HSU IT Department

Yes, it's time again for the Great January Book Giveaway! These are all books I've weeded from my shelves that need a new home with loving parents readers. Claim the one(s) you want in the comments, first person to claim gets it. Feel free to ask for as many as you like :)

Updated 1/9

Title	Author	Genre
House Lessons	Erica Bauermeister	memoir
Staying On	Paul Scott	fiction
The Echoing Green: The Garden in Myth and Memory	Jennifer Heath	non-fiction
Rage	Bob Woodward	politics (Trump)
The Sum of Us	Heather McGee	politics, economics, race relations
Little House in the Suburbs	Deanna Caswell	non-fiction
Clear and Present Danger	Tom Clancy	fiction
Dracula: The Undead	Dacre Stoker	fiction (**audiobook, on 12 CDs)
Complete Book of Furniture Repair and Refinishing	Ralph Kinney	non-fiction
A History of Wild Places	Shea Earnshaw	fiction
Natural Cleaning for Your Home	Casey Kellar	non-fiction
Brain Droppings	George Carlin	humor
Darkfall, Phantoms, Servants of Twilight	Dean Koontz	horror (3 in 1 volume)
Treasury of Fantasy	Carey Wilkens (editor)	fantasy
6 pb romance novels (all basically the same lol)	Barbara Cartland	cheesy romance
Red Death	P N Elrod	vampires
Wolf Hall	Hilary Mantel	historical fiction
Bring Up the Bodies	Hilary Mantel	historical fiction
The Good Life	Helen and Scott Nearing	nature/memoir
The Forstye Saga vol. 1, In Chancery	John Galsworthy	fiction
The Family	Mario Puzo	fiction
The Martian	Andy Weir	sci-fi
The White Hotel	D M Thomas	fiction (seriously weird)
The Fabulous Riverboat	Philip Jose Farmer	sci-fi
Moreta, Dragonlady of Pern	Anne McCaffrey	sci-fi
Educational Games for Fun	Margaret Mulac	non-fiction
Tom Brown's School Days	Thomas Hughes	fiction (v. old hc, early 1900s)
Complete Book of Composting	Rodale Books	non-fiction
Organic Plant Protection	Rodale Books	non-fiction

Read! Share! Post! Let's have a little book talk :)

1. Favorite childhood book, and why? - A tie between (1) Little Women (Louisa May Alcott), with its rich complex characters, warm and loving family life, and fully-realized range of affections and passion that it illustrates, both personal (art, talent, personal best) and interpersonal (sisters, parents and children, husbands and wives, new and old lovers), and (2) The Phantom Tollbooth (Norton Juster), because it's so original, weird, sharp, and creative. I mean, who comes up with the idea of a symphony that plays the colors of the world, or Subtraction Stew, or literally eating one's words? And of course Azaz the Unabridged totally reminds me of Dumbledore ("Blubber! Oddment! Tweak!")

2. First book you clearly remember reading? - Bambi. My stepdad gave it to me for my seventh birthday and I adore it to this day.

3. Favorite reading snack? Cheese and crackers. Salty, crispy, yummy, and doesn't leave grease stains on the pages.

4. Favorite reading location as a child? As an adult? - As a child I would take a bag of apples and a book and climb a tree. Now I'm more about the sofa and a glass of wine.

5. Most intimidating book you've tackled and why (and what happened?!) - Gravity's Rainbow. Still haven't made it past about page 50.

6. The longest you've gone without reading? - Um...six hours?

7. Genre you rarely read but wish you did? - Biography. I'm sure there are a ton of amazing bios out there, but mostly I just get bored when I read someone's life story. Which is odd since I've kept a journal myself since I was eleven lol

8. If you were taking a ten-day trip, how many books would you pack? 12-15. I have to have options, since I don't know what I'll be in the mood for.

9. What books are on your nightstand right now? - Red Rising, This Census Taker, Gods of the Blood, and Talking God.

Today is St. Bartholomew’s Day, patron saint of bookbinders, printers, and papermakers. The day is also associated with the amusingly named Wayzgoose tradition. He's also the patron saint of beekeepers, so find some mead and raise a glass to honor him and those in the professions he guards and guides, who over the centuries have worked harmoniously together to bring us so much knowledge and pleasure. (And if you happen to be in Florida, you can go to an actual Wayzgoode Festival!)

I know it's not Christmas yet (which is when I usually do this), but my mom has sent me two huge boxes of books in the past few months and so yes, I must weed the shelves. I have the following books to give away - first to claim based on time of post gets them. They really are free, you don't even have to pay postage; I just love to pass on books to people who want them. (I do have a list of charities that I support and a donation to any of them would be hugely appreciated, but it is not at all required, truly.)

So, here's the list:

The book of American martyrs, Joyce Carol Oates (fiction)
The summer before the war, Helen Simonson (fiction)
Our lady of the forest, David Guterson (fiction)
The summer before the dark, Doris Lessing (fiction)
Justice and her brothers, Virginia Hamilton (science fiction/YA)
Anya's ghost, Vera Brosgol (mild horror/YA)
Scare tactics, John Farris (horror)
Black wings of Cthulhu 3 (it's Cthulhu, so, y'know)
Cheaper by the dozen, Ernestine Carey (memoir, very funny)
Belles on their toes, Ernestine Carey (sequel to the above)
Edgar Allen Poe: 42 tales (it's Poe, so, y'know)
Microserfs, Douglas Coupland (fiction)
Wise blood, Flannery O'Connor (fiction)
Return of the native, Thomas Hardy (fiction)
Sadar's keep, Midori Snyder (fantasy)
King's Man Thief, Christine Golden (fantasy)

I also have a few non-fiction:

Starting an indexing business, Enid Zafran
Running an indexing business, Janet Perlman
Talking about detective fiction, P. D. James

Call now, telephone operators are standing by :)

New Year's Day it was -15 here. Brrrrrr.

Just finished re-reading Bridget Jones Diary and had to laugh at this quote, which expresses my current feelings exactly:

"It seems wrong and unfair that Christmas, with its stressful and unmanageable financial and emotional challenges, should first be forced upon one wholly against one's will, then rudely snatched away just when one is starting to get into it. Was really beginning to enjoy the feeling that normal service was suspended and it was OK to lie in bed as long as you want, put anything you fancy into your mouth, and drink alcohol whenever it should chance to pass your way, even in the mornings. Now suddenly we are all supposed to snap into self-discipline like lean teenage greyhounds."

New Year's Eve we binge-watched Season 1 of Game of Thrones. Remarkably, it is just as good as everyone said it was. I live in hopes that Seasons 2 will see Sansa murder Joffrey (who is a Draco Malfoy clone; even his parents are strikingly similar to Lucius and Narcissa) and that Aria Stark continues to kick butt, but Tyrion's whore provided my favorite exchange of the series so far:

Tyrion: Where did you find one so pretty at this hour?
Bronn: I took her.
Tyrion: Took her? From whom?
Bronn: From, uh...Ser...what’s his name? I don’t know. Ginger cunt, three tents down.
Tyrion: And he didn’t have anything to say about it?
Bronn: He said something.

*chortle*

Which seems an oddly logical segue to the fact that I just finished reading Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House , because it's actually quite a lot like Game of Thrones only with more suits and fewer swords. Also less incest. Hm, not completely sure about that, actually. It has a cast of thousands, lots of backstabbing, and even a Wolff lol!!

The annual Bookshelf Cull is underway! Here is the first batch on offer -- claim one, claim some, claim all. I'll be doing another pass tomorrow. As always, no need to pay any postage, but a donation to Planned Parenthood or the World Wildlife Fund would be appreciated :)

The Unconsoled by Kazuo Ishiguro
Crash by J. G. Ballard
After Alice by Gregory Maguire
Ghosts, Demons and Dolls by Erica Gammon
The Doll-Master and Other Tales of Terror by Joyce Carol Oates (ARC)
Fair Maiden by Joyce Carol Oates
The Elementals by Michael McDowell
Promise Island by Francis Clement Kelley (the one about religion, not the one about fishing)
More Than This by Patrick Ness
The Gabriel Hounds by Mary Stewart

Recently over on GoodReads, someone started a discussion on "How Did You Become a Reader?" and kicked it off with the following three questions, to which I have added a fourth:

1) Do you remember being read to as a child?
2) Do you remember when you first realized you love to read?
3) Have you always liked to read, or is it something you developed later?
4) What are some "firsts" in your life as a reader?

I had a lot of fun thinking about these questions and my own history as a reader, and since so many of us here on LJ are avid readers, I thought I'd share with y'all. I'd love to hear your answers as well (if you answer over on your own LJ, leave a comment here and let me know so I can find it!).

I don't remember ever not being a reader. Mom was an English teacher and librarian so there were always books at our house. We went to the library A LOT and I was always allowed to take as many books as I wanted. (Our first trip to a bookstore was quite traumatic, apparently, as I did not like being limited to only two!).

Mom read to me, and later to me and my brother, until I was in my teens -- he was five years younger than me so it was quite a challenge finding something that suited both of us! I remember The Hobbit, The Paleface Redskins, Half Magic, Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle...

Sometimes Mom would insist that I go outside and get some fresh air...so of course I would go outside with a book. My favorite thing to do was take a bag of apples and two books and climb a tree. I would sit in the tree happily reading for easily a couple of hours.

My parents divorced when I was really young, like about two, so for years I would go spend two weeks with my dad every summer. My stepmom had three kids when they got married; I was a pretty shy kid and they didn't like me much, or I thought they didn't, though more likely it was just that we didn't have much in common because...THEY DIDN'T LIKE TO READ (gasp). So every summer I took two suitcases, one full of clothes and one full of books. One year I didn't bring enough and had to read some of them twice.

The only time I remember mom taking a book away from me was when I was ten or eleven and I got my hands on her copy of The Godfather. Probably a good idea, I think it's a bit much for a ten-year-old. Although the best thing about books is that, unlike movies, if a kid runs into something they aren't ready for, they probably simply won't understand it or be able to picture it, so it just goes right past them.

The first book I actually remember reading was Lloyd Alexander's The High King. The first book I remember getting as a gift is Bambi, when I was about seven. The first book I remember eagerly awaiting publication of is Silver On the Tree -- I'd recently discovered the series and had zoomed through them, and was horrified to discover I would have to actually wait for the last one. I think that was my first introduction to the idea that books weren't some kind of natural resource -- they didn't grow on shelves like apples grow on trees, but had to be made -- written by a real live human being and then printed and bound and shipped and so on. (The logical corollary, which I arrived at almost immediately, was People Write Books + I Am A People = Therefore I Could Write A Book. I haven't yet, but I haven't given up on it either.) The first nonfiction book I remember reading is Jane Goodall's In the Shadow of Man, about her research with chimpanzees in the wild. The first book that actually changed how I thought about life was Jonathan Livingston Seagull.

Growing up, I never went anywhere without a book, even if we were just running to the grocery store or the gas station. This is still true today; just as some people won't leave the house without putting on their makeup, I feel undressed if I leave the house without a book. They have been and continue to be the best of teachers and friends.

Rereading Gone With the Wind for about the thirteenth time and loving it, as always. However, for the first time I really noticed some of the ages mentioned, and was a bit taken aback. Gerald O'Hara is 43 when he marries Ellen Robillard, who is only 15. Suellen O'Hara's "beau" Frank Kennedy is 40 and she's 14. And Rhett Butler is mentioned as being 30 or 35 at the beginning of the novel and Scarlett is only 16.

For some reason this never struck me before, but even for the 1860s this seems rather a wide age disparity.

A group of authors have banded together to petition the Department of Justice to investigate Amazon and its stifling of competition in the market for both physical and e-books. I'm very glad to see this and I hope it leads to action on the part of the DoJ.

The letter says, among other things:

In recent years, Amazon has used its dominance in ways that we believe harm the interests of America's readers, impoverish the book industry as a whole, damage the careers of (and generate fear among) many authors, and impede the free flow of ideas in our society.

The statistics they cite are pretty stunning: Amazon now controls the sale of more than 75% of online sales of physical books, more than 65% of e-book sales, more than 40% of sales of new books, and 85% of ebook sales of self-published authors.

It's more than a little worrisome that one single corporation has that much say over what is easily available to the general public. Not to mention their detrimental effect on small independent booksellers, who throughout history have been far more sensitive and responsive to local and non-mainstream interests. When the giant gorilla in the room only offers you best-sellers while sitting on and squashing everyone else, it's a little bothersome. Not to mention the fact that Jeff Bezos has admitted in so many words that he doesn't give a rat's ass about books; all those books are loss leaders to Amazon who just uses/sells the data thus gathered. As the longer version of the letter puts it:

The idea that Amazon would intentionally use its power in a way that vitiates the book industry strikes many Americans as counterintuitive, much like choosing to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs. But Amazon's goal has never been to sell only books. On the contrary, Amazon executives from the first spoke of their intent to build what they called "the everything store." Amazon analyzed twenty product categories before choosing books as the company's debut "commodity."

The letter goes on to put the situation in historical context with the U.S. Constitution's First Amendment, anti-trust laws going back to the 1866 Telegraph Act preventing a monopoly of that particular brand-new information highway, and the recent FCC Net Neutrality rulings.

While Amazon contends that its goal is to serve consumers by eliminating middlemen in publishing (which it calls the "gatekeepers"), Amazon's executives have also made clear they intend to make Amazon itself the sole gatekeeper in this industry. But what's at stake here is not merely monopoly control of a commodity; what is at stake is whether we allow one of the nation's most important marketplaces of information to be dominated and supervised by a single corporation...The conviction that antitrust law plays a vital role in protecting freedom of expression continues to this day. Justice Anthony Kennedy, in the Turner Broadcasting case, wrote, "Assuring that the public has access to a multiplicity of information sources is a governmental purpose of the highest order, for it promotes values central to the First Amendment," and that, "[t]he First Amendment's command that government not impede the freedom of speech does not disable the government from taking steps to ensure that private interests not restrict, through physical control of a critical pathway of communication, the free flow of information and ideas."

So for myself, I'm boycotting Amazon and any possible way they might make money off me, including all their brands and subsidiaries. I'll still use abebooks.com to find used books, but I'll go straight to the seller and buy direct from them so Amazon doesn't get a cut. I'll still use goodreads (because damn it, I was there BEFORE the behemoth ate them) but I won't use any of their links to buy anything.

Now I just have to talk Mr Psmith out of renewing his Amazon Prime membership and get him to drop his Amazon credit card...