• Jane Litte explains, among other things, what “per se” means for the Agency/DOJ case (and it’s not promising)
• #kindlestones (ok that is hilarious) has begun! Waterstones will sell Kindles in their stores. a few links for this one:
  • the straight-forward account on The Bookseller
  • the BBC’s write-up has some interesting notes about discovery and also Target
  • Nick Harkaway wrote a haiku and also a post for FutureBook

Y, Marie Celona, January 8 2013: i don’t think it’s much of a secret that coming-of-age stories are not my favorite thing. they’re not a pet peeve or anything, i just tend not to love the formula — with exceptions like WE THE ANIMALS which is freaking amazing. add Y to the list of ones i did like; it’s the story of a girl shuttling between foster homes, trying to figure out what makes a family, looking for (and finding) her real parents, and coming to terms with all that shit. in other words, it’s got all your standard ingredients, but the cake that they make is … ok worst metaphor ever, stopping now. it’s a jangly, rough, jagged book, and i read it pretty much in one big gulp.

LET ME CLEAR MY THROAT, Elena Passarello, October 1 2012: the stoic wonderali not only did not hate me for simultaneously reading this, interrupting her reading to tell her things, and then googling (and making her listen to) sounds/songs mentioned in this aaaamaaaaaazing essay collection, but she watched pretty much all of a lengthy Wilhelm Scream video with me. roommate medal of honor goes to! read this with a sound library and/or the internet close to hand, and enjoy.

ALIF THE UNSEEN, G Willow Wilson, July 1 2012: more formal review coming, but suffice to say this book pushes a bunch of my buttons: Arab literature/culture/mysticism, computer programming, oddball characters, political commentary, hijinks, redemption.

LAURA LAMONT’S LIFE IN PICTURES, Emma Straub, September 4 2012: an incredibly satisfying read. from Elsa Emerson to Laura Lamont, Wisconsin girl to silver screen star, the always-entertaining and talented Emma Straub chronicles a woman’s life in Hollywood full of tinsel and glamour and also drugs and people being fucked up, but CLASSY, Y’ALL.

a smart friend asked me today, “what if you read and loved a book, and you wanted to recommend it to people, maybe talk about it on bookrageous, but it was published by Amazon?”

this is an excellent question, one to which i don’t have an answer. what would i do?

it’s bound to happen sooner or later. i can’t just refuse to read all books published by Amazon. (well, i could. i guess that would be the first line of defense — can’t like it if i haven’t read it!)

the party line at the store is that we’ll special order Amazon-published titles people ask for (assuming they’re available from distributors we already work with), but we’re not going to include them in general orders. might this change some day? i can’t imagine the circumstances in which it would, but i suppose stranger things have happened… but really, you guys. probably not.

ok, so that’s work taken care of. but i am a person outside of work (NO REALLY I SWEAR) and am involved with various other book projects and talk about books all kinds of places. will i never, ever, ever publicly mention an Amazon-published book, the same way i pretty much never, ever, ever publicly mention books i didn’t like?

i don’t know. it seems so unfair to the authors! if you’ve written an excellent book, and for whatever reason your best publishing option was with a company that has an incredible web presence and distribution (albeit also with a name for being a bully and a monopoly-in-the-making), will i refuse to ever say a nice thing about your book, a book i enjoyed?

i think the heart of the matter is here: if i really, truly, honestly believe that Amazon is actively trying to put my chosen profession out of business, then it seems like consorting with the enemy to do anything that makes them more money.

here’s another angle: do i really, honestly, truly believe that oil consumption will be the eventual (and maybe not all that eventual) doom of the planet? absolutely. do i still ride in vehicles that consume oil? yep. weekly, if not daily. i am a hypocrite. we all are. it’s part of life.

but most of us also have a line that we won’t cross. for some of us, it’s clothing made in sweatshops. for others, it’s factory-raised meat, or cars made in foreign countries, or shows on FOX. sometimes, we pick a battle, and we fight it, acknowledging how inconvenient it is to our daily lives, how potentially unfair it is to those caught in the cross-fire, but soldiering on nonetheless.

is this my battle? is this my own personal Rubicon, or a windmill at which i am unnecessarily tilting? i don’t know. we won’t know if Amazon will really be able to put indie stores out of business and take over the whole supply chain (and potentially the acquiring and manufacturing as well, ALL THE LINKS OF ALL THE CHAINS), until they actually manage it (heaven forfend). so in the meantime, we (and i say “we” because i believe this is something all booksellers and bloggers are going to have to deal with) must decide how we want to behave, where the boundaries are, what is acceptable and what is not and how we can live in the world in a way that makes us feel good about our choices. i suspect the line will be different for all of us. when i figure out where mine is, i’ll let you know.

THE YEAR OF THE BEASTS, Cecil Castelluci & Nate Powell, May 22 2012: coming-of-age story told partly in comics, partly in prose. sad and verrrrry well-done; i particularly liked how it’s out of sync until finally, everything comes together.

SORRY PLEASE THANK YOU, Charles Yu, July 24 2012: with some of the same themes as HOW TO LIVE SAFELY IN A SCIENCE FICTIONAL UNIVERSE (meta-fiction! more alternate Yu narrators!) and some new, very interesting ones (zombies in the supermarket, emotional outsourcing, narrative-as-flowchart), Yu continues to be a favorite of mine. the more i reflect on it, the more i like it.

THE PECULIAR, Stefan Bachmann, September 1 2012: i don’t know how to talk about the fact that this was written by a teenager, so i won’t. when i started reading it, i was like, HOLY WOW this is a dark and awesome new for-grown-up-people fantasy. and then i checked the back flap and it said it was for children? written by a teenager? broken brain. anyway i’m impressed with it all around. it’s got a mythical-folklorical (shut up that’s a word) heart and is told in a beautifully straightforward style.

THE LAST DRAGONSLAYER, Jasper Fforde, October 2 2012: Jasper Fffffffforde you guyyyyyyys. this book is not long enough, there is So Much More i need to know about this world in which marzipan is a drug (but also government manufactured?) and spells are written in code (ARAMAIC is a coding language?!?) and also can someone please send me a quarkbeast for a pet immediately plz k thx bye. but after i got over mourning that it was Way Too Short For All The Ideas Please I Need More, i enjoyed it thoroughly.

THE HUNDRED THOUSAND KINGDOMS, NK Jemisin: yeah i’m a little obsessed. KILLING MOON was so good! this is the first book in her earlier trilogy; dark, sexy, fun, great female characters. reminds me why i love epic fantasy (especially when it’s not Medieval England epic fantasy)

LIBERATION, Brian Francis Slattery: reread for WORD book group; still freaking awesome. economic apocalypse meets Leverage! what’s not to love?

AURORARAMA, Jean-Christophe Valtat: newly out in paperback, the sequel (LUMINOUS CHAOS) is coming out in October. politics and drugs and drawing rooms in the Arctic, plus a zeppelin full of anarchists. weirdly satisfying.

THE LIKENESS, Tana French: i am late to the Tana French bandwagon, but guys. procedural mysteries that are so much better than that sounds. Ireland! undercover agents! Cassie from IN THE WOODS!

THE KILLING MOON, NK Jemisin: i mentioned already that i was obsessed, right? ninja-priests and dream magic and politics and fascinating cultures and i love this book.

RICE BOY, Evan Dahm: found this at Bergen Street Comics (holla!), dude is local and self-published and his graphic novels are STUNNING. was advised that this is the one to start with.

DIAL H, China Mieville: his first comic! holy shit! i am actually going to read something in issues for the first time in my life.

365 SAMURAI AND A FEW BOWLS OF RICE, JP Kalonji: can you tell i spent a lot of time/money at Bergen? i did. this one, the art and sparse text suckered me in.

LAURA LAMONT’S LIFE IN PICTURES, Emma Straub, September 4 2012: Emma is smart and funny and i love her short stories, am going to break into this one as soon as i get my brain back from Jacqueline Carey and NK Jemisin.

BRING UP THE BODIES, Hilary Mantel: i loved WOLF HALL, cannot wait to see what she does with Anne Boleyn.

• Jacqueline Carey, SANTA OLIVIA is the one with the boxing but in the militaristic future-setting
• Octavia Butler, FLEDGLING is the first one i read of hers, but they’re all great
• NK Jemisin, THE KILLING MOON is the new one, sort of ancient-Egypt-ish
• Ursula Le Guin (who you maybe have already read? but if not), THE LEFT HAND OF DARKNESS is a masterpiece
• Felix Gilman’s HALF-MADE WORLD is something i regularly recommend to people who like Mieville/Harkaway — and Le Guin blurbed it, which is kind of unheard of
• Brian Francis Slattery (newest book is LOST EVERYTHING, but i think LIBERATION is my favorite) is on my top 10 list as well

GONE TO THE FOREST, Katie Kitamura, August 7 2012: if you’ve read LONGSHOT (why haven’t you yet??) you might think you’d have an idea what to expect from Kitamura’s second book, but you’d be wrong. the prose is just as clean, the pacing just as steady, but there’s a whole new level complexity at work here — inevitable, considering the subject. GONE TO THE FOREST is the story of a father and son, managing an estate in a colonized country, who are falling apart at the same time as the political situation around them spirals out of control. tense and vivid and satisfying in that AAAAHHHH WHY IS EVERYONE CRAZY way.

THE DARK UNWINDING, Sharon Cameron, September 1 2012: When Katharine Tulman is sent by her (seriously awful) aunt to declare her estranged uncle (related by marriage) incompetent, so that their side of the family can regain control of the inheritance and the estate, it’s an opportunity to both get some breathing space and, hopefully, prove her use and assure her place in the family. BOY IS SHE WRONG. things are not what they appear, at pretty much any point in this utterly captivating book. clockwork and ghosts and espionage and YOU GUYS IT HAS ALL THE THINGS. it’s almost like ANGELMAKER for kids, actually. fantastic.

RAILSEA, China Mieville, May 15 2012: i have already said everything i can say about this book over on tumblr, more to come in an official review on Shelf Awareness

• Moby-Dick
• the Odyssey
• The Elements of Style
• the art of storytelling (in general)
• Embassytown
• that movie version of Othello where Kenneth Branagh is Iago and keeps breaking the fourth wall
• Treasure Island
• the Redwall books by Brian Jacques
• The Hunting of the Snark

SHADOW OPS: CONTROL POINT, Myke Cole: the first book in a new series that a cover blurb describes as “X-Men meets Black Hawk Down”, which i think is pretty apt. the concept is that people who have magical powers are required to join up, otherwise they’re on the run/enemies of the state. a career soldier, who previously was pretty happy with things, discovers some latent abilities of his own, plunging him into the weird world of magic in the military. entertaining as all get-out, although if you are like me you also periodically will want to yell at/throw things in the direction of the main character, who makes some catastrophically terrible decisions.

BLUEPRINTS OF THE AFTERLIFE, Ryan Boudinot: that one i wrote up for Tor.com and you can believe that i will link the hell out of it when it goes live, but until then i will just say that if you enjoy absurdity and weird technology, you will enjoy this book.

SWAMPLANDIA!, Karen Russell: i had a very conflicted relationship with this book, as evidenced by our discussion on Bookrageous, but the short version is that if Russell hadn’t done such a good job creating characters that you care about i wouldn’t have had such strong feelings, and also wow can she write a sentence.

THE VOICE OF THE RIVER, Melanie Rae Thon: a quiet gem of a book. a boy walking his dog in winter falls into a frozen river; the town turns out to search for him; and all the rescuers bring all their own baggage to the search. gorgeous writing.

I HUNT KILLERS, Barry Lyga, out April 10: my review of this one will be in Shelf Awareness’s reader edition soon, and i know you guys, it’s technically not out yet, but so soon! gory and angsty and not to be read at night and full of OMG I CAN’T BELIEVE THAT JUST HAPPENED.

THE LONGSHOT, Katie Kitamura: i read this book when it first came out in 2009 and loved it, so much so that it got me into watching MMA (which is not something people ever expect to hear about me). having recently met the author for the first time (NYC FTW), i reread it, and it was every bit as good as i remembered. Kitamura’s writing is one of the best responses i can think of to female-authors-vs-male-authors stereotyping — she writes like a Really Good Writer, and will not be put into a tidy little box. it’s a little harder to get ahold of these days, but never fear, she’s got a new book coming out in the fall.

THE PHANTOM TOLLBOOTH, Norton Juster: i blame all the people who never gave this book to my child-self for the fact i didn’t read it until last week when i was cat-sitting for a certain someone who owns FOUR COPIES. it was awesome enough that i now understand the necessity.