Each year, I set reading goals for myself, but usually not very specific i.e. 25 books, which I blow through in a few months of binge-reading. But I don’t say in advance “these 25 books”, as my goal is usually “more”, to make time for reading. And then I do, with a binge mentality.
A year ago, I read through a whack of Robert B. Parker and Sue Grafton novels. Somewhere around 60 I think, in about three months. Just plowed through them. Binge reading. One of the downsides to an e-reader is that I finish one and immediately start on the next in the series. Narnia, Artemis Fowl, Spenser, Kinsey, all grist for the reading mill.
Yet I have also wanted to “improve” my reading selections, with some from a long list of award winners or books recommended by friends, or even just great classics. I read Dracula that way, merely because I had never read it before and it’s such a classic tale that has survived in countless forms. This year, while perusing some other reading challenges, I decided I would be VERY specific as to what I was going to read, up to and including the exact books or series I would finish.
With at least one per author whose last names start with each letter of the alphabet. And my Alphabet Reading Challenge is now set. For most letters, I had numerous to choose from. In other cases, only one or two (hello Q!). The final list includes:
award winners from Time Magazine, Guardian, etc., all of whom regular compile “best of” lists;
recommendations from friends when I started making my list;
category award winners like mystery writers for Edgars, Shamus, and Agathas; and,
national awards like Man Booker, Governor General, Pulitzers, etc.
Which means the final list for this year is a bit eclectic with a broad mix of titles to keep it interesting. Some of them I’ve even read before, but it’s been a long time, so I’m going to read them again.
Margaret Atwood – The Blind Assassin
Lawrence Block – Writing the Novel: From plot to print to pixel
Paulo Coelho – O Alquimista (The Alchemist)
Fyodor Dostoyevsky – Crime and Punishment
Marian Engel – Bear
William Faulkner – The Sound and the Fury
Diana Gabaldon – Outlander series
William H. Hallahan – Catch Me, Kill Me
Kazuo Ishiguro – The Remains of the Day
Donald Jack – Three Cheers for Me
Stuart Kaminsky – A Cold Red Sunrise
Harper Lee – To Kill a Mockingbird
Gabriel Garcia Marquez – 100 Years of Solitude
Vladimir Nabokov – Lolita
George Orwell – 1984
Terry Pratchett – Discworld
Paul Quarrington – Whale Music
J.K. Rowling – Harry Potter series
J.D. Salinger – Catcher in the Rye
Leo Tolstoy – War and Peace
John Updike – Rabbit series
Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez – The Dirty Girls Social Club
E. B. White – Charlotte’s Web
Lu Xun – Diary of a Madman and Other Stories
Richard Yates – Revolutionary Road
Carlos Ruiz Zafón – Shadow of the Wind
By my rough count, that’s actually about 51 books when you include the series. Not sure I can do all of them this year, but I’m sure going to try.
I’m not usually against free upgrades, but Windows 10 has been a costly one, albeit only partly in money. Awhile back, I ran into a problem with printers after the initial Win 10 setup and it took me 2 hours of trial and error, and a sudden inspiration / brain fart to try something that worked. The simple explanation is I have a router, 3 computers, and 3 printers. Two were running Win10, 1 was running Win7. No big deal, except the printers are all wired to 1 computer. If that sounds odd, it shouldn’t — one was an old laser printer that only had a parallel port style connector, one was a newer colour model but couldn’t connect to my old router by USB or Ethernet (the router didn’t support it), and a label maker that works best when directly connected to a single PC.
With the upgrade, all hell broke loose. I could get the 3 PCs to talk to one another, and for awhile the main PC could print, but nothing else could. Then the others could, but not to the laser printer, just the ones connected by USB (that should have been a bigger clue). After fiddling for 2 hours, I was about to throw in the towel when I realized if the printer wasn’t the problem, and the printer driver wasn’t the problem, could there be a problem with the PORT driver? Not usually, that’s a pretty basic driver of input and output, but I searched in the bowels of my setup, found the problem and voila! My parallel printer started printing, and everyone could print. Great!
Then after another Windows update in early December, I lost my laser printer again. No problem, I thought, I knew how to fix it. Three clicks later, I found out that everything was still already set properly. Another hour or two, no more success. I couldn’t print to that printer no matter what. Didn’t help Andrea was in the middle of finishing her courses, but we muddled through and I was trying to figure out what to do.
One of the “saving” graces when I upgraded to Win 10 was that it said, quite clearly, that if you didn’t like it, you could downgrade back later. So once Andrea’s courses were all done, I proceeded to try the downgrade. Not an option. WTF? Apparently, buried in the small print was a note that it was an option for 30 days, but users were told to note that keeping a second copy of everything on their system was using up a lot of extra disk space so Windows helpfully deleted it after 30 days. You know, to help free up space. Would have been nice to have some sort of question or prompt at that point to say, “Hey, it’s been 30 days, and after this, downgrading won’t be an option anymore, are you sure?” Because I would have said “NO! I’m not sure! Ask me again in 30 days!”. But no, it just deleted it. On both systems. Now, sure, I have legit copies of Win 7/8, so I could wipe everything off, reinstall from scratch, put everything back the way it was, but I’m going to get forced to upgrade at some point anyway when MS Office or some such program doesn’t work on the old Windows anyway, and at the rate Microsoft is actively trying to kill old versions, that won’t be as long perhaps as most users hope.
So I accepted that the 20-year-old work horse of a printer was probably headed for the scrap heap and ordered a new network-compatible, double-sided, laser printer. Decent printer, decent price, free shipping with Amazon (I’m really enjoying the free shipping from them on my Prime membership). It arrived, and I hesitated to hook it up. I just knew there was every possibility that it wouldn’t go smoothly, and if it didn’t, I might take a hammer to it. My coping energy has been down, and is only slowly building back up since Christmas with some careful internal techniques.
However, in the meantime, just this past week in fact, Andrea upgraded her PC to Windows 10. And suddenly I couldn’t see her PC anymore, she couldn’t print, blah blah blah.
I found the problem right away, and it is the same problem that I think has underlaid some of the challenges from the beginning. When I upgraded my PC, my PC’s “name” was in the form of “Joe” (as in Joe Computer). Windows 10 however has a much stronger tie to the Microsoft online accounts, so the upgrade changed my PC name to “Joe Computer”. Now here’s the fun part — Windows 10 apparently doesn’t seem to want to admit that Joe Computer and Joe are the same computer or that Joe ever existed at all. Occasionally, when I try to do something deep in the bowels, Windows tries to tell me that Joe Computer doesn’t have the rights to do that because Joe didn’t give JC the rights. I over-ride, we keep going, all good. Except when it comes to networks.
From the beginning, Windows has told me that I’m connected to something called Network 7 i.e. a network created with Windows 7 by Joe. And that Joe created a Homegroup on said network. That I can join if I know the password. Here’s the thing — I *do* know the password, but when I try to connect I think it wants Joe to say Okay, but Joe doesn’t exist anymore. Or rather Joe Computer is asking itself, and it gets confused. It works for Andrea’s computer and the laptop, but it tells me I’m on the network already and I can join but it won’t confirm me. I followed all the helpful/unhelpful advice on Microsoft’s community forums, and nada.
Tonight, I went drastic. I disconnected from the network. I removed all the network settings I could find. It told me to do this for all three PCs, and then reconnect just 1 and create a new network + homegroup. Except that when I went to do Andrea’s PC second, it said, “Would you like to create a homegroup?”. Wtf? It wouldn’t let me do it before…oh right, my PC is now off. Joe and Joe Computer are both GONE. And her PC knows the proper name of my network, not “network 7” that I’m not sure exists anymore (it does, but I’ll get to that).
So I create a new homegroup. Looks perfect. Go to the laptop, and there is Andrea’s homegroup. Which I join, no problem, also set perfectly for the same network. Come back to my PC, turn it on, and voila! I’m still connected to Network 7 dammit.
I read something online that suggests it could be a “sticky” ID name and that it is still the right network. There’s an option to join a HomeGroup, which I do. Except this time I enter the new password from Andrea’s computer. And wait.
The computer whirs.
The icon spins and twirls.
It whirs some more.
More spinning.
Then it says, “Congrats, would you like to do something else now like….”.
Hallelujah and pass the ammunition! We have ourselves a network.
I quickly try to print to the parallel port to see if my some miracle it also fixed that but no. So I kill it, unhook it, and set up the new laser printer.
That can connect wirelessly to the router, and anything on the router can print to it. For some odd reason, it doesn’t ask me for a password, I am not sure why. Maybe because it is a printer and not a storage device. Odd, but I’m going with it for now. Bears further investigating, but not now.
I tweak a few things on my PC, and there is the new laser printer already in my setup. I love plug and play and auto discover — when it works.
I find an email I want to print, choose double-sided, and press SEND. And miracles of miracles, it prints just fine. No issues at all.
Andrea’s PC can’t print to it yet even though it can see it, but I think it is just delayed setup. Should work fine once she’s rebooted. I think. I hope. We’ll see. But *I* can print to it, and Andrea can print again to the colour. Plus all our machines are networked so files can be moved around more easily (particularly photos when I’m trying to amalgamate them all to one place for processing and backups!).
Stay tuned! But I’m hopeful I’m nearing a fully working network…
Warren Murphy is and will always be my favourite author.
I was looking for one of his books in e-form today, and just reading through the description of a book I hadn’t seen before, I came across a small phrase that struck me cold — “Warren Murphy passed away in September 2015”. I missed the news entirely. Heck, I heard from him on FB sometime early last year I think, certainly less than a year before his death.
That makes it almost sound like I knew him. I didn’t. I just knew his books.
The first ones I read were the Destroyer novels. My father used to read The Executioner series, Mack Bolans, etc., Nick Carter. So I read them too. And in some pile of similar books at a used store, I came across a pulp-style novel about a killer named Remo. An expert in the art of assassination, courtesy of the House of Sinanju, the basis for all martial arts. It was a glorious premise — the cop who gets framed for a murder, goes to death row, dies (almost), and is resurrected and trained by a small organization that only reports to the President in an oblique way, designed to take on the forces that would destroy the country and who operate outside the law so far that the law has no chance of stopping them. The most lethal of all lethal weapons who could terminate with extreme prejudice.
But the pulp format belied something deeper — the books were fun. The banter back and forth between the student Remo and the trainer Chiun was rapid, insulting, brutal — and hilarious. I loved it.
Murphy wrote them with Richard Ben Sapir and I started collecting books by both of them, including the Destroyer series. Eventually, I found one of Murphy’s Trace novels. It was like striking gold. To be honest, I didn’t find Trace first. I found Digger. If that sounds confusing, it should…they are two series by Warren Murphy with different publishers. Both contain:
a lush of an investigator who wears a wire for all his important conversations;
insurance investigations for a big company that keeps him employed because one of the senior people likes him for a favour he did him once;
an Asian girlfriend who frequently shows up at the end of the novels, listens to the tapes and identifies an important clue to help solve the crime; and,
an ex-wife and two children that he doesn’t remember the name of and so calls them by generic nicknames.
Digger is Trace; Trace is Digger. But apparently there were issues with the first publisher (for Digger), and Murphy wanted to go higher end with the novels while the publisher was going pulpy. Murphy took the books elsewhere, they were more full novel length, and Trace was born. I still have the email from him where he explained some of the details (I posted about it on a list, said I’d love to find out the real story some day, another person on the list knew him and forwarded it to him, and he responded directly to me). Getting an email in my inbox from WARREN FRICKING MURPHY was like winning the lottery. I responded, and I totally acted like a fanboy. Never heard back again. I’m sure I went in the “loo-loo” pile.
But I was seriously hooked. I read Destroyer books even after Sapir died and Murphy wasn’t writing them anymore. I read all the Trace books. I hunted down Razoni and Jackson and the Digger novels. I read his King Arthur books, and Grandmaster (swords and modern mysteries!). I found out that he had written others under a pseudonym — Dev Stryker — with his then-wife Molly Cochrane, and gobbled those up too. Hard to find, and he wasn’t blazing the ebook road, so paper was the way to go (some hard to find ones I got through inter-library loans). But every once in awhile, I’d go searching and find a new one by him. Like gold, every time.
I even remember going to see the movie Lethal Weapon 2, and loving the banter, etc. For no real reason in particular, I stayed behind so I could read the credits. I partially wanted to see who the writer was to see if there were any books out there — and there it was. Warren Murphy’s name. Of course. No wonder I loved the writing. It was him.
I didn’t know for a long time that he wasn’t a secret. That he had two Edgars and two Shamus awards. That he’d been a president of MWA. That he was a screenwriter with multiple hits to his credit. That he was actually quite famous.
He was just the writer of the most fun books I had ever read. It was Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys mysteries for grown ups, and without the noir or the cozy or the modern forensics focus. Sure, I moved on. I read about V.I. Warshawski. I met Stephanie Plum. I devoured Kinsey Milhone. I fell in love with Susan the guidance counsellor that Spenser loved, and that Hawk seemed to have a warm place in his heart for too. The gumshoes, the sleuths, the professional detectives.
And it is what made me want to be a writer. For the first time, I saw a genre that I loved. Not kids mysteries, not series like Rick Brant or Tom Swift. Not sci-fi. True mysteries. Series that built a genre. Not an Agatha Christie-like sleuth, not a Sherlock Holmes. A plodder. Who got the right answer by hook or by crook, and by plain straight stick-to-it-iveness. My writing may never see the light of publication but if it ever does, if I ever get to introduce my protagonist, you can damn well bet that the dedication will be to Warren Murphy.
My library took a hit today. Five months after his death at age 81, but still a hit. I’ll miss his stories…
I posted earlier about Michael Hyatt’s article about ebooks, and why he was switching to paper for 2016, and now there’s a semi-related post from The Ebook Evangelist (How do we define an e-reader? | The eBook Evangelist). In it, the blogger references how popular vernacular talks about so-called “e-reader” device problems:
small screens (they mean like phones, which are not e-readers but rather phones that also have e-reader apps);
large screens (they mean like tablets, which are also not e-readers but rather tablets that also have e-reader apps); and,
blue-light, back-light problems (generally meaning phones or tablets, as most e-readers are e-ink devices without backlighting of that sort, although some e-readers DO now come with a different form of backlight).
Mostly though I’m sharing the link above as she has the same reaction I do — the articles are “confusing” (as she puts it) and “worthless” (in my vernacular) as they frequently throw apples, oranges and a few internet devices into the same basket, and then hope to draw some common issues with all of them by reviewing only one. A one-size-fits-all that really often fits none. and it hopelessly confuses the debate. Some other things bother me too:
people who are passionate about ebooks over paper or paper over ebooks — personally, I don’t care about format, I only care if people read;
people who argue that reading retention is less on e-devices vs. paper and that this is bad (first, we need to quantify those metrics, because they also include the person who switched from reading to playing a game, and the real problem with their retention isn’t retention but that they got distracted doing something else and didn’t read it in the first place; and second, before we decide it is bad, can we also revise the metrics to also measure engagement with the passive books vs. active e-devices, the opportunity for greater engagement with e-devices if they are actually used effectively, not just dumping raw text onto an e-device, not formatting it for an e-reading experience, and finding people don’t remember it as well as the nicely formatting paper book? People also retain books better than they do loose-leaf hand-written pages, the same medium in different “format”, so medium isn’t the problem); and,
writers who claim an ebook is devaluing the work if it is sold for less than $10 or something.
I find most of the articles on the net about ebooks vs. paper to be wrong-headed and mostly silly. Passionate paper people who claim that anyone using an e-reader to be woefully uninformed, of low culture, and possibly impotent vs. all digital, all the time people who claim anyone reading paper is clearly a Luddite. Personally, I don’t care the format. Paper, ink, e-ink, pixels, back of a napkin, side of a serial box, pamphlet, newspaper, ceiling of a dentist’s office…I’ll read anything anywhere anytime. And usually it doesn’t take much time before I disconnect from the physical format and immerse myself in the story. So when I saw yet another “I’m going to read paper” post, I just about blew past it with a yawn. However, I didn’t, I clicked, and I find Michael Hyatt’s take kind of interesting (Why I’m Putting Ebooks on the Shelf for 2016 – Michael Hyatt).
One thing he notes that for him, “e-books are out of sight and out of mind” whereas the paper books loom in front of him on the shelf waiting to be read, and reminding him to read. Kind of an interesting idea, I think, partly because I have found the same at times. I carry my e-reader with me, but if I don’t physically “see” it, I often grab my tablet or something else first. He also finds the physical stack comforting when he’s done reading them…I see his point, but the concern with a library overwhelming the house negates that pleasure pretty quick for me.
A second item I like is that he finds the bookmarking and taking of notes less effective for him, something he enjoys doing easily with physical books. I certainly find that for non-fiction, less concerned with it for fiction.
The third item that resonated with me was about how he doesn’t get the same sense of accomplishment when he finishes an e-book as a paper book. I have found that too…in paper, I close the book. I might literally feel a sense of closure, but it’s also a moment to reflect for a second or two on what I have read, to savour the ending, to digest the story arc. On my e-book reader, particularly if I’m reading a series, I will go on to the next one almost immediately and be well into Chapter 1 without taking the time to really savour the flavour of the previous meal. That’s not really about the e-book though, that’s about my personal reading style with e-books. Nothing would stop me from savouring it the way a closing of a book does.
Sure, he also argues that e-books don’t engage the senses, there’s lower retention and comprehension, etc., and most of the science around it is complete crap, so I’m ignoring those points. I also find no resonance with arguments about more easily distracted by e-mail or games on tablets, etc. — when I’m reading, I’m reading. Earthquakes don’t distract me. I don’t even pretend to understand his complaints about more difficulty navigating though.
Yet, as I said, I`m glad I clicked. Those three points were interesting and quite different from what most people write on the subject.
