SFist Reads
Wow, so much interesting list stuff has hit our inbox this week that we've barely had time to read our online reserves from the SFPL. Well, we've learned that if we're running behind on our reading, that booksfree, (which should just give up and call themselves the Netflix of books, because that's what they are) is there to help save us from late fees on borrowed books. Then again, if we have some cash to throw around, we can either blow a wad at our fine local independent bookstores, or we can follow popsugar's lead and bid to name a character from a book by "Authors including Stephen King, Dave Eggers, Amy Tan, Lemony Snicket, Nora Roberts, Michael Chabon and more." Finally, a place to use all those wacky pet names we've been collecting over the years.
SFist Rain is just finishing Never Let Me Go. It's a weirdly touching and creepy book, and even though she was constantly tripping over plot holes she just felt...sad the entire time she was reading it.
SFist Jon just finished reading The October Horse, the last book a series of historical fiction novels by Colleen McCullough about the rise and fall of the Roman Republic. This book starts with Caesar hooking up with a not very attractive Cleopatra then details the conspiracy and subsequent assassination of said Caesar, followed by the rise of his nephew Octavius.
Much to his dismay, the book (and series) ends not with Octavius rising to Emperor but with him and Marc Antony vanquishing the last of Caesar’s conspirators. Jon loved the historical detail (Caesar,in fact, never said "et tu Brutus" and instead just got stabbed in silence) and the way McCullough was able to bring historical figures to life, somehow making them both outsized in personality but still completely human and three-dimensional. Octavius, for example, starts of as a shy, sickly, somewhat fey boy and ends up as a somewhat creepy, bloodthirsty figure who takes over Rome not out of playing general but out of deception, propaganda, and political guile -- like some winning contestant on "Survivor" . He also couldn’t help but notice the historical parallels between the crash and burn of Rome’s democracy with the crashing and burning of our own. Much to his dismay, however, a quick perusal of reader reviews on Amazon.com showed that he wasn’t the only to notice this -— in a review, Newt Gingrich points out the same. This makes Jon wonder if Newt has changed his stripes as it were or whether he compleely misunderstood the books.