Books to Prisoners

Books to Prisoners is a Seattle-based group that provides books for prisoners. You can donate books--they're always looking for dictionaries, books on auto repair, on legal self-help, on Spanish and American Sign Language instruction, and African-American fiction and non-fiction, as well as westerns and horror--but because their warehouses are full, they prefer money. One of the most requested books is Sun Tzu's The Art of War, and they also have an ongoing need for true crime books.

This is an organization where a modest gift can do a LOT. Just twenty-five dollars sends a package of books to seven prisoners. One hundred dollars covers the postage for an entire day's worth of requests. (This year, Books to Prisoners received 13,000 requests for books.) Check this organization out and consider donating.

The Goblin Crown by Robert Hewitt Wolfe, a review

Like Guy Gavriel Kay’s FIONAVAR TAPESTRY and Suzanne Collins’ wonderful UNDERLAND CHRONICLES or C.S. Lewis’ CHRONICLES OF NARNIA, Robert Hewitt Wolfe’s THE GOBLIN CROWN, is a story of ordinary people suddenly thrust into an extraordinary, magical world. We know up front that this world is a dangerous place and that the stakes—whatever they are—will be real and that actions will have consequences for Billy, Lexi, and Kurt, as well as all they meet.

Billy, our hero, is an outsider, a kid who has NEVER felt he fit in anywhere and who certainly doesn’t expect that his high school experience is going to be any different. Billy is, a familiar enough character, but Wolfe nails him, bringing him to vivid life on the page. But pretty Filipina Lexi—who really isn’t very good at minding her own business—and bullying jock Kurt are also three-dimensional and believable people. These characters are grounded—no, rooted—in reality and we believe they act in a way that has context. (There’s a lovely, magical moment when Billy meets all the freckle-faced, redheaded men who came before him and takes courage from the encounter.

Weapons of Math Destruction

One of the most stunning books I read in a college political science class was Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics by Michael Wheeler. Published in 1976--forty years ago!!!--it is about the manipulation of public opinion in America. It was scary stuff then and now, it feels eerily prescient.
The end-of-the-year "Best Books" lists are starting to come out and one that I'm seeing a lot is Cathy O'Neil's Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatans Democracy.

Here's the sales pitch:

A former Wall Street quant sounds an alarm on the mathematical models that pervade modern life — and threaten to rip apart our social fabric

We live in the age of the algorithm. Increasingly, the decisions that affect our lives—where we go to school, whether we get a car loan, how much we pay for health insurance—are being made not by humans, but by mathematical models. In theory, this should lead to greater fairness: Everyone is judged according to the same rules, and bias is eliminated.

Become a patron of the arts!

If you're a reader of fantasy and science fiction, then you know the work of Katharine Kerr. (Daggerspell was my gateway book, and I've been reading her fantastical stories set in the fictional realm of Deverry ever since.) If you're a fan of hers you may know that she and her family have been emotionally and financially devastated by her husband's early-onset Alzheimer's.

She's now reaching out to fans via Patreon, offering free fiction and other goodies in return for patronage. (Levels begin as low as $3 a month and come on...you spend more than that on a latte per day.)

Here's her Patreon page. Here's a link to her website. Here's a link to her Zazzle shop where you can pick up all kinds of swag marked with the Silver Dagger logo designed by Kerr's husband, Howard. Thanks to Patreon you don't have to be a Borgia or a Medici to be a patron to a creator. And who better than someone who's been entertaining you since 1993?

Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates

The results of this year's election--now one month old--pulled the scab off the still-festering wound of race relations in America. Read this book for a perspective. Here's what Wikipedia has to say about Between the World and Me:

It is written as a letter to the author's teenaged son about the feelings, symbolism, and realities associated with being black in the United States. Coates recapitulates the American history and explains to his son the "racist violence that has been woven into American culture." Coates draws from an abridged, autobiographical account of his youth in Baltimore, detailing the ways in which institutions like the school, the police, and even "the streets" discipline, endanger, and threaten to disembody black men and women. The work takes inspiration from James Baldwin's 1963 The Fire Next Time. Unlike Baldwin, Coates sees white supremacy as an indestructible force, one that black Americans will never evade or erase, but will always struggle against.

Joe Kenda Mug

I don't need any more mugs.
No one I know needs any more mugs. Between the one you got free when you opened an account at that new bank and the one you got from a coworker on your last birthday, and the cute one you bought online one night when you were cruising Etsy instead of sleeping--you're covered on the mug situation. And yet...this one calls me. Probably because I can hear Joe Kenda's voice in my head when I look at the words. And possibly because I know a couple of people who have crazy boyfriends--not in the homicidal kind of cray-cray way, but guys whose eccentricities make them less than endearing. (Note:  Crazy does not equal sexy. Just sayin'.)
If you have a Homicide Hunter fan on your Christmas list and they somehow don't have enough mugs in their kitchen, consider this one.

Heartblaze 3 Vampire Eternal by Shay Roberts ... a review

Heartblaze 3: Vampire Eternal by Shay Roberts

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


This paranormal thriller/romance series continues to impress with the author's deft intertwining of history and fantasy. With every book, his paranormal universe has expanded, and this--the final book in "Emma's Saga"--goes out with a bang. Great female characters are a bonus too--powerful women rule every corner of the Heartblaze paranormal universe, and if that was the ONLY thing Roberts did right, it would be worth reading the books just for that reason. But the author is a story teller with a capital S, and the elements of the plot--some of them seeded as early as the first book--mesh like jeweled clockwork. Every word has a purpose, every page has a surprise, every chapter moves the story forward. This series has been a pure pleasure to read, and it's good to know there will be other books coming set in this world.



View all my reviews