Audiobook finished

[johnridley]

Feed by Mira Grant

I've always been baffled by the popularity of zombie stuff, but I figured if it was a Hugo nominee, it was as good a chance as I'd get to see if there was anything to it.

I still don't care about zombies, but like any SF, it's simply a mechanism for a good story about people. And this is a good story with good characters.

There were some glaring factual errors to ignore, but I wouldn't be an SF reader if I didn't have sturdy belief suspenders.

Comments

[mbumby.livejournal.com]

Mmm, maybe. Perhaps it's largely more important for parents than for readers. If "Carolyn Keene" also wrote bodice-rippers, some parents and grandparents who got surprised might not buy any more Nancy Drew for their kids, or for that matter, might try to prevent the kids from buying them themselves...

And even the masters have done it -- remember Isaac Asimov writing as Paul French?

(Sorry about the false markup in the prior -- I didn't notice it until you'd responded, and I can't edit it.)

[johnridley.livejournal.com]

"remember Isaac Asimov writing as Paul French?"

No, not at all, I didn't know that (nor had I heard of Paul French before just now). I do not follow the industry in any way. I pick books up and read them. Unless it says on/in the book "By Paul French, but this is really an Isaac Asimov pen name" I will never know.

In fact I don't even really know where I would ever find out any of this information. I'm not sure if I care either.

I ask for recommendations, and I look at book lists to decide what to pick up next, but I've never gotten a "this is a pen name" notification via any of those channels as far as I can recall.

[mbumby.livejournal.com]

Space Opera. Lucky Starr and the XXX of YYY (moons of Jupiter, rings of Saturn...) _Maybe_ on the same level as Doc Savage. Or Perry Rhodan. (Neither of which I'd read in 5th grade, which is when I started reading these.) If you saw Isaac Asimov on the cover of an SF book, and expected it to be well thought out and not a hack job, you might hurl it across the room if you found yourself in possession of a Lucky Starr. (Similarly, if you expected the same easily accessible fluff that you got with LS, and picked up something more serious, you might have been put off.) On the cover of the book I borrowed from the library was indeed written "Isaac Asimov writing as Paul French." I guess he'd been outed by then, and the publisher thought it would sell more books.

[johnridley.livejournal.com]

I guess part of the difference here is that I think I may be less tied to authors than series or worlds. Generally if I read something I like, I'll give that author preference in the future but I don't automatically think that if I liked one thing he wrote, I'll like everything, or that if he wrote one book of a certain type that that's all he writes.

If I read something an author wrote in a series, I'll be likely to expect the same sort of thing from that author in the same series. Ditto worlds.

I do try to read a wider selection of genres and levels of seriousness though. I liked The Old Man and the Sea, I like comic books, I liked Ender's Game, and I liked Bill the Galactic hero.

I'm not always in the mood for one thing or another, but eventually I'll be in the mood for almost anything. If I start a book and it's not what I want right now, I just shelve it for a bit. Its time will come.