echodrift

Look, sparkles!

About a year ago my friends introduced me to Flair on Facebook. After a few days one of them was asking me “Who are Edward and Bella and why are they all over Flair?” With my google-fu powers I was able to deduce that they were the main characters in a book called Twilight. Until then I had never heard of the series or Stephenie Meyer. A year later (which would mean about now) I could barely turn around without hearing about Twilight and Edward. Bella isn’t talked about so much because everyone (exageration) wants to be Bella. Curiosity got to me so I finally read the books. Er, I mean, The Twilight Saga. Oh who am I kidding. I giggle every time I think about these books being called a saga.

That is, I read them once I finally got copies of them. They are never on the shelf at the local library and I was not going to buy them due to the number of people who have said they are absolute rubbish. I will admit that I was fully prepared to give the same denouncement because I knew about the sparkly vampire bit. Sparkles? Really? Are the going to dazzle me to death with their sparkliness? I tried to put that out of my mind and read the books. Warning: spoilers ahead. Lots of them.
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Library learning

Since I’ve started making frequent trips to the library I’ve learned something. Actually, I noticed this the very first day I went. Normally, I would expect to find non-fiction ordered according to the Dewey Decimal System and for non-fiction books to be listed by author. Paperbacks might be off in their own section but they would still be sorted by author. I haven’t checked the non-fiction section yet for myself but I suppose that’s how they are indeed ordered by the Dewey Decimal System. The fiction section is another matter.

During my first trip to the library I walked into the first floor and found myself in the children’s section. Since I was looking for The Hero of Ages a librarian directed me upstairs. She looked the book up for me and told me that it would be in the science fiction section upstairs. I was a little confused but continued upstairs. Once there I saw that all of the fiction books were not sorted by author, but rather into categories such as Large Print, Romance, Mystery, Western, Science Fiction, and Fantasy. I started my search in the Science Fiction section but couldn’t find the book. Since I think that the book is more fantasy than sci-fi I moved to the Fantasy section and noticed that there was a lot of similarity between the two. On later visits I think I’ve even found a copy of the same book in each section. Either way, I wasn’t able to find the book; it was actually located on the New Books shelf.

Before my last trip to the library I looked up a few books in their online catalog. I was intrigued when I saw that one of the books was listed in the “Oprah” section. I thought to myself surely that’s not right. Do they really have an Oprah section? The answer: yes, they do.

That’s not the whole section, of course, but it isn’t a large section. I’m supposing books that were chosen as part of Oprah’s Book Club are placed here. To me it doesn’t make any sense, mostly because it’s not always easy to define what category a book should be in. The confusion between sci-fi and fantasy should be enough reason to not sort books in this manner. I would think that being able to go straight to an author’s name would be a much faster way of finding a book rather than trying to figure out if the library decided if it was fantasy or sci-fi. To make matters worse, they have a section of books that is simply labeled Fiction.

This whole mess won’t stop me from visiting the library. I mean, who can argue about getting to read books for free? However, I’m sure I’ll have plenty more experiences of trying to deduce where they might have put a book when I only know the author’s name, like when I tried to find The Other Boleyn Girl. It’s in the general Fiction section.

Winter blues

I don’t think I have ever been more ready for winter to be over. I don’t know why it has hit me this year but every day seems so dreary and gray. When the weather is bad it looks the same when I come in to work the next morning as it did when I left the evening before: cold, overcast, windy, and dark.

I think the short days may be a big part of the problem. Of course, now each day is longer than the one before but the sun still sets less than an hour after I get home from work. It always makes it feel as if it should be much later in the evening than it really is.

Winter in general just makes me feel like bundling up inside with a blanket and reading, which is a good thing considering that I really do love to read. I’ve recently started The Sword of Truth series by Terry Goodkind. I’ve had a couple of people suggest this series to me and so far I’m enjoying it, though I’m only on book two out of the eleven or so that are in the series. There’s a bit of a funny story about how I started reading the series.

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Bookworm

While waiting for all of this transfer stuff to be sorted out I’ve been doing a bit of reading. I had been telling myself that I don’t have anything new to read but that wasn’t entirely true. Here are some of the books I’ve read lately or bought to read. (Also: I have no idea why it is saying that 4 of my last 5 tweets were 3 weeks ago. Does anyone else see that?)

Sovereign Stone Trilogy – Margaret Weiss and Tracy Hickman. I started reading these a long time ago (meaning middle or high school) but I was never able to find the third one at the local library. After a while I quit looking and even forgot who wrote it. A few months ago my sister brought them up since she had read the first two as well. It took us a while to remember the name or even the authors but she finally found all three of them at a used book store. The story starts out with the classic tale of a young prince who wants to be king in his elder brother’s place and then dives off into a tale of magic, both good and bad. The trilogy also has the classic races of human, dwarf, elf and ork but it’s unlike any other series I’ve read so far. While I found the ending a little lacking it’s still a good trilogy.

The Halfblood Chronicles – Mercedes Lackey and Andre Norton. Again, this is something I started reading years ago. My sister and I found a book called Elvenbane at a flea market. We both liked it but it wasn’t until a short while ago that I found out it was the first of a series. I purchased Elvenblood sometime last year. This weekend I found Elvenborn at a used book store and bought it as well. It appears that the fourth book, Elvenbred hasn’t been finished yet. This fantasy series has a slightly different take on humans and elves. In this world, the elves had to flee their world and found themselves in a world of humans. Since the elves posses greater magic than the humans they have forced almost all of the humans into slavery. Dragons exist as well but they are also not native to that world.

The Sword of Shannara – Terry Brooks. I think I read something dealing with the Shannara universe years ago. For the life of me I can’t remember the name of it. I was looking for something to read a while back and my sister mentioned that she had these and I could borrow them. The Sword of Shannara is the first of the Original Shannara trilogy. While the author’s website claims that it is on par with the Lord of the Rings trilogy I’m not so convinced. (I may be a little biased, though. Just a little.) While the story is captivating and intriguing it often seems that the author was trying to fill a word count quota because of excessive adjectives and other descriptors. I probably will at least finish the first trilogy since they’re on loan but I don’t know that I’ll go looking for the others.

Foundation – Isaac Asimov. Everyone knows the Three Laws of Robotics, right? Maybe not. Again, this is a series that started reading in middle or high school. A couple of years ago I bought Foundation, Second Foundation, Foundation and Empire, Foundation’s Edge, and Foundation and Earth along with a couple of other Asimov’s books. This past weekend I found Prelude to Foundation and Forward the Foundation. I think that is all of the Foundation books written by Asimov himself; several other writers have written books set in the Foundation universe. I’ve probably bungled the order of the books since their chronological order is not the same as their publication order. I would like to read through all of these again; seven books is a rather tall order, though.

I know there’s a ton of fantasy books listed with a smattering of science fiction. I do read other types of books but it’s rather obvious that these two genres are my favorites. In fact, the books on my ‘to read” are also fantasy:

• The Hero of Ages – Brandon Sanderson
• Brisingr – Christopher Paolini
• The Wyrmling Horde – David Farland

The last non-fantasy book I read was Persuasion by Jane Austen. I’d love to hear suggestions* about what to read next (or what to put on my “to read” list). You can check out my books page to see everything I’ve already read this year.

*If someone suggests Twilight… I’m already considering it. I highly doubt I’ll be buying the books and my local library lists all copies of the first book as being checked out and/or overdue.