Suramya's Blog : Welcome to my crazy life…

Recently I ordered my first set of books (after almost 2 1/2 – 3 years) online from Flipkart.com. I used to order a lot of books online but then stopped because shipping to India is very expensive on most Online book stores. e.g. Amazon charges about $5 per book and it doesn’t seem to matter how many books you order you still have to pay $5 per book. Though a friend told me that if you order about 10-15 books then the price of shipping does go down. *shrug*

FlipKart is a Bangalore based company that allows you to order international editions of books at a reasonable price and ships it to anywhere in India. So I ordered my first set of 4 books. The ordering was painless and pretty quick, though the site search engine does leave a lot to be desired. It seems like it can only do an OR search so its hard to locate books with common words in the title. Other than that the site is pretty easy to use.

Today at 11 am I got an email that 3 out of the 4 books I ordered have been shipped to me and the 4th one was being processed. At 1:10 pm I had the books in hand. I was amazed. Plus the books are in great condition and arrived safely.

The books ordered internationally (i.e. books that are not available for sale in India) take about 14-21 days to ship, but mine arrived 18 days. Once I get the last book I will be ordering my next set of books. 🙂

I am pretty happy that I found this store, though my bank balance is not going to be that happy with me. 😉

If you want to buy books that are not available for sale in India, check out their site.

– Suramya

Over at Facebook Tarini asked people to list 15 books that affected you the most and that will always stick with you. I don’t have a lot of books that affect me (probably because I mostly read fiction) so I have modified the requirements to show top 15 books that I liked and will always remember:

1. 1984 by George Orwell: One of the most popular and lasting books about the issues with a Big Brother society

2. Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury: Amazing book about a future where critical thought through reading is outlawed and all books are burned on sight.

3. Jungle Adventures: This was the first novel I read back when I was in 4th.

4. Bobbsey Twins by Laura Lee Hope: The first mystery novel I read. (This was the second novel I read)

5. Earth Invaded by Nathan Elliott: Pretty cool book about alien invaders that can only be hurt by physical weapons (bullets/arrows etc) when such weapons are no longer in use.

6. Battlefield Earth by L. Ron Hubbard: An awesome book where humans are an endangered species on Earth

7. A Princess of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs: One of the first books I read as an ebook

8. Little Brother by Cory Doctorow: Great novel about how several teenagers defend themselves against what they see as the Department of Homeland Security’s attacks on the Bill of Rights.

9. Jurassic Park By Michael Crichton: Do I even need to say more?

10. Lost World By Michael Crichton: Do I even need to say more?

11. Invasion by Robin Cook: Pretty chilling story about an Alien invasion that transmutates people

12. All books by David Weber: One of the best military Science Fiction authors of all times

13. All books by Mercedes Lackey: One of the best Fantasy authors of all times.

14. All Dr Who Books: My all time favorite TV show and books. Terrance Dicks used to be my Favorite author

15. All books by David Drake: Another great Science Fiction and Fantasy writer.

This list above is no way complete. There are probably a hundred more books that I really like but these are the ones I could think of right the top of my head.

– Suramya

Just finished reading ‘Star Flight’ which is an Omnibus edition containing ‘The Stars are Ours’ and ‘Star Born’ both written by Andre Norton in the 50’s. Baen released the omnibus as an ebook this month so I grabbed a copy and I liked it. The plot of the book is not very complicated but is interesting. In the first book, scientific thinking has been banned on earth (by the Pax) after an attack that destroyed most of the life on earth which was blamed on the Scientists. Now its death to be a thinker and any scientific knowledge is now taboo. But a handful of scientists are holding out and are secretly building a spaceship that would allow them to travel intergalactically under while the humans hibernate.

The person who developed the cold sleep is killed during a raid and only his brother knew the formula that he had developed. The book basically follows him and his niece as they try to join up with the scientists and then prepare the ship for flight. They make it to a planet that they call Astra after a few centuries of flight and settle happily over there.

In the second book, Centuries after the desperate flight from Earth, Pax has been overthrown on earth and humanity again reaches for the stars. A spaceship reaches the planet Astra, not knowing that the planet already has a colony established centuries ago by the fugitive humans from Earth . . . and that the apparently friendly natives of the planet are actually malevolent invaders from elsewhere, who are plotting to eliminate all humans from Astra, both the recent arrivals and the star born colonists.

I liked the first book better than the second one. A point which really bugged me was that when the colonists landed on Astra they didn’t face any major problems. All the food was edible, there were no surprises and everything was like it seemed. the only things that were different in the new planet were the colors and a couple of the plant life. The colonists had no trouble eating the native food and they pretty much faced no hardships. After reading books that portray landings on alien planets more realistically (At least to me) I thought that these guys had it really easy. The second one was better in this regard with the new guys getting pulled into an ongoing war without realizing that they were helping the wrong people.

Another issue I had with the book was all the spelling/proofing errors in the book. I have been proofing a lot of documents over the last few weeks so it really bugged me to find errors in the book. I guess they didn’t proof read it well enough when it was initially published.

In all the book was a good read. It didn’t require a lot of brain-power to follow the plot lines etc, good for light reading. When I want to do heavy reading I will read my programming text-books or Lord of the Rings (Which always puts me to sleep).

Now reading ‘Wolf Who Rules’ by Wen Spencer. Had read the eARC (electronic Advance Reader Copy) earlier and finally got my hands on the actual released version. There are not that many changes in the book (at least that I found so far) compared to the final released version.

This is all for now. Will post more later.

– Suramya

So many books… So little time…

As you know I love reading and read a lot of books. So I thought that I should share my experiences with you regarding the books I have read and liked or disliked… I am starting a somewhat regular feature where I talk about some of the books that I have read recently with commentary/thoughts. I will try not to make any spoilers but no guaranties. 🙂

First off in the series are the Enchanted Forest books by Patricia Wrede. (because I just finished re-reading it). This series is a set of four novels out of which I loved the first three. The last one wasn’t up to her usual standards but is worth a read just to gain closer. Each of the novels focuses on a different character in the story and while all of them do interact the personalities of each of the characters make the books unique.

The first book is called “Dealing with Dragons” and focuses on Princess Cimorene. Princess Cimorene is not your usual princess, she finds most of the stuff ‘appropriate’ for princesses too boring and is interested more in learning about magic, politics and sword-fighting than learning embroidery or how loud its permissible to scream when being kidnapped by giants.

When her parents are completely tired of her, they decide to get her married so that she is someone else’s problem. Unfortunately she doesn’t like the guy they want her to get married to so she decides to run away and become a dragon’s princesses. So she sets off with her best crown and a set of 5 clean handkerchief’s to find a dragon. She does find a group of dragons and convinces one of them to keep her as their princess. Now that she has been ‘kidnapped’ by a dragon, heroes and knights keep coming to rescue her and she has to run them off with a lot of insults and threats. The knights think she is crazy and the dragons find her amusing. Then a group of wizards start meddling in the dragons affairs so she decides to set things right with some help from a witch, a stone prince and a couple of princesses from other dragons.

The book is extremely funny and best of all its a light read. If you are tired and don’t really want to concentrate on a book to keep track of plot lines and characters then this book fits the bill.

The second book “Searching for Dragons”, sort of picks up where the first one ends but focuses on Mendanbar who is the king of the enchanted forest instead. He is a twenty something man who thinks princesses are silly things with nothing between their ears but air. But then he runs into Cimorene when he goes to meet the dragons about a wizard problem and has to change his mind. They both decide to go look for Kazul (her dragon) who has gone missing. On the way they meet giants, ride a flying carpet, meet a few interesting people and melt some wizards.

The third book “Calling On Dragons” focuses on Morwen the witch who is a minor character in the first book and a major one in the second. In this book the wizards are back and are causing trouble again and the first indication Morwen has of all this is a 7 feet high rabbit named killer who turns up in her backyard. Over the course of the book the rabbit turns into a donkey and grows wings because he just couldn’t stop himself of taking a bite of anything that looked tasty no matter how many times others told him not to. The book is somewhat slower than the first two but is still fun.

In the end of the book there’s a stalemate and that leads into the last book of the series called “Talking To Dragons”. Can’t tell you much about this book without spoiling it. The books reads completely different than the other three and if I didn’t know better I would say that it was written by a different writer. Didn’t like it as much as the others.

Try it out. You just might like it.

– Suramya

This is an age old question, with some of the copy right owners/groups suing Google for the alleged copyright infringement. The issue took a funnier (In a silly sort of way) turn recently where a couple of Book publishers decided to give ‘google a taste of its own medicine‘ .

Any ways thats not the topic for this discussion. Though while I like the prank I don’t agree with the concept. Stealing laptops is not the same as scanning books.

As most of the readers of this blog already know, I love reading and read books constantly. I also buy a lot of books because I want to be one of the first to read them. So what is my take on eBooks? are they good for sales or not? I think they are. I will use my own example as a case study. David Weber and Mercedes Lackey are a couple of my favorite authors and I have bought pretty much every books that the two of them have written so far. (And thats a lot of books). And you know what, I would have never even found the authors if Baen Free Library hadn’t made a couple of their books available for free. I found them while I was searching for good Sci-Fi books to read and I liked their writing style so the next time I was in a book store I looked for them and over the course of a year ended up buying most of their books. Now I wait for their new books to come out. So did Baen loose a sale because I downloaded a free book? I don’t think so, infact they gained a whole lot of sales because I ended up buying books that I wouldn’t have other wise.

eBooks are easy to search through so if I need to find a particular quote that I liked but can’t remember which of the books it was from I can use a search to find it. In a dead tree version (Hardcopy books) I can’t do that, I have to search through the whole book manually which takes a lot of time. So if a publisher allows their books to be scanned then anyone searching for a particular kind of book will have a higher chance of finding their books than they would if they hadn’t allowed the books to be scanned.

Another advantage of a eBook is that you can sell it anywhere in the world without having to worry about postage/shipping etc. I love Sci-Fi books but in India its hard to find Science Fiction books in most major books stores (Atleast the ones I have been to so far) the most they have for Science Fiction is the latest Robin Cook. So if I want to read the latest books I have to either wait to get back to the US or have someone ship me the books that I bought online. Or I can purchase the ebook that I can download instantly and read. So even if they are loosing a couple of thousand sales because they made the book available online they are opening up the market to a few million people that would buy the book if they had access to it and now thanks to the internet they do have access.

So I think its silly how the book industry is in an uproar about illegally scanned books and digital books. Make samples available for free, allow readers to search through it, and guess what? if the book is good, it will sell.

And the most important advantage of ebooks is this: its digital, so it won’t fade out or get destroyed in a fire. Its always going to be there for the future generations. If a particular book is the last remaining copy then almost no one can read it, because it will probably end up in a collection somewhere where it is really difficult to get access to it. Now on the other hand if the book is available digitally then it can be copied an unlimited times, so anyone can read the book without harming the original hardcopy which can remain safe in the collection.

Well this is all for now. Will post more later.

– Suramya