Entropy reads free e-books

I never warmed up to the idea of e-books. I like bringing my books with me wherever I go (I'm not even consdering a Kindle, I bet I wouldn't be allowed to download anything with a Swedish credit card). Perhaps the greatest problem with e-books is the fact that a computer can offer me too many distractions. My MSN and IRC blinks furiously, my forums need to be checked, wonder if there are some new fun auktions up, has that guy with glasses updated with a new video... I think there is something more to it too, about how I read. I'm a very fast reader and I think I take in large chunks of text at once. If the format is different it doesn't work as well.

But since I like free stuff I have gathered a small collection of e-books along the years. Here I managed to read a few short ones.

Among the Living, Jordan Castillo Price

It starts with a really pointless sex scene within the first ten pages. I'm starting to realize what I have picked up here.

The story is that Victor is a Psycop, a member of the Paranormal Investigation team. A psychic is always paired up with a non-psychic and now when Victor's previous partner has retired he needs a new one. Victor's power is to talk with the dead, which can make murder investigations a lot easier. Not this time though, strange murders have occurred that leaves nothing left for Victor to ask questions.

The setting was a bit bland but the storyline about a weird murders wasn't bad. It was a short story, only 90 pages, and I thought the author managed to establish the characters quite well in that short space. The background on Victor's psychic training seemed interesting and I liked Lisa, the cop who had been hiding her psychic skills. I liked her much more than Jacob, who Victor got paired up with after Lisa's secret got out. I guess this is why I shouldn't read romance. I seldom manage to care for the designed love interest.

I think I would read more of this if it was out in mass market paperback or if any of the other stories were available for free as e-books.

Ember, Bettie Sharpe

In this fairy tale Prince Charming is blessed with being loved by all, which might be more like a curse.

Ember's mother died, her father remarried and she has two step-sisters. The stepmother and her daughters are former prostitutes who tricked Embers father they were fallen nobles. But Ember is no Cinderella, she is a witch who comes to deeply care for her new family.

When Ember hides in the kitchen with ash in her hair it's not because her stepmother forces her to, it's because she doesn't want to fall victim to the prince's curse.

I love this story. I love how the author takes pieces of fairy tales and waves them into the story in new unexpected ways. Ember is a great character and her voice is interesting to read.

“No, she’s a witch, if ever there was one. She cut off her own finger and made the Witch’s Bargain with the spirits of Fire. She writes her spells in blood. When Lord Campos blacked my eye, she sent a plague of rats and ravens to drive him from the city. And she keeps a little doll made in his image to poke with pins or singe with fire whenever she needs amusement.”

“Is she wicked?”

“What does wicked mean? She watched the ravens harry Campos out of town, and laughed to see the wounds they pecked into his skin. But she did it to protect me. When Minette married her father, we meant to rob him blind. She struck a bargain with us to treat him well. She helped us. We’re sisters now and I do not doubt she loves us.”

His Touch is of Ice, Kody Boye

I gave up after twenty pages or so. It was pretty awful. Protagonist reaction when finding out that his new boyfriend is a vampire?

“I wouldn’t leave you just because you’re different. I knew there was something different about you. I can’t change that, but I love you and that’s all that matters to me. I don’t care."

Yeah, you have known each other for like a sex scene, plenty of time to develop deep feelings. I think this guy would get along great with Bella of Twilight. Then I checked out this "author's" website and he had a really obnoxious FAQ that made me glad I decided to call quits in time.

Entropy reads new urban fantasy

This genre and I have a complicated relationship. I like the idea. They are often extremely comfortable reads. No complex other worlds with lots and lots of names, locations and titles. But it can also be a great way to have an interesting mystery, tell a modern fairy tale or make a fun mix of action, romance and monsters.
There is one thing I cannot stand and that is the whiny heroine. Who I am told is amazingly good at her job and generally hardcore. And then I'm shown she is a whiny incompetent brat that needs obligatory love interest to save her from her own stupidity. Or the universe rearranges itself to make sure she never has to suffer the consequences of said stupidity.
But of course, not all books are like that. That is why I keep buying this genre and hope for the best.

Nightwalker, Jocelynn Drake

His name was Danaus. And what I remembered were his eyes. I saw them first by lamplight; a flicker of dark cobalt as he paused a distance from me. His eyes were the color sapphires were supposed to be, a grim sparkle of pigment. I stared at those eyes, willing time to slow down as I slipped into those still, stygian depths. But it wasn't the waters of the Styx I swam in, but a cool lagoon of Lethe where I bathed in a moment of oblivion.
This was the first sentences of the book. Oh my. But things got better as Mira the vampire got into a fight with vampire hunter Danaus. A pretty good job there showing rather than telling that Mira is kind of badass in a fight. But the two of them realize that they are better off cooperating as there is a worse threat out there. The naturi (think evil elves/faeries), who want to wipe out both humans and vampires.
Despite the beginning I really enjoyed the book. A lot of action and plot, even if there was sexual tension too. It was a fun reversal that the hundreds of years old vampire was female and the zealous vampire hunter with mystical powers was male.

Red-Headed Stepchild, Jaye Wells

This looked like generic urban fantasy and since I have a hopeless weakness for such books I ordered it. It did look action oriented. And it was! Sabrina is half vampire, half mage, which makes her an outcast since breeding between the two races are forbidden by old agreements. Sabina was raised by her grandmother who is a vampire leader and now Sabina works as her assassin. But when she is ordered to infiltrate an organization seen as a threat she beings to revaluate what she has been taught.
I actually kind of liked Sabina, she was quite ruthless and I thought it made sense that she remained loyal for so long to her grandmother who she spent over fifty years serving. It can't be easy to switch sides just like that... There was a few idiot moment but overall I liked the book. Sabina wasn't a friendly neighborhood vampires and not too whiny either. No forced supernatural romance angle, the person I was worried would be a love interest was actually a villain. Reasonably interesting world with the vampires and the mages. I’ll get the sequel Mage in Black when it is out.

I was positively surprised by my latest urban fantasy impulse buys. It was good fluff, both series I plan to continue to read.

Entropy reads Swedish horror

Obviously we Swedes generally prefer mystery novels and thrillers. That's what most best-selling authors write and there is a lot of pretty good stuff in that genre. That isn't my favorite genre though. But there have been some interesting horror lately as well, the obvious example is brilliant John Ajvide Lindqvist. But there are some more that are at least reasonable interesting.

The rest of this section is filled with spoilers. But unless you are Swedish you are not very likely to ever be reading this anyway...

Fjärilen från Tibet (The Butterfly from Tibet), CJ Håkansson
This is one weird book. I thought about it yesterday and decided to reread it to figure out what I actually think about it. I don't think I have read any other Swedish horror quite like it. A short description would be "eldritch abominations running wild in Sweden". Here is the longer description.
The main story is how Martin returns to Sweden, turned into something horrible after his experiences in Tibet. Chaos and apocalypse follow him in his steps.
First there is Markus who has run away from home, now staying in an abandoned building with other homeless. The buildings around them are turning into something different, like they are being eaten by the new houses. But they don't run away until it is too late.
Then there is my favorite part. Kajsa movies into her first apartment that her rich parents bought for her. Her life appears to be pretty nice on the surface but there is a lot of self-loathing beneath the surface. Then she becomes deadly afraid of her refrigerator and the birdmonster she thinks lives within. The birdmonster is watching and judging her, supervising everything she eats. It's at the best when it's a fine line between what is Kajsa's anorexic psychotic breakdown and what is actually happening the way she thinks it does. But of course the birdmonster is real and in the even freakier end of this part the birdmonster kills Kajsa's friends and feed them to her. Like a bird feeds its offspring. Ew. Kajsa dies horrible as more abominations are born from her body.
Patrik's mother comes to dinner and screams like her face is nothing more than a huge mouth. He is the only one in his family who survives and he and his neighbor tries to run. But where should they go when the same thing is happening all over the village?
In the last part about Martin's return home there just is complete madness. It ends with Martin's wife and son escaping in a car, desperately hoping that there is an end somewhere.
This book is screwed up. The gore and shock descriptions are way too much for me though. Way too much. I think it just gets ridiculous. I like it best when it is really good ideas and surreal horror. I don't think I can decide what I think now either. It goes from being just silly to hauntingly creepy. It makes it hard to have an overall opinion. At least I can say it is a memorable book.

Skuggorna i Spegeln (The Shadows in the Mirror), Inger Edelfeldt
Arri is seventeen, embarrassed over her family and recently had a big fallout with her best friend. In the middle of this she gains access to the vampire kingdom Eidolon that might or might not be real. But when her feelings for the boy she has a crush on is answered it gets more complicated. What does she truly want, a real life or an unreal eternity as a vampire? And this is written before Twilight if anyone wonders.
I loved Inger Edelfeldt when I was younger and that's why I decided to read this one. I probably would have enjoyed it much more in my early teens. Both Arri and her boyfriend are so very whiny. But Edelfeldt is not an amateur writer, the world doesn't rearrange itself to give Arri completely right in her whining. The book is about teenage angst and getting over it. Not completely what I want to read right now but it was alright. I probably would recommend it to someone younger.

Fördömd (Damned), Johanne Hildebrandt
Helena is an archeologist writing her thesis on human sacrifices. She has a history of mental illness, a drinking problem and is desperate to prove herself to be better than her past. She is starting to think she has succeeded with that when she finds an over thousand year old body during an excavation in the north of Sweden. This dead woman seems to have been sacrificed and that is a sensational discovery. But Helena's boss Bodil, who has her own share of problems, is taking control of the expedition to assure she gets the fame and credit. Helena's nightmares get worse and worse and she is starting to see the sacrificed woman even when she is awake. But she is not the only one. When they brought the body to Stockholm they also accidentally released an old evil some call Satan and others call Routa. Helena has refused to think of her past but to stop this force she must accept her Sami heritage.
I liked this book much more than I thought I would. The cover looked trashy, I had it in my TBR pile for over a year. But it was beyond my expectations. I like the characters. Even Bodil, Helena's evil boss who got possessed by Routa, got a pretty sympathetic portrayal. I'm not sure how correct it was but I also liked the use of Sami mythology.

Skördedrottningen (The harvest queen), Andreas Marklund
Olof's grandfather had a horrible experience in the war he never talked about. That led Olof into an obsession about war and history. As an adult he became a historian. When his old classmate Fabian disappears their common friend Caroline thinks they need to do something and that his disappearance is a part of a right-wing extremist/Nazi conspiracy. In the first part of the story the two of them search through archives and research this approach in an almost Dan Brown fashion. Except not as far fetched.
The second story is about a group of soldiers on a secret mission during the second world war, a group Olof's grandfather was in. They are not sure what they are doing in the mountains in the north, but apparently this mystic mission is very important for the safety of Sweden.
I read on the back that Marklund is a historian. It shows. Olof's love for history feels real and I get drawn into that enthusiasm as well. But well... The history subplots didn't really go anywhere. In the end it was about Olof's family secrets and old mythology. Overall it was an enjoyable book even if the horror aspect of the book only showed up in the end.

Entropy reads manga

It's hard to choose what manga series to focus on. A first volume says so little. I'm not sure what a good source for reviews would be either. Amazon tends to fail me here. I have a few first volumes I either got as gift or found cheap second hand somewhere. That leaves me with the hard decision if I should continue to invest my money in them or not.

Alichino, Kouyu Shurei
Beautiful creatures called "Alichino" grant any wish to those who find them--but at a price! A young lady searching for an Alichino wants to bring her brother back to life. She meets Tsugiri, a handsome young man who she thinks is an Alichino. While Tsugiri turns out to be a mere mortal, he does have a mysterious connection with these rare creatures--a connection that brings him and those around him grave danger.

My first reaction on this series was very positive. The art is incredibly pretty. I want a huge poster of this somewhere in my room. But I didn't think this first volume had much more going for it than the art. The story and the characters did not feel developed at this point. I honestly had a hard time remembering who was who and I consider that a very bad sign. This volume set up the story, Tsugiri is a kusabi, a person who can kill an alichino off for real and that's why they fight over him. But this far I got no sense of the characters and no reason to care about them.
I looked up the series and realized it was left unfinished after three volumes. That made decisions easy. I might as well give it up right away, if it does gets better if I will just be disappointed anyway.

Chobits, CLAMP
Chi isn't your average humanoid computer. She can't do word processing, she can't connect to the net, and she's incapable of interfacing with other persocoms ... but when the hapless, technophobic Hideki rescues her from the scrap heap and takes her home, he finds that she may be more advanced than her childlike behavior lets on...

I was into CLAMP fandom once upon a time :) I am not as enthusiastic over their shonen offerings though. I read pieces of Chobits years ago but perhaps it's time to give it a real chance.
First I have to say that I'm not found of the humor here. Too much porn jokes. So Chii's on/off switch is placed between her legs eh? How.. inconvenient? And Chii is constantly drawn in compromising positions and drops her cloths as much as possible. Not that I am completely against the kind of fanservice though…
But there seems to be an interesting story here. Despite that Hideki seems to be a porn addict he gets flustered over Chii's behavior and wants to treat her like a person. As far as I understand that is a returning theme in this series, people choosing to be with their persocoms instead of someone real. There is a picture book Hideki buys for Chii called A City With No People (I remember The City Where No One Was from early fan-translations and I liked that better) that also deals with the subject. So I'm not sure. I want to read more but I'm not sure if it is the best way to spend my book budget. A hard choice.

Eerie Queerie!, Shuri Shiozu
Mitsuo Shiozu seems to be particularly attractive to spirits. His mind and body are taken over in succession by two female ghosts who use their incorporation to resolve something left undone by their untimely deaths ... gender-bending hi-jinks ensue ... encourages Ichi Shirai, another of his classmates, to play soccer, and tells him not to feel guilty about causing the accident that led to her death. Mitsuo is put in an awkward position when his mind and body are taken over by the two young women, in that he's a young man, who winds up acting like the women. Hasunuma and Ichi find themselves attracted to Mitsuo, which places him in an even stranger position.

Pretty cute story. I have a fondness for having to untangle ghosts' personal problems storylines (and shonen ai). But I think Tokyo Babylon already did that and did it better... There is nothing in particular I dislike yet but nothing that really stands out either.
This is a tough decision as well. Is it worth continuing or not?

The Young Magician, Narushima Yuri
A battle has broken out among rival sorcerers. The most nefarious group, the Necromancers, is killing young girls in Hong Kong to read the future in their entrails. Carno, a human youth raised by Aeromancers in a different dimension, is summoned back to his homeworld to join in the battle. Does Carno have what it takes to survive in a world of political alliances and emotional entanglements?

This was.. confusing. But confusing in a good way, making me want to find out more. The main character Carno seems a bit psycho and I can't help liking that in a protagonist. It is a bit gory but nothing I seen yet makes me think it deserved that M rating.
The main question I have now is what would I be signing up for if I decided to go with it? How long is it, is it still ongoing in Japan? I found 14 volumes in English when I googled a bit but no answer to my other questions.

The Drifting Classroom, Kazuo Umezu
In the aftermath of a strange earthquake, an entire elementary school vanishes, leaving nothing but a hole in the ground. While parents mourn and authorities investigate, the students and teachers find themselves somewhere far away…somewhere cold and dark... a lifeless, nightmarish wasteland in which their school stands like a lone fortress. As panic turns to terror, as the rules start to fall apart, a sixth-grade boy named Sho and his friends must fight to survive in an alien world...

I love post-apocalypse stuff. I love situations that catches me imagination and makes me ponder long afterwards what I would do in a situation like that. Drifting Classroom does that. After I finished it I kept thinking about what I would have done if I was one of the teachers or the students. Well, probably I would have panicked so I guess I'm rather thinking about what I should have done.
The art style is really different from what I usually read. It fits excellently, the images of the wasteland outside the school and the violence the panic causes really disturbs me.
There is no doubt whatsoever that I need to continue to read this series. It's finished (actually written in 1974) and spans 11 volumes, all translated. At this point I feel comfortable with making the commitment to get all volumes.