Library Loot December 14 - 20

Library Loot is a weekly event co-hosted by Claire fromThe Captive Reader and Marg from The Adventures of an Intrepid Reader that encourages bloggers to share the books they’ve checked out from the library. If you’d like to participate, just write up your post-feel free to steal the button-and link it using the Mr. Linky any time during the week. And of course check out what other participants are getting from their libraries!

The link can be found at The Adventures of an Intrepid Reader

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I got some rather rare loot today in the Library’s cancellations bin, goodness knows when I’ll get to reading them but they fit nicely into my collection.

The first is Ursula K Leguin’s Always Coming Home .  It’s described as part novel, part textbook, part anthropologist's record,Always Coming Home explains the life and culture of the Kesh people.  All that for $1 which is an absolute steal when the paperback retails at $45.

Debbie Moorhouse reviews it here.

There was a cassette tape that went with the book making it an early multimedia experience.  It look like copies of the music and poetry can be obtained through LeGuin’s website

The next was China Mieville’s Iron Council which I also picked up for a $1.  I have Kraken (still to read since last Christmas) but I figured its China Mieville and its cheap and in condition – didn’t really have to think about it.  Wikipedia describes it thusly:

Iron Council (2004) is China Miéville's fourth novel and his third set in the Bas-Lag universe, following Perdido Street Station (2000) and The Scar (2002), although each can be read independently of the others. In addition to the steampunk influences shared by its predecessors, Iron Council also draws several elements from the western genre.

Iron Council is perhaps the most overtly political of China Miéville's novels to date, being strongly inspired by the anti-globalization movement, and tackling issues such as imperialism, corporatism, terrorism, racial hatred, homosexuality, culture shock, labour rights and war. The novel won the Clarke and Locus Awards in 2005, and was also nominated for the Hugo, and World Fantasy Awards that same year.^[1]

So all in all a damn good score.

How did your lootin’ go me hearties?

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Library Loot December 7-13

Library Loot is a weekly event co-hosted by Claire fromThe Captive Reader and Marg from The Adventures of an Intrepid Reader that encourages bloggers to share the books they’ve checked out from the library. If you’d like to participate, just write up your post-feel free to steal the button-and link it using the Mr. Linky any time during the week. And of course check out what other participants are getting from their libraries!

The link can be found at The Captive Reader

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Too many books to read so this week I went with some more DVD’s.

Jam & Jerusalem

The first, which I can heartily recommend was the Third and sadly, final series of the BBC Comedy drama – Jam & Jerusalem or Clatterford as its known in the US. 

Living in a small rural town(or just outside of it) I find that it’s spot on in regards to small town politics and peculiarity.  Well worth getting the whole series.  It stars Dawn French, Jennifer Saunders.

Call Me Claus

Rhymes with bores me to tears.  This Christmas comedy drama was so woeful that we turned it off after 20 minutes.  Not even the comic skill of Whoopi Goldberg nor the gravitas of Nigel Hawthorne could get this one over the line.  Going to the library has the added benefit of not having to pay for dud films.

So what did you loot this week?

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Library Loot–November 30 to December 6

Library Loot is a weekly event co-hosted by Claire from The Captive Reader and Marg from The Adventures of an Intrepid Reader that encourages bloggers to share the books they’ve checked out from the library.

If you’d like to participate, just write up your post-feel free to steal the button-and link it using the Mr. Linky any time during the week. And of course check out what other participants are getting from their libraries!

This week it’s hosted by Marg (where you will find the linky).

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Only one item this week – I am being prudent after last weeks haul.  I caught a couple of episodes of Warehouse 13: Season One at a friends place.  It shows some promise and I am happy to note appears to have gone to a 3rd season.  So I borrowed it through interlibrary loan only to find that its actually on free to air television.  I am watching it in chronological order though.

I like it for a number of reasons

1. Strong believable female lead
2. Steampunk styling
3. It hasn’t received the Firefly treatment.
4. It feels like an American Torchwood.

 

Here’s the intro to Season 1 that will give you the “feel” of the show.

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Library Loot – November 23 to 29

Library Loot is a weekly event co-hosted by Claire from The Captive Reader and Marg from The Adventures of an Intrepid Reader that encourages bloggers to share the books they’ve checked out from the library.

If you’d like to participate, just write up your post-feel free to steal the button-and link it using the Mr. Linky any time during the week. And of course check out what other participants are getting from their libraries!

This week it’s hosted by Claire(where you will find the linky).

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Well despite having worked full time this week I managed to squeeze in a trip to the library(it’s at the same school I teach).  While waiting for my wife to pick me up I got roped into culling the autobiography and history sections .  The downside was an hour of unpaid work the upside first crack at the deleted books.

So loot for this week included a Two volume set of the Encyclopaedia of Aboriginal Australia, The Angus and Robertson concise Australian Encyclopaedia and Manning Clarks’ A Short History of Australia. 

But the real gem was Jane Austen’s World by Maggie Lane, which sadly had never been borrowed.

I also checked out the new releases at my online library and downloaded:

A Science Fiction Omnibus by Brian Aldiss. Just for some good old fashioned science fiction shorts.

Atrocitology by Mathew White.  I am a bit of a history buff so interesting angles on old facts get me excited.

Little Star by John Ajvide Lindqvist.  Really liked Let the Right One In but this is supposedly not supernatural horror, more murder mystery.

The Kraken Wakes by John Wyndham becasue I find him easy to read and not out of touch with the 21st century as much as someone who wrote in the 50’s might be thought to be.

Triptych by Krissy Keen because this book is supposed to be challenging, and I think I can take it.

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Library Loot– October 5th to 11th

Library Loot is a weekly event co-hosted by Claire from The Captive Reader and Marg from The Adventures of an Intrepid Reader that encourages bloggers to share the books they’ve checked out from the library. If you’d like to participate, just write up your post-feel free to steal the button-and link to it via the plugin on the host's page. And of course check out what other participants are getting from their libraries! This week is hosted by Marg from The Adventures of an Intrepid Reader

Whoa, it’s been a long time between drinks participating in a library loot.  Strangely enough for the last school term I was actually employed as a Librarian. 

So looted books(bought rather than borrowed):

Well this first one comes tinged with sadness.  One of our library board members, passed away recently, he wasn’t hale and hearty, so it wasn’t that much of a shock. Still talking to a man one day and having him drop dead the next reminds you of your own mortality. 

Alby was a committed reader, who when his health was fair, would shoot about the town on his gopher, putting up promotional posters.  He led an interesting life as paddle steamer captain and lived for his westerns. 

His daughter returned his library books along with a collection of books that could be donated or sold through the library.  So I happened upon his copy of The Adventurers of Sherlock Holmes, which I shall have as a keepsake, to remind me of a dedicated reader and a library supporter.

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The next purchase was cancelled stock – Comix, A history of Comic Books in America.  Which, as I think I may have mentioned on twitter gets very interesting around the mid 1950’s, with the various witch hunting and blacklisting that occurred under McCarthy.

If you think people are only now doing edgy subversive stuff in comics now, it was being done long before.

 

 

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And my final purchase was The Bachman Books by Stephen King, four stories written by King under the pseudonym Richcard Bachman.

Why people through this stuff away I will never understand.  The 14 introductory notes that King writes on why he chose to write under another name are a story all in themselves.

 

 

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Borrowed, extended and extended again was Gone by talented Australian author and poet, Jennifer Mills.  The downside to being a reviewer is of course that books that you want to read, often sit on the back burner – I may have to reluctantly return this one until I have some spare time to enjoy it.

I have read the first chapter so far, and its good, takes me back to my short stint spent working in community mental health.

 

So link below or at Marg’s site and let me know what books you have “looted”  this week.

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Library Loot February 9–15 Shaun Tan

Library Loot is a weekly event co-hosted by Claire from The Captive Reader and Marg from The Adventures of an Intrepid Reader that encourages bloggers to share the books they’ve checked out from the library. If you’d like to participate, just write up your post-feel free to steal the button-and link to it via the plugin on the host's page. And of course check out what other participants are getting from their libraries! This week is hosted by Marg from The Adventures of an Intrepid Reader


I have decided to keep my library loot to a minimum this week as the books are beginning to build up.  I have also gone with another heavily illustrated novel despite the likelihood that it won’t display well on my reader or my laptop.


This week's loot
I was listening to the Coode Street Podcast where they were discussing Australian author, artist and film maker, Shaun Tan. Tan has received an Oscar nomination for his adaptation of The Lost Thing.  A book that he wrote and illustrated.


Unfortunately I was unable to find a eBook version of The Lost Thing or The Arrival, another of Shaun's works I have heard good things about.



I was, however, able to borrow  Tan’s Tale’s from Outer Suburbia and I was pleasantly surprised.  Here's a description of the book, his latest, taken from Shaun's Website:

Tales from Outer Suburbia is an anthology of fifteen very short illustrated stories. Each one is about a strange situation or event that occurs in an otherwise familiar suburban world; a visit from a nut-sized foreign exchange student, a sea creature on someone’s front lawn, a new room discovered in a family home, a sinister machine installed in a park, a wise buffalo that lives in a vacant lot. The real subject of each story is how ordinary people react to these incidents, and how their significance is discovered, ignored or simply misunderstood.

The stories are quirky and I am reminded in some ways of Michael Leunig, both he and Tan have ways of directing you to look at the ordinary from a different perspective.


Tan's artwork is magnificent even reading it on adobe digital editions.  


Am I about the last person to discover Shaun Tan's work? What other visual story tellers am I missing out on?




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Library Loot: February 2 to 8 - Dead Samurai

Library Loot is a weekly event co-hosted by Claire from The Captive Reader and Marg from The Adventures of an Intrepid Reader that encourages bloggers to share the books they’ve checked out from the library. If you’d like to participate, just write up your post-feel free to steal the button-and link to it via the plugin on the host's page. And of course check out what other participants are getting from their libraries! This week is hosted by Marg from The Captive Reader




This weeks loot nearly didn’t happen owing to my birthday celebrations and subsequent traveling all over the countryside and my library deciding to do an upgrade that kept me unable to log in to checkout titles I had on hold.


Thankfully though all was not lost.  I was able to get in eventually and this week I decided to experiment a little by borrowing a graphic novel.  I wanted to see how well my Sony PRS 505 handled it.

The Loot

Dead Samurai by Aron Lusen is a graphic novel obviously set in Japan, my recent reading of Shane Jiraiya Cummings' The Smoke Dragon had me in the mood for another visist to pseudo historical Japan.


The Synopsis

The bodies of local samurai are found mutilated in the fields, and no one knows who is responsible. Reluctant to become involved, Kyuzomo is conflicted by his duty to defend and his deep desire to re-forge a life and love that he once had.

Kyuzomo is a man without a memory.

Long presumed dead, and wanted for murder, Kyuzomo wanders home after a mysterious eleven year absence, only to find his former life in shambles and his village in the grip of fear.

With the specter of his dark history looming, Kyuzomo must fight to destroy an evil menace that is ravaging a village he once called home and piece together the mystery of his missing years.

How did it go?


Not well, at least on my reader.  The format is pdf and enlarging the pictures so that I could read the dialogue made it an arduous process.  I ended up reading it on my laptop and even then it required enlargement and fiddling.  


It would be interesting to know how it performs on colour readers like the iPad.  Even then I suspect that I would prefer to read/view graphic novels in paper form.  I think the artwork and hence your appreciation of it suffers in the digital form.




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Library Loot January 26 to February 2 Werewolves and the Ancient World

Library Loot is a weekly event co-hosted by Claire from The Captive Reader and Marg from The Adventures of an Intrepid Reader that encourages bloggers to share the books they’ve checked out from the library. If you’d like to participate, just write up your post-feel free to steal the button-and link to it via the plugin on the host's page. And of course check out what other participants are getting from their libraries! This week is hosted by Marg from The Adventures of an Intrepid Reader


This week I went on a bit of a borrowing binge at my online Library.  First cab off the rank was a science fiction title from Margaret Atwood - Oryx and Crake.  A bleak near future dystopian novel.

Next was The Classical World by Robert Lane Fox.  I am reading Cary Corb's The Pericles Commission at the moment and I thought that this would be a complementary borrowing(although I did study Ancient Greece at University).

Not content with these two fine tombs I also borrowed The Abused Werewolf  Rescue Group as I had heard it mentioned on the ABC's bookclub.  It also looks like its a bit of a parody or comment on paranormal fiction - well see.

Now I know that three books may not seem like a binge (considering some other loots I have read) but this makes about 5 books on my plate at the moment,





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Library Loot January 19 to 25 Diamond Anchor

Library Loot is a weekly event co-hosted by Claire from The Captive Reader and Marg from The Adventures of an Intrepid Reader that encourages bloggers to share the books they’ve checked out from the library. If you’d like to participate, just write up your post-feel free to steal the button-and link to it via the plugin on the host's page. And of course check out what other participants are getting from their libraries! This week is hosted by Claire from The Captive Reader.


Only one title for Library loot owing to the fact that a)I haven't been near the bricks and mortar library in the past week b) I have won landslide of books in a couple of competitions c) trying to keep my reading manageable while I attempt to write some fiction.

This week I went out on a limb to try something a little different.  I offer you The Diamond Anchor by Jennifer Mills.  Jennifer resides in my old home town of Alice Springs.  I had the pleasure of hearing her read excerpts from her  poetry chap book Treading Earth (and got it signed).  


This was Jennifer's first book, she's just about to release Gone, her second book and from reading her twitter feed she's currently crafting book three.


I know very little about the Diamond Anchor other than what is written in the blurb below:

An unexpected letter from her childhood friend Grace forces May to relive their extraordinary past and confront the events that drove them apart fifty years earlier.

May's father won the Diamond Anchor, a dilapidated pub perched on the ocean's edge, in a game of cards - a gamble which positioned her at the heart of the close-knit community for seventy years, and gave her custody of its stories.

Now, trying to maintain a careful balance between the demands of the collapsing building and her own solitary life, May must decide whether to reach out to Grace, whose health is fading, or let her go.

With all the humour and storytelling of small-town life, The Diamond Anchor is a brilliant tale of the places and relationships that define us. 

If her writing sounds of interest to you, check out her blog .

Library Loot January 05 to 11th

Library Loot is a weekly event co-hosted by Claire from The Captive Readerand Marg from The Adventures of an Intrepid Reader that encourages bloggers to share the books they’ve checked out from the library. If you’d like to participate, just write up your post-feel free to steal the button-and link it using the Mr. Linky any time during the week. And of course check out what other participants are getting from their libraries! This week is hosted by Claire from The Captive Reader.


There was only one book looted this week and only because I had to read/research it to participate in a giveaway by Marianne de Pierres on the RoR blog.  


Not that I wouldn't be reading it anyway due to my resolution to read more Australian spec fic writers.  This comp just moved it up my list.

 I am of course talking about Sharp Turn by Marianne Delacourt (AKA Marianne de Pierres).  The cover has a sort of Charlie Angels (which I am not a fan of) feel but I have purposefully limited how much I have read about the series before reading the book - no preconceptions (or as little as possible).

Library Loot December 29 to January 04 - Vampires and Mark Twain

Library Loot is a weekly event co-hosted by Claire from The Captive Reader and Marg from The Adventures of an Intrepid Reader that encourages bloggers to share the books they’ve checked out from the library. If you’d like to participate, just write up your post-feel free to steal the button-and link it using the Mr. Linky any time during the week. And of course check out what other participants are getting from their libraries! This week's Library Loot is at The Adventures of an Intrepid Reader




Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter is the latest book from Seth Grahame-Smith of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (which I will read past the first chapter) fame.  I put down P&P&Z because I hadn't yet read the Austen original and wanted to get a sense of how well Seth had adapted the classic.  It was beginning to feel very clunky at the time. 


 So why am I bothering to pick this up?  Not sure.  Perhaps I am a victim of clever marketing.




Autobiography of Mark TwainVolume 1, the long awaited unplugged, uncensored thoughts of one of Americas greatest writers and social commentators.


Twain has been usually pretty upfront in his published writings so far, but these are the thoughts that he wished delayed until long after his death, so he could speak with his "whole frank mind".


Can't wait to read this one.