Free Books For Your Quarantine Downtime

Whether from voluntary social distancing or official shelter-in-place orders, many of us are currently finding ourselves with more time on our hands than we're used to (others, of course, are in the medical field or grocery industry and working overtime to meet the current crisis, and I for one offer my sincerest thanks). Some of us, no doubt, are taking the opportunity to attack our tsundoku, but just in case anyone is in danger of running out of things to read, many authors are stepping up to fill the gap - at no charge.

The most prominent, at least in my Internet circles, is Corona-Chan: Spreading the Love, an anthology assembled in just a few days by David V. Stewart and many, many authors of the Pulp Revolution. I've talked about some of them on this blog before - Jon Mollison, for example, has donated his entire novel Adventure Constant, which I reviewed a few years ago and still recommend wholeheartedly. Other contributors include Justified's Jon Del Arroz and former and current Geek Gab hosts Brian Niemeier and Daddy Warpig. They are joined by a host of other independent authors, many of which have appeared in various issues of Cirsova magazine. And speaking of Geek Gab, their most recent episode has as guests contributors John Daker and Yakov Merkin:

If you prefer something a little more mainstream, gonzo techno-thriller writer Jeremy Robinson is offering a five-book package on his website, with a sixth offered for joining his mailing list. Now, I haven't read a great deal of Robinson, but what I have has kept me interested. Of the books in his bundle, I'm particularly interested in Flux, which sounds like it shares some premises with Eric Flint's Time Spike or 1632. The latter of these also happens to be free, from Amazon or Baen Books directly, although it's been so since long before the Wuhan Flu made its presence known. Come to think of it, the Baen Free Library is another great source in general for free things to read, including one of my perennial favorites - Larry Correia's Monster Hunter International.

To conclude, I'd like to thank all the authors mentioned above for their generosity in making their work available to the reading public during this crisis. Now let's do our part by keeping our hands clean and giving the coronavirus no chance to spread.

Larry Correia's Opinion On Gun Control

Being a former gun-shop owner and CCL instructor, the author of the Monster Hunter International series knows what he's talking about when it comes to the laws and the realities surrounding firearm ownership here in the U.S. Luckily for us, he hasn't lost his teaching skills by switching to writing best-selling novels, as he demonstrated a few nights ago:



That "best, most definitive and thorough article" is found on Larry's blog, under the title "An opinion on gun control", and is well worth your time if you're interested in hearing more about the topics touched on in the TV segment.

30 Day Book Challenge - Days 1 And 2

Recently I've been reading a blog called the Egotist's Club, which is just finishing up a month-long book-themed blogging challenge - it looks like it could be a fun idea, so I think I'm going to give it a try. There are 30 different topics to cover - conveniently, one for each day in June:

Day 1 – The best book you read last year
Day 2 – A book that you’ve read more than 3 times
Day 3 – Your favorite series
Day 4 – Favorite book of your favorite series
Day 5 – A book that makes you happy
Day 6 – A book that makes you sad
Day 7 – Most underrated book
Day 8 – Most overrated book
Day 9 – A book you thought you wouldn’t like but ended up loving
Day 10 – Favorite classic book
Day 11 – A book you hated
Day 12 – A book you used to love but don’t anymore
Day 13 – Your favorite writer
Day 14 – Favorite book of your favorite writer
Day 15 – Favorite male character
Day 16 – Favorite female character
Day 17 – Favorite quote from your favorite book
Day 18 – A book that disappointed you
Day 19 – Favorite book turned into a movie
Day 20 – Favorite romance book
Day 21 – Favorite book from your childhood
Day 22 – Favorite book you own
Day 23 – A book you wanted to read for a long time but still haven’t
Day 24 – A book that you wish more people would’ve read
Day 25 – A character who you can relate to the most
Day 26 – A book that changed your opinion about something
Day 27 – The most surprising plot twist or ending
Day 28 – Favorite title
Day 29 – A book everyone hated but you liked
Day 30 – Your favorite book of all time

Of course, we're already a few days into the month, so I'll have to double up on the first few. In addition, I'm going to set a couple of other boundaries - no using the same book for two different days (although no promises about using different books by the same author, or from the same series), for example. Also, I might tweak the topics a bit as I write them up - but only a little.

So, having said that, let's get started, shall we?

Hunting Up A Good Read

One of the biggest problems with being someone who loves to read is not, as one might expect, finding new things to read. No, these days the Internet will give you the full information on any book you might hear about, and probably recommend a hundred more for you that are vaguely related. The problem is time - at least for me, who at any given moment is probably working on several books at once, and has "to read" list rivaling an academic bibliography. So, it takes something fairly unusual to make me jump "out of order" in my reading list.

Handily, Something Fairly Unusual happened just the other week - two separate and very different online communities pointed me at Monster Hunter International by Larry Correia. It had already been slightly on my radar, but the revelation that there are a bunch of preview chapters available increased my interest significantly.

And boy, was I not disappointed. The main character of the book is a young accountant named Owen Pitt, who is recruited into the titular organization after his boss becomes a werewolf and attempts to eat him. Luckily, Pitt is a firearms enthusiast and all-around protagonist type and is able to not only escape with his life, but actually kill the monstrous manager (I suppose a fourteen story fall followed by a heavy desk landing on your head will kill just about anything not already dead). The rest of the book is his recruitment by and first job with MHI, the world's most renowned monster-hunting business.

"MHI" stands for "Monster Hunter International", the company as well as the book title. But you figured that out yourself.

It sounds like a common, almost clichéd setup, but the author does several interesting things with it. The most obvious is the guns - in many of these kinds of stories modern weaponry is either ineffective against the supernatural creatures, or just not mentioned as a potential resource. For MHI, however, "shoot it until it stops moving" is generally Plan A, and surprisingly enough it's usually effective enough to disable most monsters until they can be permanently disposed of.

Another interesting twist is that MHI is a private, for-profit business* rather than a government agency or a religious/academic association. While I'm sure this is not a unique idea, it is different enough to be noteworthy.

I was also intrigued by the world-building in the book. Correia took an unusual step, in my mind, of taking the standard horror-fantasy monsters - werewolves, vampires, zombies, and such - and adding not only the by-now-also-standard stable of H. P. Lovecraft-inspired creatures (an aside in the book reveals that Lovecraft got some of his inspiration from hanging around with Hunters), but also a trailer-park full of elves and a tribe of heavy-metal loving orcs living deep in the woods of Alabama (Tolkien apparently knew some Hunters, too). The latter of these even fight alongside our protagonists, showing up at the climax with horse-trailers full of giant riding wolves. Does Scott Oden know about this?

Anyway, although it definitely take more than good ideas to make a good writer, Correia is no slouch in the wordsmith department, either. Monster Hunter International is a fast-paced read, and one that mixes suspense and action with a decent dose of humor, especially of the sarcastic first-person-narration kind. Owen Pitt and Harry Dresden would probably either get along fantastically, or hate each other. Possibly both.

Now, I don't want to give the impression that the book has no flaws at all - I did notice a few issues, mostly about characterization (certain portions of Pitt's biography read suspiciously close to the author's). However, despite this I enjoyed reading it very much, and would not hesitate to recommend it to others. I'll definitely be getting the sequels (numbering two at present), too. As if I hadn't spent the first paragraph of this post complaining about how I have no time to read the books I already have . . .

*Albeit one that derives much of its income from Federally-funded monster bounties. This is one of the reasons I hesitate to label this book the first Libertarian Urban Fantasy to come to my attention (the second being that my bestowing such a label would be pretentious and silly).