Books, School, and Feet

So I get a coupon for 30% off any one book. I guess you're not supposed to buy anything on sale that you wouldn't pay the full price for. At least I read that one time. The theory's that you end up buying things that you don't actually want and end up wasting money instead of saving it. That kind of makes sense in a limited way, but it also makes sense to buy things on sale that you would not buy at the normal price.

The run up to Saturnalia/Mithra's birthday/the Winter Solstice/whatever isn't good for me. It's not that I have family I want to be with or anything. I can deal with not seeing my living relatives for a lot longer than they usually let me. But everything's so crowded. I hate crowds. I'm not crazy about the music playing everywhere for a month, or the lights on trees. Every now and then I catch some old ballet on TV. I think it's the same one from the Sixties every year. I get bored after around fifteen minutes, but it's cool to watch until then.

This year, Borders has been dropping a lot of coupons on me. I used one when I bought the manga from last post. In the lead up to the holiday, I've seen about three or four 30% off coupons go by. I ignore a lot of 20% off and 25% off, but a 30% off usually gets me to at least go to the store and look around.

Last year I got into the 1632 series by Eric Flint, et al. It's about a small town from modern West Virginia that gets thrown back into the middle of the Thirty Years' War. The first one was ok. It's up at the publisher's website to read for free, so that's what I did. It's not great. Later on Flint admitted he wasn't writing alternate history. He was writing Americana. That's what grated on me. I'm just not that patriotic and I've lived among small town people long enough to know he's being extremely generous in portraying them. I guess he's from a small town and had exactly the opposite experience from me. I kept pretty isolated from everyone else growing up, but you can tell a lot if you're the local freak just from the times you do have to go out. I liked the alternate history as far as it went, but the Norman Rockwell stuff wasn't good. Neither were the two romances he managed to shoehorn in. But ok, he wrote sequels with co-authors that go into a real exploration of what 400 years more knowledge would do to Europe. That's neat. I kept reading for three more novels and two anthologies. Some of it was really good, but he fell into a hard formula where every novel uses some kind of romance as a major plot element. That's a little much for me.

I think the sameness is a factor too. Even the town outcasts, the kids raised on the hippie commune by the pot-grower, the kids that play Dungeons & Dragons, everyone in this town wants to be exactly the same. Ok, I get that people with similar backgrounds are going to have similar ways of approaching life. That's culture. But the story of someone who's a little bit out of mainstream finding a way to fit perfectly into the mainstream happens again and again. The token Jewish male in town hated hunting and never shot at an animal, but he bought a gun and went out with the guys every year. For what? Just so he could be one of the guys. Um, ok. I guess I read that kind of stuff as saying that being different is only ok as long as you are willing to hide it and be a clone as far as everyone else cares.

So I read 1632. I read the sequel, 1633. It's got a big love letter to the American Navy, and sets out to redeem a jerk from the first book. A really racist, bullying jerk that did his best to get the Americans to set themselves up as a ruling class over a bunch of German refugees, and he was willing to play a little dirty to do it. He didn't succeed, but he came off as a pretty solid villain. Even his son hated him. He's still exactly the same guy, but I guess when you lock someone away with him for a while they turn into big admirers just because. They even appreciate how his bullying built character. That's just sick.

1634: The Gallileo Affair, is almost a political thriller. The plot diverges completely from the bullying Navy guy and moves down to Italy. Events there would overlap in time with what happened up in North Germany. Except it's about the pot-grower's kids. They were really cool in a short story from one of the anthologies but here, they're Extreme Typical and they fall in with a bunch of hapless Venetian revolutionaries who decide to rescue Gallileo from prison and are being used by a Huguenot working for Richelieu. He's trying to use them to assassinate the Pope and pin it on the Americans. Along the way, we get a Catholic priest lecturing us about how Galileo kind of had it coming because he was rude to the Pope.

That's it. I was done. The alternate history was still there, but I didn't need to read about some hormonal teenager who fell in "love" on first sight with a big-breasted Italian girl and does dumb stuff to impress her. Time passed and I did still wonder what happened. Not about the romances, the interesting stuff. There's another sequel. 1634: The Baltic War. I looked at it a few times, but knew I didn't want to pay full hardcover price, and the cover flap mentioned the romance right off. Oh boy.

So I end up back in the bookstore today. It's 30% off. That makes the book $20. I'm still kind of curious and I've passed it over several times. But it's still on my mind. I want to know what happens with the Dutch Revolt (not looking so good last time) and if things turn around (which was foreshadowed, but not certain). I've got the book now. I mean to read it eventually.

Before Death Note took over my reading life for a while, I was reading 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus. It's a neat exploration about what we now know, but hasn't really made it into the textbooks because I guess that would make kids in high school too sympathetic for the Indians. It screws things up if they had cities and farms instead of just being clueless. School sucks because stuff like that, and whatever the local politicians want, ends up deciding things. I guess colleges (not the one my cousin went to...that place is scary) are a lot better about that. I want to finish it but I might let it wait and read some more fiction before going back. I usually like fiction more than non-fiction. It used to drive Mom nuts.

I had to go out and get some foot stuff today. My shoes are old and I broke a big crack in the sole of one last spring. I don't walk when it's raining out, so I didn't really worry a lot. The shoe still worked. But now there's snow everywhere and I get water inside my shoe and soaked into my socks just going between the house and the garage. Shoveling isn't fun either. But I was stupid and didn't dry my feet out right after I got in, so now the side of my big toe is all peeled and cracked with athlete's foot. Disgusting. I'm not even athletic. At all. I hate exercising. I guess I kind of get how it could be fun, but I'm not that kind of person.

These post titles aren't very accurate, I guess. I pick them out for what I plan on writing about, then I end up writing about something else towards the end. Dad used to make me do pre-writing stuff to stop that. Nobody's getting graded on this, though. Contents may shift in shipping. Game experience may change during play.