Sunday Morning Book Thread - 08-25-2024 ["Perfessor" Squirrel]

Welcome to the prestigious, internationally acclaimed, stately, and illustrious Sunday Morning Book Thread! The place where all readers are welcome, regardless of whatever guilty pleasure we feel like reading (perfection is eternal). Here is where we can discuss, argue, bicker, quibble, consider, debate, confabulate, converse, and jaw about our latest fancy in reading material. As always, pants are required, unless you are wearing these pants...(in style in R'lyeh this season!)

So relax, find yourself a warm kitty (or warm puppy--I won't judge) to curl up in your lap, sharpen those #2 pencils, and dive into a new book. What are YOU reading this fine morning?

PIC NOTE

This is an artist's depiction of Unseen University's Library, located in the city of Ankh-Morpork, on Terry Pratchett's Discworld. At the center is the Librarian--and yes, he's an orangutan. A magical accident transformed into an ape (not a monkey!). He actually prefers his current form and resists all attempts at changing him back. He's discovered that while there are books too dangerous for Man to read, apes don't have that limitation. He's also able to navigate the intricacies of "L-Space" which links all libraries together via complicated quantum entanglement.

WHERE DOES PUNCTUATION COME FROM?

Since school started for me this past week, why not have a little history lesson today? We take modern punctuation for granted, but it wasn't always there to help us navigate our reading. In fact, spaces might just be the most important form of punctuation there is, as without them, all words blend together making it very difficult to decipher. The ancient Greeks and Romans used ALLCAPSWITHNOSPACESORPUNCTUATION. Everyone was forced to read out loud because that was about the only way to decipher what was being said. Punctuation was introduced as a way of helping the reader SPEAK the words, rather than read them.

Early Christianity had quite a bit of influence on spacing and punctuation because the early Christians wanted to spread the Gospel to anyone and everyone. They standardized quite a bit of the structure of various languages, particularly Latin, of course, because of that desire and need.

The appearance of punctuation does vary quite a bit among languages, though their function may remain consistent. Spanish is famous for its upside down question marks and exclamation points, for example. French uses a double-angled-bracket for quotation marks. And so forth. I have no idea how punctuation works in Asian languages like Chinese, Korean, or Japanese, though I suppose they must have some form of it.

1 BOOK MARKETING TACTIC EVERY AUTHOR CAN DO

It may seem counter-intuitive, but I think the YouTuber above is correct in that giving away your books/stories for FREE may be the best marketing tool you have. Word-of-mouth is a very powerful tool, especially in today's interconnected world on social media. Consider the following scenario:
Last year, one of you Morons recommended some books by Douglas Preston & Lincoln Child. I liked your recommendation, but wasn't sure if I wanted to spend the money on a book just on the off-chance that I might enjoy it. I suppose I could have looked for a cheap copy on Kindle or something. However, I happened to go to a local library book sale where books were dirt cheap. I picked up four or five books by Preston & Child for less that $5. Not a bad investment. Then I read one of them. And devoured the rest. After that, I wanted more, more, more. So within a short span of time, I had spent over $200 or so on the rest of their books. All because I picked up one of their books for a low, low price of $1 or less.

That is not an outlier, either. Looking back over my past buying patterns, I can think of dozens of authors whose books I have bought because I either found a copy of one of their books for free, or checked out their books from the library and wanted to read more. Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time is a prime example. I found a copy of The Eye of the World for free at a library's community swap shelf, where people brought in books to be swapped out for other books. From the prologue, I was hooked. I ended up giving away a couple of copies of this book to friends to get them to read it and they also enjoyed it.

The second part of the equation, though, is that the book has to be actually GOOD. That means in addition to writing it, you have revise, edit, and proofread it to death. Giving out free copies is also an excellent way to receive feedback so that you know where to direct your efforts in improving your story. But you also will need to engage in deliberate practice to improve your mastery of the craft of storytelling. As the YouTuber above points out, his first book wasn't his best. But he worked HARD to improve his writing and now he's helping many other authors improve THEIR writing.

MORON RECOMMENDATIONS

OK, Koontz fans, I read my first Dean Koontz selection this week: Watchers. What a great book! Genetic researchers created an extraordinarily smart dog. He escaped from the lab, and changed the life of the man who found him, and some other characters as well. The man also changed the life of the dog. Alas, a terrible monster also escaped the lab.

Throughout the story, the dog is hunted by the monster and the NSA. Oh, and there's a bonus assassin, who also wants the dog. And there's a wee bit of romance.

It's a fine story. Picked up Odd Thomas for my next read.
Posted by: Dash my lace wigs! at August 18, 2024 09:17 AM (OX9vb)

Comment: As you can see below, I broke down and purchased Watchers based on the recommendations of you Morons. That's one of the cool things about this place--we can always find something interesting to read because we trust each other to give us quality recommendations. Not all of them will pan out, but that's OK. We explore our horizons anyway. I've been cycling through a few other authors between Koontz books, but I promise I will get to this one eventually (still have quite a few others in the queue...).

This week I read a graphic novel: "Ghost of the Badlands" written by Razorfist (the YouTuber) and illustrated by George Alexopoulos. It's essentially The Shadow (the old pulp character) in the old west, with heavy (heeeeeeeeavy) Christian overtones.

Our main character is a bandit who survives when the rest of his posse is massacred. He was spared because....Well, he doesn't have a heart of gold, but he does have a little bit of a conscious. So, the Ghost recruits him, and sends him to infiltrate another evil gang, to help facilitate their downfall.

Its not clear why the Ghost needed our main character's help, as he is willing and able to gun down plenty of baddies on his own....But its a fun story. I recommend it.

It's funny, I've read two sperate 'old-west vengeful gun-men from God' comics in recent years, (the other being "Wraith of God) and both books have been amongst my favorites. There's just something about that genre...

Posted by: Castle Guy at August 18, 2024 09:41 AM (Lhaco)

Comment: The "Weird West" is an unusual subgenre of fiction, being a blend of urban fantasy, wild west, and Native American mysticism. I'm not familiar with Raz¨o;rfist's take on this genre, but it sounds a bit similar to R.S. Belcher's Golgotha series, which is one of the strangest series of books I've ever read. It's a kitchen sink of myths, legends, tall tales, and more. All surrounding the town of Golgotha, Nevada, built over a Hellmouth of sorts.

Read "Default" by Gregory Makoff this week. The non-fiction book is about the sovereign debt default saga for Argentina that stretched from 2001 to 2016. As with any event, the headlines don't tell the whole story, so learning about a lot more of the specifics was interesting.

Sovereign defaults are unique because there is no bankruptcy court. Lending to emerging market or developing countries historically involved other countries, organizations like the IMF and World Bank and commercial banks. After a series of big defaults in the 1970s and early 1980s, commercial banks largely pulled back. Emerging market bonds started as a way to repackage bad bank loans and get them off of bank balance sheets. That change had lots of implications and the Argentina saga played that out.

Sovereign defaults aren't going away and they have many political, social, and geopolitical cross-currents. The Catholic Church 2025 Jubilee plans to feature debt forgiveness, so we'll likely hear more chatter from those who want to reduce or cancel debt loads for Emerging/developing market countries.
Posted by: TRex at August 18, 2024 09:50 AM (IQ6Gq)

Comment: I've mentioned before that I find global finance bewildering. But it is important, of course, because our global economy relies upon some form of trade and commerce in order to function. We may be reaching a tipping point where the largest, most powerful nations have officially run out of money--both their own and all that they have borrowed. The global "reset" is going to suck, but I suspect most of us will get through it in some fashion...unless the burning times do come and we turn into Reavers just to keep what we have.

More Moron-recommended reading material can be found HERE! (1000+ Moron-recommended books!)

WHAT I'VE ACQUIRED THIS PAST WEEK:

• Watchers by Dean Koontz -- This has been recommended more than once around here. Might as well read it, since I've acquired a taste for Dean Koontz's particular brand of horror and suspense.

WHAT I'VE BEEN READING THIS PAST WEEK:

After reviewing some of OregonMuse's old Book Threads, I thought I'd try something a bit different. Instead of just listing WHAT I'm reading, I'll include commentary as well. Unless otherwise specified, you can interpret this as an implied recommendation, though as always your mileage may vary.

The Taking by Dean Koontz

Dean Koontz fully embraces cosmic and body horror with this story. A small California mountain town is gripped in terror when a mysterious rain brings with it a full-blown alien invasion. Turns out the rest of the world is also infected by the parasitic, alien lifeforms that are devouring the population of earth in favor of its own ecology. I actually reminds me quite a bit of P.C. Hodgell's Perimal Darkling in the way the alien life is portrayed, blending the animate and inanimate into a terrifying hybrid of terrestrial life. Only dogs and children (a Koontz trademark) seem to be spared for unknown reasons. Pretty gruesome stuff, but there is a message of hope at the end...

Salvation Sequence Book 3 - The Saints of Salvation by Peter F. Hamilton

In the previous entry, the seemingly-benevolent Olyix revealed their true colors by abducting most of the human population of Earth to take them on a journey through tie to the end of the universe to meet God. Thousands of years later, the remnants are starting to fight back against a foe that is all but impervious to human technology. Can the humans find the source of the Olyix invasion and strike a blow that will cripple or destroy these bastards?

Peter F. Hamilton does *not* think small when it comes to far out science fiction. His stories are full of incredibly weird and bizarre ideas about future physics. Here we have a situation where humanity has harnessed the power of gravity to the point where they can launch a neutron star through a wormhole as a weapon to be used against the Olyix. It's a callback to E.E. "Doc" Smith's Lensmen saga where the two opposing sides hurl antimatter planets at each other across entire galaxies, just because they can.

The Word and the Void Book 3 - Angel Fire East by Terry Brooks

Knight of the Void John Ross teams up with Nest Freemark again in the third and final chapter of The Word and the Void. This time, John's visions have led him to a strange entity known as a "gypsy morph," a powerful creature born of magic that lives only for a short time and requires protection until it can release its magic safely. However, the Void has other plans for the gypsy morph and sends the ancient demon Findo Gask to capture or destroy the gypsy morph.

I was a bit ambivalent about reading this, since I know the ending is setting up the beginning of the end for mankind. Evil will soon take over the world in the Genesis of Shannara trilogy, which bridges the timeline between The Word and the Void and the original Shannara series. All John and Nest can do is fight a rearguard action to preserve what little hope will remain in the world after they are gone.

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