Sometimes, I am very much my father’s daughter. You see, at our family Chanukah party last month, my dad and I got into an argument (the type that’s probably better described as a friendly bickerment) about cell phones. Dad had just gotten a new phone, and when he purchased it, he had the nice Verizon employee switch off all potential web browsing, email, general internet, and even text messaging options.

My dad wants a phone. He wants to be able to call people and have them call him. That’s all he wants.

All of which is fine and dandy. Not what the bickerment was about. That came in when he insisted that my shiny black iPhone is not a phone, it’s a computer. Which, on the one hand, is true. It’s a teeny, tiny computer that I carry around in my purse, which happens to send and receive phone calls.

And so we spent half an hour arguing: “It lets me call people! That makes it a phone!” “All a phone does is send phone calls! That’s why they call them phone calls!” “You don’t get to define the word just because you don’t want to pay for a smartphone!” “I don’t want to pay for a computer plan when I just want a telephone!” “But it is a telephone!” “It is not!”

We eventually reached a consensus of, “You’re wrong,” “Your FACE is wrong,” and I stormed off to talk to more reasonable cousins, like the pre-teens who won’t talk to you unless you can quote Monty Python sketches with them.

All of which is to say, I suspect my feelings about ereader tablets are irrational and unfair, but god damn it, ereaders are for READING BOOKS, not watching movies.

I have an ereader that I very much like. It’s a black and white Nook. It’s started to go a little wonky with age, but I plan to use it until it falls apart, because it’s more or less perfect for my own, personal reading habits. It’s great for subway reading: it fits into my purse, I only need one hand to hold it (and that same hand can turn pages, or, I guess, “turn pages” since actually it’s hitting a button); it’s light enough to carry around everywhere I go¹; it holds roughly a million bajillion books, so if I finish one while I’m out, I’ve got plenty more loaded up to read; I can buy books from my couch (dangerous!) including finding a lot of things I have trouble finding in stores; and all the public domain books I want are easily found and free (did I just download the entire Sherlock Holmes canon? Why yes, yes I did).

Now, I realize that absolutely all of that is true of all color, tablet, 3G, and other various ereaders that are out there. In fact, there’s nothing my elderly Nook can do that they can’t. Which is kind of the point.

I bought my Nook to read books on. It’s black and white, which means it’s eink rather than LCD, and thus easier on my eyes for long periods of time. I mostly use it on the subway, so I wouldn’t be able to do internet-related stuff on it anyway. And if I’m not on the subway and want to do internet related stuff, I have my laptop for that, or if I’m out and about, my iPhone.² And when I’m using it at home, if I want to watch a movie… well, I probably want to have a movie on WHILE I’m reading my book, which I couldn’t do if my book and movie were playing on the same device. Besides which, I have a TV which has cable, a DVD player, and Netflix streaming hooked up, which makes for a much better movie-watching experience than something I’d have to hold on to or prop up. ³

So basically what I’m saying is: for all of those bell and whistle features, I’ve got something else that’s more effective. I don’t need and am not interested in a tablet, and if I was, instead of getting a hybrid ereader-tablet-thingy, I’d go whole hog and buy an iPad, probably. Which seems to be the crux of the matter: iPads are great for many things, but they aren’t really ereaders. Yes, they can be used for reading electronic books, but they’re designed for all kinds of other things and they also happen to let you read books. The Nook Tablet and Kindle Fire and others like ‘em seem to be chasing that market, which is only tangentially related to reading, hoping to catch on by being significantly less expensive. And that may well be a winning strategy! I am not a business person, and clearly am not the market for those devices, so what do I know?

Well. I know that I don’t want a tablet that also happens to let me read books. I want an ereader: a device designed for reading books, that doesn’t have to do anything else, damn it.

(Dad is still wrong about my iPhone, though.)

You know how some people get wanderlust, and just have to move, or find a new job, or make a massive life change every few years to stem off boredom? I’m not generally one of them. Except with this blog, which is now on its third home. Whew.

“But Becky!” you might cry. “Isn’t moving your blog without bothering to set up some form of redirect pretty much the worst way to build up or maintain an audience of actual readers?”

To which I would say, “Thank you for being so concerned! But no. The worst way to do that, I suspect, is actually to only update twice in one year.” Then I would probably pause and think about it, and say, “Oops.”

So if you’ve found me somehow, hello! Nearly all of my old, old, old blog entries have made the leap, except for some that were so embarrassingly earnest that I winced upon rereading and decided the internet didn’t really need to see them any more.

As for what happens now, well, if I were the sort of person who made a lot of New Years resolutions, I’d almost definitely have resolved to blog more. But I’ve had various online journals since roughly 1998, and history indicates pretty strongly that I’m not cut out to be a regular blogger. I’m okay with that, but it’s why I wanted to downsize from a blog that was a whole domain, to this little personal site. Rebecca-Allen.net still exists for my online professional life, but this new space feels much smaller and cozier, like a return to my old Geocities collective of web projects, albeit with less Sailor Moon fanfiction.

So anyhoo: if you’re reading the RSS feed, click on over! I’ve got a lovely new template up and running and relentlessly tweaked. We’ll see how long it lasts before I decide I hate it.

And to get things started on the right foot, here is a picture of my cat:

During a meeting at work a few days ago, we were scrolling through a collection of MSNBC videos, and stopped on this one. If you’ve got a moment, check this out:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

[Summary for those who don't do video: an NBC news segment from the early 80s, which reports on a mystery illness found primarily but not exclusively in gay men, which wrecks the immune system. A third of the people who have it have died, mostly of Kaposi's sarcoma or pneomocystic pneumonia. The CDC has just released a report saying they don't know what causes this, but they think it's a new, deadly STD, which as of yet has no cure, but is becoming a serious health problem.]

What struck me watching the video was how much it seems like science fiction, since it’s practically the set up for a horror story. There’s an outbreak of a mystery illness, which seems to come out of nowhere, gets spread around quickly, and next thing you know, hundreds of thousands of people die, and the story begins. Except that it’s nonfiction, and, as is probably clear to anyone watching today, the video is a very early report on HIV/AIDS, even before it had that name. And the video is relevant this week because this past weekend was the 30th anniversary of the first published reference to HIV, which appeared June 5, 1981, in the CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.

But frankly, does being non-fiction mean this isn’t a horror story, in a way? At this point, the count of people who’ve died is in the millions, and while there’s effective medication for those who can afford it and have access to treatment, there’s still neither a cure nor a vaccine.¹ And here in the U.S., now that there are effective medications, there’s also not urgency left around the virus, and so people continue to get infected, and both here and globally, people continue to die.

Wow, is that depressing. Another depressing fact: anyone born in the last 30 years has never lived in a world without AIDS. Which isn’t mind-blowing or anything, but it was very much on my mind in the last few weeks, as we at the TheBody.com began gearing up for coverage of AIDS at 30. In fact, it was on my mind enough that I actually wrote a whole article on it:

AIDS Is Older Than I Am: Musings From Generation Y

I don’t want to make it sound like HIV/AIDS was some sort of specter that haunted my childhood. In fact, to the best of my knowledge, I didn’t even know anyone with HIV growing up. My first memories of the world around me begin around 1990, and HIV is among them, in a handful of jumbled, confused moments. I think it was like that for a lot of people my age who hadn’t been personally touched by HIV/AIDS: It was a huge deal when we were kids, but not necessarily in ways we understood.

When I was 7 or so years old, I remember a wild round of boys-chase-girls, girls-chase-boys, sort of free-for-all tag on the playground. A boy grabbed me, and in my frantic attempt to get away, apparently I bit him. A few minutes later, my teacher pulled me aside and told me I had to go stand by the wall for 10 minutes (the harshest punishment known to second graders, not to mention unfair to boot, since he grabbed me, but after 20 years, I think I’ve come to terms with it). My teacher explained the reason for my miniature detention: “Biting is really dangerous. Because of AIDS.”

Feel free to read the whole thing. And, if you’re interested, we’ve actually got tons of other perspectives, from people living with HIV, advocates, doctors, and community members. Check it out: 2011: Thirty Years of AIDS.

I think I’m going to try to do round-ups instead if individual reviews this year, because on the one hand, if I do individual reviews, I put them off until I’ve forgotten what I thought about what I read; on the other hand, when I don’t write book reviews, I don’t update this blog (which was not meant to be a book review blog, but whatchagonnado? *shrug*).

So!

Darkwing Duck: The Duck Knight Returns by Ian Brill, art by James Silvani
I was a latchkey kid in the early 90s, which means I watched The Disney Afternoon pretty much religiously, and Darkwing Duck was absolutely always my favorite. (I can live without TaleSpin or Rescue Rangers, but I own DW on DVD.) When I found out through comics-savvy friends that DW was being reborn as a comic book, I was super psyched, even though comics aren’t particularly my thing. My BFF got me the paperback collection of the opening issues, and let me say, it’s delightful. Heroism! Adventure! Family! Hijinks! Gosalyn yells “Keen gear!” Aside from the nostalgia, it was a great story, and a really fun read.

Sapphique by Catherine Fisher
I snapped this up as soon as I saw it in a store (the first non-e book I’ve bought in months) and I really wanted to love it — but I didn’t. It wasn’t bad, but I didn’t find it satisfying, either. Details at Active Voice.

Bleeding Violet by Dia Reeves
If anything, Bleeding Violet had the opposite problem of Sappique: I read it practically in one sitting and loved it as I turned the pages… But a few minutes after I set it down and paused to catch my breath, I started noticing flaws. Details of that, too, are over at Active Voice.

Arrows of the Queen, Arrows Flight and Arrows Fall by Mercedes Lackey
… Look, I didn’t mean to reread these, but I was sick, and it was snowing, and as I’ve mentioned before, the first book fits squarely into stories of my heart territory. I wanted something warm and friendly and familiar.¹ I can spot flaws in this series that I didn’t when I was a kid, but it’s one of the few series where they don’t bother me or take away from my fun.

Unfinished: Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
Aaaaaaarg. This was the second time I tried to read this. And I really, really did try, for almost a month before I gave up. I just…couldn’t…get through it. I understand why the book is a classic, I understand why it’s important. I understand what it was doing. I just couldn’t slog through it. I feel sort of guilty, both because leaving a book half-finished kind of irks me, and also because, as I said, I do get why the book is important and a classic, but… it just wasn’t gonna happen. (Also, I’m pretty much over anything where all the women are whores.)

So that’s January. Here, have a Disney Afternoon video to go out on:

It’s been awhile since I’ve shared a subway anecdote, so here’s a bit of holiday hilarious from my errand-running today: on the train home, two sisters (maybe ages seven and eight) were sharing a candy cane — sort of. It was clearly the little sister’s, and she was working hard to suck it into a perfect point. She kept holding it up for her sister and then pulling it away before her sister could actually lick it. Her sister was clearly growing increasingly grumpy about this, but the younger girl found it too hilarious to stop.

Finally, the little sister actually did hand the candy cane over. The older sister took it, gave her a smug look, and bit off that carefully-created point. She handed it back with a smile. (My own sister adds, “See? Little sisters are the worst!”)

On the assumption that I won’t have a chance to update with the rest of my 2010 books, here’s the list:

#49: The Comet’s Curse by Dom Testa. Middle grade scifi about a bunch of kids on a space ship. Totally delightful!

#50: Soulless by Gail Carriger: steampunk urban fantasy. Fun romance, and I liked Alexia a lot (though I didn’t think she was much of a detective). This was also the first time I’ve ever actually gotten the werewolf thing.

#51: All Through the Night: A Troubleshooter’s Christmas by Suzanne Brockmann (reread). One of the most satisfying books I’ve ever read! I spent the other books about Jules and Robin squeeing that they need to get maaaaarried… and they do!

Happy holidays!

First things first: I bought an e-reader! Specifically, I got B&N’s Nook, original black and white flavor. Technically, I bought it back in November, and Ash was the first book I read on it, but I bring it up now because once I had it, I checked out the Baen Free Library. The library offers some of their books as free e-books, and I noticed On Basilisk Station among them. I decided to give it a try because one of my good friends loves the Honor Harrington series, and hey, it was free.

I let her know I’d downloaded it, and she said, essentially, “Great! Uh, there’s a lot of technobabble in it, FYI.”

And oh boy, was she right.

The thing is, I really wanted to enjoy the book, and there were pieces I really did. As a character, Honor was fine — heck, a determined young leader who’s going to do what’s right no matter how much pressure there is to give in to corruption? Who wins the respect of her crew that way, and turns a rag-tag bunch into an elite force to be reckoned with? Those are all things I love. And make it a space opera? Heck yes!

Unfortunately, all the things I liked about the book were buried. This got a little long, so have a cut: Read this article »

Last week, I listed a bunch of books YA books that I’d read planned to review later. Well, later is now, at least for two of them, lumped together for no other reason than they’re short, and they’re both sequels.

Behemoth by Scott Westerfeld is the sequel to the awesome steampunk Leviathan. In this installment, Deryn and Alek go their separate ways in Istanbul: Deryn’s got a secret mission to help the Darwinist powers hold the Dardanelles out of Clanker hands, while Alek’s looking for allies to help him end the war.

Blue Fire by Janice Hardy is the sequel to The Shifter. In it, Nya and her friends are still wanted by the Duke for some nefarious purpose — and when her friends are arrested, Nya has to sneak into enemy territory to try to get them back.

Both books are great — and you can read why I thought so in one convenient entry over at Active Voice.

So here’s a fun thing about me. Recording all of the books I’ve read this year has led to me, I think, reading a bit more, which is great! Hooray! Except I’m pretty bad at writing timely reviews, which means that now that we’re getting close to the end of the year that means I have a whole glut of books to tell you about. So instead of my usual, kind of lengthy review, here’s a list with some super short reactions (though some of these will get reviewed properly at Active Voice in the next few weeks).

#41: Behemoth by Scott Westerfeld — this is YA steampunk, so I’m saving it for AV.

#42: Carter Beats the Devil by David Glen Gold

I loved this! I think by this point it’s pretty clear that I rarely read anything that isn’t either YA/MG or SF/F, so this was a bit of a departure for me. My sister handed it to me as highly recommended, somewhere between historical and literary fiction. It’s (sort of, roughly) about Carter the Great, a Vaudeville magician accused of conspiracy to murder President Harding.

The structure nerd in me loved this. It went back and forth through Carter’s life a lot, in lengthy chunks that painted pictures of his rise to fame and everything leading up to the show before Harding’s death, and then its aftermath. It’s incredibly rich, long enough to sink your teeth into, but with very little drag. I will say that the Mysterioso sub-sub-sub plot felt a little tacked on, but the climax was pretty great. I also wish there had been more women, as only two played major roles in the book (and the first was there for only about a third, and the second for only about half), but those are fairly minor quibbles. Overall, it’s probably one of my favorite reads of the year.

#43: Ship Breaker by Paolo Bacigalupi — it’s post-apocalyptic YA, so I’m saving this one for AV.

#44: Blue Fire by Janice Hardy — MG fantasy, so I’m saving this one for AV.

#45: Ash by Malinda Lo — YA fantasy, so I’m saving this one for AV. (I’m really, really behind on reviews over there…)

#46: Flygirl by Sherri Smith

Another of my favorites from the year, and another historical novel, although this one is YA. It follows Ida Mae Jones, a young, black girl during WWII. Ida is a pilot who hears about the WASP — Women Airforce Service Pilots — and because she’s fairly light skinned, she decides to try to pass as white so she can fly for the army.

This one is really, really good. The voice is really strong, and the way it deals with race is really well done. (For example, a heart wrenching scene where her mother has to come visit to deliver bad news, and she has to pretend her mother is her maid; or her general anxiety when a white man asks her to dance. She wants to, but she knows that she can’t have any kind of relationship with him in the future.)

The book is actually pretty light on plot, but I would happily read hundreds more pages about Ida’s missions during the war and what happened after.

#47: Goblins in the Castle by Bruce Coville (reread)

I’ve written pretty extensively about my love of Bruce Coville before. A few weeks ago I found myself in the mood for something spooky (no idea what brought that on) so I grabbed this off my shelf. It is, like all Coville books, pretty much delightful.

I definitely didn’t get the “My name is Ishmael, but don’t call me that,” joke as a kid. (I’d go so far as to say it doesn’t actually fit with the tone very well, even.) And while I love the worldbuilding, there was quite a bit that goes unexplained — not in a plot-not-wrapped-up way, but it feels like part of a much larger folklore. I’d love to read more about Granny Pinchbottom and Igor, and even where William came from, and lots and lots about Fauna — her life before meeting William, what she does after, and so on. (She’s so intriguing, but there’s so little about her!)

As a whole, everything about this is weird and funny and kind of spooky, but still infused with Coville’s usual humor. It practically begs to be read aloud and reread on Halloween.

So here’s the thing. I love boy bands. This shouldn’t come as an enormous surprise, given there’s a whole category to the right somewhere called “this must be pop.” (Which, aside from being about pop, is also an *NSYNC lyric.) So last year when my awesome BFF Jess suggested we should keep some sort of official look out for up-and-coming boy bands, naturally I was all over that. And thus, the Official Tweenage Wasteland Official Boy Band Watch was born!

Aaaand also not a surprise, if you’ve poked around here before (or spoken to me pretty much at all in the last few months), I adore the Nickelodeon show Big Time Rush, which is, of course, about a boy band named Big Time Rush, who have recently put out an album titled (just to be different)… “BTR.” And naturally, Jess and I had to rate it.

So here it is! OTWOBBW: Big Time Rush. (Bonus, we spruced up Tweenage’s layout a bit, so now the text isn’t squished into such a small column. Check it out!)

The Brooklyn Book Festival was a couple of months ago. I’ve meant to go every year since I moved to New York, but Brooklyn is far away and things come up and blaahhhh. Anyway, this year I finally did! And, as one does at such things, I bought a lot of books. The first one I tackled was Meet the Annas: A Musical Novel by Robert Dunn.

The book basically plays what-if with a fictional 1960s girl group, the Annas. It’s told from the POV of Dink Stephenson, one of their song writers, looking back at what happened years later. He was in love with the band’s front woman, Anna Dubower, and eventually proposed to her as the girl group era passed and they were desperately trying to manufacture a hit to bring them back. Anna didn’t give him an answer, and weeks later, was mysteriously dead. Now there’s a rights dispute over that last song, Dink has to go to court over it, and running into people from that old life stirs up old memories. At last, he’s determined to figure out what happened to Anna.

I was pretty ambivalent when I first finished this book. In the months since (I am waaaay behind on my reviews) the ending has festered, and now I find it enraging. I’m going to cut here because the book is sort of a mystery. I found it super obvious, but your mileage may vary. Read this article »