My treasures, let me show you them

What good is a booklog if you cannot permit yourself a small gloat over newly acquired treasures every now and then? I struck a rich new vein of fantasy and science fiction books last Monday and would like to show them off to you now:

  • Sweet Silver Blues – Glen Cook
  • Dread Brass Shadows – Glen Cook
  • Old Tin Sorrows – Glen Cook
  • The Game Players of Titan – Philip K. Dick
  • Counter-Clock World – Philip K. Dick
  • The Man Who Japed – Phlip K. Dick
  • Strange Seas and Shores – Avram Davidson
  • Or All the Seas with Oysters – Avram Davidson
  • The Beast that Shouted Love at the Heart of the World – Harlan Ellison
  • Flandry of Terra – Poul Anderson
  • Can you Feel Anything When I Do This? – Robert Sheckley

All of these, except Anderson, are authors whose books are rare to find secondhand here. The Glen Cook novels you can find are usually Black Company ones, all of which I already have. Ellison is rare as hen’s teeth, the Dicks are usually marked up because too many booksellers know they’re supposed to be rare and Avram Davidson and Robert Sheckley are such acquired tastes few Dutch sf fans seemed to have bothered with them….

In the mail (always wanted to do one of those)

cover of CauseWired

Sharp-eyed readers may have noticed the blog has changed somewhat, having been upgraded from a homebrew of handcoded HTML and an obsolete PHP version of Blosxom to WordPress. All the old links to individual book reviews still work and will keep on working, but this way I can make this into slightly more of a blog and less of just a placeholder.

Meanwhile, in the mail yesterday I reviewed an advance copy of CauseWired, a book version of Tom Watson‘s blog. Watson is an American journalist (not a British member of parliament) who has long been involved in various community and charity orientated web 2.0 and 1.0 ventures. His book is intended as a testimonial to show others how to organise their own causes in a always on, 24/7 internet world with people who’ve never know the world to be anything else.

It was offered through the generosity of Andrew Wheeler, ex-Science Fiction BookClub editor and now some Wiley Publishing bigwig, who earlier this month offered review copies to anybody who “want to read this book before it’s published, and […] have somewhere (preferably online) to talk to people about it afterwards”. I’m in the process of reading it; expect a review this weekend or possibly earlier.