At any rate, the first thing I read was Ninth Grade Slays by Backspacer Heather Brewer. You know when a new character comes into town and he's a vampire slayer named Joss that this book is right up my alley. A fast-paced fun read, and if you're even remotely into vampires you're going to love all of the little references to other vampire stories that sneak in.
I've been hearing that Scott Westerfield is the bomb for some time now, so I picked up all four books - Uglies, Pretties, Specials, Extras - at Christmas. I admit I approached them with a bit of trepidation. I had also heard that Philip Pullman was the bomb and while I appreciated his work on an analytical level, I never really emotionally engaged with it the way others (namely, my husband) did. I was afraid this would also be the case here, but considering I blew through all four books in a week (and the real testament: stayed on the treadmill past the three mile mark just so I could finish one more chapter) you could say these really clicked with me. A lot of cool ideas, and some of the things I was longing for him to explore deeper when reading the first book were just the things he got into in the later books. Highly recommend. (Also, I really wish I had a hoverboard).
The next one actually got me into a bit of trouble: Little Brother by Cory Doctorow, a story of hackers who run afoul of Homeland Security. If you're into sci-fi at all you've already heard this book talked to death (my assessment: they're right, it's brilliant). My trouble? Well, somewhere in the middle bit of the book the MC is talking about how he built his own laptop, and how it was tougher than building your own PC, which any rube can do. Now I've been using the same PC in my office since about 1997, and it was far from state-of-the-art then. Now it just barely lets me check e-mail and listen to music at the same time, and if I try to run my flashcard program on it I can actually hear it screaming (because in order to run the flashcard program I also have to run another program that lets me type in Devangari, and that poor little processor just can't take it). My brilliant idea: why don't I just buy a new processor and motherboard? I have tons of hard drive memory (which I installed myself), and I don't need a new DVD player or power supply since I swapped those out fairly recently. If I can add my own hard drives and swap out my own power supplies, how much harder could installing a motherboard be? And it would be so much cheaper than buying a new PC.
Yes, I really should have known better. The motherboard wouldn't physically fit in my chassis, so I had to buy a bigger one. Then I realized my video card wasn't compatible with the new motherboard either, so that was another chunk of change, and we were venturing out of the range of money I had set aside for computer purchases (and into the realm of eating more Ramen noodles). When I finally had all the pieces I needed put together and pushed the On button, the little light came on but nothing happened. So I had Quin take the thing to work and have his IT guy take a look at it.
(I'm told that conversation went something like this: "My wife built this PC but she can't get it to turn on."
"Your wife built a PC? Is she a dork?"
"Totally. You'd like her.")
But he couldn't see anything wrong so in the end we had to take it to the Geek Squad and pay to have it fixed. What did they do? I have no idea. They were very recalcitrant when I attempted to find out what I had done wrong. I felt like Indiana Jones at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark when he realized the only answer he was going to get was "Top men." No matter what I asked, they would only admit to "there were multiple issues with the way the processor was installed". And installing the processor seemed like the easy part.
I got the PC back with lots of little pieces busted off my new chassis, and it would power up but still didn't actually boot up. My storage hard drive had been fried and for some reason which makes no sense at all to me they had switched the setting on my master drive to slave. I spent a few days tearing my hair out over BIOS screens and in the end had to re-partition the hard drive and re-install Windows (losing everything, but that was backed up before hand because, evidence to the contrary, I'm not a total idiot). And you can add the cost of a new hard drive for storage to the bill.
So I had no PC in my office for a month and spent twice as much as I had expected, but it was still cheaper than buying new and I have a wicked fast PC now than can do more things at once than I'd ever need it to do.
The ironic bit is that Little Brother set me off on this path of aspiring to techy-hood. Somewhere around the second or third purchase of PC equipment from Amazon.com I tripped up my check card's security system. In the book, you're a terrorist until you prove you're not. In my world, I was a thief until I proved I wasn't. I got a very humiliating phone call in which I had to verify all the purchases I'd been making (and resist the urge to explain them, and it was a powerful urge. "And the charge for 18.95 to the Science Fiction Book Club?" "Well, the new Lois McMaster Bujold just came out... I mean, yes, that was me."). The irony was all the suspicious purchases were things I ordered online and shipped to my house. Not that the check card people knew that, but still. If someone steals your credit card but doesn't spend more than you have and ships it all to your house, that's a considerate thief.
So anyway, I wrapped up the month with a little non-YA, and something I've read about half of before: Notes from The Underground, The Double, and Other Stories (White Nights, The Meek One, The Dream of a Ridiculous Man (Dostoevsky). The movie Saawariya is a retelling of White Nights, which I first read in college and after seeing the movie in theaters wanted to read again, only to discover I didn't have the book anymore. Which is why I don't loan out books; I have no idea who walked off with that one. So I picked up a new copy as part of my Christmas haul. But I think I'll reserve specific comments for next month. So far June has been nothing but Dostoevsky, so I'll just discuss them all at once.
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