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Free/nearly free Andre Norton books via Kindle, and apparently elsewhere.
The hidden truths about calories:
White dudely thinking:
Dessa, Spiral Bound: A collection of short essays and poems by the rapper; perhaps unsurprisingly, I liked the lyrical bits better than the essays, which tended to wander. At her best, she reminded me of Jenny Holzer: “Legally, the furthest you can go is to another person. A new, sexually attractive person. By the love scene, when the story’s all but over, you may find your numberless anxieties returning to you. But in the hour before any definite commitment has been forged, your brain is wholly occupied by the intrigue….”
Ben H. Winters, The Last Policeman: A Novel: An asteroid is going to hit the planet and cause an extinction-level event in a few months. Our protagonist, Henry Palace, is a newly minted detective, and he believes (when no one else does) that one of the suicides he’s called in on is actually a murder. The novel is about the question, What does it mean to seek justice when we’re all about to die in the very near future? I thought it did a great job—Det. Palace is rigidly sympathetic, and the other characters are equally understandable.
Ilona Andrews, Gunmetal Magic: No clue what this title means, but: Andrea Nash, Kate Daniels’ friend and business partner, has been kicked out of the Order and has broken up with her boyfriend Raphael over her commitment to the Order, so that kind of sucks. And the shapeshifters want her to join the Pack or leave town. Then someone murders four of Raphael’s crew, and the resulting investigation forces her to confront her feelings about joining the pack (since the shapeshifters she grew up with abused her terribly) as well as her romance with Raphael. Oh, and the prospect of death by god. I like Kate a little better—or maybe I just want more about what’s up with Kate’s family—and I could have used about three fewer reminders that Andrea is blonde (does anyone really think “my blonde hair was looking good” or the like?)—but overall it was a solid entry in this series.
Stars: Original Stories Based on the Songs of Janis Ian, Janis Ian & Mike Resnick, eds.: I like Janis Ian and I wanted to see what pro songfic looked like. Mostly they just used the songs as epigraphs or similarly; some were relatively literal (for sf values of literal, as when “Society’s Child” became several stories about loving a person of the wrong social class on another planet/in the posthuman environment/etc.) while others were more evocative. I can’t say anything really stood out, though the contributors are all well-known names in contemporary sf/fantasy, including Terry Bisson, Tad Williams, Joe Haldeman, Jane Yolen, John Varley, Mercedes Lackey (Valdemar!), Kage Baker, Gregory Benford, Tanith Lee, Robert J. Sawyer, Robert Sheckley, Susan R. Mathews (Dolgorukij!), Barry N. Malzberg, Mike Resnick, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, Stephen Baxter, Nancy Kress, Spider Robinson, David Gerrold, Judith Tarr, Diane Duane, Sharon Lee & Steve Miller, Harry Turtledove (truly terrible!), and Orson Scott Card (sexual abuse of a child!).
Mike Carey, Dead Man’s Boots: Okay, I’m a full-fledged Felix Castor fan now. Among other things, I like how the exorcist/gumshoe has the exact same excuse for missing calls that I do—given the other stuff going on in his life, I believe that he forgot to charge his phone, even though it’s plot-convenient. I also like how his choices are often legitimately bad ones—he has bad alternatives and sometimes he screws up, and people die. Here, he investigates a murder that soon seems to involve something even the ghost-hunters and demons think impossible: possession of a human by a ghost. He’s also still trying to deal with the friend into whose body he accidentally sealed a demon several years ago. And if the plot comes together a bit neatly in the end, there’s very little neatness in the world so I don’t mind.
Curt Selby, I, Zombie: Unnamed girl who drowned while institutionalized has her body used as slave labor offworld, as do many people who die under usable circumstances. Except that her profound cognitive impairments in life interact surprisingly with the computer system running her in death; unlike an ordinary subject, she can think and act for herself, more than she ever could before. But she doesn’t want to explain this to any of the “living” people, and now someone seems determined to kill her. Also there are these dying aliens poking around. Odd little book; affectless but simultaneously angry protagonist. The ending was way too neat for me, but it might be good for those seeking a Twilight Zone vibe.
The hidden truths about calories:
In general, it seems that the more processed foods are the more they actually give us the number of calories we see on the box, bag or other sort of label. This applies not just to cooking and pounding but also to industrial processing. A recent study found that individual humans who ate, as part of an experiment, 600 or 800 calorie portions of whole wheat bread (with nuts and seeds on it) and cheddar cheese actually expended twice as much energy, yes twice, in digesting that food as did individuals who consumed the same quantity of white bread and “processed cheese product.” As a consequence, the net number of calories the whole food eaters received was ten percent less than the number received by the processed food eaters (because they spent some of their calories during digestion).I didn’t build that: “Over the years, I’ve encountered a few successful people who believe they did it all themselves and achieved success because they are just better than their fellow human beings. Some were bankers; some were writers; some were lawyers. Some male, some female. Some rich, some not. Some were born into privilege, some weren’t. I guess they’re a pretty diverse crowd. They only have one thing in common, really: They’re all assholes.”
White dudely thinking:
The company was hiring more women in managerial jobs, and while he had no problem with that in general, he said that some of these women hadn’t started out hauling cotton as he had and didn’t know the business from the ground up. But the company felt pressure to hire them, Charles told me, “to keep up with the times.”… Charles was always pretty handy, so he considered starting a construction company [after he quit], even though he had never run a business. Working with trucks and piles of wood was a “humbling experience,” especially after having been a head of national sales. He said that he knew he would be competing with men who were in the business a long time or with younger men who once worked for him.Now, this dude is not to blame for America’s economic woes. But JFC that’s some entitled, hypocritical bullshit!
Dessa, Spiral Bound: A collection of short essays and poems by the rapper; perhaps unsurprisingly, I liked the lyrical bits better than the essays, which tended to wander. At her best, she reminded me of Jenny Holzer: “Legally, the furthest you can go is to another person. A new, sexually attractive person. By the love scene, when the story’s all but over, you may find your numberless anxieties returning to you. But in the hour before any definite commitment has been forged, your brain is wholly occupied by the intrigue….”
Ben H. Winters, The Last Policeman: A Novel: An asteroid is going to hit the planet and cause an extinction-level event in a few months. Our protagonist, Henry Palace, is a newly minted detective, and he believes (when no one else does) that one of the suicides he’s called in on is actually a murder. The novel is about the question, What does it mean to seek justice when we’re all about to die in the very near future? I thought it did a great job—Det. Palace is rigidly sympathetic, and the other characters are equally understandable.
Ilona Andrews, Gunmetal Magic: No clue what this title means, but: Andrea Nash, Kate Daniels’ friend and business partner, has been kicked out of the Order and has broken up with her boyfriend Raphael over her commitment to the Order, so that kind of sucks. And the shapeshifters want her to join the Pack or leave town. Then someone murders four of Raphael’s crew, and the resulting investigation forces her to confront her feelings about joining the pack (since the shapeshifters she grew up with abused her terribly) as well as her romance with Raphael. Oh, and the prospect of death by god. I like Kate a little better—or maybe I just want more about what’s up with Kate’s family—and I could have used about three fewer reminders that Andrea is blonde (does anyone really think “my blonde hair was looking good” or the like?)—but overall it was a solid entry in this series.
Stars: Original Stories Based on the Songs of Janis Ian, Janis Ian & Mike Resnick, eds.: I like Janis Ian and I wanted to see what pro songfic looked like. Mostly they just used the songs as epigraphs or similarly; some were relatively literal (for sf values of literal, as when “Society’s Child” became several stories about loving a person of the wrong social class on another planet/in the posthuman environment/etc.) while others were more evocative. I can’t say anything really stood out, though the contributors are all well-known names in contemporary sf/fantasy, including Terry Bisson, Tad Williams, Joe Haldeman, Jane Yolen, John Varley, Mercedes Lackey (Valdemar!), Kage Baker, Gregory Benford, Tanith Lee, Robert J. Sawyer, Robert Sheckley, Susan R. Mathews (Dolgorukij!), Barry N. Malzberg, Mike Resnick, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, Stephen Baxter, Nancy Kress, Spider Robinson, David Gerrold, Judith Tarr, Diane Duane, Sharon Lee & Steve Miller, Harry Turtledove (truly terrible!), and Orson Scott Card (sexual abuse of a child!).
Mike Carey, Dead Man’s Boots: Okay, I’m a full-fledged Felix Castor fan now. Among other things, I like how the exorcist/gumshoe has the exact same excuse for missing calls that I do—given the other stuff going on in his life, I believe that he forgot to charge his phone, even though it’s plot-convenient. I also like how his choices are often legitimately bad ones—he has bad alternatives and sometimes he screws up, and people die. Here, he investigates a murder that soon seems to involve something even the ghost-hunters and demons think impossible: possession of a human by a ghost. He’s also still trying to deal with the friend into whose body he accidentally sealed a demon several years ago. And if the plot comes together a bit neatly in the end, there’s very little neatness in the world so I don’t mind.
Curt Selby, I, Zombie: Unnamed girl who drowned while institutionalized has her body used as slave labor offworld, as do many people who die under usable circumstances. Except that her profound cognitive impairments in life interact surprisingly with the computer system running her in death; unlike an ordinary subject, she can think and act for herself, more than she ever could before. But she doesn’t want to explain this to any of the “living” people, and now someone seems determined to kill her. Also there are these dying aliens poking around. Odd little book; affectless but simultaneously angry protagonist. The ending was way too neat for me, but it might be good for those seeking a Twilight Zone vibe.