Tag Archives: books

One ‘sweetheart’ of a town

Posted on by Standard 1

Many of our readers and customers may be enamored with Loveland, Colorado. I know it found its way into my heart 30 years ago when I moved here to escape the “big city” of Fort Collins. I settled in an older home on 4th and Harrison, walked to the Library, purchased fresh meats at The Little Store on 5th Street, nosed around shops and taverns downtown, and quickly fell in love with my new hometown. Soon I was active in community affairs, including chairing the Loveland Valentine Museum efforts, handling vendors and displays for the Corn Roast Festival, helping with philanthropic efforts, and serving on the Human Relations Commission for the City.

So, when I heard of the Loveland365 Project (www.loveland365.com), I was not surprised the “secret” was out. “Loveland 365 is a not for profit grassroots coalition of Loveland business people and citizens who undertook a year-long project…to write about and photograph compelling stories and images about Loveland”. The result is a 12″ x 9″ full color, 384 page coffee table picture book that tells the remarkable and inspirational stories of our hometown.

Entitled Loveland365 People, Places & Things that Make Us America’s Sweetheart City, the book is now available for pre-sold orders at $39.99. All net proceeds, up to $20, will be donated to participating non-profits. Go to the website to order your book, purchase it with a credit card and designate your favorite non-profit. More information and details can be found there. The book will not be sold in retail stores.

Anthology Book Company is proud to help in the promotion of this exciting endeavor. We have printed information in the store, and can put you in contact with the appropriate avenues for ordering your copy.

A sincere thank you to John Giroux and his volunteers who had the vision to undertake this project, while taking the initiative to contribute to non-profits here in Loveland. You can be a part of this effort. Order your copy today.

E-books and illegal file sharing

Posted on by Standard 4

I very much liked this post about the ethics of file-sharing, especially of e-books: http://deepad.dreamwidth.org/61462.html
Obviously, as an independent bookseller, I am in favor of physical copies of books. But there’s a lot to chew over in this space; e-books vs. paper books; illegally sharing e-books vs. using the library or buying used books. As the post points out, just having the option of using an e-book means you’re in an incredibly privileged position:

To have the ability and the desire to read an e-book, one must first, have the privilege of being literate. Second, literate in a dominant language like English. Third, have computer literacy enough to be able to navigate the internet enough to obtain the book. Fourth, have sustained access to a computer or other electronic device in order to be able to read it. Fifth, have access to whatever complex catalysts of creative and societal stimulants that foster a spirit of creative consumption - the desire to read, and the desire to read that particular book. And then finally, after all those barriers, the book must be there.

A used book store like Anthology tries to lower the entry barrier to reading, by making more books available to more people for less money. Books don’t need expensive equipment like a laptop; don’t even need electricity. They are freely sharable, nearly untraceable, and don’t become obsolete. But of course, getting a book from a used bookstore or a library doesn’t benefit the author either.

It’s a complex issue, and there are no easy answers. What do you think?

Scifi Book Club 1/3/11: The Darkship Thieves

Posted on by Standard 1

Our December book club book was The Darkship Thieves by Sara Hoyt. Because of the weather and my poor memory, the author wasn’t able to join us after all, but we still had an energetic discussion.

The story is a romantic space opera, told from the first-person perspective of a twenty-something princess with serious psychiatric problems. After her spaceship is mysteriously hijacked, the princess is rescued by a mutant pirate/miner, then taken to a libertarian asteroid-city. Hijinks ensue, a conspiracy is uncovered, and to no one’s surprise, the main couple does eventually admit their love. Don’t let the tone of my summary turn you off- one of the book’s strengths is that it doesn’t take itself too seriously.

We agreed that the coolest thing in the book is the “forest” ringing the earth. A geneticist designed these space trees, which use photosynthesis to make energy pods. The “miners” harvest the pods to provide cheap, abundant energy for the entire planet. The science is a little hand-wavy, but the important part is the imagery. The forest is a dark, twisted jungle, navigated by small ships with small crews, and made dangerous by the covert game of cops and robbers being played by legitimate miners and the titular thieves (flying mining ships painted black =”darkships”).

Although this is a book written by a female author about a female protagonist, I personally was disappointed that it didn’t pass the Bechdel test (1. two named female characters 2. have a conversation with each other 3. about something other than a man). There are only two occasions where the princess speaks to another woman - once to the miner’s sister, about how much they missed him, and once she orders her father’s female secretary out of the office at gunpoint. Her biker gang (“broomer lair”) only appears to have one other female member, who has no lines.

The princess definitely softens and becomes more complex as the book progresses, and everyone in the group liked her better at the end. Her romantic relationship gives her a more convincing emotional grounding, and revelations about her juvenile delinquency make a more interesting life story. One member pointed out that she doesn’t exactly grow a conscience - she just wants to avoid the inevitable conversation with her very lawful-good boyfriend about why she just killed a guy.

One of our members, a middle-aged male engineer, found the first-person POV too distracting, too far removed from his own experience, to even finish the book. The rest of us had varying reactions to the narrator, both as the “voice” of the story and as a main character. Several people mentioned that it was interesting to have a female character whose primary characteristic is anger and instability, rather than responsibility and caring. On the other hand, that did make her head an uncomfortable place to hang out over the course of an entire novel. We also had mixed reactions to the princess’s use of her body and sexuality to advance her own ends - it reminded one member of the X-Files episode where Scully flashes her cleavage to a teenager to test if he’s a human male, because no human male will resist the chance to take a peek.

There are definite shades of Heinlein’s libertarian tendencies (though I’ll take Luna City over the asteroid-city Eden any day). There are also explorations of a couple of ideas found in Lois McMaster Bujold’s Vorkosigan books. First, Hoyt uses some ideas about the artificial womb (uterine replicator) very reminiscent of Bujold - but there is also a hint of the idealism possible in a feudal political system, where the aristocrat has a personal obligation to every vassal.

One of the princess’s more appealing traits is her feeling of responsibility to the people she’s supposed to rule - when she stages her getaway from Eden, that’s the main reason she gives.

[spoilers]
Oddly, at the end of the book, the princess seems to abandon that idea in favor of living happily ever after with her boyfriend. All of our members (who finished the book) agreed that we’d like to read a sequel about the heavily-foreshadowed revolution that’s about to be led by the heirs of the current nobility. Will the ties binding their biker gang together hold through the coming storm? Can they use the princess’s connections to Eden to help reform the political system on earth? Will the princess go back and help at all?
[/spoilers]

Join us next time, Tuesday, February 7 at 6pm, for That Sweet Little Old Lady by Randall Garrett.

December’s Scifi Book Club Meeting

Posted on by Standard

Sorry for the delay in posting this recap. Our scifi book club meeting for December was our best-attended yet, with 11 participants! We read Theodore Sturgeon’s The Dreaming Jewels. It’s a very dark story of Horty, a boy with mysterious powers, who runs away to the carnival.

Perhaps because Theodore Sturgeon was primarily a short story author, we all agreed that The Dreaming Jewels felt very much like three different short stories loosely connected by the central character. First is a very YA-feeling story of the boy running away to the carnival to escape an abusive home situation; then a psycho-social family drama involving Horty’s long-time crush Kay and his step-father; then a high fantasy-style showdown with the Big Baddy. Because the three stories were so different in tone, different people liked different stages of the book. Almost nobody liked the entire book.

The themes of the book were a mixed bag, and that’s part of the reason the different sections of the book felt so different.

The first and last stories are very concerned with alienation and connection - Horty’s abuse, and his unusual origins, make it very difficult for him to form normal relationships with his family and friends. His only points of contact with friendship and love are two women - his childhood crush, and the dwarf who “adopts” him at the carnival. [Point of interest: “dwarf” is the term used in the book, which was written in 1957.] In the last story, the final battle reveals the nature of the titular dreaming jewels - beings so alien that humans are are unable to comprehend their purpose:

All earthborn life proceeds and operates from one command: Survive! A human mind cannot coneive of any other base.
The crystals had one-and a very different one.
Horty almost grasped it, but not quite. As simple as “survive!”, it was a concept so remote from anything he’d ever heard or read that it escaped him.

Doesn’t that sound just like something you’d read in HP Lovecraft?

Oddly, for the 1950s, the first and second stories have a lot to say about gender. There are only two female characters - Horty’s crush Kay and his surrogate mother Zena. Both behave in fairly stereotypical feminine ways. Kay is pure Virgin, unable to take control of her sexuality and powerless against the judge who victimizes her. Zena is a loving but very manipulative mother figure, unwilling to let Horty take control of his own life until external circumstances force his hand. It gets interesting when Horty takes control of his own shapeshifting powers - and changes into each of them. It seems as though every time Horty grows as a person, he first has to become female.

The second and third stories consider the nature of force and power, especially the power of a powerful father figure over his subordinates. The second story is the subtler of the two. Horty’s step-father, now a judge, is victimizing Kay. Kay is timid, virginal, and utterly powerless, until Horty anonymously helps her escape. But then Horty assumes her form, and takes control of the power of female sexuality to seduce his stepfather (!) and get his revenge. In the third story, the Big Baddy - literally the circus’s ringleader - goes toe-to-toe with Horty in a battle of psychic power. In the end the battle hurts the victims at least as much as the Big Baddy himself. The direct confrontation of power against power is disastrous for everyone concerned.

There was a lot of grist for the mill in this one, but in the end our consensus was that it was more interesting as an intellectual exercise than as a story. The writing was direct, almost like a kids’ chapter book, and the main character was so alien(ated) that it was difficult to care about him. Our average score for the book was about 6.5/10 (although personally I gave it an 8.5, the highest score of the group).

Join us next week, January 4th 2011, for Sarah Hoyt’s The Darkship Thieves. The author lives in southern Colorado, and she said she may join us, schedule permitting.