Whiter Than Snow

In Whiter Than Snow, Sandra Dallas offers another look at life in Colorado’s gold mining towns during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a time when the hardiest, most adventurous (or, perhaps, most desperate) souls were willing to risk their lives for a steady job in a company town. Swandyke, near Tenmile Range, is filled with people who have come to the cold little town for a variety of reasons. Some are in hiding from creditors or the law; some just kept moving westward, failing in one move after the other, until they ended up in Colorado; and its lone black resident is here because he struck a white man and had to run for his life in the middle of the night.

Swandyke is a town in which the privacy of others is respected. Those who want to keep to themselves can do so for years. The men, many of whom are of the hard-drinking variety, work the mine; the women stay home and raise their children, teach in the town schoolhouse, or work in the local brothel. Life in Swandyke, especially in the wintertime, is tough but, by the spring of 1920, life there has become routine for most of its residents.

That will change, though, at 4:10 p.m. on April 20, 1920 when an avalanche gobbles up nine Swandyke school children as they make their way home form their little schoolhouse. Five of the avalanche victims are the children of two estranged sisters, one is the son of the mine manager, one is the only black child in the town, one is the daughter of a prostitute, and the other is being raised by his Civil War veteran grandfather.

The author remarks in the book’s very first chapter that only four of the nine children will survive. The rest of Whiter Than Snow deals with who the nine children are and how their families came to be in Swandyke, Colorado, working for the big Fourth of July mine. Dallas tells their story in a series of flashbacks and backstories involving each of the six families that have had children snatched away by the avalanche. The reader learns of the strengths, weaknesses, hopes and dreams of each parent, a group of people with very little in common other than their work at the mine and their love for their children. Suddenly, though these people have hardly interacted before, they come together in a wave of mutual support that will help the most unfortunate of them survive the five terrible losses just ahead.

As the book’s main characters are being developed, the novel is steadily building to a dramatic climax during which the reader will finally learn which children survive and which do not. The townspeople know they have less than twenty minutes to dig survivors from beneath the snow - and, one-by-one, they will bring children to the surface in their race against the clock. For five children, it is too late. If you begin this book, you will not quit reading until you find out which five.

Rated at: 4.0

(Review Copy provided by Publisher)

Another Reason E-Readers Still Cannot Beat the Book

Reading via an ebook reader is an entirely different experience than reading from the printed page. I find it hard to believe that reading from a hard copy will ever be topped by reading from a plastic box. I do, however, read a number of ebooks each year, but that is primarily because the ebooks I read are books that would not have been available to me otherwise. So, it is a case of reading them electronically or not reading them at all.

Now something I've sensed about my ebook reading has been confirmed in this PC Magazine article: it takes longer to read a page on an ebook reader than it does to read the same printed page. In my case, I find myself having to re-read whole sentences, if not paragraphs, because my mind tends to wander when I'm using my Sony Reader; I seem to be more easily distracted for some reason. Also, the Sony Reader has a bad problem with glare and I sometimes struggle to find just the right angle at which to hold the thing.

It will take you longer to read a book on an iPad or Kindle compared to the printed page, according to a recent study. Dr. Jakob Nielsen of the Nielsen Norman Group...The study found that reading on an electronic tablet was up to 10.7 percent slower than reading a printed book. Despite the slower reading times, Nielsen found that users preferred reading books on a tablet device compared to the paper book. The PC monitor, meanwhile, was universally hated as a reading platform among all test subjects.

The article mentions the small sample size of the study, but I suspect that 24 readers is a large enough sample to prove the point that reading via an ebook reader is still a less comfortable experience than reading from a real book. The PC Magazine writer does wonder if the age of readers has anything to do with how quickly they can read from an ebook reader, and I think that is a valid question. Perhaps, younger readers, those who have grown up reading for countless hours on PCs and other devices, might be quicker e-readers than their elders - folks like me who have been slower to adapt to the new technology.

I don't know the answer to that question. All I know is that reading from a paper and cardboard book is still a whole lot more satisfying to me than the experience I have reading from my Sony Reader - and I do not expect my opinion ever to change.

Libraries Challenge Copyright Law

I've griped a few times about the limited number of "copies" of ebooks available from my county library system. It seems that close to 90% of the books are always checked out (and that I seldom have interest in the other 10% anyway), and getting an ebook via the library's hold list seems to take forever. That's why I'm happy to see this unorthodox approach to making the supply part of the equation more equal to the demand part.

From the Wall Street Journal article:

Libraries are expanding e-book offerings with out-of-print editions, part of a broader effort to expand borrowing privileges in the Internet Age that could challenge traditional ideas about copyright.

Starting Tuesday, a group of libraries led by the Internet Archive, a nonprofit digital library, are joining forces to create a one-stop website for checking out e-books, including access to more than a million scanned public domain books and a catalog of thousands of contemporary e-book titles available at many public libraries.

And in a first, participants including the Boston Public Library and the Marine Biological Laboratory will also contribute scans of a few hundred older books that are still in copyright, but no longer sold commercially. That part of the project could raise eyebrows, because copyright law is unclear in the digital books arena.

[...]

Only one person at a time will be allowed to check out a digital copy of an in-copyright book for two weeks. While on loan, the physical copy of the book won't be loaned, due to copyright restrictions.

The effort could face legal challenges from authors or publishers. Paul Aiken, the executive director of the Authors Guild—which challenged Google's scanning efforts—said "it is not clear what the legal basis of distributing these authors' work would be." He added: "I am not clear why it should be any different because a book is out of print. The authors' copyright doesn't diminish when a work is out of print."

Mr. Kahle said, "We're just trying to do what libraries have always done."

Having to receive prior permission from a copyright owner in order to scan a book is onerous, said Mr. Blake, of the Boston Library. "If you own a physical copy of something, you should be able to loan it out. We don't think we're going to be disturbing the market value of these items."

This is certain to be challenged, of course, but it is interesting to see libraries try something that challenges copyright law this way. The publishing world is changing so quickly that we might not recognize it ten years from now. Good, or bad, change is coming. Please read the Wall Street Journal article, linked above, to get the complete story. You might also want to take a look at the Internet Archive website to see what is already out there.

4th of July Celebration

Happy 4th, fellow Americans. As you share food and fireworks with friends and family, please take a moment to remember our soldiers, and those of our allies, the men and women who are dying every day to make this world a safer place for all of us.

On a lighter note, here's a little music from a few characters I haven't seen in a while:

A Bad Day for Pretty

Avenging angel, Stella Hardesty, is at it again. Stella was introduced to readers in Sophie Littlefield’s debut novel, A Bad Day for Sorry, a novel that Stella barely survived. Now, in A Bad Day for Pretty, Stella is nearing full recovery from her injuries and is again ready to take on any man foolish enough to physically abuse his wife. The fact is, Stella has more potential business than any dedicated avenging angel can be expected to handle but she is more than willing to do what she can to help out a sister in trouble.

Stella, though, is not your typical vigilante. First, she is 50-something years old; second, she still runs the sewing machine shop she was left with when she ridded herself of her abusive husband in the first novel in the series. The resulting, and rather misleading, image allows Stella to maintain a low profile with local cops (she is even semi-romantically involved with the local sheriff as this new one begins) but, within the closed community of abused women, she is well known - and available to help.

In an unusual twist, Stella now finds herself defending, not trying to intimidate, a man. Neb Donovan, whose wife begs Stella for help, is suspected of having murdered the woman whose body is unearthed when a tornado strikes the local demolition derby track. Stella has a history with the man, having already helped him kick a vicious oxycontin habit, and she finds it hard to believe that he could have killed anyone and buried them in a concrete-filled hole. Stella takes on Neb’s case and, with the help of Chrissy Shaw (also a first novel survivor) and a cast of colorful characters, she sets out to prove his innocence.

A Bad Day for Pretty is a wild ride. It mixes hardcore vigilante justice with humor in a way that keeps the reader rooting for Stella and Chrissy despite their easy way with breaking the law - and a few arms and legs if that will get the job done. Stella’s appeal is her ability to see and accept herself for what she is. She is a woman’s advocate who understands that the justice system cannot always protect a woman from the man she lives with - that there is a point, if a woman is to survive, when justice comes from the blunt end of a baseball bat. She also recognizes that, despite what she suffered at the hands of her former husband, she is ready for a new romance - and that the clock is ticking. She is every abused woman’s idea of Superwoman, and that is pretty cool.

Rated at: 3.5

Chris Hitchens in the Battle of His Life

I have admired Chris Hitchens from afar for a long time. Few authors give a better interview or handle their detractors more effectively than Chris, and I have had great fun watching him drive his critics to distraction. The man simply does not care what you think about him; he has something to say and you are welcome to take it or leave it. That's not his problem. Criticism just seems to roll off his back and he continues to slash away in his almost stereotypical British style. He seemed invulnerable to me - someone who would be shaking things up for many years to come.

And now Chris Hitchens is in a battle for his life. Perhaps his very lifestyle has finally caught up with him, because now he is suffering from cancer of the esophagus, a cancer that can be caused by excessive drinking or smoking, both of which Chris has been guilty of for many years. Sadly, the odds are stacked heavily against him, but if anyone can beat the odds it is Chris Hitchens.

Chris is the man Christians love to hate; he is an avowed atheist and has written about it effectively, and often. He is the man liberals love to hate because he has become an active conservative voice and he consistently destroys the liberal viewpoint in open debate. And if the comments attached to the news articles about Hitchens I have been reading on the web for the past day are any indication, now some liberals and conservative Christians are taking delight in the man's illness.

It takes something like this to remind me how little progress we, as human beings, have made in the last 2000 years. I am too disgusted with the comments to quote them here - and that would be pointless, anyway - but I suspect that, if Hitchens does bother to sample them, they will give him the strength he needs to fight his illness even harder than he would have.

You're still the man, Chris. Good luck to you, sir.