ThePessismist.com

My desk calendar is from Despair.com — the pessimist’s daily calendar.  I’ve been pretty entertained by the snark so far, especially the literary quotes and fun poked at authors.

The entry for January 11th is my favorite to date:  50 Shades of Meh.  Here’s a link to the blog’s review.  My favorite bullet points from the calendar:

• Fifty Shades of Grey, an unreadable soft-core pornographic novel by author E.L. James, is the bestselling book in British history.  (So don’t ever let a Brit condescend to you again.)
• Gentlemen, prepare to be bored-ded… “Anticipation hangs heavy over my head like a dark, tropical storm cloud.  Butterflies food my belly – as well as a darker, carnal, captivating ache as I try to imagine what he’ll do to me.”  (Oh, if only he’d spanked her with The Elements of Style.)

B&N’s bad news

Jane at Dear Author included B&N’s disappointing holiday sales news in her Friday News post last week, along with one industry observer’s speculation about the underlying problem: the Nook, its success, and the resources devoted to it.  In the DA comment thread, the posters share their general discontent with B&N’s sales and customer service with respect to the Nook.

I still have a B&N membership, renewed in November.  Although half the coupons I get are for Nook devices or books, I still get coupons and discounts for paper books, which I use.  (Last month I bought The Complete Calvin & Hobbes — the price ended up being $57 rather than $100 after discounts.)  The emphasis on Nook in marketing is irritating: I’m a Kindle-user and buy from various outlets but B&N is not one of them for ebooks.  (I’m not thrilled with their handling of the eBookwise and Fictionwise library.)

For me, B&N is still a purveyor of paper books, although the company seems less interested in paper these days.  When I walk into the store, I don’t love that the Nook displays now take space that used to be devoted to new releases.  I don’t love the volume of non-book material that takes space formerly occupied by books:  puzzles, games, toys, totebags, etc.  There are never seats in the cafe for customers who bought a drink or food — they are all occupied by people using the free WiFi or reading magazines without buying or using unpurchased books as reference tools as if B&N were a library.  The mystery section keeps shrinking, diminished in order to make space for YA and YA paranormal, the largest individual fiction sections in the store.  Romance has been shoved into the far corner and is dominated by trade paperbacks, which are something I seldom purchase lately.  SF/F is being squeezed by manga and graphic novels; the section is usually hard to negotiate because there are kids sitting in the aisles, thumbing through manga.

I like the hold service…unfortunately, it only really works with popular books.  For non-NYT best sellers or lesser-known names, Amazon is still faster than B&N’s in-house ordering.

I go to B&N on off hours, usually with a specific book in mind and a coupon in hand.  It’s still worth it to me, based on sales/discount, to keep my membership.  But I can imagine the time coming in the future when the membership won’t be worth the cost, when they stock so few non-NYT/BigName/NextBigThing books that I won’t be bothered to go there but will instead default to online purchasing.

Random thought:  B&N’s forward-looking statements language is…interesting. It mentions that the expected sales lift after the closure of Borders may not occur, which makes me wonder:  it’s been more than a year since Borders closed for good, if there was going to be a bounce, it should have happened already.  Why is that language still in the risk disclosure?

Unrelated random thought:  Audible.com is a sponsor of the SavageLove cast, or was for the 1/1/13 edition in which an author was interviewed.  Another reason to appreciate the service.

Most popular posts

WordPress is kind enough to prepare a little report telling users about their traffic, stats, etc.  I try NOT to pay attention to that, but one stat — most popular posts — bemuses me.  You never can tell what people will be most interested in, can you?

1.  If you can’t afford an editor, you shouldn’t be publishing — 435 views.  When I first posted this, I was very cranky about the lack of editorial polishing I’d been seeing in epublished books, and the authorial shrugging about readers who quibbled about such immaterial things as spelling, punctuation, etc.  I didn’t expect it to get that much attention.

2.  Black Wade: The Wild Side of Love – 421 views.  This is a review of an erotic graphic novel that I did back in 2010, but it seems very popular.

3.  SBD: Bared to You by Sylvia Day — 167 views.  I didn’t care for this book and made it pretty clear in my post.  But for some reason, web searches on the hero’s penis size and anal sex in the book bring readers to my blog.  I’ve forgotten, was there anal in that book?

4.  Groupon’s Ad Fail – 160 views.

5.  Bear, Otter and the Kid review — 123 views.  Another negative review, which contrasts to the general glowing reviews about this book.  The review was written in 2011, so I’m guessing the traffic is a function of the comparison to the movie Shelter.

6.  BOATK/Shelter comparison — 107 views.  Yes, I thought they were extremely similar.

7.  Barcelona: a city I’m going to want to visit again — 87 views.  My travel summary of my February 2012 holiday.  Had a lovely trip.

This and that from the holiday weekend

+  Browsed at the bookstore on Sunday.  Left with a 2013 planner that I really like.  It’s got 2012 dates too, so I’ve already begun using it.  Much better than the massive 8.5×11 thing from work that weighs a ton and is less than attractive.

+  Was looking for a biography of JFK, An Unfinished Life, based on a review that intrigued me, but ended up buying a new Nordic mystery (the red shoes on the cover sold me) by Kristina Ohlsson and Alison Bechdel’s family memoir, Fun Home.  I’ve paged through Bechdel’s work before but never bought, and am EXTREMELY pleased with this purchase.  The story telling and the drawing are excellent.

~  A review of a newish m/m book sent me to the bookseller for a sample.  When I saw that the publisher was selling the novella for $3.99, I immediately closed that tab.  Seriously?  The story is 68 pages in total; with copyright, blurbs, author bio, etc., it’s probably 60 pages.  For $4?  I don’t think so.  For the same price (or less), I can buy a category novel elsewhere from a known author.  #lostbooksale

 I love Carla Kelly’s One Good Turn.  Rereading it in e-format, I still think it is her best work and that Liria Valencia is an amazing character, even though she’s not a POV character.  (Actually, that makes me want to go through Kelly’s backlist and catalog POV, because in my mind it’s usually from the heroine rather than the hero.)  However.  HOWEVER.  The formatting for Kindle is pretty irritating:  most of the time, there is no tilde over the “n” in señor…but not always.  If it was not used at all, I would have chalked that up to a conversion problem, but having it appear occasionally but inconsistently was irritating as hell and sloppy editing for the reissue in a new format.  Which I suppose presumes that anyone at the publisher bothered to check for things like that in the new electronic version of the book.

- I read an F book last week.  Not a DNF, not a D, but an F.  If I had been reading a paperback, I’d've torn it down the spine and ripped the pages out to feed to the shredder.  Maybe the author was attempting a contemporary fairytale, but it failed for me as a reader.  Cliche riddled, lacking any significant plot, two Mary Sue or Gary Stu MCs.  Blech.  This is from an author who seems to be very well reviewed and a fan-favorite.  Oh well, different strokes I guess.

 

Is that (genre) romance?

Audible.com is having its semi-annual sale.  Being a book hoarder in any/all formats, I checked it out even though I’ve got several unlistened-to audiobooks still and have no spare memory on my iPod until I delete a couple of books.  Browsing by category, I noticed that on the first page of “romance” audiobooks, I noticed that 15 of the 20 books involve vampires or werewolves.  Of those, seven are by Kelley Armstrong…whom most readers would not characterize as a romance author.  Rom-readers enjoy the romantic threads of her books, but the relationship is generally not the focus of any of the books.  Well, except for Bitten maybe?  But even that doesn’t really fall into the genre romance definition.  Her Otherworld series is urban fantasy or horror; any relationship involved is a subsidiary to the larger fantasy/horror plot, even that of Elena and Clay.

Who selected these categories?

*crickets chirp*

Normally I would post a “recently read” rundown right about now, since I’ve been quite on the blog for the last week.  Except I don’t have anything that I’ve newly recently read.

I am in the process of re-reading Tigerland, so I can write a coherent review; mostly I just want to gush about Simon as POV character.

On the audiobook front, I finished listening to Bujold’s A Civil Campaign:  the narrator lived up to my expectations, and I laughed and smirked at appropriate places, which earned me strange looks from my fellow commuters and gym occupants.  Despite Greg Wise’s mellifluous voice, The Portrait of Dorian Gray is…not very engaging.  But then, I feel ambivalent about Oscar Wilde and tend to like his plays better than any of his other work.  I’m eyeing the Peter Grant urban fantasy books at Audible, but I don’t *need* them since I have paper editions. Right?

Work is cancelled tomorrow in light of Hurricane Sandy, so perhaps I’ll have something new/smart/fascinating/provocative to say then.  I’ll buckle down and read, and also do more weeding of the book collection.

Random observation

I’ve seen a few tweets about JR Ward’s book signing and excitement about her next BDB book, which is going to include a gay romance. (Yay? That whole series is a hot mess, so I’m not waiting with baited breath.)

Anyway, I find it somewhat entertaining that one very vocal fan of this couple is a reader who at RWA 2009 stood up in Ward’s Q&A and said that she totally didn’t get/see/feel the homoerotic vibe from Ward’s books that other readers did.

Perhaps on reread it struck her?

Emptying the junk drawer

When I was a kid, my sister and I would spend part of the summer with my grandparents, who spoiled us rotten.  (I’m not exaggerating:  we were the first grandbabies and could do NO WRONG.)  One of the mysteries and treasures of the summer was Mommom’s junk drawer.  You could find amazing, magical, useful things in the drawer; whenever you needed something, it could be found there.  Spare keys, a screwdriver, twist-ties, lids for canning, a ruler, etc.  The drawer collected the flotsam of the household, the bits and bobs that wound up in the kitchen for some reason, and held it all securely until we needed it.  Because sooner or later someone would need that key chain or a green ink pen or whatever other oddity might’ve gotten added to the jumble.

As an adult, I recognize the pack-rat tendencies and Depression-era mentality of my grandmother that led to the junk drawer — don’t get rid of anything still usable because it might be useful at some point.  I’ve managed to avoid having my own junk drawer in the kitchen, but I still manage to have a sort of book related equivalent:  not just this blog, but a collection of notebooks, some expensive and some not, that reside in my shoulder bag, being filled with notes about books to buy, reviews to write, links to share, and things to look up.

• The Economist on the success of Nordic crime fiction
• An interview with Gore Vidal that was banned.  I have thoughts about Vidal’s play, The Best Man, and how it reflects on the current election season, but haven’t managed to string them together coherently other than to think that John Stamos’s character seems like a frighteningly accurate portrayal of the GOP veep nominee and also any tea party candidate.
• Matt Taibbi on Romney the archipelago man.
• This article on David Ferrer made me ::head desk:: when I read it.  Really? Has that journalist (assuming he is a legitimate sports journalist) paid more than cursory attention to professional tennis?

 

On the reading front, I’ve finished Aaronovitch’s first and third Peter Grant urban fantasy novels.  As I mentioned earlier, I found them at the Strand, but unfortunately could not find a copy of the second book of the series.  I’ve broken down and bought a copy of the ebook, but read #3 before doing so.  I’m kind of sorry I skipped around now, because some of Grant’s behavior in the second book changes my opinion of his reliability as a narrator and a detective/constable, which would make a difference to my reading of the third book (although it wouldn’t change my enjoyment of the series.)  Will have to reread book three once I’ve finished book two.

I’ve also fallen prey to the lure of Audible.com.  I used to borrow a lot of audiobooks from the library, but fell out of the habit.  A recommendation over at Dear Author in a comment thread got me started again.  ::sigh::  Just what I needed:  more books, just in another format…

 

Te quiero, España

A while back I added Mike Randolph’s photos of Spain to my feed.  I especially loved the photo of the Tio Pepe sign.  I think I mentioned in my travel recap post that the sign was missing from the Puerta del Sol in Madrid on my trip this past February; the roof of the building looked oddly naked without it, despite being shrouded in scaffolding.  Apparently may not be reinstalled after the renovation of the building.

Anyway, going through my personal photos, I found this older photo of the Tio Pepe sign:

Tio Pepe sign in the Puerta del Sol
Taken February 2009

 

And here is the same building this past February, signless.  Apparently I didn’t take a photo of the naked building, although I definitely remarked upon it in my travel journal.

 

I’ve got a photo of the Mezquita in Cordoba in black and white that I took a while back (maybe in 2002 or so?), but it doesn’t look nearly as good as his — imagine that!  Hmm, I should find the digital back up of the photo (not on this hard drive but on disc, I think).

 

Sort of but not really related:  a couple of weeks ago The Economist reviewed La Roja: How Soccer Conquered Spain and How Spanish Soccer Conquered the World.  Which seems prescient in light of La Roja’s EuroCup2012 win over Italy yesterday.

Nothing to see here, move along

1.  Check out the first rough draft of the next Kate Daniels’ book by Ilona Andrews, posted as part of a bribe.

2.  I’ve found the links and articles posted by The Arabist to be very helpful in giving a less western-oriented MSM perspective on political events in Egypt, North Africa and the Middle East.

3.  Have you checked out Courtney Nguyen‘s reporting on the French Open in Beyond the Baseline for SI?  She loves and knows tennis, it’s clear in her writing, but her voice is fresh and irreverent, which is welcome among some of the more conservative sport journos (Neil Harman, I’m looking at you). 

4.  La Tienda has a post up on coffee in Spain.  Personally, I don’t drink much coffee unless it’s been ruined adulterated diluted almost beyond recognition by a great deal of milk and sugar, but I have been known to enjoy a morning cafe con leche while on vacation in Madrid or Barcelona.  (FWIW, the blog post is also available in Spanish.)

5.  Dear author:  why would you have someone drive from Baltimore to Dulles to catch a flight to New York?  That’s an hour drive at best and closer to two at worst.  Government employees traveling from Baltimore to NY would either fly out of BWI or take the Acela, which drops you in midtown in 2 hours.  In a pinch, they might fly out of Reagan, maybe.  But Dulles? No.