Top Picks for Sci-Fi/Fantasy Books

So, NPR recently released this years top picks for Science Fiction and Fantasy novels.  And there are _many_ awesome and deserving choices.  In many cases, it may as well be a list of all my favorite books.  But one of my favorite entries is #82, The Eyre Affair, by Jasper Fforde.

Now, if you know me in real life, you are probably sick to death of hearing me talk about "the Thursday Next series", but if you haven't heard me tout it at every possible turn, you should take this entry as an encouragement to go and read it.  All of it.

NPR's blurb is a pretty good synopsis of the first book:

"In a world where you can actually get lost (literally) in literature, Thursday Next, a notorious Special Operative in literary detection, races against time to stop the world's Third Most Wanted criminal from kidnapping characters, including Jane Eyre, from works of literature, forcing her to dive into the pages of a novel to stop literary homicide, in a wildly imaginative, mesmerizing thriller."

The whole series is _fantastic_.  I have read it several times at this point, and also quite enjoy the off-shoot Nursery Crime series.  I will say that the first book is not as engaging as the rest.  It's good, I love it, but the second book is where it really gets into the meat of the world building.

So, if you're looking for something new to read, definitely consider this series.  It's smart, funny, complex, and my favorite series, so I want everyone else to like it, too.

New World Archive

While purging the enormous amount of books and other media the three of us have accumulated throughout our entire lives, we have been selling anything that's worth it on Amazon to make back at least a little of the money we originally spent on all of it in the first place.

I will often get sales from libraries, businesses, churches, convents (I kid you not), and sometimes even book stores.  But one of the more interesting sales I had recently from was a business called "New World Archive".  Often when I get a particularly interesting business purchasing something I'm selling, I'll do a Google search, which often times results in nothing as interesting as it seems.  In this case, it was the exact opposite.  

New World Archive seems to try to avoid having any online presence whatsoever.  In doing some digging, I first found a mention of them on BookThink.com.  They linked to a more in-depth article about New World Archive.  

According to their research, New World Archive is a Canadian based company that buys books from all different places and consolidates them in their warehouse (of which they think they found a picture; there is apparently a US location as well).  They then have a huge staff dedicated to improving the items they get (erasing marks made with pencil, cleaning them up, repackaging them) and then they resell them either as new or at a higher grade than they purchased them.  In many cases, they're buying from individual sellers or sometimes stores in the US that have these items at significantly lower prices than the Canadian market is supporting.  It's not limited to books, either.  According to this site, they have a high volume of CDs that they clean industrially to sell re shrink-wrapped as new.

This whole thing is completely fascinating to me.  It feels like some majorly covered up conspiracy, but really it's just a strange business model that seems difficult to keep up a constant profit.

Weird!

No more Eureka

Yesterday, the SyFy (god I hate that...) network cancelled Eureka.  It's one of the best original shows to come out of the network, and I'm surprised at the news.  The writing could be...less than ideal at times, especially when it came to making situations plausible, but it was always about the characters.  And they really knew how to make awesome, lovable characters.

But they don't know a good thing when they have it (_or_ not enough viewers are tuning in, but this _has_ to be one of the most successful original series they've had; maybe the budget's just too big).  So after the episodes airing now, we have one more season next year (which is finishing up filming now), and that's it.  Major rewrite is likely happening as we speak since the last episode of season five is filming in about a week.  They're working hard to make sure the series ties up as best as it can.

But what really annoys me is that, apparently, SyFy released an official statement about it  without even telling the cast first (and possibly even the directors/producers).

What?  Assholes.