Reading Meme - Books on Best Seller List the Week of Your Birth

First go HERE -- The Sad But Inevitable Trend Toward Forgotten Sci-Fi.

The go to find the books that were listed on the NY Times Best-Seller List for the Week of Your Birth. (ganked from conly and wendalh)

Next, list the books for the week of your birth, bold the one's you've read and italicize the ones that you've actually heard of.

Here's mine:
( Read more... )

Needless to say? I only read one (can't remember it) and only recognize about three of them. Most? Never heard of.

It's weirdly reassuring. Also interesting which ones are still available, in print, and we know about.

It would be nice to believe that a great book can survive entirely on its merits… but this is not the case. Even a printed book can be erased from history, thanks to any number of things that are in no way the fault of the author or the book. The author could die without a proper will, leaving their work in the hands of people actively hostile to their career. Publisher bankruptcies can lead to rights nightmares. When a series is spread across several publishers, some books might fall out of print. Personal tragedy could distract the author from maintaining their fan-base. Ill-conceived marketing schemes—marketing a Gothic fantasist as a horror writer just as the horror market collapses, again—could convince an entire continent’s worth of publishers that there was no more market for that author. And there are many more ways for things to go wrong.

We might not have a publishing industry at all if humans weren’t terrible at judging comparative risk.

[ETA: Apparently even if the books aren't available in the World Catalogue or the Brooklyn Public Library, they are in the LA Public Library...which, hmmm, LA is doing better with books than I thought?]

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1. And I'm still entertained by the youtube videos ripping apart Game of Thrones S8 as horrible and the worst ever. (It's not. There will be worse. And the internet fandom is wonky, but amusing. But there's a reason I never got that into the Game of Thrones fandom. Although I do miss some of the people on DW who were REALLY into it and had read the books and are long gone. I texted my brother, who basically stated he was never that invested and felt it was badly written and acted, and built on an absurd HBO logarithm to keep it going indefinitely, and all he really wanted to see was Ayra put on various faces and go on a killing spree. I told him he was wrong about HBO, it wasn't HBO who did that but George RR Martin, who had written this insane narrative structure where each and every character had their own point of view chapter. And how in each book he added characters. So by the time we reach book five, we have about a hundred point of view characters, a thousand characters to keep track of, and fifteen story threads...and none of them appear to be connected.
Reading it was like leap frogging from fantasy novel to fantasy novel, often as the last one ended on a cliff-hanger. Martin as I informed my brother is like a mad garderner who instead of pruning or tending his garden, just keeps planting and letting it do what it wants. So I wanted to see how the hell they'd turn that into a television series.)

What's most entertaining? The petition to remake it. LOL! Has anyone asked for that to be done before? Because that's new to me.

Apparently they got reamed for not using their powers for good, so they decided to Raise funds for Emilia Clark's Charity to aid brain damaged and stroke victims.

And they are apparently putting up a petition to get D+D fired from Star Wars Triology.

Sigh. We live in an age of absurd petitioning. Petitions don't work people. But it is hilarious. Remember the good old days when people just ranted on fan boards and sent mean letters? In 2002, in the Buffy fandom, people went crazy on the internet boards after a highly controversial episode. And the writers came forward to justify their actions and attempt to apologize. The fans declared that the writers betrayed them. It got pretty nasty for a bit there. But there were no petitions.

Honestly, you'd think there was nothing else out there for folks to watch? Or that this was the only lackluster ending. I didn't like the ending, but I didn't think it was that bad. I've seen worse. So have you. Come on.

2. Saw both Bumblebee and Jurassic World: The Fallen Kingdom on television this weekend. Don't recommend either. Jurassic World was slightly better, due to the acting and direction and production value. Bumblebee was disappointing -- it was written and directed by a female director/writer -- but she clearly wasn't given much money or support -- because it looked like a cheap straight to video movie, with a few scattered good bits here and there. Otherwise stiff acting, and bad dialogue. I was annoyed. The set-up was pretty cool -- an eighteen year old female mechanic and former high diver, discovers a beaten up volkswagon beetle, and tries to repair it -- only to find out it is in reality an alien robot warrior that can transform into a car.

It subverts a lot of gender film tropes -- the hero is a teenage girl, not a boy.
Her love interest is a geeky black boy, not a hunky white dude or nerdy white boy.
Her Mom has remarried an upstanding guy, and her kid brother is into karate. Her mom is played by Janeanne Garanfola. (sp?). And the girl by Hailee Steinfield. It should have been good. But the other casting was horrid. And I was annoyed.

I want good female action flicks, with woman allowed to be in the traditional male roles. Get with it Hollywood.

Jurassic World -- was slightly better in this respect, with Bryce Dallas Howard. But not great. That said, it was better written and had cool special effects. But overall the story was rather cheesy and unbelievable, with boilerplate bad guys.

Oh well. I tried Flea Bag again -- but the first episode keeps putting me to sleep for some reason.

Not a great television day. It's my own fault, I could have picked other fair.