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Courtesy of Tor and their bitchin’ email list, I just finished my 2nd eBook yesterday for free, courtesy of them. I must say, this is a great way for them to get people to read a book they otherwise might not. Case in point is Crystal Rain by Tobias Buckell, the first in what to this point is a 3 book sci fi arc. I probably wouldn’t have picked it up, but now, being the serial story kind of guy I am, will probably buy the next two books in the series soon.

So yes, Tor, good plan on that marketing. Same thing also happened with me for John Scalzi’s Old Man’s War, though admittedly I’d been planning to read that series for some time.

The nice thing about the Tor program is that you can download the book as a PDF, HTML, or in a mobile format, so I can toss it on my phone to read during my commute, or any time really, when I have a few minutes and am a little bit bored. They also don’t put any DRM stuff on them, which means that if I really wanted to I could forward it to a friend, Scalzi even suggested people do that with his Old Man’s War…just asking not to put it up on a torrent site, which I think is completely fair.

So yes, Crystal Rain got off to a rocky start for me, the diction of worlds main characters drove me kind of batty at first, and I still don’t care much for it, but with the entire book, the context of the diction / accent makes sense now.

This was my 19th book to finish on the year…technically the 20th started, but it was a much quicker read than The Great Chicago Fire, which because I wanted something non-fiction, jumped in front of Scalzi’s The Android’s Dream.

Chris and I are headed down to Indianapolis tonight to spend some time with my family. We’ve not been down there since Christmas time, so it will be nice to see everyone. My youngest brother is going to be pretty excited, I think, since I can snag 3 Orioles v. Cubs tickets for May 26th. The Orioles are Scott’s favorite team and the three of us, my other brother Ryan, and Scott, were talking about going to that game already.

So now its Friday, I ain’t got a job, I ain’t got shit to do. Ok, so I do. So I will. Until next time.

19 down, 31 to go.