007, 2006 and 2005, herewith an account of my Thanksgiving shopping spree at the ABC. Since I'm again cross-posting between the message board and the weblog, a short intro for any non-messageboard people who weren't weblog people yet last year either (there's some, according to my feed subscription counts): English science fiction and fantasy books are somewhat scarce in regular bookstores in the Netherlands. Yet there is one place to go to, one place which makes up for it all. The American Book Center imports from both the US and the UK, and as such has a collection that many people from both the US and the UK have mentioned to be larger and more diverse than anything they know. Members of the ABC and students get a 10% discount. And every year at Thanksgiving, they add another 10% discount on top of this. (20% discount is a big deal in the Netherlands, especially with the lack of choice.) And so there's a yearly pilgrimage to stock up on all those books that everyone's been meaning to buy for a long time now... (Plus the atmosphere at the ABC is always great on this day; very welcome as it doesn't seem to permeate the shiny new store as much as it did in the old place.)This year has been weird where reading time has been concerned. During the first half of the year, I had long daily commutes which allowed me to read nearly two books a week, and make great progress with going through my to-read stacks. But then from July onward, progress pretty much halted due to many changes in my personal life, and so there's still quite a few books left unread from last year's Thanksgiving. Still, I went pretty much all-out with buying new things to read; I'll just have make a point of it this coming year to actually find the time to read them all.
So, herewith, in alphabetical order, the spoils:
* Neal Asher - The Gabble and other stories. (I still haven't read his latest full novel, Line War (though that's currently right at the top of my pile), but I figure that I'll continue liking it well enough, and so some short stories in between that and the next novel will undoubtedly be welcome.)
* Iain M. Banks - Matter. (Banks is pretty much hit-and-miss, but since Matter is a culture novel, and his latest non-Culture novel was a miss, I'm hoping this will be a hit again.)
* Emma Bull - Bone Dance. (The only Emma Bull I've read so far was her collaboration with Steven Brust on one of my all-time favorite books, Freedom & Necessity. I'm still looking to get my hands on a copy of her best known work, War for the Oaks, but meanwhile Bone Dance looked like a thoroughly intriguing book in its own right, so I'll be very interested to see what it'll be like.)
* Brenda Cooper - The Silver Ship and the Sea. (Every year I gamble on some completely unknown (to me) authors; this book is the first of the big gambles from this year. The coverblurb makes me cringe, and although there's a quote from Vernor Vinge inside, it's for a collaboration between this author and Larry Niven, which is pretty much the opposite of a recommendation. And yet...)
* Cory Doctorow - Makers. (Although I highly enjoyed Little Brother, thinking it one of the most important books of last year, I still don't have a very high opinion of Cory's writing ability. As such, I wasn't really planning to look into Makers until it hit paperback. But the hardcover was there, and the coverblurb mentioned "venture capitalists take on a new strategy: backing litigation against companies like Disney", and well, I'm just a sucker for a line like that... *g*)
* Greg van Eekhout - Norse Code. (A horrible generic "babe with sword" cover almost made me put this gamble back on the shelf before even reading the coverblurb, but then I spotted a quote by Steven Brust. Such a quote is rare to such a degree that it became an instant certainty that I'd end up taking it with me, and am even putting it way near the top of the pile.)
* David Louis Edelman - Infoquake. (Yet another gamble, one of many books I picked up this year which had some kind of "the internet of the future, and the daring 'hacker' heroes who're fighting to save/destroy it" angle. What I liked in the coverblurb on this one was that the purpose in this book is to release some new technology to the public in order to keep it safe; that at least makes me hopeful.)
* Steven Erikson - Bauchelain and Korbal Broach. (A long time ago, I bought the first of the Erikson signed limited edition hardcover novellas, Blood Follows, before deciding that I really didn't want to support that exploitative type of publishing (the fans being the ones being exploited here). Now, a mere seven years later, that novella is being joined by The Lees of Laughter's End and The Healthy Dead in this volume, and so I can finally read those other two stories. (Incidentally, I see that my original copy of the PS Publishing edition of Blood Follows (of which I even have two) is now being sold for $250+ on abebooks. Hmm...))
* Michael Flynn - Eifelheim. (Somehow quotes by Orson Scott Card and Jack McDevitt (both authors which I avoid at all cost) weren't quite enough to make me give up on this gamble. I guess the concept of a first contact story set back in the 1300s is original enough that I was willing to overlook it.)
* C.S. Friedman - Feast of Souls. (In the days of yore, I used to be a great fan of C.S. Friedman. Yet then I lost interest in pretty much all "generic" fantasy, and so when she returned to the scene in 2007 with a new fantasy, I picked it up, wavered, and put it down again. But I guess the temptation has remained, and so now I've decided to go and give this one a try anyway.)
* M. John Harrison - Nova Swing. (Last year I picked up M. John Harrison's Light as a gamble. Though darker than I'd hoped for, the universe was rather awesome, and so I didn't have much trouble deciding to see what this next book set in the same universe.)
* Robin Hobb - The Dragon Keeper. (I pretty much stopped being a Robin Hobb fan after the failure which was the Soldier Son trilogy, and then this intended stand-alone Rain Wilds novel was split in two, and so I decided I'd go look at it again when it'd be published in paperback. But, well, y'know, a hardcover at Thanksgiving is almost the same as a paperback, and it is set in the Rain Wilds, after all...)
* David Marusek - Mind Over Ship. (Back in 2007 I gambled on David Marusek's Counting Heads, and pretty much won the jackpot, as the book was totally awesome. So here I am, two years later, picking up the next volume in hardcover.)
* David Marusek - Getting to Know You. (Wanting more, I also picked up this short story collection.)
* Kelly McCullough - WebMage. (Another gamble like Infoquake, I really don't have high hopes of reading the story of this
hacker extraordinairein a world where
magic has gone digital. But still, it's barely 300 pages, so the gamble of reading it probably won't cost me too much.)
* Paul Melko - Singularity's Ring. (Quotes by Charles Stross, Robert J. Sawyer, Karl Schroeder, John Barnes and Neal Asher. One can hardly call this a gamble anymore; plus, I'm rather looking forward to seeing how this author writes a character consisting of five individual humans.)
* Larry Niven & Jerry Pournelle - The Mote in God's Eye and The Gripping Hand. (Each year I buy a couple of books which I read way back when during my library days, but am still missing in my personal library. These two books fall in that category.)
* A.E. Van Vogt - The World of Null-A. (Another classic which was missing from my library, and which I'll desperately need to reread in order to be able to fully enjoy John C. Wright's sequel, below.)
* Tad Williams - The Dragonbone Chair, Stone of Farewell, To Green Angel Tower Part 1 and 2. (More books which were shamefully lacking in my library. I really need to reread these as well, to see if I can gain a proper appreciation for what Tad did in them, which I didn't have the first time I read them as a teenager.)
* Walter Jon Williams - This is Not a Game. (The (Orbit) cover reminded me strongly of the (Orbit) cover of Halting State by Charles Stross. I suspect that's exactly the association Orbit was going for. Either way, it's a near future science fiction, in which an online game plays a big role, so it was an easy choice to gamble on it.)
* John C. Wright - Null-A Continuum. (I had high hopes for John C. Wright, calling his originality reminiscent of Roger Zelazny. So far that's a comparison which hasn't really quite proven to be justified, but I'll still keep following his work with great interest. Here, he's doing a sequel to A.E. Van Vogt's classic Null-A (which I'll have to reread, first), an although I'm generally opposed to authors extending well-loved classics (see Amber, Dune, etc), this one feels like a justified tribute.)
The total clocks in at 25 books, requiring two shiny black ABC bags to carry out. If you're interested in what I think of the books (especially the gambles), keep an eye on the What's everyone reading at the moment? thread.