Tag: Lois McMaster Bujold

Plans for My Personal Home Library

If everyone has a weird or quirky super power, mine is the ability to acquire books. Even when I was living out of a suitcase in a remote Caucasian village, or traipsing across the Middle East, I was constantly acquiring books.

With my marriage to Future Mrs. Vasicek coming up, I’ve decided to put this super power to use. Instead of acquiring books randomly, I’m approaching the task of building a personal library with goals and a plan. Part of that plan is to inventory all of the books that I own, with lists of books / ebooks / audiobooks that I want to acquire. Part of it is to find a place in my home where I can shelve them all, instead of keeping them in boxes or the closet. And another part is categorizing all of the books, with goals for each category.

Requirements

After putting some thought into it, here are my basic requirements:

  • The entire library must fit in a single room / device / server.
  • The only books that I’ll keep are ones that:
    • I want to read again,
    • I want to talk about with others, or
    • I want to share with my family.
  • Ebooks and audiobooks must be DRM-free and device agnostic.

A while ago, I did a blog post on the pros and cons between print books, ebooks, and audiobooks. That seems to be a pretty good set of criteria for determining which formats to collect my books in, or whether to collect a particular book in multiple formats.

Ideally, I want to set up my personal library in a shared space in my home, where I can host guests. Future Mrs. Vasicek and I are going to get a set of scriptures, kind of like the tradition of a family bible, and I want this to be the centerpiece of my personal library. Eventually, I also want to get a dedicated ereader (or set of ereaders) that lives in the library, as well as a portable hard drive for all of the audiobooks. I don’t want any of it to depend on the cloud.

Categories

So far, I’ve got eight categories, though I’m sure this will expand. They are:

  1. Science fiction & fantasy
  2. Other fiction
  3. LDS non-fiction
  4. Self-improvement
  5. Writing & publishing
  6. Arabic language
  7. History & current events
  8. Other non-fiction

I have a lot more fiction books than non-fiction (go figure). For now, I’m using Goodreads as a library inventory system, though I may want to find something better in the future. If you check out my Goodreads profile, you can probably see all of them.

I’m working to come up with goals and plans for each category. Here’s what I have so far:

Science Fiction & Fantasy

My main goal here is to collect the complete works of David Gemmell. He is my favorite fantasy writer of all time, and I’ve read all of the Drenai series and most of the Stones of Power and the Rigante series as well. I’m holding off on the Troy books, mostly because I want to savor them. He’s also got a few standalones and duologies, most of which I’ve read.

Other series that I want to collect in print are:

  • Louis McMaster Bujold’s Vorkosigan series
  • All of Heinlein’s juveniles
  • The Barsoom series by Edgar Rice Burroughs (Princess of Mars, etc)
  • Ursula K. Le Guin’s Hainish cycle
  • All of the books by my writer friends

There are also a bazillion trilogies that I either own or want to collect, but it’s not worth listing them all here. I’m sure this is going to be a very dynamic part of my personal library.

Other Fiction

My main goal for this section right now is to collect all of the Sackett books by Louis L’Amour. There are only two left, both of which I’ve requested on Paperback Swap. Now I get to read them all, without any interruption!

I also plan to focus on collecting Jeff Shaara, especially the Civil War books. I currently have The Killer Angels by his father, as well as Gods and Generals and The Last Full Measure. But before that, I need to read Rise to Rebellion and The Glorious Cause, which I also own (those ones cover the Revolutionary War). Depending on how much I enjoy those, I’ll decide whether to collect Shaara’s complete works.

LDS Non-fiction

There are a tone of authors that I want to collect in this section: Nibley, Givens, Gileadi, Groberg, and more. There are also a few key books that I need to acquire and read, mostly biographies and church histories.

One series that I’m really looking forward to is the four book SAINTS series published by the church. The first book was fantastic; I listened to the whole thing on the train, and it was really cool to pick out the people from my own family history and learn how they contributed to the rise of the church. The next book is going to cover the westward migration, and I have a bunch of ancestors who participated in that, including a few in the Willie handcart company. Really looking forward to it!

Here in Utah, it isn’t difficult to collect LDS non-fiction books. You can find most of the older titles in thrift stores, and there are lots of LDS bookstores to choose from. That said, I don’t have any concrete goals for this section yet. The biggest challenge will probably be in refining this section so that I only keep the best books (ha), since it would be very easy to let this section get cluttered with good but mediocre books. That seems to be the general trend.

Self-Improvement

The biggest thing I need to do in this section is reread How to Win Friends and Influence People, preferably once a year. Fantastic book.

I should also probably focus on marriage and relationship books, since y’know, I’m getting married. Personal finance is also huge: I’ve got Rich Dad, Poor Dad, and should probably collect all of Kiyosaki’s books. Stephen Covey is another huge one.

Beyond that, my cowriter Scott Bascom is really into self-improvement, so my plan for now is to build out this section based on his recommendations.

Writing & Publishing

There are a few classics that I need to re-acquire, such as Character and Viewpoint and On Writing. One classic that I will probably skip is Strunk & White’s Elements of Style (can’t stand that pretentious book). Other than that, the biggest thing is to stay current and focus on indie publishing. For that reason, I suspect that I’ll collect mostly ebooks in this section.

Arabic Language

My main goal here is to read The Book of Mormon (كتاب مورمون) in Arabic. I also have plans to study the Qur’an, though that’s not a priority at the moment.

Most of these books are ones that I acquired while studying Arabic in Jordan. I don’t think I’ll acquire many more anytime soon, though if an opportunity arises, I probably won’t turn it down. The big question in my mind is whether to expand this section to Arabic language & culture, since I do have a bunch of English books on the Middle East.

History & Current Events

My biggest goal for this section is to build a collection of monetary & financial books that together make a complete history of the United States. This subject is my current pet interest, much to Future Mrs. Vasicek’s chagrin. I also have plans for a coin collection / history that I’m currently writing, though that’s on the back burner for now.

Other than that, I plan to focus on book recommendations by Ben Shapiro and Glenn Beck.

Other non-fiction

No real goals yet for this section. At some point, I will probably spin off family histories as a separate category, since there are a lot of them in my family.

General Goals

The biggest thing I need to do is read every book that I own. I may be really good at acquiring books, but I’m not as good at actually reading them. Currently, I’ve read only about 20% of them.

When will I have them all read by? Ideally, the end of the year, but I doubt that’s going to happen. Then again, if I can keep my goal to read for an hour or two each night, a year might just be enough.

Since the library is constantly growing, though, I suspect this will be more of an aspirational goal, or a moving target. Even when I manage to hit it, it probably won’t take long before I acquire more books and have more reading to do again.

The next big goal is to find a place for all these books, which probably won’t happen until after Future Mrs. Vasicek and I are married. At which point, all of these plans may change, since she has a bunch of books too—but probably not too much. We’ve talked about it, and it shouldn’t be too hard to merge our books into one family library, if that is what we decide to do.

Aside from that, I’d like to get as many books signed and personalized as I can. Shouldn’t be too hard: just look up the guest list of any convention I’m attending, and bring the books along.

That’s basically the plan as it stands right now. With my quirky super power for acquiring books, it shouldn’t take long to build an epic personal/family library.

Ethan of Athos by Lois McMaster Bujold

I love the Vorkosigan books. Miles isn’t in this one, but a bunch of other characters are. It’s the same universe, with the same fascinating history, just with a bunch of new and interesting complications.

Ethan is from a world where women do not exist. The uterine replicator has rendered them obsolete, and a colony of fundamentalist MGTOWs has established a functional society where everyone is male and no one has ever seen or interacted with a dreaded female. But make no mistake, Ethan is not a MGTOW. He’s Athos’s best doctor: professional, responsible, and conscientious to a fault. And that’s why the council of elders has sent him on a mission to acquire female reproductive cultures before the ones on Athos all die out.

Along the way, he gets caught up with the Dendarii mercenaries, specifically one Commander Elli Quinn, and is soon caught up in the machinations of the Cetegandans and House Bharaputra, who are involved in some less-than-ethical bioengineering schemes that have brought the galaxy to the verge of war. If Ethan fails his mission, Athos itself might be nuked back to the stone age. But that is nothing compared to his most difficult task: learning how to work with a woman.

This book was a lot of fun! I have yet to read a bad book by Lois McMaster Bujold, and this one certainly didn’t disappoint. Lots of action and adventure, with dashing, resourceful heroes and frighteninginly comptetent villains. The all-male society of Athos was both fascinating and eminently believable, given the technology, and the interstellar espionage was loads of fun.

This isn’t the best place to start if you’ve never read any Bujold, but if you’ve already read The Warrior’s Apprentice and a couple of other Miles Vorkosigan adventures, you’ll really appreciate this book. Definitely one of the highlights of the series.

Trope Tuesday: Neutral Good

Arguably the best of the good-aligned characters, the Neutral Good can always be counted on to do the right thing, whether that means working within the system or rebelling against it.  Whether young or old, soft or shrewd, nice or not so nice, these are the guys (and girls) most likely to save the world and defeat the enemy with love.

From the easydamus character alignment page:

A neutral good character does the best that a good person can do. He is devoted to helping others. He works with kings and magistrates but does not feel beholden to them.

The Neutral Good is not devoid of weaknesses, of course.  Although they are devoted to good, their lack of commitment to law means that they are not always willing to enforce it.  Also, for those who just want to get things done, this alignment can be somewhat limiting, in the way that a commitment to any higher ideal usually is.

Interestingly, this is a very common alignment for heroes in space opera stories.  Case in point, Luke Skywalker: even though he’s young and reckless, he’s not above learning the ways of the force and joining the Jedi order.  Miles Vorkosigan from Lois McMaster Bujold’s Vorkosigan series also falls squarely into the Neutral Good camp.  Moving on to manga and webcomics, Alphonse and Winry from Fullmetal Alchemist both fall under this alignment, giving balance to Edward’s more chaotic outbursts.  Agatha from Girl Genius is also a Neutral Good…at least, when there aren’t any wrenches nearby.

There are quite a few characters with this alignment in my own work.  Even though she’s a mercenary captain, Danica from Bringing Stella Home falls squarely into this alignment; she’s got a tough outer shell, but she’ll do anything for her men, even…well, I don’t want to ruin Stars of Blood and Glory. 😉 Also from Bringing Stella Home / Sholpan, Stella is solidly Neutral Good, which is part of why the ending is so deliciously twisted.  In Star Wanderers, Jeremiah falls into this alignment mostly through default, which is good for Noemi because the circumstances of the novel put her totally at his mercy.  And in Desert Stars, this is probably Mira’s alignment, though she’s easily manipulated by her Neutral Evil mother.

What can I say?  I’ve got a soft spot for Neutral Goods.  Considering how well this kind of a hero fits in to a classic space adventure, it shouldn’t come as any surprise.

Blurb for Bringing Stella Home and thoughts on Borders

One of the essential elements for a successful in epublishing is a killer book description, and I think I’ve got a pretty decent one for Bringing Stella Home.  However, I could use some feedback, so if you could read it and tell me what you think, that would be great. Here it is:

It is a dark time for the galactic empire. Rebellions at Tajjur and the New Pleiades sap the empire’s strength from within, while hordes of spacefaring Hamiji warriors from the outer reaches sweep ever closer to the Imperial capitol, slagging entire worlds in their wake.

When the Hameji forces conquer his homeworld, young James McCoy runs away to rescue his older brother and sister, Ben and Stella, from their grasp. Though he faces an enemy undefeated in battle and feared throughout all of inhabited space, James will stop at nothing–not even death–to get his brother and sister back.

Things start to look up when he meets Danica Nova, a Tajji mercenary captain who takes him in and becomes his mentor. James reminds Danica of her own brother, whom she failed to protect when the empire slaughtered her family years ago. Now, she hopes to find some redemption from her demons by saving James from his own.

Unfortunately, neither of them realizes that Stella has become a concubine to the main Hameji overlord–and that Ben has been brainwashed and made into an elite shock trooper in the empath squadron sent to hunt them down.

So what do you think?  Too long, too confusing, too cliche, or too boring?  The genre (if you can’t tell) is space opera / space adventure, so I’m hoping it will appeal to fans of Orson Scott Card, C. J. Cherryh, Lois McMaster Bujold, Star Wars & Star Trek, etc.  It’s also got a slight military science fiction bent to it, though I wouldn’t presume to be qualified to write true military sf.

In unrelated news, I recently did an interview with Charlie of Playground51, which appears to be down for some reason (the link is on my Blog Tour page above).  Topics discussed include how I got the idea for Genesis Earth, which parts were inspired by real life, and thoughts on book promotion.  Hopefully the site will be up again soon!

Also, I’m thinking it’s time to do a major overhaul of my blog template.  As much as I love the current one with the purple stars and nebulae, I need something with two sidebars so that my books don’t push everything else to the bottom.  If you have some ideas for a good WordPress template that still keeps the sci-fi feel of this one, please let me know!  I’m very much open to suggestions.

Finally, since the Borders liquidation is all over the news, I thought I’d share my $.02.  It’s sad, certainly, but I don’t think that the fallout will be nearly as gloomy as Joshua Bilmes claims.

Corporate-run big box stores are certainly on the way out, but there will always be a market for good stories, and in many ways the new ebook technology is causing that market to expand at a wonderful rate.  So while the predictions of the print death spiral appear to be coming true (David Gaughran did a great post recently on that), new models will emerge–indeed, are already emerging–which will fill the vacuum.

The thing that gives me great reason to hope is that these new business models give so much power back to writers.  Instead of relying on the mercies of large media corporations to build a viable career, we can now make a living by publishing independently or going with any number of small independent presses.  Readers have more choices and writers have more options.  It’s glorious.

If anything, the Borders bankruptcy has confirmed to me that I’ve made the right choice to go indie, rather than wait for New York to anoint me before launching my career.  Will I ever go with a traditional publisher?  I’d like to someday, but I no longer feel dependent on the old system to accomplish my dreams.  Instead, it’s my readers who will decide my fate, and that’s exactly as it should be.

So thanks for reading!

Shards of Honor by Lois McMaster Bujold

Cordelia Naismith never thought she would find the love of her life on a scientific survey to an unexplored border world, let alone that he would be a Barrayan, one of the enemy.  But Aral Vorkosigan is not just any other officer in the Barrayan Military.  He is courteous, fair-minded, thoughtful–and above all else, driven by an innate sense of honor.  To her surprise, Cordelia soon finds that she has more in common with the man than she thought possible.

But the rumors of war between Escobar, Beta Colony, and Barrayar soon conspire to drive them apart.  Though Cordelia sees Vorkosigan for the good man he is, the rest of the galaxy only knows him as the “Butcher of Komarr”–an unfortunate title which Vorkosigan does not entirely deserve.

As Barrayar goes to war and Cordelia finds herself rising through the ranks of the Betan Military, she is forced to choose between loyalty to her country and loyalty to the man she loves.  When the two are mutually exclusive, how does one preserve one’s honor while securing a degree of happiness?

I loved this book.  Unlike some romances, where the male protagonist is a complete douchbag, Aral Vorkosigan is the kind of guy I’d like to be like.  Bujold strikes an excellent balance between strong and sensitive that enhances, rather than taints, his manliness.  Besides that, Vorkosigan is extremely fascinating, with a complicated backstory and motivations that are both believable and interesting.

Though it’s technically a romance, the book reads very much like military science fiction, with deliciously tongue-in-cheek phrases like “the cadet was too young to believe in death after life” and rigorous attention to the details of military life, such as rank and chain of command.  The book definitely has enough explosions, space battles, and political intrigue to appeal to boys as well as the romance audience, but Bujold melds the space adventure elements seamlessly with the romantic elements, so that readers of either genre don’t feel left out or patronized.

There was only one thing that bothered me, and since it contains spoilers I’ll put it in black so that you don’t inadvertently see it.  To read it, highlight the text:

After Cordelia ran away from home and married Vorkosigan, why did she never think about her homeland again? You would think that as a career military officer who had dedicated her life to her country, she would at least have some lingering doubts that she’d done the right thing by running away–especially when her husband became the new Lord Regent of Barrayar! To me, this seems in-congruent with her character.

All things considered, though, this was an excellent, well-written science fiction adventure/romance. I thoroughly enjoyed it and will definitely be reading more of Lois McMaster Bujold’s work again.