Big Bernard Cornwall Fans Here!

The cat on the right actually prefers his Sharpe

novels.. more violence.

Further Adventures in Accessibility

Oh well. Remember back when that authors' group threw a fit because Amazon's Kindle 3 would allow readers to listen to their books converted by text to speech? And so Amazon said "OK, then we'll let the rights holders for books say no if they don't want their books available for text to speech?" And remember when I told you all about how Amazon promised blind people could apply for exemption from this disabling of the text to speech? [Kindle 3, A Brave new World... Almost May 2009]

Not so fast there, pardner.

A couple weeks ago I was asked to review a book called The Time Traveler's Guide to Medieval England: A Handbook for Visitors to the Fourteenth Century by Ian Mortimer. They sent me a print copy, which I figured I would have to scan to read. Then I noticed the book was on Kindle! Wahoo! Oh, not wahoo! This is one of those books where the text to speech is disabled. Well, no big deal. I'll just call and find out how I register for the exemption for print impaired people. I call Amazon, ring ring, and get this nice fellow named Jim who has never heard about this exemption. He checks around and sure enough that exemption never was available. When I asked for the name and email of someone who is responsible for making materials accessible, he said there was no one like that at Amazon. He said I had to understand they really have a very small staff at Amazon. I told him, well maybe Amazon can't make the publisher accept an accessible version, but as a blind consumer, I can under the Fair Use provision of U.S. Copyright law.. in other words, I'll scan the dang book as I originally planned and share it via BookShare.org, as I also originally planned. So ha...

Of course this flip flop on Amazon's part is annoying. They said they would provide the exemption for people who need the text to speech. Now they are basically saying, "Who? Us?" It is true that neither Amazon nor the publishers have a legal obligation to produce books in accessible formats. They do however have to permit qualified organizations to do so. But if Amazon had just stuck to its promise
this wouldn't have been necessary.

On top of that, I continue to shake my head about the authors' group that complained that the text to speech would compromise their own audio books.

1. What audio books? I really wonder if any member of the group has produced an audio version of their books.
2. I said it before and I will say it again: no one who doesn't have to will listen to books on the Kindle when they could listen to a professionally narrated audio book. Why? I'll tell you why. Check out
these examples of how the Kindle's text to speech manages quite normal words.

• "He clutched the stump of his severed hand. " "Severed" is pronounced "se-VEER-ed.". That's not the adjective "severe", guys.. it's the past tense of the verb "sever".
• "I saw a figure silhouetted against the wall." The Kindle pronounces it "sil-HOW-et-ted.".

 One of my favorites is text to speech program's propensity to complete

what they perceive as abbreviations if followed by a period.

•  "It was the morning of the day Alice was to wed." "Wednesday."
• Even abbreviations no longer in use, like "It was hit or miss." "Mississippi".
•  It's downright worth it when you get a line like "It was like putting the fox in the chicken coop." It comes out as "chicken cooperative". And I didn't even realize chickens had organized. Must have missed the committee meeting to discuss it.

I know one author, Helen Hollick, who was none too pleased with how the device, which cannot, by the way, have pronunciation edited, handled her two main characters names in SeaWitch (Sea Witch Chronicles 1 .


Jesamiah - pronounced "JEZ-ah-MY-ah" - the Kindle reads it "je-SAY-me-ack". Yes, ACK. My sentiments exactly.

• Tiola - the poor woman is driven crazy when people pronounce her name "Tee-OH-la" when it is supposed to be "TEE oh la" but wait until she hears my Kindle pronounce it "SHY-la".

So tell, me O Mighty Authors who are so afraid your unborn audio books will suffer from the Kindle 3's text to speech.. you still think so???

The Last Seal, by Richard Denning

The Last Seal

Ricahard Denning

Take the biblical terrors of a Dan Brown novel, add a little Harry Potter, then set it in the time of the Great London Fire of 1666, and you have a snapshot of Richard Denning's suspenseful and exciting novel, The Last Seal.

14 year old Ben Silver has been disappointing his schoolmasters lately as a traumatic memory drives him away from his studies.  On one of his distracting trips around London he literally runs into Freya, a street thief his own age.  In no time the two are joined by a bookseller who is part of a secret society called the Presidium.  Add a doctor with modern ideas and follow the hunt as they try to prevent the cavalier leader of the Liberati as they seek to release the demon Dentalion into the world just three hundred years after Ben's ancestor imprisons the beast.  The Liberati, their well meaning dupes, and an increasing number of demon avatars set the fires in Pudding Lane that consume most of the great city of London in order to destroy the six seals that lead to the last, and most important, one.

The characters in The Last Seal are sufficiently archetypal and well rounded to provide the reader with plenty of material so you never quite know how each will decide to react in the many challenges they encounter.  Ben's trauma, watching his parents die in a housefire, constantly tempts him to use newly discovered powers to forget his pain.  The bookseller is frustrated by being possessed of only part of the knowledge he needs to fight his ancient enemy and must face his own guilt at past failures.  The doctor is bent on revenge for his own father's death at the hands of the cavalier,  while finding that the skepticism that drove him and his father apart was almost both men's undoing.  Matthias, the fire and brimstone preacher has been tricked by the power mad cavalier into believing the demon he is helping release is actually an avenging angel.  The king's spymaster and his quartet of heavies come in to symbolize both a search for truth and betrayal of that truth.

The last and decidedly not least, young Freya, is one of the more refreshing female characters I have run into lately.  She is street samrt, practical, cynical, sneaky, uncompromising, and possessed of a love for her city that surpasses all.  Denning's faithfulness in his portrayal of all these characters, as well as several lesser characters, extends beautifully to her as well.  She may be the only female character, but she is so strong and likeable, she's plenty.

The history revealed in this tale of the supernatural is fascinating, in spite of the demonic interpretation of real events.  The one fly in this ointment is that the pacing you would expect of a novel that follows something as relentless and threatening as a huge fire is not maintained throughout.  Too often the characters are stopped in their forward motion by simple necessity, to eat and sleep, for example, but also to talk over their respective traumas, on side trips, on capture by and escape from the spumaster, and unfortunately the reader loses the sense of impending disaster at times.

This is a clever, smart nd skillfully written story of temptation and redemption that should be a natural for a movie.  I can see the kid who played Harry Potter in the role of the dashing but sinister cavalier.  How about it, Hollywood?

The Last Seal is currently availabl as a downloadable ebook fromt Smashwords and is threrefore in an accessible  format for both sighted and print impaired readers.  Chrck the book's own web site for future publishing developments.

Pirate Code, by Helen Hollick - Sea Witch Chronicles

 
Pirate Code

Helen Hollick

Sea Witch Chronicles

The second in the Jesamiah Acorne series continues the the story of this Jack Sparrow-esque pirate and his white which beloved, Tiola, soon after their reunion aboard the Sea Witch in the first novel, also called Sea Witch. I enjoyed the first in the series mainly for the chance to meet and get to know these engaging characters, but the second is a much better crafted novel, with a taut construction and more insights into what makes Jesamiah tick.

Back at Nassau, Jesamiah is tricked into going pirate again. Convinced by the sea goddess's daughter, Rain, he believes that Tiola, left behind, no longer wants him. He decides to set off on his own with the crew and Sea Witch to find a treasure he has been told is hidden in Hispaniola. The trouble is that England and Spain are at war, so if Jesamiah's detractors don't have enough to send them after him to destroy him, they have it now. He meets a gorgeous redhead named Francesca whose questionable character gives him lots of conflicts, while he gets mixed up with rebels, nuns, and an evil dictator, making for a complex and engrossing story.

One thing that really impressed me about this book is its expert but not-at-all intrusive use of nautical terms. Hollick brings them in to the story just exactly as much as she needs to to authenticate the characters of the seaman and pirates, but one does not feel lectured or clubbed over the head with them.. She provides a glossary to enrich the reader's understanding.

Her handling as well of certain revelations about Jesamiah's past appear at one point to be following formula, but then cleverly you learn something new, quite original and as a result, far more meaningful.

I would like to have seen more of Tiola in Pirate Code, but got every bit as much of Jesamiah as I could want. Any questions I had while reading about the purpose of seemingly extraneous scenes were resolved by reading further. I would like to have had the ultimate crisis vary more from the same in the first novel, but this did not take away from a jolly good yarn.

My one serious quibble with this otherwise delightful novel is its insistence on portraying fat people as foolish or evil. This is an unfortunate stereotype in our societies that does not seem to want to go away. Of course, not all the "bad guys" are fat, but all the fat guys are either bad or stupid. More than that, their fatness is used in descriptions intended to enforce just how bad or foolish they are. El Gardo is shown after sex as having a belly "extended like an eight months pregnant woman" whereas I doubt she would have focused so on the thinness of another character. Character Jasper insists on calling him "El Gordo", Spanish for “fat”. Jesamiah puts his dagger to the "double chins" of one of El Gardo's lackeys. Two other characters that are both fat are unlovingly portrayed as such. I would like to see Hollick think twice about these stigma-laden portrayals in future books.

I read the authors' historical notes in novels with relish, and I loved Hollick's "admission" that this one was not enslaved to historical record. Sometimes we want to relax and enjoy and not count the rivets on the hull of the Titanic. It was refreshing.

As usual Hollick has provided the reader with characters that are fun but also flawed enough to stay interesting. The tale of seafaring is so real you might think Hollick has had a life under the Jolly Roger herself. You will come to want more of this lovable rogue, just as I have.

The author and publisher provided me with a digital copy of Pirate Code in exchange for this review. I read the PDF on m y Kindle 2.

New! Medieval Literature from Oxford University Press

Please find below information about new books from Oxford
University Press publishing in this subject.

The Familiar Enem
Chaucer, Language, and Nation in the Hundred Years War
Ardis Butterfield

The Familiar Enemy examines the linguistic, literary, and cultural identities of England and France during the Hundred Years War. It explores works by Deschamps, Charles d'Orléans, and Gower, as well as Chaucer who, the book argues, must be resituated within the context of the multilingual cultural geography of medieval Europe.


Hardback
476 pages

£60.00
10 December 2009
978-0-19-957486-5

More details and ordering information:
http://academic-marketing.oup.com/c/176kk7qAz9q2C84vx

Anglo-Saxon/Irish Relations before the Vikings
Edited by James Graham-Campbell and Michael Ryan

Hardback | 400 pages | 24 December 2009

More details and ordering information:
http://academic-marketing.oup.com/c/176kmpDLspgSU10zY

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Marketing Services Department,
Oxford University Press,
Great Clarendon Street,
Oxford OX2 6DP, UK

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River God, by Wilbur Smith

River God

Wilbur Smith

Taita is a slave with a difference.  he is talented, inventive, brilliant, deboted, and unwilling to be freed.  To be free he would have to give up his service to his mistress, so he would rather never be free.

The era is a time in Ancient Egypt when the kingdom is divided into two parts, an Upper Kingdom, where Taita and his mistress and the rest live, and Lower Kingdom, where a usurper holds the throne.  He does not hold it long in this novel, as this is also a time in history when another nation, the Hyksos, are about to overrun both Upper and Lower. How Taita changes technology and therefore the balance of power is the theme of the novel.

The story starts with the Grand Vizier Intef's daughter wanting to marry Tanus, the son of Intef's greatest enemy.  No matter what Taita the slave does, this is not going to happen, and the daughter, Lostris, winds up marrying Pharaoh instead.  Their union is not fruitful until Tanus and she get some alone time.  One of the sad aspects of the story is that even after Pharoah dies, Lostris and Tanus cannot reveal their love nor can their three children be revealed as anyone's issue but Pharoah's.  This is in spite of the fact that Tanus is a lion of a man and much loved both by the army and the people.  Much of the novel is about the incursions by the Hyksos and the court's exile to lands beyond the Nile's great cataracts.  It is an involving story full of excitement  and compelling characters.

If you ever read Jean M. Auel's Valley of the Horses,  you will know what I mean when I say that Aula and Taita bould start their own R&D company.  I used to say about her that she invented everything but the blender.  Taita is quite the same, but in both cases the characters are credible as innovators, to a point.  Taita has developed a "Nilometer", for instance, that helps him gauge how high the Nile will get during its annual floods.  In the decades long timespan of the novel he manages to invent the spoke wheel, to domesticate horses, to discern the elements of epidemiiology, even to develop beterinary tracheotomies.  It gets a little stretched at times.

There were a couple times when I thought Smith was interpreting the cultures of the other nations around Egypt in terms of later Islamic cultures.  Taita takes some getting used to, his ego being more than a little insufferable.  ostly what this book suffered from in my case is not Smith's fault at all.  The Brilliance Audio production was laughable in places.  Pharoah sounded like Kirk Douglas, and iit was almost too much when I realized Tanus was a vocal dead ringer for "Duff man" on The Simpsons.  It is a testament to Smith's writing that this unappealing fact did not prevent me from loving the character of Tanus.  I recommend you read the print format or find a different audio production.

This book is scheduled for discussion on Let's Read Historical Novels on February 2, 2010.