Scott's Reading List

Hybrid reading

Print books aren't going away, people. And B&N's Jim Hilt agrees:

Despite the popularity of eReaders, Hilt warns booksellers not to get carried away with eBooks. “The idea that the print book is going to die some slow long death is actually a fallacy,” he said.

I love ebooks, it is true. I also love "real" books, and I always will. I buy lots of both kinds, and plan on continuing that into the near future.

It generally comes down to price. If I can get the eBook for cheaper than a print copy (usually used), eBook it is. However, if there is a new novel from one of my favorite authors I am not against paying $13 for the eBook since I hardly ever re-read novels.

2012 Edgar Nominees

Generally, I stick to reading science fiction, but I've been dipping my toes into the world of mysteries. I tend to read books that have been nominated for an Edgar, and the 2012 Edgar Nominees have just been announced.

Interestingly, amongst the nominees is The Company Man which is a sci-fi novel. This means, of course, that I'll be reading The Company Man at some point.

To be a sparkly vampire, or not to be a sparkly vampire

To quote Amanda Hocking:

For me Twilight is my Romeo and Juliet.  I never cared for Shakespeare so Twilight is a new adaptation to geek out on.

Hocking is a fabulously successful author, so she's doing something right. But not caring for Shakespeare? That's just wrong.

Philip K. Dick Award 2011 nominees

The Philip K Dick Award nominees for 2011 have been announced. I haven't read any of the books on the list, but I am sure as hell not going to read Deadline (Feed was my least favorite read of last year).

Here's the list with some Amazon links to make me a few cents:

• A Soldier's Duty by Jean Johnson (Ace Books)
• After the Apocalypse by Maureen F. McHugh (Small BeerPress)
• Deadline by Mira Grant (Orbit)
• The Company Man by Robert Jackson Bennett (Orbit)
• The Other by Matthew Hughes (Underland Press)
• The Postmortal by Drew Magary (Penguin Books)
• The Samuil Petrovitch Trilogy (Equations of Life, Theories of Flight, Degrees of Freedom) by Simon Morden (Orbit)

I haven't read any of the nominated books, though I have admired the covers of the The Samuil Petrovitch Trilogy in a bookstore recently (and I just bought the first book on my Kindle):

No time to read

In the Land of the Non-Reader Jonathan Gourlay writes about going cold-turkey with reading: "I must have some free time. Perhaps the “I don’t have time to read” line is just a cover. A way that people excuse themselves from the uncomfortable truth that they do, in fact, have time but that they would rather do something other than read with that time (such as pretending to be a wood-elf)."

For awhile I stopped reading because I thought I didn't have any time for it. Turns out I did have plenty of time to read, I just spent it watching Murder, She Wrote. Now I just read a novel while watching Jessica Fletcher outwit some criminal.

Bookshelf Porn

Bookshelf Porn: For all your bookshelf drooling needs.

(Via Drawn.)

What took so long?

I've long wanted to create a blog devoted to by two passions in life: reading and writing. In fact, I've created several iterations of this very blog, Scott's Reading List, none of which launched.

As I was struggling to figure out why I could never get this site together I realized I had made a rookie writer's mistake: I was concentrating on the tools and not the words.

I'm a geek, you see, so I took the opportunity of launching a new blog to learn some new blogging software. I tried a few, and I had some cool ideas about how the site should work but I would get lost in the details. As I fiddled with settings and templates I continued to read books, but not write about them.

That's when it hit me: no one cares what software I use to run the site, so just use something that works and get on with it.

This is me getting on with it.