I don’t have time or energy to do full reviews, as today was probably the least productive day ever recorded in human history, but here’s stuff you should look at:

The Sherlockian (Graham Moore) – a mysterious murder in the world of Sherlock Holmes nerds, intertwined with the story of a murder investigation conducted by Arthur Conan Doyle, who has just rid himself of Holmes in “The Final Problem”. Our nerd-hero is very likeable and the Doyle portrait is very believable. This is a breath of fresh air if you made the understandable error of trying to read The Arcanum.

Getting Off (Lawrence Block) – yes, okay, the cover will have people on BART looking at you funny. I was expecting it to be okay but not great, and it was actually quite good. Not Eight Million Ways to Die good, but well worth a read. Kit, our heroine, has sex with men and then kills them, for reasons that make perfect sense to her. I was expecting this to turn into a cat-and-mouse game with a brave detective investigating the killings, but Block knows better than to pull that nonsense. One finds oneself torn between rooting for Kit and being creeped out.

The Book of Cthulhu (edited by Ross E. Lockhart) – a compendium of stories “inspired by” Lovecraft, which means it’s a very mixed bag. Some of the stories are really well-done (like Caitlin Kiernan, surprise surprise) and others appear to have been phoned in, or missed the point entirely.

How Not to Write a Screenplay (Denny Martin Finn) – on the first page, the author lays out for us that he’s not a screenwriter; he’s the reader. Therefore, as the person who is going to help decide whether your screenplay is rejected or not, he has a great deal of advice on what works and what doesn’t, what used to be in screenplays that is left out, and he compares crappy screenplays (with the serial numbers filed off) with really good writing from actual moves. I found this very interesting from a non-screenwriter perspective because it has very useful information about what goes into a novel that doesn’t belong in a screenplay, and possibly vice versa. The Arcanum, I’m looking at you, damn it.

Art History: A Very Short Introduction (Dana Arnold) – good grid, I love the Very Short Introduction series. The books are small enough to be portable, Oxford gets actual experts to write them, and you can feel especially smart. Instead of reading a “Dummies” book you can pretend you’re reading “Dummies for Very Intelligent People with Little Spare TIme”. This is a good overview of the discipline of art history and approaches to the history and curation of art, and if a Philistine like me can understand it, it should be perfectly adequate for you.

This isn’t a unique problem. It’s just one more of the usual ooh-shiny geek reaction too many people have when a New Thing comes out: the old thing is dead! Onward, comrades, into the glorious future where we will leave behind all those uncool, outdated people with their buggywhips! Like brick-and-mortar stores. Remember ten years or so ago, when “e-” everything was going to totally replace brick-and-mortar stores, and you’d be able use the Web to do everything from ordering groceries to having people run errands for you?

Well. You still can order groceries online, and all kinds of other good things, and some of those stores have gone away. But Safeway and Target still have physical stores, and companies that promised to run around the city for you are out of business. Just as television didn’t kill radio, online availability didn’t kill brick-and-mortar stores or real-life grocery shopping. Turns out there are things it’s not always easy to do online, and that there are people who can’t just hop on their trusty computer to have organic grass-fed steaks shipped to their door, perhaps because the entire world is not upper-middle-class and residents of hip urban neighborhoods.

And so it is with books. E-readers and electronic books are a fabulous thing. They’re especially helpful for books that need updating frequently (textbooks) or to handle accessibility issues (larger type). They are encouraging publishers to re-issue out-of-print materials, and they allow authors to release older and shorter pieces quickly.

But: they require a reader, which costs money, and has to be kept charged, and stores the books in a format selected by a vendor. The books themselves can go into the memory hole. It’s not easy to lend e-books, because they have to be controlled with DRM. They’re not “green” (perhaps the stupidest argument made in their favor), and not just because they require electricity to use; they are not spun out of recycled pop bottles and repurposed copper wire, but are manufactured under pretty crappy (and sometimes deadly) working conditions, and let’s not even get into what happens after their life cycle is over. They also, as McGuire pointed out, are largely out of the reach of anyone other than the sort of person with a spare couple of hundred bucks to spend on a new reading medium.

The sales figures waved around to suggest that e-books are “overtaking” print books are also misleading. Amazon, whose motives are not exactly pure,  reports figures for any kind of e-book sold at all, from badly-formatted copies of public-domain works to actual books that someone chose to buy instead of a print copy. Those figures don’t reflect sales from Wal-Mart, or independent bookstores, or second-hand bookstores; they tell us very little reliably that would suggest people hate paper books and are eager to entire the Glorious Kindle Future.

Print books are going nowhere except in the minds of people who have a progress fetish. And those people need to check their privilege.

First, because if you are at all familiar with Mamatas and his writing style, you know that he’s blunt, opinionated and not given to telling people what they want to hear. This can be annoying if he in fact tells you something you’d rather not hear, but is very refreshing if you’ve ever gotten the feeling that vague, happyish advice about writing was perhaps not entirely truthful.

For example, here’s Mamatas on the belief that only a select few can actually make a full-time living as a writer:

It is true that only a very few writers do nothing but write; it is not true that they must have another job. Writers choose to have other jobs rather than live humbly. This brings us to the first hidden assumption involved in the question: writing isn’t a job, it is a middle-class profession that should earn the practitioner both petit-bourgeois status and a comfortable income.

A significant fraction of writers who have a day job or a side gig as a teacher could live on their writing; they just don’t want to, as it would mean a smaller house, a less pleasant neighborhood, fewer vacations, or less (perhaps even no) health insurance. That’s an entirely valid choice, of course. Nobody gets any artiste point for eating beans and living in a garret. But wanting to live comfortably is not the same as being unable to live on one’s writing.

Second, because the book is not (as most writing advice tends to be) focused on Writing That Novel, but instead focused on writing short stories and non-fiction articles. Shorter pieces can be finished faster, are easier to market and most importantly, bring in money faster; in the time it takes to write a single novel the writer can most likely produce and sell many shorter works, and possibly even sell them. A hundred dollars today to keep the lights on is better than a theoretical six-figure advance years from now.

Mamatas also talks about work that is profitable, but which most people who want to be writers likely wouldn’t think about or want any part of, unless they were driven by money, like writing term papers (very lucrative, apparently, and the chapter on this work has some exceptional insights into the market; no, the customers are not all bored overprivileged Ivy League kids who’d rather not waste precious kegger time on a term paper). He also warns away from markets that seem like a good idea but aren’t, like content mills.

The only disappointment was the chapter on POD and vanity publishers, which is admittedly many years out of date. It would have been interesting to see an updated take on new incarnations like Smashwords and Lulu.com, even though the underlying structure probably hasn’t changed enormously.

Highly recommended for anyone who would actually like to write and sell their writing. Not recommended for anyone who just wants to sigh about the novel they’re going to write “someday” or whose entire writing output consists of a couple of stories that got shelved after Asimov’s rejected them.

The Pluto Files: The Rise and Fall of America’s Favorite Planet, by noted astronomer and Pluto-hater Neil Degrasse Tyson. Samwise read this book and immediately displayed signs of having drunk deeply of the haterade. It includes reproductions of well-deserved angry letters Tyson received from second- and third-graders.

Sixty-One Nails by Mike Shevdon, which I bought because of this amazing Big Idea piece by the author, and also because The Queen is very much into urban fantasy. Kids these days! I have to say that so far it hasn’t grabbed me, but I haven’t exactly thrown it across the room, either. I’m also not a huge fan of the current tendency to publish all SF/F books as a series; yes, I get from the publisher’s point of view this is a great marketing tool, but from my point of view, it’s like dating and finding that on the first date, everybody grills you about whether you’re interested in settling down and having kids. Publishers, I just want to read a book, not commit!

The Damnation Game by Clive Barker, which is still one of my favorite horror novels. At some point I’d misplaced my copy, and as it’s now out of print I was fortunate to find a used one in very good condition. I hadn’t realized until reading the new edition that Barker gave himself a cameo.

Moxyland, another Angry Robot imprint, by Lauren Beukes. It had positive blurbs from every hip cyberpunk author ever, with an especially killer comment from Charles Stross, so of course I bought it. Amazingly, archival technology has advanced to the point that the pages are actually treated to protect them from handling by the uncool, so that I was able to pick up the book for extended periods of time without any noticeable degeneration to the cover or spine. It’s currently somewhere in The Queen’s room and will require excavation to locate.

Game Theory: A Very Short Introduction, one of the VSI series from Oxford Press. I am addicted to Very Short Introductions. They are affordable, interesting, generally written by somebody who knows what they’re talking about, and you can stuff two of them into a purse, easily. Unfortunately it appears that I really am just never going to understand game theory.

The author, Thomas Wheeler, is a screenwriter by trade, and boy does it show. A trivial example: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle takes a ship to America in order to meet with H.P. Lovecraft. The chapter starting on his arrival is headed, yes in all caps, “TWO WEEKS LATER”. Now, this is something you have to do in a movie, where there’s no really good way to explain the scene shift unless you’re using a narrator. Same for the hero looking through the notebooks of a dead magician, and finding the kind of mysterious expository scribblings that, in a movie  are there to show the viewer what’s going on. In a book it’s ridiculous and reminds you that, yes, somebody is probably tilting this thing to be made into a movie.

Add in wooden dialogue, a frankly embarrassing portrayal of the lone female protagonist as a lonely sexpot, and a leaden Evil Conspiracy Opposed By A Good Conspiracy, and you’ll understand why I quit halfway through.

Naturally we all made like he was a piñata, but in retrospect, perhaps I was too hasty.  I woke up at about 2 a.m. today to discover that I have totally jacked my neck and my left arm from the shoulder to the elbow*, so with the help of a lot of ibuprofen I can manage to do things that don’t require me to raise my arms or carry anything over a couple of pounds in my left hand. In other words, I’m in fine shape to sit propped up in bed with a laptop and type. This means I am actually getting a little writing done, when the painkillers are working.

So, suffering = Art. When do I get my six-figure advance?

*No, I have no idea how I did this. No, it didn’t keep the kitten from purring directly into my ear like a buzzsaw and demanding to be petted. At two in the morning.

Miéville, darn him and his talent, has written a police procedural, set in a city that lies alongside another city. Beszel and Ul Qoma are interlinked in places, sometimes even overlap, but they are separate nations – calls between them are mentioned as “international calls” – and the separation is enforced by Breach. Crossing over, or even perceiving, the “topolganger” city next door invites terrible punishment, and the citizens of both cities have developed an entire, almost subconscious culture of mannerisms, dress, colors and styles to tip the other off to “unsee” or “unhear” what is going on next door.

And he does this while hitting on many of the familiar tropes of police procedurals: a body found in a park, a police inspector pushing an investigation past mysterious and sudden bureacratic resistance, traveling to another country to team up with his foreign counterpart, and even a (rather pulse-pounding, actually) chase scene – which are all different, and fresh, because of the way they intersect with the separate doppelcities.

Highly recommended.

But when I’m deciding to invest time reading a book, I don’t want to commit to reading (much less buying) multiple books if I don’t know I already like it. It’s a bit like agreeing to a first date and then having the other person ask you what kind of house the two of you should live in and how many kids you want to have; geez, buddy, I’m not ready for that kind of commitment!

And so it really pisses me off to get to the end of a book and only then find out it’s only Book 1 of a trilogy. Because that tells me that not only could you not fit a whole tale in a book-sized package, but you figured you needed to trick me into reading it, and then hope you’d hooked me into shelling out for two more books just to find out what happened next.

Not going to happen, hopeful author. I stopped caring about the characters right there and then.