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Voluminous, from developer Wooji Juice, is an interesting piece of software recently released for Mac OS 10.5. It has great things to say for itself:

The Internet is full of free books. But who has time to search for them? Let Voluminous bring the books to you. It finds, downloads and organises a vast library.

As best I can tell, this “vast library” is actually just Project Gutenberg (which is, admittedly, vast). In my opinion, this is a bit dishonest on Wooji Juice’s part (Project Gutenberg already has an easy search function, so the implication that Voluminous is doing loads of work the average citizen couldn’t by scouring a number of sources on the internet for books and consolidating them is suspect). It’s possible Voluminous is accessing more than just Project Gutenberg, but I haven’t seen any evidence of this; and that the help files and website don’t even mention Project Gutenberg smacks of dishonesty to me. I’d be a lot more impressed if the developers were upfront about what Voluminous is doing behind the scenes and played to its strengths: being more user-friendly and (this is a big one) not hideous. As it is, all the verbiage about saving you time is just marketing-speak shooting to take advantage of people who aren’t aware of the amazing resource that Project Gutenberg’s website represents. If all Voluminous is doing is downloading and parsing the GUTINDEX, shame on Wooji Juice.

Since the website was what I saw first, my first impression of the software was negative, but I downloaded it anyway for a closer look. I found that Wooji Juice may love the borderline marketing-speak, but they’ve still done some things extremely well:

Formatting the books. Project Gutenberg is a great project, but the actual book files are nothing you want to be reading because they are plain text and hideous. Voluminous’s greatest strength is that it makes the texts much more attractive. Sure, they aren’t like having a real book in your hands, but at least you don’t feel like clawing your eyes out while you try to read them. I would never consider downloading a book from Project Gutenberg to read (although I’ve used them for other things), but Voluminous helps make Gutenberg texts visually appealing and easier to read.

Attractive interface for searching and browsing. Voluminous has a great browsing interface. I love that while browsing, category headings (or authors, or whatever happens to be there) stick to the top of the screen, making it easy to keep track of what you’re looking at. Browsing by topic and the various searching capabilities are also very pleasant. This is a clear selling point of the software to my mind, because browsing and searching Project Gutenberg is not attractively designed at all (though entirely functional).

So at this point, despite the marketing-speak, Voluminous was looking pretty useful. Unfortunately, I then stumbled onto the program’s cons:

Text zoom is tied to window size. What the hell? I had thought there was no text zoom at all (bad enough), but then I tried to size the window down to get a more humane line length. I grabbed the resize dongle in the lower right corner, but the window wouldn’t move. Confused and alarmed, I dragged outwards, and as the window resized, the text zoomed in. This is a usability nightmare:

• Not only is it impossible to control line length (which is an important part of making it easy to scan along the lines), but users who need or want a larger font will have to have a correspondingly larger window/monitor.
• Two things that have no relationship to one another (the size of the window, and the size of the font) are now inextricably linked. Did I resize the window down because I wanted a smaller font? No, I resized it because I wanted to be able to cross-reference the book with a document next to it (or for any number of other reasons).
• Standard Mac UI conventions are completely ignored. For me, the behavior of windows is sacred ground. I take for granted that I can close, minimize, and resize any window (with occasional minimum restraints on window size). Not being allowed to do so in Voluminous is inordinately frustrating, even if figuring out what is going on is easy. Damn it, I want a shorter line length!

The user has no control over what font is used. Although there are some good fonts in the nine provided themes, the user is given no way to select their own font (or, for that matter, design their own themes that I’m aware of). I ask you: what’s the point in reformatting plain text so nicely if you can’t modify even the font? Being unable to modify line height and so forth just adds insult to injury.

Full screen, of course, is also completely non-configurable and suffers from the same weaknesses as the main window. I was hoping for either a single column in the middle of the screen or, even better, multiple columns with horizontal scrolling a la Tofu.

In the end Voluminous is a great idea marred by the overall inability to configure the program in the one area where it matters (the display of text on screen). Not to mention an overabundance of marketing-speak that shifts focus away from its strengths and towards trivial aspects of the program that are easily available for free. I’ll definitely be keeping an eye on Voluminous, since I love the idea of a beautiful interface for Project Gutenberg (which might actually encourage me to make use of the resource), but at the moment I don’t think it’s really worth the £15/$30.

I just finished the best pair of fantasy books that I have read since I polished off Jonathan Stroud’s Bartimeus Trilogy or Megan Whalen Turner’s The King of Attolia. They were called Dragon Bones and Dragon Blood by Patricia Briggs, and I am astonished that a fantasy author of this caliber has escaped my notice for so long.

Fencing, fighting, torture, revenge, giants, monsters, chases, escapes, true love, miracles: from the classic list, the two books of the “Hurog duology” score an astonishing 10/10 (well, maybe 9/10; it isn’t fencing so much as swordplay). Add to that strong women characters (often sorely lacking in this Tolkien-inspired world), homosexual/bisexual relationships that are portrayed with the same depth of feeling as heterosexual relationships (although admittedly vilified slightly by the “young boys” predatory stereotype), and a world of realistic battles and fantastic heroics living side by side and you’ve got a winning formula if ever I’ve met one. I strongly recommend both Dragon Bones and Dragon Blood, and will be eagerly seeking out Patricia Briggs’ other novels.

Dragon Bones introduces us to a world of dragons long-dead, magic waning, and a problematic feudal system. After reading the blurb online and on the back cover, the story sounded pretty borderline, but Briggs successfully takes a plot that in other hands might have come across forced and hackneyed and deftly weaves it into a fascinating tale filled with memorably enjoyable characters. For whatever reason, I tend to enjoy children’s and young adult fantasy the most, and Dragon Bones successfully melds the pace and interest of young adult fantasy with some slightly more adult themes for an overall experience that should be appealing across a broad age span.

Dragon Blood is a bit darker than Dragon Bones (featuring, as it does, torture and political corruption), but every bit as good and leads the story in a more mature direction (appropriate, considering the aging of the characters). I found Dragon Bones more fun, while Dragon Blood was more gripping.

A big reason I enjoyed Dragon Bones and Blood is because Briggs successfully melds fantasy standbys in theme, plot, and setting with realistic-feeling world dynamics and characters. The heroics and magic are certainly larger than life, but they take place within the context of a world where violence is brutal and actions have consequences. It’s always a pleasant surprise for me to find an author who can write a complex fantasy world that utilizes fantasy tropes even as it moves beyond them, and Briggs does a good job of this.

Perhaps, though, the highest praise I can offer is this: when I laid down Dragon Blood, grinning like an idiot because I enjoyed it so much, the thought I came away with was “I want to write like this.”

Not only that, but she has a decent website, which is a pleasant change from some of my other favorite authors.

Judging by number of books owned, C.J. Cherryh is my favorite science fiction author. Although I had an early love affair with Orson Scott Card, he’s not consistent. Cherryh’s novels are consistently excellent and no one can build an alien culture the way she can.

I’ve recently been reading some of Cherryh’s older books, and as a result picked up Alliance Space which contains the novels Merchanter’s Luck and Forty Thousand in Gehenna.

Merchanter’s Luck is reason enough to buy the book. It’s a classic Cherryh novel (tense action from a close third person perspective in space), and has a nice dash of romance which isn’t something I usually expect from Cherryh. I highly recommend it.

Forty Thousand in Gehenna is unlike any other book that I’ve read. It takes place over 200 years, and in some ways almost feels like an exercise in world building and backstory rather than a traditional novel. It’s fascinating, but is unlikely to appeal to everyone (I’m not sure if I’ll reread it any time in the near future, either). It’s a shame that Cherryh hasn’t published anything using the unique culture that she builds in Gehenna; the two-page epilogue cried out for a sequel.

In any case, Alliance Space is an interesting collection, and certainly worth a read if you enjoy Cherryh (if you’ve never experienced Cherryh before then the Foreigner series might be a better place to start).

The Sight by David Clement-Davies is a bit of a let-down. I had picked it up at the same time I bought Fire Bringer, and while the plot and idea behind The Sight are interesting (who doesn’t like prescient wolves?), the quality of writing hasn’t improved any since Fire Bringer. Clement-Davies has a really bad habit of using exposition to describe every stupid thing in the book. If a wolf mentions a mystical city, then Clement-Davies instantly goes off into a tangent about how actually the Romans built it back in blah de blah de blah, which pretty much kills the momentum of the story. I like it when authors research their topics, but not when they beat me over the head with their findings.

Add to that the fact that he constantly tells about emotion rather than showing it, and you’ve got a book that feels much longer than it should. I was hoping that these tendencies in Fire Bringer were part of the first book syndrome, but I’m beginning to think that Clement-Davies is simply a mediocre writer. To add insult to injury, every dang myth in the book is a rip-off of some human myth, religion, or story (Little Red Riding-Hood as one of the earliest wolf stories? Shoot me now), making the whole wolf culture feel forced.

If you like anthropomorphic animal stories, then I recommend reading The Sight rather than Fire Bringer (evil psychic wolves are a bit more believable than fascist Hitler deer), but overall Clement-Davies’ work has left me feeling more frustrated than anything else. His creative approach to animal stories has a lot of potential that isn’t quite realized thanks to the quality of the storytelling.

The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie is one of those beautiful books that captures a small but representative sliver of life. I’m always in awe of books that portray life in all its horrific, capricious, hilarious complexity. I tend to hyperbolize in my writing; Sherman Alexie has managed to mingle a humorous love of life with mind-numbing tragedy in a way that makes me painfully envious.

I highly recommend The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. It’s an excellent read, and the comics interwoven with the text are hilarious.

I’ve been meaning to read Fire Bringer by David Clement-Davies for years but kept forgetting to buy it. I finally stumbled across it in Barnes and Noble the other day, though, and gave it a read.

It was a mixed bag. Fire Bringer was a fun read, but it didn’t tread any new ground. It’s very similar to Watership Down, both in anthropomorphic animals and content (deer in unholy contracts with humans, etc.), with a little Nazi fascism mixed in for good measure. A decent book, but one that I probably won’t reread in the near future.

I broke my own rule and bought a book with the word “chronicles” on the cover. Normally, this means that I’m in for a mediocre book with a cliff-hanger ending. With The Shadow Thieves by Anne Ursu it meant I was in for an exciting romp through Greek mythology with an extremely satisfying plot.

I highly recommend The Shadow Thieves. There’s some points where the pacing is a bit slow, but Anne Ursu’s voice and style keep you interested. This is a very worthwhile, casual read.

Once upon a time, there was a boy named Ian who bought a book with “chronicles” on the cover and didn’t get burned…

HarperCollins has a web program called Browse Inside that allows you to browse books on your computer before buying them. Although most of the books in the program offer 20% of the book for your reading pleasure, HarperCollins is testing the effect on sales of offering full text versions. For the next month (March 2008) you can read Neil Gaiman’s American Gods for free, along with a number of other titles that don’t excite me as much.

If you’ve never read American Gods, this is a fantastic opportunity. It’s a wonderful book, and the Browse Inside application is pretty slick. For iPhone users, there is also a version of Browse Inside specially formatted for your phone.

Go. Read. Enjoy.

I know, I know, I’m a bit behind on the times, but I finally got around to reading Abarat and Abarat: Days of Magic, Nights of War by Clive Barker.

Abarat is extremely vivid, but not particularly cohesive. It’s a good read, but it reads like Clive Barker had a bunch of disparate ideas that were really cool and then had to find a plot to somehow connect them all. Although most of the characters have fascinating descriptions, they by and large don’t have much depth.

Still, well worth reading if you like fantasy, and particularly if you’re in the mood for some vividly imagined environments and creatures.

I’ve expressed my appreciation for Nightwatch already. Daywatch (its sequel) was pretty good, but a little inconsistent. Fortunately, Twilightwatch, the third in the series, is excellent. Not as good as Nightwatch, but it’s still well worth reading Daywatch to get to Twilightwatch.

I particularly love how Sergei Lukyanenko keeps redefining good vs. evil. It’s a great series.