The book series is called the Bridge Chronicles, and the awesome person is Gary A. Ballard, the author.
Why? The Bridge Chronicles is fucking wonderful. It gets a good solid four from me. A coherent, realistic, believable (except for The Know Circuit, I have a few problems with that) storyline. Very good writing. Human characters with human characteristics. There are four books now, but I've only read the first three.
I would have finished them all in one sitting, but I had to go to Thailand for a little while and the glare from the sun doesn't work too well with the iPad.
(Yes, I read ebooks, no, it doesn't bother me. All I care about are the text and formatting, I don't give a single shit about whether I have the physical copy in my hands. I do plan to hunt down extremely pretty editions of my favourite books, though. I'm something of a hoarder, collector, whatever.)
And why am I pimping the author too? (God, the phrasing makes me uncomfortable.)
Because he has a blog, and from what I see, he's a very logical person who's more than willing to consider various perspectives. He seems to make his decisions based on a consideration of all the angles. (Or most angles, at least.) He's wonderfully coherent.
(I was sold after the single post about gun violence. (It's bloody difficult to do html on iPads, by the way.) Very cohesive and persuasive. Then again I was all for gun control in the first place, and also think "guns don't kill people, people kill people" is phenomenally stupid and blind. It's a crazy generalisation.)
Also Ballard is very coherent about how guns are the most efficient murder weapons available... And I really can't believe America doesn't have basic background checks and doesn't require people to prove that they know how to use a gun. Isn't it basic? Make sure that he isn't a psychopath or a total idiot before handing him a killing device?? America what are you doing?
Anyway, Ballard is the most human author I've ever seen. There's always this distance between actual published authors and the rest of us humans, you know? Like singers, actors, whatever. They sometimes feel like they're polished and hyperaware of PR. So they censor themselves like crazy. Ballard writes awesome introductions for his novels. Ballard also writes semi-personal blog posts about kind of controversial things that might damage his reputation or at least make his fans turn away.
(Hey, it happens. You know Ender's Game and its incredibly homophobic author Orson Scott Card or something? I read the first three books of the series, thought they were good, but somehow slightly off-putting. I didn't find out about the author's idiocy until much much later. And then I tried to read the fourth book and ended up feeling nauseous and mildly disgusted. Apparently he didn't preach much about religion or his personal views in the first few books, so that's why I was able to make my way through the books. Objectively speaking the first three books are good, though!! Really.)
(Also with the Lamplighter trilogy. I read the second? Or third book, and thought that I might like to read the others. I didn't actively like the book, but I'm a little OCD and not reading the whole series makes me incredibly frustrated. So I flipped the first page of the trilogy and the author starts thanking god for everything. I just couldn't. I got a little nauseous and annoyed. I mean, what, did you write that book or did you not? Give yourself a little credit. Your god couldn't help starving kids, but helped you write three books??)
Anyway, point is, Ballard is an awesome human being as far as I know. If he turns out to be a intensely religious person I would be intensely disappointed, but he'd still be logical and coherent, and I'd still like that about him. (But I'd think "irony" every time I think about him.) (Just like how I always think "oh the dreadful irony" whenever I read the 'personal beliefs' section on Orson Scott Card's Wikipedia page.)
So here you go. A book rec and a person rec. I hope I didn't fuck things up too much.
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