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Nostalgic Apocalyptica, Take 2
Hey there, all...
Yesterday was a very hard day at work. Blah. Since I had Tuesday off, I came back to an ungodly amount of books waiting to be shelved. Everyone was tense because of the sheer amount of people coming in to sell books...this has always been a problem. Basically, our Bookshop works this way; we buy books from people in the community and repair them, clean them, and sell them. Lately, we've been doing too much buying, and not enough selling, so the room in our really big bookshop is becoming more cramped and less workable. Add to that the fact that we're a bit undermanned and everyone can't keep their sections as straight as they would like, and you have a bit of a mess.
The owners seem to think that we can handle all of this on our own, and that we're not working hard enough, which is something I bristle over. This job has worked me the hardest of any job I've ever had, and I've gladly done it because I've enjoyed the work. If I weren't good enough to handle the work, then I could understand the situation, even understand being fired (even though it would break me for a bit). If I'm not capable of something, well then that's that...but don't accuse me of not trying my best. That...gets under my skin.
Anyway, too many books were bought, we have boxes and boxes of books for the owners to price and barely enough room (hah!) on the shelves to put them up once they're done. Don was frustrated, and that pretty much makes everyone frustrated. Even Heidi, as laid-back as she is, was pretty tense. Add that to the gaggle of customers who all wanted something special (as usual), and by the end of the night I was pretty much done with people. :P
There was one saving grace of the night. I picked up Book 2 of Remnants, this young adult series by K.A. Applegate. She's done the Animorphs series, and while all I remember of most of that was the horrific series Nickelodeon butchered it with, I can't say it was bad or anything because I never picked up a book. Remnants, though, was something that I just glanced at casually and found myself absolutely unable to put down.
It's a short little book, only around 150 pages that could be read in a few hours (probably less time; I'm a slower reader than a lot of folks), but it's a really fascinating read. The main characters have really stupid names obviously intended to appeal to the market (Jobs, 2Face, Mo'Steel are a few of the suicide-inducing examples) but once you get past that the story is absolutely...wonderful.
First of all, it contains some pretty hard stuff for its audience to swallow. The premise is this: In the year 2011, NASA finds that an asteroid about the size of the moon is going to slam into Earth and kill *everything*. In a desperate attempt to save the human race, NASA chooses the Eighty -- eighty people specifically picked to build a society, heck, a race from scratch -- to board a ship called the Mayflower, which will wander space for a time looking for a possibly habitable planet. Once it finds one, it lands, and the Eighty are woken out of suspended animation to try and make do on this alien world. Of course, it's a very, very long shot, but it's all they've got.
In Book 1, which I haven't read, there seem to problems from the very start. People riot at the site of the Mayflower launch, there are at least 2 murders and the commander decides that death would be preferrable to going on while his wife and sister have been vaporized. A mechanical malfunction disables the solar sails and two of the Eighty (Jobs and Mo'Steel, I think) have to fix it somehow. They escape just in time to get a choice view of the Rock slamming into the Earth and breaking it into three chunks that float off into space. There goes Earth.
So, we pick it up in Book 2. People begin to wake, but about half of the Eighty have died in some way; Jobs' father actually succumbs to a mold that eats him alive completely, so his chamber is nothing but blue-green fungus, and there are others who share similarly nasty fates. Some have been riddled with micrometeors, others had their hydration supplies cut short, so they've just dried out to the point of garishness, and still others have apparently been eaten by worms somehow. One of the survivors, Tamara Hoyle, was pregnant inside the sleep chamber, and had the baby, which is now *attached* to her. For reasons unknown, the baby's eyes melted onto her stomach and it stares at the world with empty sockets. This is a *children's* book. At least it seems to be a pretty happy baby, though.
There are other characters that figure into the book, each with very interesting, rich personalities. There are a couple of pretty cheesy hooks, but that matters less because the characters are so well fleshed out. It strikes me as a wonderful combination of Lord of the Flies, an old sci-fi series on NBC called Earth 2 and a really good (if gory) suspense film. The social dynamic of the Mayflower crew is trouble enough, but they also have to deal with aliens that have apparently captured their ship and put them in real-life paintings.
It all *sounds* like a jumbled mess, but Applegate takes the weirdest ingredients to put this together and makes them work. She obviously knows where she's going with this, too, so it helps add weight to the more bizarre tricks instead of a "Where the hell did she pull *that* from?" feel. And, it starts with the end of the world, where the characters have nothing - and everything - to lose.
I think I'm slightly addicted. <:) I'll be buying Book 1 at Barnes and Noble, but the rest of the series up to 7 is at the Bookshop. Something tells me I'm going to have to tithe half of my paycheck to books that I've been saving the past two months. The stack is getting ungainly high. <:) Work, work, work and gaming today. My first game with Nick's "Wheel of Time" campaign....I play an ogier (ten-feet-tall, cute ears, brawny but gentle and thoughtful critters...doesn't get much better than that) who's (surprise!) fascinated by the last time the world ended (the history is actually recorded) and wants to find out if it could ever happen again. Reah is playing some magician-warrior-princess. Yeah, I think we've got our delusions covered. :) Should be fun!
Yesterday was a very hard day at work. Blah. Since I had Tuesday off, I came back to an ungodly amount of books waiting to be shelved. Everyone was tense because of the sheer amount of people coming in to sell books...this has always been a problem. Basically, our Bookshop works this way; we buy books from people in the community and repair them, clean them, and sell them. Lately, we've been doing too much buying, and not enough selling, so the room in our really big bookshop is becoming more cramped and less workable. Add to that the fact that we're a bit undermanned and everyone can't keep their sections as straight as they would like, and you have a bit of a mess.
The owners seem to think that we can handle all of this on our own, and that we're not working hard enough, which is something I bristle over. This job has worked me the hardest of any job I've ever had, and I've gladly done it because I've enjoyed the work. If I weren't good enough to handle the work, then I could understand the situation, even understand being fired (even though it would break me for a bit). If I'm not capable of something, well then that's that...but don't accuse me of not trying my best. That...gets under my skin.
Anyway, too many books were bought, we have boxes and boxes of books for the owners to price and barely enough room (hah!) on the shelves to put them up once they're done. Don was frustrated, and that pretty much makes everyone frustrated. Even Heidi, as laid-back as she is, was pretty tense. Add that to the gaggle of customers who all wanted something special (as usual), and by the end of the night I was pretty much done with people. :P
There was one saving grace of the night. I picked up Book 2 of Remnants, this young adult series by K.A. Applegate. She's done the Animorphs series, and while all I remember of most of that was the horrific series Nickelodeon butchered it with, I can't say it was bad or anything because I never picked up a book. Remnants, though, was something that I just glanced at casually and found myself absolutely unable to put down.
It's a short little book, only around 150 pages that could be read in a few hours (probably less time; I'm a slower reader than a lot of folks), but it's a really fascinating read. The main characters have really stupid names obviously intended to appeal to the market (Jobs, 2Face, Mo'Steel are a few of the suicide-inducing examples) but once you get past that the story is absolutely...wonderful.
First of all, it contains some pretty hard stuff for its audience to swallow. The premise is this: In the year 2011, NASA finds that an asteroid about the size of the moon is going to slam into Earth and kill *everything*. In a desperate attempt to save the human race, NASA chooses the Eighty -- eighty people specifically picked to build a society, heck, a race from scratch -- to board a ship called the Mayflower, which will wander space for a time looking for a possibly habitable planet. Once it finds one, it lands, and the Eighty are woken out of suspended animation to try and make do on this alien world. Of course, it's a very, very long shot, but it's all they've got.
In Book 1, which I haven't read, there seem to problems from the very start. People riot at the site of the Mayflower launch, there are at least 2 murders and the commander decides that death would be preferrable to going on while his wife and sister have been vaporized. A mechanical malfunction disables the solar sails and two of the Eighty (Jobs and Mo'Steel, I think) have to fix it somehow. They escape just in time to get a choice view of the Rock slamming into the Earth and breaking it into three chunks that float off into space. There goes Earth.
So, we pick it up in Book 2. People begin to wake, but about half of the Eighty have died in some way; Jobs' father actually succumbs to a mold that eats him alive completely, so his chamber is nothing but blue-green fungus, and there are others who share similarly nasty fates. Some have been riddled with micrometeors, others had their hydration supplies cut short, so they've just dried out to the point of garishness, and still others have apparently been eaten by worms somehow. One of the survivors, Tamara Hoyle, was pregnant inside the sleep chamber, and had the baby, which is now *attached* to her. For reasons unknown, the baby's eyes melted onto her stomach and it stares at the world with empty sockets. This is a *children's* book. At least it seems to be a pretty happy baby, though.
There are other characters that figure into the book, each with very interesting, rich personalities. There are a couple of pretty cheesy hooks, but that matters less because the characters are so well fleshed out. It strikes me as a wonderful combination of Lord of the Flies, an old sci-fi series on NBC called Earth 2 and a really good (if gory) suspense film. The social dynamic of the Mayflower crew is trouble enough, but they also have to deal with aliens that have apparently captured their ship and put them in real-life paintings.
It all *sounds* like a jumbled mess, but Applegate takes the weirdest ingredients to put this together and makes them work. She obviously knows where she's going with this, too, so it helps add weight to the more bizarre tricks instead of a "Where the hell did she pull *that* from?" feel. And, it starts with the end of the world, where the characters have nothing - and everything - to lose.
I think I'm slightly addicted. <:) I'll be buying Book 1 at Barnes and Noble, but the rest of the series up to 7 is at the Bookshop. Something tells me I'm going to have to tithe half of my paycheck to books that I've been saving the past two months. The stack is getting ungainly high. <:) Work, work, work and gaming today. My first game with Nick's "Wheel of Time" campaign....I play an ogier (ten-feet-tall, cute ears, brawny but gentle and thoughtful critters...doesn't get much better than that) who's (surprise!) fascinated by the last time the world ended (the history is actually recorded) and wants to find out if it could ever happen again. Reah is playing some magician-warrior-princess. Yeah, I think we've got our delusions covered. :) Should be fun!