Books, books, lovely books ... and DVDs

[sholio]

I indulged myself this week in one of my semi-annual Amazon.com shopping sprees. Oh how I love Amazon ... and its many ultra-cheap resellers! Let's see, what did I get?

- SGA season 3 DVDs (wheeee!)
- The second volume in Robert Sawyer's Neanderthal Parallax series. I read the first book, "Hominids", on my flight down to Ithaca this fall -- on a parallel Earth, Neanderthals evolve to sentience rather than humans ... and then they discover our world. One part novel, one part political/social/behavioral treatise ... and very fascinating, even if you don't agree with every one of his points.
- "World-Building" edited by Ben Bova, on creating sci-fi solar systems and making them scientifically plausible
- "The Science of Science Fiction Writing", another book in the same vein
- A book on the Maasai, research for one of my original novels
- "Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands", which I stumbled across by accident some time back and put on my list of books to read and then forgot about; it's the autobiography of a Jamaican nurse in the 1800s that looks like it'll indulge my historical-curiosity kink.
- "An Island Out of Time: A Memoir of Smith Island", about life on an island off the coast of Massachussetts (if I'm remembering the location correctly?) which is essentially its own little microcosm with no local government or schools. Technically, it's supposed to be research for writing one of my SF settings, an isolated mining colony, but in reality I just thought it looked interesting.
- a CD by Miriam Makeba (which has already been shipped, ultra-fast! Yay!)

Apparently I'm on more of a non-fiction-reading kick lately. Fanfic has been scratching my fiction urge, not to mention that I have a staggeringly high pile of unread books that I really *ought* to tackle before I go buying new ones.

ETA: Both my books on writing have shipped now, too! Squee!

Comments

[naye]

Ooooooooh, those books look very interesting! Particularly the ones about Smith Island and Mrs. Seacole. I doubt any library around here is going to order any of them, but I can always hope. (And then add them to my Bookmooch wishlist!)

Will you be back with more on them when you've read them?

[friendshipper.livejournal.com]

I'll try! I keep meaning to start doing "book report" type posts and then I forget, but I love talking about books. :)

[iamrighthere.livejournal.com]

That world-building book sounds really interesting. Let me know how you like it, 'cause I might want to get a copy for myself.

[friendshipper.livejournal.com]

Actually I got it yesterday and I've been flipping through it. I'm still trying to figure out how much use it's going to be for me, on the level that I write (and the level of math ability that I have) -- it's nice to have all the equations for planetary motion and gravity and such together in one place, but I'm really going to have to read the whole thing from cover to cover in order to know how to apply them.

[iamrighthere.livejournal.com]

I understand. I read some of the comments about it on Amazon, and the book sounds very detailed in terms of the scientific basis for world building. A useful reference, perhaps, to supplement the usual Earth-like characteristics that we bring to our particular corner of sci-fi writing.