Interactions in Real Time

I was really hoping that this year we’d have really good options for ebook gifts.

I don’t want to receive physical books. I want to receive ebooks. But I simply can’t find any way to put ebooks on my wishlist and allow people to give them to me.

• Apple allows you to purchase an iTunes Book for someone, but they receive it instantly. That’s not useful for christmas giving.
• Amazon allows you to purchase an ebook for someone, but they receive it instantly. That’s not useful for christmas giving.
• Barnes & Noble fails entirely by not allowing you to purchase an eBook for someone else — only gift cards. Barf.

As a matter of fact, the only large online retailer which seems to have any reasonable gift giving choices is Books a Million. You can download the eBook from their site and put it on a CD as a physical gift if you want, or e-mail it if you prefer an electronic delivery.

I believe that the ebook retailers are handicapping themselves. This is a great opportunity they shouldn’t be passing up for Christmas business.

Have you found any better ways to give eBooks as gifts?

A few people have questioned why I have started publishing reviews of books. They point out that this appears to be a very busy field, and there’s no money to gain.

There are the obvious simple answers: I enjoy doing it, and others have expressed appreciation for my review style. But there is a much more important reason that I’d like to share: I don’t see many reviews done the way I appreciate, so I’m putting my mouth where my interests are.

Far too many reviewers (for my taste) do one or more of the following in their reviews:

1. Summarize the story – A summary of a story provides no value to the reader. You can’t tell the difference between a well-written and a poorly written story from the summary. And fairly often it ruins the exploration a reader might do when they read the story.
2. Use the review to advocate – This point of a review is not about the reviewer, it is about the thing being reviewed. I grow weary of seeing a reviewer use a review as a stick to chastise the creator because of a difference in beliefs or approaches.
3. Forget to answer the question: why would I invest in this? – This is the primary question of a review — who might appreciate this thing? Why might you want to invest time or money in the object being reviewed?

This is what drives me most to do reviews. I want to let people know why they might enjoy or find useful something. And honestly, I’d like to see many more reviewers do the same for me. There’s some great stuff out there, let’s talk about it.

This book is not what you might guess it would be. No, this book is much better, and more enduring, than you can imagine.

From the title I expected to find a book filled with sci-fi imaginings of catastrophe and chaos. And yes, this book could easily be called “Sixteen different ways calamity found us.” But to do that would be to overlook something very essential and different about this anthology.

These stories are cast after the apocalypse, often far in the future. And they don’t lay claim to the scientific predictions, nor the destruction. There is fairly short thrift paid to disaster. This is an anthology about humanity’s soul. Who we are. Who we can be, and who we have become. This anthology doesn’t challenge you to imagine physical earth disasters – it challenges you to imagine how far humanity might climb, or how low we can fall, after today’s expectations are far enough in the past to have been forgotten.

Jeff Carlson presents the story of a miracle boy that wanders across the earth trying to heal it. Pat McEwen tell us the moral delimas of a public defender trying to reestablish justice in a newly wild west. Chris Lawson shows us the struggle involved in trying to reestablish lost species on the planet. Each of these and nine other stories focus on the people trying to survive, live and love in an environment that we can barely imagine in our comfort today.

Gordon van Gelder’s selections for this anthology don’t tell us what’s going to happen to this planet. Instead they challenge us to see what we are capable of, both good and bad, noble and otherwise. Who will you be? What are you capable of?

Why am I doing a review for Green more than 2 years after release? Because I found something remarkable and lovable about Green that I haven’t seen anyone else mention.

As I’m sure that you’ve read from other reviews or from the book itself, Green is a young child sold (or stolen) away from her farming father to a foreign prince. Over the course of the book she goes from rebellious child to well-trained assassin, in a story which spans regions and civilizations.

Yes, another competent female killer. But there is something truly wonderful about Green. The main character is not a spinning, kicking automaton with a god-given motive far beyond her years. The main character is… a young girl. A young girl with incredible skills which she spent years training to acquire. Whose skills do not transfer to the next thing she does magically, as if any competency is all competencies. The things she does are completely believable based on her story within the book.

Many reviewers harp on her immature response to going home and trying to reintegrate, or the way she gets pulled into things without a sense of direction. Honestly, this is exactly what makes the character Green real to me. When I watch the movies or read books about characters with an unnatural sense of what to do, it pushes me out – takes me away from believing in the character except as an expression of the author. Green acts as many young children have acted – she falls into things she may have known better. She acts against her own interests when rebelling against others. She is truly and completely human to me.

Green is a wonderfully real young lady. Reading her story brought me pleasure, and I gaze eagerly at the recently arrived hardback for her next journey — Endurance.

In a letter written to someone the other day I mumbled out something about myself that is more true than my quick typing should have been able to write. I have reread it several times, and found it more true on each rereading, therefore I thought I’d share this with you.

I enjoy communication. I enjoy talking with people about things that interest them, that challenge them. I enjoy conversations about anything someone likes, or hates, or is thinking about. This is joyful to me. This is learning, this is expanding, this is experience.

Moreso, this is something that simply isn’t possible without being human. I know a great many people think that Heaven will be wrapped up in God’s love, being close to him and knowing everything. Perhaps. But someone connected to the all-knowing source cannot experience the moment of realization — the “ah ha!” moment, the moment when your reality changes, broadens and becomes something different because of something you just learned. Only living beings which are separate and non-omniscient can have that moment, can change each other’s lives. Only we can sizzle with the warmth of a new experience, a change in ourselves due to something we have just learned.

Only we can change moment by moment, evolving through interactions in real time.