And here we go again…
- I’ve been reading Jeff’s daily reviews of the books in the Penguin Great Ideas series. While I don’t think I’m interested in trying to read all sixty of them in sixty days (despite Jeff’s examples and the exhortation of the Harvard University Press) I am very impressed with the presentation of the volumes, and have cherry-picked a couple that I want to get around to in the near future. Maybe that’ll inspire some posts.
- My long awaited copy of Escape From Hell (here’s a review) has arrived. It jumped a few hundred books to end up about 3rd down the to-be-read queue. While I’m waiting Duncan is entertaining me with meditations on whether or not that little Turkish Delight loving traitor deserves to die. As is usual for him, it’s lengthy but also well worth the read.
- Given that I’ve read and enjoyed 4 of the 5 books on this particular best of 2008 list, I probably have a very good motivation to go seek out The Gone-Away World by Nick Harkaway.
- Some recent(ish) favourites at Tor.com: a focus on Clark Ashton Smith, who you will not be surprised to find is my favourite of the old Weird Tales crowd. Nightshade is helping me replace my raggedy paperbacks with nice hardcovers.
- Some recent(ish) favourites at Tor.com: In one entry my interest is substantially raised in both an existing book, and a forthcoming book, and I get a free story in both readable and listenable form. How did I not hear about this book from any other source?
- Some recent(ish) favourites at Tor.com: Bringing some love to Scott Westerfeld’s Risen Empire books (a.k.a. Scott’s last not-YA books). As much as I enjoy Scott‘s YA stuff (and I’ve used the Uglies books to definitively prove to people that YA can do all the things that “adult” science fiction can do) this kind of just makes me wish that there was sense
To see what this means, go here, and scroll down to the “When are you going to write more adult fiction” question. in him writing for adults again. YA’s gain was a loss to adult SF for sure. - Hey look, there’s a new YA book coming out from Jonathan Stroud. As I quite enjoyed Stoud’s previous work, The Bartimaeus Trilogy, which was both well-written and politically and socially subversive (particularly when viewed through the YA lens), I’m looking forward to this one.
- Popping over to comics, I was both happy to finally have finished Urasawa‘s Monster when the final volume came out last month, and sad that it was over. There’s some discussion of the series over at Christopher Butcher’s blog–and I should note that I started reading Monster in the first place on Butcher’s recommendation, and I’ve handsold the series to at least ten of my friends since.
- On the mystery front, I’ve read only 5 of the books on the January Magazine list (with Winslow‘s book probably being the best of the 5), but their writeups don’t motivate me to seek out the ones I haven’t read.
- Also from the “how did I not hear about this already file” is the NESFA project to do a six volume Collected Stories of Roger Zelazny. That’s pretty much the definition of a must buy, as soon as they’re ready to sell. (And I have to find this out from an Australian? Yay for the Internets, I guess.)
- I found Charlie Stross’ ruminations on the reasons for genre novel length, and the following comments, a very interesting read. It’s even more interesting when paired with Walter Jon Williams’ stepping up to point out the elephant in the room. (As an aside, for someone like me who has WJW on his “automatic buy” list, and has had for almost a couple of decades now, reading this bit in the comments was absolutely heart-breaking: “all I know about the sales staff is that they’re always rejecting my best ideas. The editor tells me, ‘The sales staff will never understand this,’ and that’s that, another fine novel that will never see the light of day.” At least I’ve got This Is Not A Game to look forward to–Wheeler says in March–and apparently another one after that as well.)
- Back to comics for a second: Fantagraphics is after my wallet this year. A preview of their 2009 releases sees me spending a lot more money on their line than I historically have. A Prince Valiant collection–there’s no way my LCS will let me avoid buying that, what with Foster being a local, a swanky Usagi Yojimbo collection, a new collection to follow up on that big Locas collection, a followup to that crazy Fletcher Hanks book, …
- Speaking of being after my wallet, we should mention the king of that, Bill Schafer and his Subterranean Press–definitely the champions of producing things that I am forced to buy. Already this year he’s announced new Jack Vance books, a new Blaylock story about Langdon St. Ives, and a print edition of Metatropolis, all of which I’ve dutifully signed up for. He could well be the ruin of me.
- 2009 will also be bringing me the third Ambergris book. I just got my fancy edition of Shriek last week, too.
- And let’s stop for tonight with Jincy Willet bringing us the most challenging madlibs on the Internets.
