What I am reading: September 2010

1. At the Foot of the Rainbow by Gene Stratton-Porter:(M)
2. Her Father's Daughter by Gene Stratton-Porter:(M)
3. Laddie; a true blue story by Gene Stratton-Porter:(M)
4. A Daughter of the Land by Gene Stratton-Porter:(M) I really love Gene Stratton-Porter. I very much enjoyed reading these except for the tremendous shock I got when reading the second: it was full of a white supremacist and anti-Japanese "yellow peril" demagoguery that I have never seen before. Written in 1921 and the latest of her books that I have found to read, I had never seen such arrant racism and belief in "white supremacy" in her works before and wonder if it is evident in her later works. I hope not. I understand that this may be evident of the tension of the times and I now have a greater understanding of the environment that allowed the internment of Japanese-American citizens in California: I did not realize how intense and how long the incitement against the Japanese had existed.
   
5. Outta the Bag (a preview prequel) by Maryjanice Davidson:(M) Ah. It was free. I use to very much like Davidson, but now I feel, each time I buy a book (which I haven't recently), that it was just a puffed up chapter of what the novel really should be. Too much fluff, too little story, unmemorable. Even though I enjoy her characters, they dissolve in my head leaving a feeling of nothingness.
   
6. Dead in the Family by Charlaine Harris:(DT) Sookie Stackhouse book 10. I waited a very long time to read this because I wanted to buy it on Kindle and the brice was several dollars higher than buying it in dead tree form. that ticked me off. In fact, as you can see, I waited and purchase it in HC from the UK because that price was still cheaper than buying the Kindle edition. If I didn't like the series as well as I do, I wouldn't have bought it at all and I'm still resentful. In addition, although I am still enjoying the plot (very different from the HBO Series True Blood and I am truly angry that this HC has pictures of the cast on it), I am finding that there has been a definite veering to the overt sex and less plot development side. CH is not yet LKH (whose books I no longer buy), but her books have been better and I definitely miss her other series, with their more detailed character development and plots. This is a bridge book between the massacre of the last and a change in Sookie's loyalties , it has a lot of external development and goes more deeply into Eric's past.
   
7. Interstellar Patrol by Christopher Anvil:(MB) and
   
8. Pandora's Legions by Christopher Anvil:(MB) I'm shocked to realize that somehow I completely missed Christopher Anvils works, both when I was reading through my library's collection of books with atoms on their spines and as an adult while Baen was re-issuing his work. I expect to remedy this situation over the next year and take advantage of Baen's wonderful DRM-free and well priced e-book collections.Very EF Russel-like, very 1950's can-do, space-opera. In other words, I loved these collections of short stories.
   
9. All Cats are Grey (novella) by Andre Norton: Charming pulp short story with a woman and a cat as heroine. I think I read it originally thirty years ago and wandered across it as a free download on line.(M)
10. The Lost Prince by Frances Hodgson Burnett: I was charmed to read this most especially because of this:

    "No one could have suspected them of carrying a strange and vital secret with them as they strolled along together. They seemed only two ordinary boys who looked in at shop windows and talked over their contents and who loitered with upturned faces in the Marien-Platz before the ornate Gothic Rathaus to hear the eleven o'clock chimes play and see the painted figures of the King and Queen watch from their balcony the passing before them of the automatic tournament procession with its trumpeters and tilting knights. When the show was over and the automatic cock broke forth into his lusty farewell crow they laughed..."

    This was delicious because I actually did exactly this last weekend in the Marienplatz. Perhaps I would have had more of a sense of wonder if I had read this first, from the perspective of a century ago. But one of the reasons I love to read stories with travel is to see places that I have been as they were and think of places I may one day be.(M)
    
11. Pollyana and Pollyanna Grows Up by Eleanor Hodgman Porter: The late 1800's and early 1900's are a period I grew up reading about. I find the books charming and generally unexceptionable, with morals that are not cloying and still true. THe Glad game is one that I could stand to play a bit more of.(M)
12. Inherit the Stars by James P. Hogan:(M) I haven't read this in years, but when I recenetly had the chance to download it, I enjoyed it. It was interesting how thoroughly I had forgotten it and how the sexist tropes had gone fwoosh straight over my head when I first read it. I had been interested in picking up some more of Hogan's works as I had vagely fond memories of his books, but I was distressed when reading his wikipedia entry (after hearing of his death, to read that he had been a Holocaust denier. I have too many books waiting to be read to deal with those two issues, I think.
    
13. Divorced, Desperate and Dating by Christie Craig:(M) Another free download. Fluffy romance with a writer as the protagonist (I always enjoy books with writers as characters:)). Her life is being threatened in a way that's been lifted from not only the pages of her published work, but also unpublished. The police detective who is afraid of committment is the one that believes that she is in danger.
    
14. The Goddess of Fried Okra by Jean Brashear: (M) Although I would never have picked this up if it hadn't been a free offer, I really liked this story.The protagonist is trying to deal with the loss of her sister by seeking her reincarnation through the dusty highways of Texas, picking up other strays as she keeps moving, when a car failure makes her stop moving long enough to in teract with others. Charming story.
    

The (M) stands for Mobipocket (the generic form of the file that Kindle Reads) as well as AZW and PRC, the other forms readable by Kindle. Let's leave DT as Dead Tree books. I think it's clear what percentage of my reading is becoming e-format. The vast majority are also free, either as public domain or as promotional offers through Amazon and the other online sources I frequent. B stands for Baen, the best of the on-line stores by so many orders of magnitude there is no comparison.