unwiredben

If you want a real bargain on a bunch of books that you probably wouldn't be reading unless you got a real deal, head to the outlet mall in Dalton, Georgia. After over a decade of operation, the Book Warehouse is closing, and they're liquidating their inventory. I first saw this before Christmas when all hardbacks and audio books were $4 and paperbacks were $2. Yesterday, my sister and I stopped in, and we found their prices slashed again to $2 and $1 respectively.

I admit that I picked up quite a few books. We'll see just how easy it will be to get them back to Austin. Among the new treasures that I might find time to read in the new year (and leaving out the ones I picked up to give as gifts to a few friends...):

• The Mercury 13: The Untold Story of Thirteen American Women and the Dream of Space Flight
• The Well: A Story of Love, Death and Real Life in the Seminal Online Community
• Small Things Considered: Why There Is No Perfect Design
• Six Not-So-Easy Pieces: Einstein's Relativity, Symmetry, and Space-Time
• Korolev: How One Man Masterminded the Soviet Drive to Beat America to the Moon
• The Dancing Wu Li Masters: An Overview of the New Physics
• In Praise of Slowness: How a Worldwide Movement Is Challenging the Cult of Speed
• Off the Wall at Callahan's
• Einstein's Bridge

While I like bargains, when this store closes, it will leave Dalton with only one bookstore (AFAIK), a pretty tiny "Bookland" at Walnut Square Mall. When I was growing up, the mall could support both a Bookland and a Waldenbooks, but those days seem to be in the past.

While on this trip, I've been busy with another book, one I ordered straight from the publisher, Bill Kunkel's "Confessions of the Game Doctor". I'm about a third through right now, but I'll probably finish it today. It's a gonzo account of the early days of video games, told by one of the founders of the first video game magazine, "Electronic Gaming". There's a lot of details about the business, and even a rather funny description of the failed 1982 World's Fair in Knoxville, Tennessee. There's even some legal intrigue as Bill gets to be an expert witness at some of the landmark video game trials (it amazing what Atari would sue about, back in the day). Based on what I've read so far, I'd gladly recommend this to anyone interested in the history of gaming.

My publisher let me know through a bulk email that my collectible and almost completely obsolete book "Palm OS Web Application Developer's Guide" is on special for $9 through August 31st.  It comes with an ancient CodeWarrior for Palm OS V8 demo CD as well hundreds of pages of screen shots and code listings from the old Palm VII, VIIx, and i705 devices.  Almost every detail in the book is no longer valid, as those devices haven't been made for several years and the software I talk about doesn't work on current devices.  There may be some useful info for designing for small screens and creating Palm OS application plugins, but that's about it.  Get them while they're stacked up in some warehouse taking space!

I saw on Trish Wilson's blog a pointer to a list of the 100 science fiction novels you've got to read. I'm not a big novel guy; I prefer short stories, but I've actually read about a fifth of this list. There are a few titles there that have been on my "read this soon" list for a while; I've had an unopened copy of "Hyperion" on my bookshelf for over ten years.

( What I've Read and What I'd Like to Read )

I've got to give credit for having read several of those titles to the late Bud Foote who taught the immensely popular Science Fiction course at Georgia Tech when I was an undergrad.

I'm a frequent customer at Fictionwise, my favorite online e-book store. They both sell complete books as well as shorter works. I love being about to play a dollar for a cool short story, and having plenty of reading material around on my Treo 650 has been really useful at times. Last fall, I let my paper subscriptions to Analog and Asimov's lapse, instead renewing them as e-subscriptions through Fictionwise. I don't get all the neat artwork or the ads, but they're so much easier to carry around and I don't lose my place if I'm reading while having lunch.

Each year, Fictionwise has done a promotion where most of the short fiction on the Nebula ballot has been available for free download from their site. They're doing it again for the 2006 nominees. Once you've added the books to your cart and checked out, they're available on your "bookshelf" for as long as you have your account, and can be downloaded in PDF format, as well as a bunch of formats for mobile devices. I usually use eReader Pro for reading on my Treo, although the software could use some adjustments to work better with the Treo's five-way navigation.

So, I just found out that there's an eBook version of the book based on the movie that's based on the video game "Doom". That's at least two steps from the original material too many. While I've not seen "Doom" the movie, I hear that ten minutes of the film is shot in the first-person shooter perspective that the game made famous. In the novel, is this whole section written in second person? "You move down the hall, reloading your shotgun. Turning to the right, you spot an imp in the distance. You pull the trigger on the gun, strafing to the left to avoid the imp's fireball."

Of course, I don't want to be the guy that's having to explain that rather than playing "Doom" on my handheld, I'm reading the book version of the movie of the game. "I've got Doom on here, and I just passed the fourth chapter. I had to read that one three times to make it to the end!"

From Kelly Link's story "The Hortlak" in her collection "Magic for Beginners":

The zombies were like Canadians, in that they looked enough like real people at first, to fool you.

About 3:30AM this morning, I finished "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince", putting the book back in its dust jacket and finding space on my shelves for it next to the other five books in the series. It is now safe for me to join in discussions with my other Harry Potter-loving friends who have finished this book.

Now that it's out of the way, I'll return to my other active books: "Emotional Design" by Don Norman and the "Best Sci-fi of 2003" collection I've been reading on my Treo. I think I've abandoned my ebook copy of "I am Charlotte Simmons" about 1/3rd through, although it might be picked up again in the future. I started on Dan Gilmore's "We, the Media", but I think I already understand his ideas from hearing a few podcasts on the topic, so it's been relegated to the back seat of my car to be used as an occasional meal companion. I also really need to start in on the Bruce Campbell book that ocyn and satyric got me for my birthday, as it looks like a blast.

After lunch, I dropped off a basket of clothes at the Goodwill on Metric, then I went inside to check out their book section. In addition to a couple of mind-teaser books by the great mathematician Martin Gardner, I also found a copy of "The James Tiptree Award Anthology 1", just published earlier this year. It's a collection of sci-fi short stories examining gender issues, and the reviews have been good. However, even better than getting this for $2 is that it was signed by three of the editors: Pat Murphy, Karen Joy Fowler, and Debbie Notkin. One of Karen's stories also appears in the book. The inscription read "To Dana: ... A Different Light 2/18/05", so I'm guessing this was signed at an event at the famous San Francisco bookstore earlier this year.

Update - 6/25, 9:15PM: I just got an reply from Pat Murphy to an email I sent to the Brazen Hussy's webmaster address. Here's what Pat said:

I'm always amazed at how books travel. I'm glad that one made its way from San Francisco to Austin, where you could find it. (It makes sense to me that it was in Austin. In all of Texas, that's where I'd expect a book from San Francisco to end up!)

I'm so glad that finding it made your day. Hope you enjoy it!

Very, very cool!

At dinner tonight, I finished Marjane Satrapi's autobiographical graphic novel "Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood". This is a really touching work about growing up as a young teenage girl in Iran during the revolution of 1979 and subsequent Iran-Iraq war. It's funny, poignant, and occasionally very sad, and it gave me a very different perspective on life in Iranian society and how much it changed during those years. The art style is bold, full of black and white contrast, some fantasy sequences, and lots of great facial expressions. It reminds me of Andi Watson's work, although on a smaller scale. This story really works well in this form; there is enough text to convey the subtleties, but the drawings do a great job of representing a child's perspective. The author has written several other graphic novels, including a sequel, "Persepolis 2" where she returns to Iran as an adult, and "Embroideries", a collection of stories about the lives of Iranian women. I look forward to reading those in the near future.

A few weeks ago, while browsing through the Philosophy section of a Barnes & Noble, I notice that there were a huge number of pop culture philosophy books, taking some TV show or movie and then milking it to talk about deeper intellectual questions. With the help of my friend Flickr, here's a little Flash-based slideshow of the titles I saw on my visit.