Dumping some ballast

In our apartment, ~e and I have two full book cases and multiple floor stacks of Advance Readers' Copies. Today, I spent a few productive hours pruning out ARCs we've read and those that we've had for more than 3 years without reading. The book cases are still full, but at least I was able to eliminate the floor stacks.

This leaves us with a big honkin' pile of books we must somehow dispose of. Both of us abhor the thought of throwing books in the trash, even if they're just ARCs. So we're hoping you'll help us out by taking these off our hands. At first, ~e and I tried to come up with a good way of fairly distributing the goodies, but gave up on that notion in the hope of better achieving our goal of getting all this stuff out of our way.

So this is how it's going to work. I've listed what we have available below, with links to Amazon so you can read plot summaries and customer reviews. You can request as many books as you'd like in the comments of this post, in response to my twitter or facebook posts, or via email to books at mcaudill dot net. First come, first served. I'll update this post from time to time to reflect what's still available.

If you work with either me or ~e or if you'll be at Supper Club in Lexington on June 6th or at Snadra's party on July 4th, we can hand deliver your selections to you at no cost.
If you require shipping of your picks, we can do that too. However, we'll have to charge enough to cover the postage. Shipping via USPS Media Mail (within the continental US) will be $2.50 for the first book and $0.50 for each additional book. Just contact me and we'll work it out.

So that's everything. Now start browsing through the list below and take these books!

EDIT: I'm leaving this open until July 3rd June 15, but we'd appreciate it if people claimed books earlier than that. Right now, they're taking up all the space on our dining room table.

EDIT @ 5/21/09: I've changed my blog settings so that anyone can post a comment, not just those currently logged into Gmail. So if you couldn't post before, try again now.

EDIT @ 6/6/09 No longer attending the event on July 4th, so I'm moving the expiration date on this offer forward to June 15th. If there's anything here you want, please let me know before then.

EDIT @ 6/18/09 It's over. Thanks to everyone who participated. I feel much less guilty about binning the dregs, now.

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Claimed

General Fiction & Humor

The House of Paper - Carlos Maria Dominguez

The Monsters of Templeton - Lauren Groff

Who's Irish? - Gish Jen

Parasites Like Us - Adam Johnson

Almost Single - Advaita Kala

The Pleasure of My Company - Steve Martin

Fourth Comings - Megan McCafferty

The Wages of Genius - Gregory Mone

The Only Good Thing Anyone Has Ever Done - Sandra Newman

Fat Girls and Lawn Chairs - Cheryl Peck

Captain Freedom - G. Xavier Robillard

Mr. Sebastian and the Negro Magician - Daniel Wallace

Science Fiction, Fantasy, Horror, & Mystery/Thriller

Evolution - Stephen Baxter

The High King's Tomb - Kristen Britain

Magic Street - Orson Scott Card

Slow Train to Arcturus - Eric Flint & Dave Freer

Pattern Recognition - William Gibson

The Host - Stephenie Meyer

The City & The City - China Mieville

Iron Council - China Mieville

Victory of Eagles - Naomi Novik

The Necessary Beggar - Susan Palwick

Claws That Catch - John Ringo & Travis S. Taylor

The Last Colony - John Scalzi

Infected - Scott Sigler

An Unpardonable Crime - Andrew Taylor

Off Armageddon Reef - David Weber

Young Adult & Intermediate Readers

Kingdom of the Golden Dragon - Isabel Allende

Ana's Story: A Journey of Hope - Jenna Bush

Dragon Rider - Cornelia Funke

Skulduggery Pleasant: Playing with Fire - Derek Landy

Wicked Lovely - Melissa Marr

How I Live Now - Meg Rosoff

So B. It - Sarah Weeks

History, Memoir, & Biography

The Indifferent Stars Above - Daniel James Brown

The Cross and the Crescent: Christianity and Islam from Muhammad to the Reformation - Richard Fletcher

Witness: Voices from the Holocaust - Joshua M. Greene & Shiva Kumar (editors)

All Elevations Unknown - Sam Lightner, Jr.

History of Ireland - Malachy McCourt

Frost On My Moustache - Tim Moore

Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life - Amy Krouse Rosenthal

Rough Crossings - Simon Schama

The Beatles - Bob Spitz

The Billionaire's Vinegar - Benjamin Wallace

The Frozen Water Trade - Gavin Weightman

A Crack in the Edge of the World - Simon Winchester

Business, Economics, Current Events, & Social Sciences

Sway - Ori Brafman & Rom Brafman

On Paradise Drive - David Brooks

The Ice Cream Maker - Subir Chowdhury

The Pecking Order - Dalton Conley

The Untied States of America - Juan Enriquez

Work Naked - Cynthia C. Froggatt

Freakonomics - Steven D. Levitt & Stephen J. Dubner (this is not the updated edition)

A Whole New Mind - Daniel H. Pink

The Robot's Rebellion - Keith E. Stanovich

Miscellaneous Nonfiction

Meat: A Love Story - Susan Bourette

Between You and I: A Little Book of Bad English - James Cochrane

Knitting for Good! - Betsy Greer

Masters of Doom - David Kushner

Doing Our Own Thing: The Degradation of Language and Music and Why We Should, Like, Care - John McWhorter

So Many Books, So Little Time: A Year of Passionate Reading - Sara Nelson

Life's Little Annoyances - Ian Urbina

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Dumped

General Fiction & Humor

Acts of Faith - Philip Caputo

Downtown Owl - Chuck Klosterman

A Changed Man - Francine Prose

At First Sight - Nicholas Sparks

The Song Reader - Lisa Tucker

Science Fiction, Fantasy, Horror, & Mystery/Thriller

Acorna's Rebels - Anne McCaffrey & Elizabeth Ann Scarborough

Victory of Eagles - Naomi Novik (one copy left)

Pale Death - David & Aimee Thurlo

Young Adult & Intermediate Readers

Molly Moon's Incredible Book of Hypnotism - Georgia Byng

A Sterkarm Kiss - Susan Price

The Devil's Toenail - Sally Prue

Dancing in my Nuddy-Pants - Louise Rennison

History, Memoir, & Biography

Two Lives - Vikram Seth

Business, Economics, Current Events, & Social Sciences

Joy at Work - Dennis W. Bakke

Cyberselfish: A Critical Romp Through the Terribly Libertarian Culture of High-Tech - Paulina Borsook

When Markets Collide - Mohamed El-Erian

The Flight of the Creative Class - Richard Florida

Global Values 101 - Kate Holbrook, Ann S. Kim, Brian Palmer, & Anna Portnoy (editors)

A Hundred & One Days - Asne Seierstad

Miscellaneous Nonfiction

The Making of a Bestseller - Brian Hill & Dee Power

Family problems

Read: March 5 through March 17, then finished post-honeymoon on April 2
Title: Honor of the Clan
Authors: John Ringo & Julie Cochrane
ISBN: 9781416555919
Binding: Hardcover

Depending on where you look, this book is either the 7th or 10th book in Ringo's Legacy of the Aldenata series (which started back in 2000 with A Hymn Before Battle - you can read the first book free online) and it's definitely the 3rd book in the Cally's War spinoff series. Regardless, take it as given that there's a lot of backstory.

Short summary: An omnivorous and voracious species called the Posleen is spreading across space, eating everything it encounters. The Galactic Federation makes contact with humans and tells us that we're in the path of the oncoming horde and offers to help us if we'll just pledge ourselves to fighting the Posleen. Unfortunately, none of the member races of the Federation can actually help with the fighting bit because they've all been genetically uplifted in the far distant past by the meddling godlike hand of the Aldenata and violence is unthinkable to them (literally in the case of one of the species - they go berserk and die if their thoughts get too bloody). Therefore, it's up to good old humanity and our untrammeled aggression to save the day. Of course, some of the Galactics don't want to risk trading one dangerous species for another and so endeavor to make sure we conveniently extinct ourselves in the process of exterminating the Posleen.

By the time of Honor of the Clan, more than half a century after the beginning of the first book, the Posleen presence on Earth has been reduced in most places to scattered wandering ferals, but the human population is also much reduced. Billions died during the decades of war and Cally, one of the daughters of the main character of the first few books, is presumed to be among them. Instead, she went underground and is now one of the leaders of the human resistance against the Darhel. The Darhel are the administrators and bankers of the Galactic Federation. They're also the ones who sneakily tried to wipe us out (sneakily, because they're the ones whose noggins go pop if they too directly ponder killing*).

I'm not even going to attempt a plot summary here. Nobody should start reading the series with this book, because by the time you get to this point the plot threads are so convoluted that any new reader is going to immediately get lost. It doesn't help that new readers will have no idea who any of the characters are or why they should care. This is definitely a series that builds on previous books and rewards the faithful reader.

I have to admit that Ringo books are guilty pleasures for me. Even though I'm sometimes appalled by the politics and actions of many of his characters, the man can tell one hell of a rip-roaring story. That said, I am not directly recommending this particular book solely for the reasons listed in the previous paragraph. However, I am recommending that you start at the very beginning with A Hymn Before Battle (if you don't want to buy it, read it online) to see if you want to go any farther. Just be forewarned that the timbre of the series changes quite a bit with When the Devil Dances, completed after September 11th. Or, if you'd rather skip all the Starship Troopery goodness and get directly into the gritty cloak and daggery bits, you can start with the first book of the spinoff series, Cally's War.

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*The Darhel inability to directly contemplate murder leads to a lot of verbal circumlocutions that would make any movie mobster proud. I don't have any examples in front of me at the moment, but there was quite a bit of the "He is becoming a problem that must be solved" and "Make him an offer he can't refuse" sort of stuff going on. No horse heads in beds, though.

No acquisitions this week

Much like a boa constrictor that has swallowed an entire pig, I'm still trying to digest the massive influx of books from last week.

Scoreboard

At the end of the 20th week of this year, I have completed 22 books.

January - Six
February - Four (all but one of them in the Dresden Files series)
March - One (started Feb 22 and finished March 4. Turns out a wedding eats up a lot of your time!)
April - Six (two of which were omnibus editions, so I really read eight books)
May - Five to date, with one more in progress

I've reviewed 11 and have 11 more in my todo stack.

If I can just keep up this rate, I'll have plenty of buffer in place by the time November and December roll around and annihilate all my free time.

It's even better that the illustrator is named Bruce

Read: March 4
Title: Diary of a Wombat
Author: Jackie French
Illustrator: Bruce Whatley
ISBN: 9780547076690
Binding: Paperback

I don't plan on making a habit of reviewing the picture books I browse through at work, and I won't be counting this one as one of my book-a-week reads, but it was just too damn adorable not to at least get a mention. This delightfully illustrated book covers a week in the life of a young female wombat. At first, she's doing normal wombat things like eating grass, sleeping, scratching, sleeping, digging in the dirt, eating grass, and sleeping. Then some strange creatures move in nearby and a whole new world of experiences appear. Now she can add wonderful things such as carrots and oats to her diet, though she also encounters unexpected new enemies such as welcome mats ("Discovered flat, hairy creature invading my territory. Fought major battle with flat, hairy creature. Won battle. Neighbors should be pleased. Demanded a reward."). At the end, she decides that these "human beings" are easily trained and will likely make good pets.

What's not to love about this book? I mean, it's about wombats! The art is great. It even turns out that the story is based on real events in the life of the author (including the time a wombat clawed a hole through the door of her house so it could come in and demand some carrots). If you want more information on wombats and a more detailed background to the story, read How to Scratch a Wombat by French (also illustrated by Whatley).

It's not Occam's Razor

Started: February 22
Finished: March 4
Title: Lucy's Blade
Author: John Lambshead
ISBN: 9781416555773
Binding: Mass Market Paperback

Yet another bad cover! The woman depicted is supposed to be a sixteen year old girl in Elizabethan England. Granted, she's sharing her body with a being of pure energy from the far future (or perhaps a parallel dimension), but that still doesn't explain the ridiculous rack. Must be an example of "most common superpower". It's become egregious enough with most books published by Baen that I've begun thinking of the publishers name as being an acronym for Boobs Adorn Each Novel.

This book mostly takes place in the Elizabethan era, but also features both a few modern-day or near future scenes and one bit set in the unimaginably far future. In the more or less now, a woman working (or compelled to work for) a shadowy organization steals a chest from an archeological dig and then, against orders, opens the chest and is hypnotized by the enormous diamond inside. We'll call this the wrapper story, as the book is written somewhat as though the tale is being told to her.

In the short bit set in the distant future, an intelligence is created for the sole purpose of being flung into the past (or across the dimensions) to search for the genesis of her people. It appears that there's a religious schism in the works between those that believe the energy beings descended from or were created by organic life and those that believe they arose naturally or in some way unrelated to the organics. The young intelligence successfully lands in the more or less modern day, colonizes the internet, and sucks up all the information she can lay her mind on. Just as she's getting ready to jump back home (likely causing every computer on the planet to crash in the process), she's grabbed by an unknown force and dragged further into the past, where she is caught first by one demon summoner and then by another. The latter summoner is working for Queen Elizabeth's head spy, Sir Francis Walsingham. Unfortunately, Walsingham's niece breaks the summoning circle and the energy being enters her. This has the beneficial effect of basically turning Lucy into something very like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but means that Lilith (a name the energy being picked up from the first summoner) can't leave without killing her.

Of course, it turns out that the first summoner is working with people trying to assassinate the queen. Lucy, with her new powers and the help of Lilith's vast intellect, jumps into the fray to help foil the plot. A series of adventures occur. At the end of the book, the current-day lady awakes from her diamond-bedazzled daze in possession of immensely important knowledge and also in great danger. A sequel appears assured, probably focused on sleepy-gal.

This appears to be a first novel (the only other things I can find under the author's name are a few Warhammer game supplements), but it reads well. My only real quibble is that the book sometimes feels like a collection of short stories stitched together with bridging text. I'm not going to force this one on all my friends and family, but I do plan on reading any other books Lambshead comes out with (as long as they aren't more sourcebooks for a game I don't play).

TGIF

Started: February 21
Finished: February 24
Title: Saturn's Children
Author: Charles Stross
ISBN: 9780441015948
Binding: Hardcover

Let's just get this out of the way at the beginning. I'm so very very glad I read this one in hardcover, because that allowed me to remove the dust jacket and carry the book around in it's (ironically) less mortifying naked form. And if you think the cover is bad from the thumbnail to the left, let me assure you it's even worse when you're faced with the full wrap-around art that places a sexbot crotch on the spine of the book.

Yep, you read that right, sexbot. The main character of the book, Freya, is a humanoid robot designed for sex. Unfortunately, she was put in storage after construction and didn't get activated until around 100 years after the death of the last human being. This leaves her scrambling for other jobs in an attempt to both find purpose in "life" and keep from going into debt and getting slave-chipped, all the while facing the prejudices leveled against her due to her too-accurate humaniform shape. In a solar system where the robot aristocracy look like elves and chibi manga characters and the lowest classes are the machines that look like machines, Freya is decidedly lower middle class.

At the beginning of the book, she accidentally offends an aristocrat. The aristocrat's companions try to kill her. She runs, calls in favors, and gets off-planet. Someone tries to kill her again. She escapes and flees again, trying to figure out just what the heck is going on. Someone else makes her an offer she can't refuse, and she agrees to carry their package to yet another place in the solar system. All the while, she's learning more about the true purpose for which she and her "sisters" (the other models like her) were created and she keeps stumbling across evidence of opposing secret societies working for and against bringing back humanity from genetic samples.

A year or so ago, I read an interview with Stross in Locus about this book. He said that he'd grown up loving Heinlein novels and that he'd really wanted to write something like them, but that he kept running into a major problem in that human beings are just too damn fragile to go zooming around the solar system the way Heinlein and most other SF authors have 'em do. Either it takes years at a relatively slow speed to get somewhere, by which time the bones have turned to gelatin and cosmic rays have induced fatal cancer, or you go really really fast (probably using nuclear rockets, once again inducing fatal cancer or just frying the people outright) and quite likely pulp the people into red goo. Then he hit upon the solution. Robots! They don't really need air or food and are more resilient to both acceleration and radiation. And then he set to work.

If you've read Heinlein's Friday, you've read the identical cousin to this book. From the names - Freya and Friday - to several of the plot points - smuggling biologicals and the "not a real girl" mental anguish - Stross hits all the requisite targets. Heck, he even goes so far as to (purposefully) make Freya a redhead with nipples that go "spung!" (though in her case, it's due to a faulty overpressure valve). Little nods to other Heinlein works abound, as well. There's the Puppet Masters aspect of being slave-chipped. The ending of the book could be seen as a setup to a story like Orphans of the Sky or the Howard families diaspora in Methuselah's Children. Heinlein isn't the only one riffed, though. There are also references slipped in to writers such as John Scalzi and the Maltese Falcon even makes a brief appearance.

Overall, I liked this book. Stross manages a decent pastiche of Heinlein without crossing the line into outright parody. The little easter eggs tossed in did occasionally lead to me imagining Stross hunched over his keyboard giggling at his own cleverness, but that's more indicative of my flaws than of his and the references did not noticeably detract from my enjoyment of the book. Stross is not "The New Heinlein" any more than are John Varley (whose The Golden Globe may have provided inspiration for some of the details of Freya's trip from Venus to Mercury), Spider Robinson, or the aforementioned John Scalzi. What he is is a talented young writer having a great deal of fun and inviting us along for the ride. Plus, this was probably a good way give his brain a rest from dealing with the complexities of his Merchant Princes series.

More acquisitions

As if the rep breakfast wasn't enough, I've also picked up a few more items this week.

Title: Heroes of the Valley

Author: Jonathan Stroud

ISBN: 9781423109662

Binding: ARC

Publisher: Hyperion

Pub Date: January 2009

Pages: 483 (Amazon claims 496 for the hardcover)

Cost: Free

Obtained from: Freebie case at work

Synopsis: The author of the Bartimaeus Trilogy tackles Norse mythology. Halli Sveinsson, swarthy and stumpy unlike all his siblings, goes too far in playing a prank on Ragnar of the House of Hakonsson and must undertake a hero's quest.

Title: A Christmas Carol and Other Christmas Books

Author: Charles Dickens

ISBN: 9780192806949

Binding: Paperback

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Pub Date: November 2007

Pages: 438

Cost: Free

Obtained from: Freebie case at work

Synopsis: Contains, in addition to the expected work, Dickens' four other Christmas books - The Chimes, The Cricket on the Hearth, The Battle of Life, and The Haunted Man.

Title: Jerusalem Fire

Author: R.M. Meluch

ISBN: 0451139232

Binding: Mass market paperback

Publisher: Signet

Pub Date: November 1985

Pages: 331

Cost: $2.50 + tax

Obtained from: Passage Books

Synopsis: Alihad (meaning "he left") has foiled the evil Na'id empire countless times, but now seems to be trapped by a Na'id squadron closing on his ship. The real battle, however, is to be fought not in space but in a world out of time. I bought this one because I've already read and mostly liked Meluch's Tour of the Merrimack series (Romans in Space!). From what I can discern from the badly written jacket blurb, this one is going to be Jews in Space.

New stuff, Rep Breakfast edition

The week isn't yet over, but ~e and I had the opportunity to attend a breakfast this morning with sales reps from several different publishers. It's always fun glomming new books. Synopses come, when possible, from the sales copy used by the reps.

First, since she was a bit less greedy than me, ~e's acquisitions:

Title: The Other Queen

Author: Philippa Gregory

ISBN: 9781416549123

Binding: Hardcover

Publisher: Touchstone

Pub Date: September 2008

Pages: 438

Price: Free

Obtained from: Simon & Schuster rep

Synopsis: Gregory fictionalizes a little-known episode in the life of Mary, Queen of Scots.

Title: Farm City - The Education of an Urban Farmer

Author: Novella Carpenter

ISBN: 9781594202216

Binding: ARC

Publisher: Penguin Press

Pub Date: June 2009

Pages: 269 (subject to change)

Price: Free

Obtained from: Penguin rep

Synopsis: Memoir of one woman living on a farm in downtown Oakland. The jacket copy mentions that her turkeys keep escaping and winding up with the prostitutes that hang out just off the nearby highway. Sounds interesting.

Title: More of This World or Maybe Another

Author: Barb Johnson

ISBN: 9780061732270

Binding: ARC

Publisher: Harper Perennial

Pub Date: November 2009

Pages: 188 (subject to change)

Price: Free

Obtained from: HarperCollins rep

Synopsis: A collection of stories about four outsiders whose lives intersect on the backstreets of New Orleans, written by a woman who has been a carpenter in New Orleans for more than 20 years. The rep told us that the story "If the Holy Spirit Comes for You," about a pig, has even made workers at meat-packing plants cry.

Title: The Whiskey Rebels

Author: David Liss

ISBN: 9781400064205

Binding: Hardcover

Publisher: Random House

Pub Date: September 2008

Pages: 525

Price: Free

Obtained from: Random House rep

Synopsis: Liss writes historical thrillers infused with financial intrigue. His first novel set in America, The Whiskey Rebels features (among other things) a disgraced spy from George Washington's army, the early days of the Bank of the United States, rival founding fathers, and the volatile whiskey trade.

Title: The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie

Author: Alan Bradley

ISBN: 9780385342308

Binding: Hardcover

Publisher: Delacorte Press

Pub Date: April 2009

Pages: 373

Price: Free

Obtained from: Random House rep

Synopsis: In the summer of 1950, eleven-year-old Flavia de Luce must use her chemistry skills and deductive knowledge to solve a murder at the decaying English mansion her family calls home. When not doing that, she's slowly poisoning her younger sibling. It's being marketed as a "tea-cozy" mystery and I've heard it described as "one of the elderly ladies from Arsenic & Old Lace as a child".

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Next, the things both of us individually marked on our wishlists (we'll have to share, I guess):

Title: The End of Overeating - Taking Control of the Insatiable American Appetite

Author: David A. Kessler, MD

ISBN: 9781605297859

Binding: Hardcover

Publisher: Rodale

Pub Date: April 2009

Pages: 320

Price: Free

Obtained from: Macmillan rep

Synopsis: In this groundbreaking investigation, Dr Kessler explains why we eat more than we need to and what we can do to stop the vicious and unhealthy cycle of overeating. I personally wanted this book because I'd heard the author on NPR earlier this week talking about how he even went dumpster-diving behind restaurants in order to figure out exactly what we were putting into our bodies.

Title: The Fourth Part of the World

Author: Toby Lester

ISBN: 9781416535317

Binding: ARC

Publisher: Free Press

Pub Date: November 2009

Pages: 442 (subject to change)

Price: Free

Obtained from: Simon & Schuster rep

Synopsis: 500 years ago, two obscure German scholars made an epochal leap of the imagination to design the Waldseemuller map, the first map to call the New World America and to declare it separate from Asia. Lester traces the convergence of ideas, discoveries, and social forces that made the Waldseemuller map possible.

Title: Chronic City

Author: Jonathan Lethem

ISBN: 9780385518635

Binding: ARC

Publisher: Doubleday

Pub Date: October 2009

Pages: 422 (subject to change)

Price: Free

Obtained from: Random House rep

Synopsis: It's Jonathan Lethem and therefore nearly impossible to synopsize. We'll try anyway. In short, an ex-child star is living in Manhattan while his fiance is trapped on the International Space Station by low-orbit mines. The child star, named Chase Insteadman, winds up working with a pothead pop critic named Perkus Tooth, a self-loathing ghostwriter named Oona Laszlo, and the NYC mayor's fixer (named Richard Abneg, in case you wanted to know) to unearth the truth. The truth about what, I'm not sure, since the jacket copy is kind of vague on that point.

Title: Coop - A Year of Poultry, Pigs, and Parenting

Author: Michael Perry

ISBN: 9780061240430

Binding: ARC

Publisher: Harper

Pub Date: May 2009

Pages: 352 (not sure if that's the same as the hardcover edition)

Price: Free

Obtained from: HarperCollins rep

Synopsis: The author of Population 485 and Truck: A Love Story tells about his first year of marriage, living on a 37-acre farm in Wisconsin with his new (and newly pregnant) wife. If it's half as good as either of the previous two books, I expect to both laugh and cry (though likely not simultaneously).

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And then there's my trove of treasure. Ahhh, book booty:

Title: Gourmet Rhapsody

Author: Muriel Barbery

ISBN: 9781933372952

Binding: ARC

Publisher: Europa Editions

Pub Date: September 2009

Pages: 141 (subject to change)

Price: Free (and I also got a tiny little themed collection of food writing from several other Europa Editions books, with room to microscopically etch my own recipes at the end.)

Obtained from: Penguin rep

Synopsis: Prequel to The Elegance of the Hedgehog, this is the story of the end of the life of Monsieur Pierre Arthens, the greatest food critic in the world. In his last hours, he desires only one thing, one last taste of the sublime and singular flavor par excellence. The book follows Arthens from childhood to maturity through all manner of culinary delights, and in alternating chapters gives voice to a chorus of acquaintances, familiars, and even enemies.

Title: Johannes Cabal the Necromancer

Author: Jonathan L. Howard

ISBN: 9780385528085

Binding: ARC

Publisher: Doubleday

Pub Date: July 2009

Pages: 290 (subject to change)

Price: Free

Obtained from: Random House rep

Synopsis: Johannes Cabal is obsessed, body, heart, and mind, with raising the dead. He'd be obsessed by soul as well, if he hadn't traded it to the Devil in exchange for knowledge of the laws of necromancy. Unfortunately, it turns out he actually needs his soul for his experiments to succeed, so he travels to Hell and makes a wager with the Devil. He'll get his soul back if he can persuade 100 other people to give up theirs within a year. The jacket copy compares it to Wicked, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.

Title: A Book

Author: Mordicai Gerstein

ISBN: 9781596432512

Binding: Hardcover

Publisher: Roaring Brook Press

Pub Date: April 2009

Pages: 48

Price: Free

Obtained from: Macmillan rep

Synopsis: Yes, I like children's books. What of it? This picture book is the story of a family that lives in a book. The father is a circus clown, the mother is a firefighter, the son grows up to be an astronaut, and even the pets know what their lives are about. The little girl, on the other hand, doesn't know what her story is supposed to be, so she goes exploring. Along the way, she passes through fairy tales, pirate adventures, historical novels, and science fiction, and none of them fit. At the end, as you might expect, she figures out what her story should be. The perspective of looking down into the book kind of reminds me of the Sims.

Title: Karate Pig

Author: Alan Katz

Illustrator: Daniel Moreton

ISBN: 9781416958260

Binding: Board book

Publisher: Little Simon

Pub Date: April 2009

Pages: 16

Price: Free

Obtained from: Simon & Schuster rep

Synopsis: Yep. Another children's book. Karate Pig likes pork-chopping everything in sight. Thanks to the lift-flap, pull-tab nature of the book, he can even knock pieces of the pages off. At the end, he learns that the proper way to treat a book is to read it. I had to had to had to have this one just because of the title. Now that I've had time to sit down and read it (though I'm not planning on doing a full-on review of it), I can happily pass it along to someone who actually has children.

Title: All-Star Batman & Robin

Authors: Frank Miller

Artist:Jim Lee

ISBN: 9781401216818

Binding: Hardcover

Publisher: DC Comics

Pub Date: July 2008

Pages: 240

Price: Free

Obtained from: Random House rep

Synopsis: Frank Miller gives us a grittier reinterpretation of the Boy Wonder's origin story

Title: Amplified - Fiction from Leading Alt-Country, Indie-Rock, Blues, and Folk Musicians

Editors: Julie Schaper & Steven Horwitz

ISBN: 9781933633718

Binding: Paperback

Publisher: Melville House Publishing

Pub Date: May 2009

Pages: 229

Price: Free

Obtained from: Random House rep

Synopsis: Short stories from a whole passel of musicians. I snagged this one because I actually recognized a few of the names.

Title: Crazy for the Storm

Author: Norman Ollestad

ISBN: 9780061766725

Binding: ARC

Publisher: Ecco

Pub Date: June 2009

Pages: 272 (subject to change)

Price: Free

Obtained from: HarperCollins rep

Synopsis: At the age of 11, Norman Ollestad was in a chartered Cessna with his father, his father's girlfriend, and the pilot. The plane crashed into an 8,600 foot mountain in a blizzard and only Norman survived. Alone, he had to make it down the mountain to safety.

Title: The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian

Author: Sherman Alexie

ISBN: 9780316013697

Binding: Paperback

Publisher: Little Brown

Pub Date: April 2009

Pages: 230

Price: Free

Obtained from: Hachette Book Group rep

Synopsis: Sherman Alexie's first YA novel. The story of a boy from the Spokane Indian Reservation who leaves the rez to attend an all-white school in the neighboring farm town where the only other Indian is the school mascot. Inspired by Alexie's own experiences growing up.

Title: Monster

Author: A. Lee Martinez

ISBN: 9780316041263

Binding: Hardcover

Publisher: Orbit

Pub Date: May 2009

Pages: 304

Price: Free

Obtained from: Hachette Book Group rep

Synopsis: Monster (he's human) runs a pest control agency, er, Cryptobiological Containment and Rescue Service, that specializes in the wee (and utterly gigantic) beasties that most folks consider mythological. Got a Yeti in your freezer, eating all your ice-cream (except vanilla. They don't like it.)? Call Monster. He'll fix the problem and you won't even remember it the next day. The jacket copy also mentions something about his girlfriend *literally* being from hell.

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Well, that about covers it. Would you believe there were another half dozen books on our wishlists that we weren't able to get?

New stuff this week

Only one this time.

Title: Forbidden LEGO

Authors: Ulrik Pilegaard & Mike Dooley

ISBN: 9781593271374

Binding: Trade Paper

Publisher: No Starch Press

Pub Date: August 2007

Pages: 179

Price: Free

Obtained from: the freebie pile at work

Synopsis: Written by two guys who design stuff for LEGO, this book tells you how to build the things the company would be sued out of existence for if they ever actually tried to sell 'em. I'm looking forward to building my own candy catapult and LEGO machine gun (or, as they call it, High Velocity Automatic LEGO Plate Dispenser).

A Harry situation

It's been somewhere between two and three months since I read these. Let's hope I haven't forgotten too many details (or moved any bits of plot between volumes).

Read: February 2009
Title: Fool Moon (Book 2 of the Dresden Files)
Author: Jim Butcher
ISBN: 0451458125
Binding: Paperback

At the start of the second book, Harry has been called to a building under construction just outside of town to view a body apparently savaged by a large animal. He just has time to determine that the attacking animal appears to be somewhat but not exactly like a wolf when a group of FBI agents show up to take over the case and somewhat forcefully remind Murphy that she's a little out of her jurisdiction.

Of course, based on the title and the opening scene, I'm sure you've guessed that this book is all about werewolves. What you might not have guessed is just how many different types of were Butcher manages to cram in. As an incomplete list, he's got a pack of college kids who change back and forth with a magic spell, Hexenwolves who transform via magical artifacts given to them by some unnamed other, a Loup Garou cursed to turn into a ravening beast at the full moon, and Lycanthropes who retain their human shape but have souls filled with pure rage (as well as enhanced strength and healing and quite an appetite for blood - think viking berserker). Of course, Harry must bounce from one suspect to another - sometimes literally - as he tries to unravel the mystery of who or what is committing the murders and who or what stands to gain from the results. Oh, and I shouldn't forget to mention that Marcone, the big Mob boss who played a tangential role in the first book, gets much more time in the spotlight this time around.

There's still a good dose of the screaming stupids in this book. Not surprising, since it was published less than a year after the first one hit the bookstores (though it did take a few years for the first one to find a publisher, so the time spent writing the second couldn't have been all that compressed). My biggest pet peeves with this one are that Harry continues to knowingly do dumb and risky things and also continues to withhold crucial information from Murphy in order to "protect" her. Not surprisingly, this leads to a somewhat extreme lack of trust on Murphy's part which results in some of the bruises Harry picks up coming at her hands.

Overall, I rate this book on par or very slightly above the first book. Well-written fight scenes, but they fail to completely overcome the annoying characterizations.

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Read: February 2009
Title: Grave Peril (Book 3 of the Dresden Files)
Author: Jim Butcher
ISBN: 0451458443
Binding: Paperback

This one opens with Harry and his long-time friend Added Character, er, Michael Carpenter racing to get to Cook County Hospital in time to stop a ghost from snuffing out the lives of every baby in the maternity ward. It seems that something has been stirring up Chicago's ectoplasmic population and Harry and Michael have had a rough week of ghostbusting.

Let's back up for a second and introduce this Michael guy properly. He's a holy Knight, carrying one of only three Swords containing a nail from the true Cross, and sent by the Creator to wherever he's most needed. He's also a contractor (making his last name all the more appropriate) and a family man with several children and a wife who really dislikes Harry. To be fair, she probably has a point, since Michael apparently winds up injured every time he and Harry work together.

Ok, back to the plot. During the battle with the supernatural suffocatrix, Harry figures out that she's probably going completely off the rails because someone has wrapped her in something like spiritual barbed-wire. Soon after, it's proven that the torture spell isn't just for the dearly departed when it hits some of Harry's acquaintances. This includes Murphy, taking her out of action for most of the rest of the book. Harry has to figure out who or what the Nightmare (as he calls the thing causing all the spectral distress) is, whether it's working for itself or for somebody else, and how to take it down before it achieves whatever it is it's working toward. This is further complicated when he's picked to be the representative of the White Council (think of it as the wizards' guild) to a kind of vampire* summit, being held at the home of a vampire he didn't really endear himself to back in the first book.

Of course, just about everything is interconnected somehow. Lots of screaming and large explosions ensue. As has become the norm, Harry gets the everliving shit kicked out of him more than once. And something very very bad happens to someone Harry cares about (in addition to the something merely very bad that happens to someone else). In the end, of course, Harry survives (as you might guess by the fourth book being reviewed below) - but things have gotten quite a bit more complicated and the scars he bears aren't just on his body.

The writing started to come together for me with this one. Apparently, it (in addition to Fool Moon and perhaps the fourth one as well) was already completed before the first one actually got published, but, in the words of Jim Butcher himself, "I had started putting together enough craft skills to overcome the lack of inborn talent." I admit I was thrown a bit by the way Michael was suddenly introduced in such a "I haven't mentioned him yet? But he's always been here!" kind of way. Butcher's explanation for this is that each book only really covers the absolute worst week of Harry's entire year because it's not really worth writing about the other eleven point something months when he's paying his bills by finding lost pets and spending his off hours at the drive-in movie. I guess I can accept that.

*Much like the weres in the second book, Butcher can't stop at just one type of vampire. He's got at least three, with hints of more. There's the Red Court, mentioned in the first book, that look like humans until they rip off their skins to reveal the slimy black batlike monstrosity beneath. Oh, and their spit is a powerfully addictive narcotic. Then there's the Black Court. Dracula was one of these. They're the undead ones with the power to turn into mist and a bad allergy to garlic. Apparently, Stoker wrote his book at the behest of the White Council as a kind of "how-to" guide on destroying the things. And then there's the White Court. They don't feed on blood. Instead, they subsist on emotions and life energy. Think "Sex Vampire."

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Read: February 2009
Title: Summer Knight (Book 4 of the Dresden Files)
Author: Jim Butcher
ISBN: 0451458923
Binding: Paperback

Harry's chilling at his office when a femme fatale straight out of a noir novel saunters in and promptly causes his blood to freeze. Not literally. Though she could. It's Queen Mab, the faerie queen of Winter, and she wants to hire him to clear her name. Someone has killed the Summer Knight, the mortal champion of the Summer Sidhe, and suspicion is falling on her. Even though Harry would love to tell her no, he takes the job because Mab has bought out his debt with his faerie godmother (don't think Cinderella, think more of the one that curses Sleeping Beauty). He has to either find or create proof of Mab's innocence before the Autumn Equinox, when power passes from the Summer Court to the Winter Court, or there will be a war that will likely send the Earth into another ice age.

As you might expect, someone doesn't want him digging into their business. In addition, the war between wizards and Red Court that Harry started in the last book continues to rage on and senior members of the White Council are seriously considering feeding his ass (perhaps literally) to the vampires as a peace gesture. This all leads to him having to dodge (or, at least, survive) attacks of all kinds as he travels through, above, and below Chicago in hopes of interviewing the various principals and suspects, including the three aspects of each of the courts - Lady, Queen, and Mother. My favorite bit is the attack in the garden section of WalMart by a plant monster. This is mainly because Harry insists on calling it a "chlorofiend" because, let's face it, you can't pick up chicks with daring tales of battling azaleas. I also greatly appreciated the reappearance of Toot-toot the pizza-loving fairy.

Harry does succeed in restoring the balance of power between the Seelie and Unseelie barely in time to avert the apocalypse. Just don't expect it to be a happily ever after sort of ending.

Of the first four, this one has faded most in my mind. Some of the sharpest memories of specific scenes stick with me, but the rest of the book has faded into the background a bit. Perhaps ironically, I consider this to be a good thing. It means the writing has improved to the point where it's getting out of my way. I remember so much of the first books because of the ways in which they annoyed me. The parts of the fourth book that are clearest to me are the parts that most delighted me (as those who witnessed my guffaws as I read it over several lunches in the breakroom at work could probably attest). This is the first one I actually feel like recommending.