Why I am doing this
I like to read, but cannot afford to constantly buy new books. I also like to read eBooks due to the convenience of compact eReaders and reader applications available for mobile. The ebook libraries like openlibrary https://openlibrary.org/ are okay but selection of contemporary material is often limited. I therefore gravitate towards free eBooks that are old and in the public domain or cheap ebooks by independent authors. I have had a hard time finding good books this way though. One day, thinking about the movie Andre Norton's Time Trader's could make, and how Gavin Smith's trillogy beginning with The Age of Scorpio could never be made into movies, I realized I had actually read a lot of really good books doing this. I decided to catalog those experiences in a blog and this was born.Format of the blog
I like sci-fi, adventure and sometimes fantasy stories but I might get into detective stories, comedy or drama as well from time to time. I may also have friends, who read a lot, also contribute. You may also notice that all of the books in this blog have positive reviews. I will not review books I did not like because I do not want to spend any more time thinking about these time wasters and in some cases I am trying desperately to expel memories of bad stories from my brain to make room for useful stuff. So only good or great books will appear. I will add tags "good" and "great" to each post depending on what I thought of the book. I will also try to identify books that are short stories with a tag "short" and a mention in the first paragraph of the review. The short stories at Gutenberg are super frustrating for me actually. It is difficult to tell when looking at the long lists at Gutenberg, if a Wikipedia page does not exist for the author in question, if a work is a short or not. We have to click on each book and try to determine the length based on the file size of the ebooks available. Many old sci-fi, fantasy and adventure books available came from the pulp magazines and are therefore short stories, but Gutenberg do not distinguish this in any way. For instance, if I just grab books from an Author at random, I bet most will be shorts. Here is one I just grabbed that I do not know anything about:Gallun, Raymond Zinke
- Asteroid of Fear (English)
- Big Pill (English)
- Comet's Burial (English)
- The Eternal Wall (English)
- People Minus X (English)
- The Planet Strappers (English)
- The Revolt of the Star Men (English)
- Stamped Caution (English)
Looking at the pages for each story here I find these are all from old time pulp magazines. Also to my horror, the first one in this list is from the Planet Stories magazine with "The Black Amazon of Mars", by Leigh Brackett, on the cover. I unfortunately read The Black Amazon of Mars on this journey and it was HORRIBLE!!!! I want those hours of my life back now please!!! Why did I have to see that cover again!!!! Sorry.
About the reviews
When going for totally free, we are faced with books from the past that have had their copyright expire and are in the public domain", and available at places like Gutenberg http://www.gutenberg.org and The Internet Archive https://archive.org/details/internetarchivebooks?and[]=subject%3A%22Fiction%22 . While works in some genres might hold up over time, old timey sci-fi stories, and sometimes fantasy stories as well, tend to feel dated more than not. If they try to explain any science or technology, based on what was known at the time, it often does not sound right today. The adventure and fantasy stories suffer from the confident, handsome, too perfect heros and chauvinistic tendencies towards women, that prevailed at the time. I have found more books that fail, for me, for the reasons mentioned above than not and looking in the Science Fiction bookshelf at Gutenberg http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Science_Fiction_%28Bookshelf%29?level=1 for a new book really stresses me out. I will judge these types of books based on these criteria. The books must hold up and I will mention how well they achieve this in the reviews.My second source for affordable reading material is new and independent authors. These are often self-published and they sell their works directly at Amazon or their own website for very reasonable prices, usually between $.99 and $6.99. However, these can often be not very good as the authors are either too new and the works suffer from poor writing or they are seasoned authors but suffer due to a lack of good reviewers and editors. However, since these types of books are usually very reasonably priced they are often worth taking a chance on. I have read a lot of bad ones and wish I had saved my money however. For these, the reviews will be just about if the book is well written and interesting.
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