Thursday, April 18, 2013

The Rising at Roxbury Crossing by James Redfearn.  This will appeal to a very small group of readers.  There are also quite a lot of characters, not well introduced.  A little bit of editing goes a long way.  Also, there is quite a bit of swearing, which I'm sure the author thinks make them sound realistic.  It just makes them sound crass.

Blues in the Wind-- ReVisited [sic] by Whitney J.LeBlanc.  What is it with all these "American Saga"s?  They are uniformly bad.

Angels at Sunset by Tom Mach.  Another book inside a book?  Use those pages to better tell the real story.  The story is told in third person, but has so many italicized thoughts for the main character that first person would have been more appropriate, more natural, and more powerful.
Also, all the conversations feel contrived.  

But By the Chance of War by Richard C. Lyons.  A screen play spanning from 535 to the modern day?  How could this go wrong? This is not a novel.  These rhymes are ridiculous: someone is trying way, waaaayyy to hard.

The Kabbalist: A Cinematic Novel by Michael Laitman.  No, no, no!  Not a novel!  And so many fonts; my eyes, they hurt.

The Widow of Port Seaton by Susan Gibbs.  This one is off to a good start; I put it off so long because the cover art is so very terrible, but the book inside will be worth having another read-through in the future.

Recorded Books.  Not my normal thing, but it definitely falls inside the library world.  Here's what happened: we have an audiobook (I don't remember which one now, not that it matters) and one disc was damaged.  The rest of the dozen-or-so discs played perfectly well and the title was popular, so I wanted to replace the damaged disc.  I didn't want to buy a full replacement as this was somewhere in the $90 area, if I remember right.  I tried my normal vendors to no luck. The audiobook's publisher was Recorded Books, so I called to see about getting a replacement disc straight from them.  I've worked with other publishers before, it's pretty straight forward.  However, Recorded Books wouldn't sell me a replacement disc.  I was told over the phone that they won't sell replacement discs if we didn't buy the original directly from them.  Since this audiobook has been at the library far longer than I, I have no idea who purchased it or from which vendor.  Because there has been alot of turnover at the library over the last few years, we have different, frequently multiple accounts for single vendors, in different librarians' names.  We also don't have the acquisitions add-on for our ILS, so without going back through years and years of paper invoices, I have no idea where it came from.
I think it very small and petty of Recorded Books to have this policy.  They published the audiobook; no matter who eventually shipped it to our library, they got paid for it.  This practice does not motivate me in the least to buy directly from them; if I had more time, or stronger standards, I wouldn't purchase anything by them at all, no matter who I was buying it from.  Boo on you, Recorded Books.

The Olympian.   This year's periodicals budget is smaller than last year's, so we decided we couldn't afford to keep the Seattle Times along with everything else.  We signed up for a 6-month subscription to the Olympian instead, to still provide some cross-state coverage.  Let me just say, those people are on drugs.  We've had problems with the website and the mail-delivery, but that doesn't compare at all to trying to call them.  Our patrons like the paper, but it's hardly worth the staff time trying to keep everything straight.  Drugs, man.

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