_Made to be Broken_, Kelley Armstrong

Second in the Nadia Stafford, Canadian, lodge owner and hitwoman with scruples series. The crew is back: Evelyn has a new idea for Stafford, an organization that makes the punishment fit the crime would like to hire her. But Nadia and Evelyn aren't getting along so good, and besides, Nadia's annoying employee has been murdered and her baby has gone missing. The circumstances lead Nadia to investigate similar crimes and discover a ring of baby-snatchers who identify young mothers on the margins of society, murder them, take their baby and either adopt it themselves or farm it out to people having trouble satisfying their adoption needs through more official channels in exchange for Lots o' Cash.

There are a variety of problems with this, which I'll get back to in just a moment. However, in case anyone thinks the idea that (a) people might pay extra for babies who have, incidentally, been (b) kidnapped from their loving parents might want to read this:

http://www.hinduonnet.com/fline/fl2211/stories/20050603006700400.htm

Or watch the Frontline episode it refers to, I suppose.

One of the problems with the Armstrong novel is the sheer, mind-bending stupidity of the main character, which I think is intentionally created on the author's part (that is, I don't think Nadia is a moron because Armstrong is a moron). Her willingness to introspect or pay any attention to her inner self and basic motivations is not merely lower than average. It is, effectively, non-existent. This gives Armstrong a lot to work with: an otherwise ridiculous triangle between Jack, Quinn and Nadia can be dragged out over hundreds (hey, at this rate, it'll be thousands) of pages and even Evelyn can get in on it; Armstrong can send Nadia off to kill an apparently innocent guy more worried about resolving her image of herself as a "pro" with whatever scruples she may or may not have, when Nadia _really_ ought to be worrying about whether Evelyn is setting her up. Or the client is a cop. Or whatever. I would mention that it goes on, but why?

The other problem with the novel is that it takes an annoying reality (white suburbanites who feel like they deserve someone else's healthy white baby, even tho they're basically crappy people who, incidentally, can't reproduce or at least not together) and confuses it with a really serious problem (babies being kidnapped to adopt out to white surburbanites who can't reproduce). It's like confusing poor women who have a lot of babies and collect social support so we don't have to watch them starving on the streets with a structural deficit caused by bad tax policy and military spending. Yes, babies are being kidnapped. But the victims probably aren't teen mums on the margins -- the victims are often functioning, happy families in very poor areas in other countries. Yes, people are adopting those babies. But the reason they are adopting those babies probably _is not_ because dad is shooting blanks and doesn't want his wife to use someone else's sperm to get knocked up. For one thing, artificial insemination is crazy cheap (in money, time, effort, etc.) compared to adoption, even without the illegally kidnapped markup, and if there's one thing you learn quickly from reading about people whose efforts to reproduce in the ancient way have not been successful, it's that economic considerations are key.

Will I read more? It depends. As long as these are available on the kindle for cheap enough, there's a strong likelihood that I'll continue reading just to find out what happens next. But I'm hitting a point with Armstrong where her basically conservative belief-set is moving from annoying/disturbing to unnerving. Another couple of books and I'll be unloading everything I ever bought and, around the same time, I'll quit buying more.

Hey. I've done it before. I haven't read LKH in a while. _Acheron_ has resulted in all my Kenyon heading out the door. The first Morganville vampires book by Rachel Caine was so unreadably bad, I finally fizzled out on the Weather Wardens series. I'm in the process of unloading a lot of Lori Foster (altho I still have great affection for the Winston-and-spinoff series). Once upon a time, I just stopped reading backwards in an author's oeuvre when it started to irritate me; only very occasionally did an author annoy me more and more as they developed (altho that, too, has happened -- I gave up on Neal Stephenson a while ago, sadly). I'm not sure precisely what's going on, but I seem to be abandoning authors lately at a shocking rate.

Should I blame it on turning 40?

Rachel Sue, er, Mary Morgan, er, yeah, the Hollows

Writing about abandoning authors, I'll mention here that Kim Harrison may well be next on the list of series allowed to continue without me. Rachel Morgan has, by this point in The Hollows series, accomplished the following:

survived (with illegal assistance from an elf and others) an always fatal disease
given a ghost a body-for-a-night and helped rescue a child from a vamp-pedophile
got out from under a death threat from the I.S. for quitting her job with them
killed the Master Vampire who was causing all kinds of trouble for her and her friends
become part of a Were-pack without being Were (for the health insurance, IIRC)
given the Weres an object that significantly increases their power after stealing it from a particularly troublesome Were
solved the elven breeding problem, after discovering that (a) elves still existed and (b) she knew some of them
rescued an elf from a demon
become a student of a demon
become a demon (sort of)
survived an attack by a baby banshee
survived an attack by an adult banshee
lives with a living vampire she has shared blood with but isn't any more
lives with a pixy, his wife and their 4 dozen children
given the pixy a full-size body for a period of time
been summoned (she has the demon's summoning name)

Among other things.

It may or may not be apparent from this sum-up, but Rachel Morgan is acquiring major new powers at a steady and world-imbalancing clip. I've complained about this series before, in that people keep talking about her as if she's some kind of high-maintenance bimbo, without recognizing the huge risks she's taking and the huge successes she has had. If the book is "code", the way Buffy was "code" for high school, then that makes sense. But it does not make sense within the world of the books.

I'm having trouble finding the source of feminism isn't about the amazing women getting to do stuff, it's about mediocre women doing as well as mediocre men. Currently, google is returning a lot of Palin articles, every time I frame the search. In any event, there are a _ton_ of novels and series out now written by women, with female protagonists, who are physically strong, skilled fighters with and without weapons, leaders in significant battles/wars with far-reaching impacts, etc. 10 years ago, you couldn't say that. 10 years ago, if I could find a movie or a book with a main character who was a woman and who literally kicked butt, I'd watch it and be happy, even if that meant sitting through that weird remake of _Casablanca_ with Pamela Anderson. I'd read it and be happy, even if it meant LKH.

But I don't read LKH any more. The TV adaptation of True Blood is well on its way to curing me of Sookie Stackhouse. _Acheron_ has pretty much done in Kenyon for me. I'm thinking the real issue is very simple: in a world inundated with books in which women fight and kill and have Mad Skillz, I can actually be picky about whether it's well-executed. I no longer have to read it, just because it satisfies the basic criteria.

Baen Books shopping experience

Previously, I have raved about how wonderful it is that Baen books includes CDs with lots of ebooks on them in some of their hardback books. I have also raved about how wonderful it is that Baen books gives away free ebooks on their website. The process for getting free ebooks onto the kindle is straightforward, and, for me, no worse than shopping Amazon (because I don't have coverage here for my kindle -- this will change when I move).

I expected something similar when I forked over money for ebooks on the Baen website. I broke down and bought the Hemry bundle (JAG in space and Stark's series, both available only used as near as I can tell) when I bought _Storm from the Shadows_ (the latest in the Honorverse, a sequel to the Saganami book). I was really happy with the price on _Storm_ ($6!); I was okay with the Hemry price. I'm particularly okay with the non-DRM'edness of it all.

After placing the order and receiving an e-mailed confirm, I was then completely puzzled how to actually acquire the book. It took doing a little digging around (and there might have been other ways to do this), but basically I had to log into the site with my new account and then click on my order number to get to the download page. Not direct. Not intuitive. Not automatic at all. And not clearly documented at time of sale (but once you've done it, you don't need to be constantly reminded, either, so I can see the UI problem).

I have no mortal clue what the shopping experience is like for the Sony Reader (altho I've heard rumors that suggest it might actually be worse than this, if they require you to download software, on top of everything else). I do know from previous research that book pricing for the Reader is a lot higher than Baen's pricing or kindle (but again, it's often not possible to compare the exact same book across two platforms, never mind three).

Format War!

Sorry. I felt compelled to add that exclamation mark. Probably because of what's going on with Cramer v. Stewart on the Daily Show. It'll be pretty funny if Cramer fails to show tonight. Of course, it'll be funnier if he does show tonight. We'll see. If Cramer doesn't show, it'll be a good indication that the CNBC punditry have collectively even fewer balls than Republicans when it comes to the Comedy Channel talk shows.

But that's all off topic.

I'm in the process of packing books and putting location ids in LibraryThing in case I don't get to unpack the library for a while (that's what happened last time). It's an activity that strongly encourages weeding, and I had already marked a couple hundred books in LibraryThing to weed. All my Pratchetts, for example, are marked weed, on the premise that should I want to reread them, I can acquire them quickly and cheaply via the kindle. But when the time came to actually put these books out to swap, I hesitated.

Unfortunately, I've been through format changes a few times now. I cleverly noticed that CDs were coming fairly early on in the process and I had not accumulated many LPs yet -- so I didn't. I bought cassettes for stuff I was going to listen to again and again in the car, and otherwise waited for CDs to come down a little and for a player to be affordable. I never bought a lot of movies on VHS (altho I did buy a lot of UFC vid). I actually had a portable 8 track player for a while, and a bunch of 8 tracks (all garage sale items, so no tears when they went away again). (About the only thing I miss from VHS are the episodes of Probe I had saved; I was only missing the Halloween episode.)

So I do recognize that when you have a format, you have to think carefully about how you commit to it, how you maintain it, what you transfer to it, and what you say good bye to. I'm perfectly happy getting rid of every used paperback "classic" I have lying around; those are available in non-DRM'ed form that can follow me anywhere, should I choose to acquire one at some point (the Palliser and Barset bundles, for example. . .). The problem lies in those Pratchetts. I own the Pratchetts. If I want to reread them (I've reread most of them at least once), doing so is "free" (cost of space, hassle of moving them, etc.). If I get rid of them and decide to reread them, it'll cost me -- but I save the space and the hassle factor. It was _easy_ to get rid of the Honor Harrington books (again, I reread them occasionally) when I realized I had free e-copies. I forked over for the Hemry bundle, partly because I still don't have the second and third in the Stark series -- buying kindle copies (or e-copies, or whatever) forward is easy to do.

But should I get rid of _Getting Rid of Bradley_ and three other Crusies that I own (and those are four Crusies I haven't been tempted to reread, but you never know), figuring I can pick up the bundle for $10? Or possibly less some day? Unfortunately, I'm noticing already that there are kindle books that appear to have once been available that no longer are. While the trend is to stay and get cheaper over time, what if I go to buy _Pyramids_ and it costs full paperback?

I talked to R. about the decision making process. He agreed with the strategy (buy new stuff in the new format, switch over everything that is "free" to switch over), and noted that he only bought a few dozen albums that he owned in vinyl on CD. And he never ripped the vinyl, either, altho he still owns it. He has been much more persistent in ripping the CDs to his iPod, but he's happy to accept a significant downgrade in audio quality as a tradeoff for having a massive chunk of his music library on shuffle. He says he's listened to a lot more that way than he ever did when the library was in cases in the living room (it has since mostly migrated to plastic bins in the basement, due to toddler depredations).

I doubt I'll be unable to buy _Pyramids_ when I want it. Even if I were, I doubt I would cry. And yet it is still hard to part with those Pratchetts, so they will almost certainly travel to Acton with us. I'll just get rid of something else instead.

_White Witch, Black Curse_, Kim Harrison

Well, several event-filled page-equivalents ago (kindle edition), I was more or less ready to give up on Harrison, the Hollows and Rachel Morgan.

Now, however, I am not so sure. The problems have in some ways gotten worse: still _more_ banshee attacks, still _more_ crazy-ass Rachel posturing. Etc. But some interesting things happened in the final showdown(s). Ford, for example, was a nice little rabbit to pull out of the hat that was which-banshee-mother-is-more-toxic. Gotta love Harrison for having an FIB officer (male) install a potty chair at HQ and bring the kid to work. Especially since there's _no one else at all_ who can hold that baby safely (unless you want to go _back_ to the which-banshee-mother-is-more-toxic dilemma).

Also, Jenks commenting about Rachel's aura coming off as easily as a banana skin.

Rachel's nutty behavior is also starting to cohere in my head a little better. Instead of how-stupid-and-short-sighted-do-you-have-to-be, I'm starting to see her the way Harrison is trying (I think) to portray her: she's a demon, all right, crazy the way demons are. The good news is, that makes the rapid acquisition of powers a lot more palatable.

Al's stunt with the spare potions was interesting, but what happened between Pierce and Al afterwards further confirms that Rachel's behavior really is the behavior of a sane demon, rather than an insane witch. She makes sense in the right context -- which is probably what Harrison is trying to get across.

By having Robbie and mom move away, some of the treat-her-like-a-kid crap should fade away. By having the witches shun Rachel, she has a low-level significant problem in her life to slow her down. It seems like the stage is set for Rachel to tackle the large problem of getting everyone else to come around to her way of thinking (and Ford's, now, too) about What is Right/White and What is Wrong/Black. That should provide an epic enough struggle for at least a couple books. I'm sure Harrison will find something else to do up front, but I'll play along for at least one more outing -- even if it turns out to be a bunch of foolishness about vampire souls and everyone's aura.

ETA: I meant to say, there at the end when Ivy is loaning her aura to Rachel who feels a need to burn the crap out of the last resting place of Kisten's killer AND Denon (both already dead, which was apparently unsatisfactory for both of them; I thought it was kind of convenient), Ivy seems surprised at just how much power Rachel can wield off the ley line. Further indication that there will be a lot less of the treat-her-like-a-kid foolishness.