Book Review: Altered Carbon

Hi. My room is messy, I'm going OCD about my library job to the tune of 18.5 hours this week (but it's fun!), and I'm chicken about calling temp agencies in Seattle.

I'm stacked, backed-up, and I'm fifth dan,
And I ain't afraid of the Patchwork Man.

I just read Altered Carbon, which was a lot of fun, but I didn't quite have the focus to get everything out of it. It's cyberpunk noir, so the clues are everywhere, thick as flies, and the constant "resleeving" (body swap) made my head spin. This is partly because I've lost some of my ability to read for details over the years, but partly because it's just a damn disorienting book.

So, for those of you who like surfing in a high-data ocean of tech toys, excellently fun book. For those of you who got irritated at Lord of the Rings for unnecessary name proliferation, probably too low a signal-to-noise ratio. Also, if you have any opinion on that sort of thing, the author's vision of 25th century Catholics is zealot Luddites.

I made an observation in the last two days: There's a reason my public library's selection of science fiction is not as good as it could be, and it's our own fault. See next entry.

Public Service Observation

It's our own faults if there are not enough science fiction (or insert pet-genre-of-your-choice) books on the shelves of our local libraries.

I was weeding the stacks the other day, you see. (Twitch. Stacks. Can't get Altered Carbon out of my head, where stacks are personality-storage.) I was weeding for books more than five years old that had not been checked out more than three times in five years.

A lot of what I was weeding was science fiction. My library makes a good-faith effort to stock a variety of SF and Fantasy, which people proceed to not check out. I think this is because we're all book collectors. We have our own personal libraries.

There's a problem with this. I'm a cheapskate. I want to check out a book at least once and preview it before shelling out for it, and frankly, I revisit books infrequently enough that the only books I should sensibly keep on my shelf are the ones that it's very unlikely the library will have, or books that I want to access at least once every six months. (Coincidentally, these are usually the same books.)

But why the hell do I still have David Eddings on my shelf? The library will keep that in stock for a long, long time. Why don't I surf the library for titles I haven't read, instead of surfing Amazon?

Obviously, there are reasons for larger private collections, compulsion not the least of those reasons. I'm just thinking about it more lately. So now I'm trying to check out more books, change my surfing habits, and request a good book be added to the library's collection instead of adding it to my own.

In conclusion, I'm a big crazy socialist freak and I'm high on libraries. But it was just something I was thinking about.