Reading report Q1 2013: Kindle is King

For me, the first quarter of this year was dominated by February, when I fled the winter chill of London for a month of summer in my antipodean mother land. I won’t bore you with how great it all was – great weather, old friends, family on good behaviour, plenty of good wine and beer and so forth. Instead I’ll bore you with far less interesting chat about reading.

I’ve had a Kindle for a couple of years and have taken it on holiday a couple of times, but this is the trip it was made for. I always end up taking what I consider a sufficient number of books (perhaps six) and then while I’m in NZ one thing like to is search second-hand bookshops for obscure SF paperbacks from the seventies and eighties. What I particularly love is a small town book exchange (every small town in NZ has got one) with a SF section that looks like it might have come from the estate of a lonely farmer and SF fan.

I’ve done pretty well with Jack Vance, picking up nice seventies and eighties editions from Grafton and the New English Library with cool covers by Jim Burns, Mick van Houten and Peter Elson, etc. But this year I discovered something that’s killed that hobby dead: The SF Gateway. 

It’s changed my holidays for ever and I may now never visit New Zealand again.

The Pale Queen's Courtyard by Marcin Wrona

As I mentioned in my entry on The Big Knockover (and maybe in Dracula as well) I have a Kindle now, and as a failed writer, I am quite naturally very interested in the new wave of electronic self-publishing that has come in its wake. I have a few acquaintances who have had a go at self-publishing on Kindle, and one in particular asked me to review his book on here and for amazon.

This put me a tricky position! I'm only vaguely acquainted with Mr Wrona through an RPG message board, and I've read a little of his travails in getting The Pale Queen's Courtyard published (it was a finalist in a high-profile unsigned fantasy writers competition a couple of years back) and so I was confident that it met a certain basic level of competence but I was still a little hesitant – if I didn't like it, it would be socially difficult (in a low-key way) to piss all over his cornflakes, as it were.

I am a slave to social niceties like this: sometimes my inner monologue is like an episode of Seinfeld on permanent loop.

Consequently, I declined his offer of a freebie and instead bought a copy myself on the quiet so that if I didn't like it I could just not mention it again and get around the whole tricky business that way. Fortunately, however, the Pale Queen's Courtyard is really good.