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On the shape of books
There is something within the specific shape, weight, and composition of a book that has the unique ability to warp time around it. Much like way the surface molecules of a drop of water have a unique tension that keeps the drop rounded rather than flat where it rests on a leaf's surface, if you gather words and ink and paper together and arrange them in just the right the right combination, you produce a time warp effect where you sit down at six o'clock to read a few pages and the next thing you know, your Wonderful Husband is informing you that it's after nine and would you like him to heat some soup for dinner as it's too late for the stir-fry you'd planned, and you realize that something like five hundred pages have flown by and where did the time go?!
Inspired by the likes of![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
kelbebop and snarkyllama, I've decided to do the "Fifty Books in 2007" meme/challenge/thing. I've started in on the year's books with Firebirds Rising (page count: 523), a short story anthology I bought on the strength of it having a story by Tamora Pierce in it, and am actually fairly pleased with. The worst complaint I've read online is that it's heavily biased toward fantasy over science fiction. Its subject matter ranges from human empathy to serial killers to the dangers of assumption in planetary colonization. There's a quite good story on the dangers of technology, too, but I know few if any of my friends will agree with me on its point, as I am admittedly a luddite and suspicious of the role technology has come to play in modern society. One of the most pleasant surprises was a story dealing with a second human society of little people, like in Gulliver's Travels or Mistress Masham's Repose or The Littles. It's made me interested in checking out the other of the author's works in the same universe, as well as in rereading the first two of those books later this year. And, yes, the Tamora Pierce story I bought it for was good if unusual--I'm not used to reading low fantasy from her, only high, so there was a touch of cognitive dissonance for me.
Inspired by the likes of
kelbebop and snarkyllama, I've decided to do the "Fifty Books in 2007" meme/challenge/thing. I've started in on the year's books with Firebirds Rising (page count: 523), a short story anthology I bought on the strength of it having a story by Tamora Pierce in it, and am actually fairly pleased with. The worst complaint I've read online is that it's heavily biased toward fantasy over science fiction. Its subject matter ranges from human empathy to serial killers to the dangers of assumption in planetary colonization. There's a quite good story on the dangers of technology, too, but I know few if any of my friends will agree with me on its point, as I am admittedly a luddite and suspicious of the role technology has come to play in modern society. One of the most pleasant surprises was a story dealing with a second human society of little people, like in Gulliver's Travels or Mistress Masham's Repose or The Littles. It's made me interested in checking out the other of the author's works in the same universe, as well as in rereading the first two of those books later this year. And, yes, the Tamora Pierce story I bought it for was good if unusual--I'm not used to reading low fantasy from her, only high, so there was a touch of cognitive dissonance for me.