KJToo

I arrived home this evening to find a soggy package from Amazon.com on the front stoop. Fortunately, the cardboard box had not allowed any of the damnable rain to seep through and damage my copy of Seth Harwood’s novel, Jack Wakes Up.

Harwood is the latest Podiobooks.com author to land a book deal and see his novel—which is still available for free in audio form at Podiobooks— in print. When the novel was released, March 16th was declared PALMS SUNDAY; Harwood’s fans (myself included) mobbed Amazon.com and pushed Jack Wakes Up to the top of the Mystery charts there.

From the back cover of Jack Wakes Up:

What does an action movie one-hit-wonder and ex-drug-addict do when he’s cleaned up, down on his luck, and running out of money?

In the three years since Jack Palms went clean—no drugs, no drinking, no life—he’s added fourteen pounds of muscle, read 83 books, and played it as straight as anyone can ask him. Now, when an old friend from L.A.calls, he hits the streets of San Francisco to help a group of Czech drug buyers make one big score, a single drug deal that he hopes will set him up for life.

But, when people start turning up dead, and an old nemesis on the police force calls, Jack finds himself with just 24 hours to track down San Francisco’s biggest drug supplier or face charges that will put him behind bars.

Only an Oscar-caliber performance will get him through this alive.

The next Podiobook to see print is Scott Sigler’s Infected (originally titled Infection when released as a podcast novel, but changed in the print version for legal reasons). Sigler is the author of several other podcast novels, including EarthCore, Ancestor, The Rookie and Nocturnal. The last of these is—as of this writing—in progress, with Sigler releasing a new episode like clockwork every week even as he pimps the hell out of the April 1st release of Infected on Amazon.com. To quote a certain wizened old Jedi Master, “he’s more machine now than man; twisted and evil“.

How twisted is this guy? Well, he’s been putting audio versions of his novels out on the Interwebs for a couple of years now, and he’s somehow bamboozled his publisher into giving away the PDF version of Infected for free until Monday, March 31st! That’s right, if you’re not reading this from the far-flung future, you, too, can get the entire text of Infected at absolutely no cost. Nooooo! It’s the future! You’ve missed it! Go back! Go back!

Why in the name of sweet, money-lovin’, capitalism would Scott do such a thing? Because he’s not right in the head. Or maybe, just maybe, he thinks that if you like his stuff you’ll think it’s worth dropping a few bucks to get a shiny and oh-so-tangible print copy. He’s either a flaming lunatic or a freaking genius. Either way, download the PDF. What have you got to lose? Oh, and tell your friends to download the thing, too. Don’t just send them the PDF; that’s cheating, you bastard. Besides why should you make it that easy for your buddies? What have they done for you lately? They can click on the link just like you did. But tell them to do it by Monday, or they’ll be left with nothing but regrets and an empty feeling inside. Oops! Too late! The hour has passed, and that hollow feeling in your gut? Yeah, I tried to warn you about it. Now you’ll have to buy the book.

Are you still reading this? What’s that? You want a synopsis of the book before you download it for free? Fine, here you go:

Across America, a mysterious disease is turning ordinary people into raving, paranoid murderers who inflict brutal horrors on strangers, themselves, and even their own families.

Working under the government’s shroud of secrecy, CIA operative Dew Phillips crisscrosses the country trying in vain to capture a live victim. With only decomposing corpses for clues, CDC Epidemiologist Margaret Montoya races to analyze the science behind this deadly contagion. She discovers that these killers all have one thing in common — they’ve been contaminated by a bio-engineered parasite, shaped with a complexity far beyond the limits of known science.

Meanwhile Perry Dawsey — a hulking former football star now resigned to life as a cubicle-bound desk jockey — awakes one morning to find several mysterious welts growing on his body. Soon Perry finds himself acting and thinking strangely, hearing voices—he is infected.

The fate of the human race may well depend on the bloody war Perry must now wage with his own body, because the parasites want something from him, something that goes beyond mere murder.

Posted March 27, 2008 Comments(2)

Bloginatrix Lorelle van Fossen issued another of her blog challenges earlier this week: Blog about what you are reading, what you like to read, and why. I hesitated to take up the challenge because we’ve been talking about books and such a lot over at The Secret Lair, but then J.C. Hutchins took up the call and I thought I’d be a good little clone and follow suit.

What I’m Reading
Blood and Rust by S.A. Swiniarski is actually two previously-published horror novels collected in one volume. Both stories are set in Cleveland, Ohio, but in different eras.

Raven, set in the present, is the story of a man who wakes up in a storm drain with no memory of how he got there or who he is. His investigation into the events leading up to his awakening reveal the horrible truth: somehow, in the last few days, he has become a vampire.

The Flesh, The Blood and The Fire is set in the late 1930s, after Safety Director Eliot Ness failed to capture the Cleveland Torso Murderer, a notorious serial killer who left more than a dozen decapitated, mutilated corpses in his wake. From the back cover text: …one Cleveland cop refused to give up the case. And his search led him down a bloody trail from the depths of the city’s shantytowns to the inner citadels of industrial power to the darkest parts of the human soul…

Swiniarski, who publishes science fiction novels under the name S. Andrew Swann, is a local author and Chris Miller (persuasive fellow that he is) talked me into buying Forests of the Night, the first book in Swann’s Moreau series (which now has four volumes) last winter. Looking at Swann’s bibliography, I realized that I’d read another of his books, The Dragons of the Cuyahoga, several years ago; so after finishing Forests of the Night I grabbed the sequel to Dragons: The Dwarves of Whiskey Island. Both were fun reads; enough so that I thought it might be worth giving his horror a try.

Some people might consider this cheating, as I’m listening to Spook Country by William Gibson on CD, but I’m not going to argue the merits of listening to an unabridged audio production versus reading the actual text; I’m just going to enjoy the damn book.

The first Gibson novel I ever “read” was Virtual Light way back in the days when books on CD were a novelty but books on cassette were abundant at the local library and I was still driving a hand-me-down ‘77 Mercury Marquis (ride-engineered by Lincoln-Mercury). My 30-minute commute to and from work was the perfect time to catch up on my reading, and I would go to the library check out any of the Recorded Books audiobooks if Frank Muller was the narrator. Unfortunately, Frank Muller was severely injured in a motorcycle accident several years ago and is no longer able to narrate; Spook Country is narrated by Robertson Dean. I’ve only listened to about 10 minutes of the first disc, so I can’t render even a partial review at this time, except to say that Dean seems like a good narrator.

Skein of Shadows by The Wandering Men is a book I’ve mentioned here before. At last year’s Con on the Cob I interviewed one of the authors, Brannon Hollingsworth, then pre-ordered a signed copy. The book arrived in the mail just before I went on The Great December Information Detoxification and I had every intention of reading it while on my vacation to Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. As usual, I managed to get distracted by a host of other stuff and I find myself just over halfway through the book.

Skein of Shadows is five short works, each by a different author, that tell a single story. I really enjoyed “Vendetta”, “Fiend Fighter” and “Seaborn Sentinel” (by Nathan Ellsworth, Davis Riddle and Brannon Hall, respectively), but “The Bonds That Bind Us” by Corey Blankenship feels disconnected and has really slowed me down, to the point where I don’t look forward to picking the book up and continuing where I left off. This is unfortunate, because I’m very curious about the final story in the book, Brannon Hollingsworth’s “Tenet’s Tale”.

I Am America (And So Can You!) by Stephen Colbert is one of those rare books—along with The Daily Show with Jon Stewart Presents America (The Book): A Citizen’s Guide to Democracy Inaction—for which I’ll break my “no hardcovers” rule; the books just work better as hardcovers. Plus it was a Christmas gift.

I Am America is one of those books that can easily be read in little bits over the course of a few months, which is exactly what I’ve been doing. The humor is an extension of what Colbert does Monday through Thursday on The Colbert Report, complete with margin notes that duplicate the ironic bullet points on “The Wørd”.

What I Like To Read (and Why)

• Science Fiction – No surprise there. As a child of Star Wars I tend to prefer the more fantastical sci-fi to the hard stuff. I’m in the definite majority minority of people who prefer Kevin J. Anderson’s Star Wars novels to those written by Timothy Zahn. Speaking of Anderson, I also like the Dune stuff he’s written with Brian Herbert, which is probably cause for the hardcore Frank Herbert fans to burn me as a heretic.
• Fantasy – Again, this isn’t a big shocker. I think the first fantasy novel I read was Azure Bonds by Kate Novak and Jeff Grubb, which I picked up thinking it would help me beat The Curse of the Azure Bonds game for my Apple //GS. No such luck. Not long after that I started reading the Dragonlance Chronicles by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman. Stephen King’s Dark Tower series also falls into this category, as do the Harry Potter novels, which I loved to the last (more than I can say about Dark Tower, unfortunately).
• Mystery/Thriller – It’s probably not fair to lump these two genres together into one, but when you’re writing your own list you should feel more than free to separate them. I read plenty of Agatha Christie (and before that Carolyn Keene and Franklin W. Dixon) in my youth, but I don’t read much in the way of pure mystery anymore. Instead, I go for stuff like the Agent Pendergast series by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child.
• Horror – I read plenty of Stephen King, Robin Cook and Dean Koontz in my post-adolescent years, and I do enjoy a good vampire novel now and again (though most of those probably fall into the Fantasy genre). I read most of a Lovecraft short story collection last year, but H.P. can be a difficult slog.
• Non-Fiction – Every once in a while I pick up a random non-fiction tome, such as Holley Bishop’s Robbing the Bees: A Biography of Honey—The Sweet Liquid Gold that Seduced the World or Daniel Schorr’s Staying Tuned: A Life in Journalism. Come to think of it, NPR seems to drive a lot of my non-fiction reading.
• Chuck Palahniuk – I have no idea what genre this guy writes in, but I love it.

You can always see what I’m reading (as well as what I plan to read and what I’ve recently read) over at GoodReads.com.

Posted February 8, 2008 Comments(8)

The second episode of The Secret Lair is available for immediate download. If you’re using one of those newfangled podcatchers (like iTunes), the dang thing may have done all the hard work for you; all you’ve got to do is listen. Why, in my day, we had to download files by FTP from a command prompt over a 2400-baud connection and we had to manually set the file type to binary and we liked it! You kids are soft! Soft, I tell you!

Before you had all these fancy Internets and your high-definition television sets and such, we got all of our information from two places: whores and books. Since the boys over at The Secret Lair ain’t whores (yet), they’ve decided to open The Secret Library, an online discussion group that combines the newfangled whizbangery of the Internets with the blood, sweat and good old-fashioned elbow grease of Johannes Gutenberg’s printing press.

So listen to the episode, webalate yourself to Amazon.com or get off your ass and go to your local bookstore or library1 and get yourself a copy of Fatherland by Robert Harris. Read all the words, then join in the discussion over at The Secret Lair’s official online community or The Secret Library BookReads group.

Don’t make me tell you again.

1. It’s like a bookstore where all the books are free; perfect for all you left-leaning liberal Pinko wingnuts. [back]

Posted January 20, 2008 Comments(0)

The International House of Johnson, despite its impressive moniker, is not a grand palatial estate. It is, in fact, a three-bedroom, one-and-three-quarter bath, split-level ranch with approximately 1,100 square feet of living space1. Laura and I have claimed the master bedroom and the second doubles as both Kyle’s room and our guest room. The third bedroom has been converted into an office, as has the family room; the former is used by Laura, the latter by me and the cats2.

In most respects, the International House of Johnson is the perfect size for two adults, one toddler and two cats. When I want to read, however, the compactness presents something of a problem. There are really only five places within the walls that I can comfortably read: the master bedroom, the living room, my office, and…well, I’ll get to the other two in a bit, but first I want to explain why I don’t do all of my reading in the other three locations.

The Master Bedroom

The master bedroom at the International House of Johnson is gloriously appointed with a queen-sized Select Comfort bed3, two night tables, two dressers, two laundry hampers, and no chairs.

The lack of chairs doesn’t present a problem for bedtime reading, but I’m not particularly fond of lying down while reading during the day, so the master bedroom—while great for sleeping and other nocturnal activities—isn’t the ideal location for daytime or early evening reading.

The Living Room

One of the first things we did upon moving into the International House of Johnson was…well, that’s beside the point, but eventually we purchased two new sofas, both of which feature a recliner on each end. Laura and I sit at opposite ends of the north-south sofa when we watch television, while the east-west sofa is generally only used when we have guests.

My southside recliner is a very nice place to read; just yesterday, while my young apprentice napped and Laura was out shopping, I finished Robert R. McCammon’s The Wolf’s Hour there while sipping Lipton Instant Raspberry Iced Tea.

Unfortunately, if the television is on, I can’t read in my southside recliner. Whether the television is tuned to The Backyardigans, CSI or Eureka, I am almost entirely incapable of the maintaining focus necessary to ignore the boob tube and concentrate on the printed words marching across the page of a novel. The television is not only a distraction when it is on, but the twenty-plus hours of pre-recorded shows and movies on the TiVo are a temptation even when the idiot box is turned off (not to mention the siren call of the Xbox).

The Office

Formerly the family room, my office features a fireplace in one corner and a large, three-paned window that looks out on Laura’s rose garden. It should be a cozy den to which I can retreat for some peaceful solitude when I want to read. Should be, and would be but for a few minor drawbacks:

1. First and foremost, I share the room with the cats. Take a cozy office né family room, add a bowl of cat food, a watering dish and two litter boxes (not to mention two cats) and it becomes something entirely different. The fact that there’s nowhere in the room one can sit and be more than four feet from a litter box is a problem in and of itself; the carpeted floor onto which the cats scatter or track the litter (and food) is another issue all together.
2. Second, my office is adjacent to the laundry room. The very small laundry room. Laura does a very good job with space management inside the laundry room, but there’s just no room to set up an ironing board in there. Sometimes, the ironing board gets hauled into the living room when it’s needed, but more often than not it is set up in my office.
3. Finally, there is the matter of the crawlspace. The crawlspace is accessed through the laundry room, which is accessed through my office. Thanks to Laura’s space management in the laundry room, it can be a bit of a chore to get to the crawlspace on a regular basis. Thus, my office serves as a sort of storage purgatory; a place where Christmas decorations and baby clothes linger in cardboard boxes and Rubbermaid containers until I get off my ass, shuffle around the contents of the laundry room so I can get to the crawlspace, and put it all away. This, as you may have gathered, is my own damn fault; more a product of laziness than any true necessity.

Reading Rooms

If a man can’t read in his living room, his office or his bedroom, where can he go? That’s where those other two rooms enter into the picture: the master and guest bathrooms.

Now, I understand that there’s a certain amount of ickiness associated with reading in the bathroom (not that it’s ever hurt the publishers of the Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader series), but I’ve been in plenty of bathrooms that are furnished with a magazine rack, and I often find a copy of The Plain Dealer in the restroom at work, so clearly the practice is not entirely outside the realm of social acceptability.

That said, I do have my own personal rules as to what I will and will not read in the bathroom:

1. Books I own. If I purchased it, chances are I’ll read at least part of it in the bathroom. I don’t generally disclose this when loaning my books to other people, but perhaps I should in the future.
2. Books I’ve borrowed. Under no circumstances do I read borrowed books in the bathroom. This is one reason it takes me so long to read borrowed books.
3. Library books. I waffled on this one for quite a while, but with the due date for The Wolf’s Hour looming and several hundred pages yet to read, I decided that I would allow myself to read library books in the bathroom. I have a feeling that being read in my bathroom is fairly mild compared to the unpleasant things that have been done to most library books.

Reading in the bathroom is not without its difficulties. Aside from the obvious desire to maintain a certain degree of hygiene, there is also the problem of blood vessels: after about twenty minutes of reading with my elbows firmly planted just above my knees, both of my feet fall asleep, resulting in a few minutes of post-bathroom pins and needles and the need to “walk it off”.

Perhaps one day I will devise an alternative solution to sharing my office with Rosie and Gil, enabling me to reclaim the space and make it truly my own again. Until (and probably well beyond) that day, the Reading Rooms will remain open.

Essay Questions

1. Where do you do most of your reading?
2. Do you have a special place set aside just for reading? What type of environment makes for a relaxing, satisfying reading experience?
3. Do you read in the bathroom? If so, what are your personal bathroom reading rules?

1. I think. My recollection of the months leading up to and immediately following April 2001, when the International House of Johnson was purchased, is somewhat hazy; it is entirely improbable that our Realtor drugged or hypnotized me, but I have no other (interesting) explanation of my inability to dredge up the particulars of the sale from the nigh-infallible storage system that is my memory. [back]
2. Rosie and Gil, to the best of my knowledge, don’t perform any clerical work in the office we share. Rather, it is the site of their food and water dishes as well as their litter boxes. My office is their cafeteria and restroom. [back]
3. My Sleep Number tends to be in the area of 55 to 65. [back]

Posted August 13, 2007 Comments(7)

Transformers: Ghosts of Yesterday by Alan Dean Foster is “[t]he story you must read—before Transformers rockets to the big screen!” Until I saw the book on the shelves of my local independent bookseller, I hadn’t been aware that there were prerequisites to seeing Michael Bay’s big screen treatment of my favorite childhood transforming-robot toys,1 but I certainly didn’t want to show up at the theater bright-eyed with cash in hand only to be turned away at the box office due to my own ill-preparedness.

I think Paramount and Dreamworks dropped the ball on this; in all the Transformers pre-release hype—trailers, GM and Burger King tie-in commercials—there’s not a single indication that the audience needs to read a book before they can watch the movie. I can only imagine the scene that will play out over and over, all across the country (if not the world) tomorrow evening:

“One for Transformers, please.”

“Have you read Ghosts of Yesterday?”

“What?”

“Ghosts of Yesterday; it’s the official prequel to the blockbuster film. Have you read it?”

“No, I—”

“Sorry, no one sees the movie until they read the book. Next, please!”

“Wait a minute! I want to see Transformers!”

“Sorry, kid. Rules is rules. You gotta read the book. Step aside, please. Don’t make me call security.”

The real tragedy is that Ghosts of Yesterday isn’t an especially good book. The story revolves around a top-secret space mission that coincides with the 1969 launch of Apollo 11, the not-at-all-secret space mission that first put a man on the moon.2 While the world watches Neil Armstrong, Michael Collins and Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin make their historic voyage to a Hollywood soundstage Earth’s only satellite, a secret government agency known as Sector Seven covertly launches Ghost One, an experimental spaceship derived from alien technology. The source of the technology is “The Ice Man”, a giant mechanoid being, one of two alien artifacts held in secret by the United States government.

During its maiden voyage, Ghost One encounters an unexpected phenomenon on the far side of the sun: a wormhole that transports the ship and its crew to an unknown area of outer space, where they encounter two warring factions of sentient mechanical beings who have been exploring the vast reaches of the universe in search of a lucrative merchandising deal.

Meanwhile, back on Earth, the powers-that-be decide to move The Ice Man from the frozen Arctic wastes to balmy Arizona, where there’s absolutely no chance he’ll thaw and wreak havoc on humanity; I mean, just put that thought right out of your head, it’s all perfectly safe. Unfortunately, it’s 1969, and no one’s thought to end the Cold War just yet. The Russians, perhaps a little annoyed that we’re about to beat them to a soundstage in Hollywood the moon, arrange for a little accident en route to Arizona.

It’s not a terrible story, but it felt empty to me. Maybe Transformers—perfectly suited to toys and comic books and animated television series—just don’t translate well to the realm of pure prose. Foster makes almost no effort to describe the giant robots, other than to say that they’re giant robots. There seems to be an unspoken assumption that if you’re reading the book you know what a Transformer looks like so there’s no point in wasting words describing them. And while the story certainly sets the stage for the movie, it really doesn’t accomplish much of anything else. The human characters, for the most part, are just sketches with little opportunity for any true development; of the Transformers themselves, only the Decepticon Starscream and the Autobots Optimus Prime and Bumblebee get much in the way of “face time”, but they’re in constant battle with one another and the only part of their characters that really comes across is the fact that they’d like to destroy their enemies.

I’m glad I read the book, if only because now I’ll be able to stride proudly up to the box office and say, “One for Transformers, please, my good ticketmonger! I have completed the required reading and am fully prepared to enjoy an evening of motion picture entertainment!”

1. I’m still waiting for the announcement that John McTiernan (Die Hard) will be directing the GoBots movie. Any day now… [back]
2. You know, if you believe in that sort of thing. [back]

Posted July 1, 2007 Comments(2)