Sigh. I finally got around to reading the Edge of Reason last night. Despite the fact that lots of people on the Internets seem to think this was the wonderful book I was expecting, it just didn’t work for me. The plot was kind of interesting, but the rest of the craft just wasn’t there. The only review I could… Read more →
Category: Books
Sunday night quick book links
As I write this I am watching the Australian movies made from Shane Maloney’s books about Murray Whelan. You may remember that those books were some of the big successes from my first Australian trip, and that I even mentioned the movies when I wrote that stuff up. Well, my usual online sources didn’t make the movies available, but just… Read more →
Friday Night Book Links
I love “give us an obscure favourite” pieces. From this recent one at the Village Voice I can see myself looking for Harold Q. Masur, Dorothy Dunbar, and Don Carpenter. The only guys there I was already familiar with are Harry Stephen Keeler (much touted by a certain popular genre author), Amis (who I am generally less impressed with than… Read more →
Just Read, To Read
The last book I read: Lye Street by Alan Campbell. I read Scar Night earlier this year during my Australian sojurn, and thought it was quite good, especially for a first novel. This is a prequel that focuses primarily on two storylines: one that highlights the madness of the angel Carnival, the other of which deals with the reconstruction of… Read more →
Explainers
That’s a sample page from a book I’m really enjoying reading at the moment: The Explainers by Jules Feiffer. (You can see some other sample pages at The Comics Reporter, or even cooler check out the slideshow on Flickr.) Here’s how the publisher describes the book: In 1956, a relatively unknown cartoonist by the name of Jules Feiffer started contributing… Read more →
Same As It Ever Was
I helped make Mexico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefits of Wall Street. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912. I brought… Read more →
In which I embody the Internet as infinite recursor
So, Jeff VanderMeer, author of many things (including frightfully good stories about mushroom people) linked to my post below about pseudonyms. He’s gone with the “rather laugh than cry” route and has introduced a new Internet meme for book nerds: So, what’s your literary pen name? THIS IS THE OFFICIAL FORMULA (as created by, um, me): (1) Use the first… Read more →
Ions played instead of notes
This is how things happen: First, author Sarah Monette mentions a LiveJournal that posts a poem every Monday. I follow this link and make a note to come back later and look for poets I am not familiar with. And as I start looking over the list the first thing that grabs me is a post of Thylias Moss’s poem… Read more →
Bookish Bits: A Miscellany
Check out PodCastle, a new podcast of readings from in the F/SF genre. They got my attention with their first reading, of Peter Beagle‘s Come Lady Death. There are several more stories there now, as well. More details on Anathem, the new Neal Stephenson. Looks to be another monster of a book. And, I’m thinking, we’re going to be seeing… Read more →
Bookish Bits: Pseudonyms
OK, I’m comfortable with the idea of pseudonyms for authors. Sure, when I was a kid and first ran into the concept (I think it was when someone told me that the Eric G. Iverson guy whose stories I liked in the digests had novels under another name) I was a little shocked, but I’m used to it now. Some… Read more →
Bookish Bits: Small Press Publishers
I give a disturbing amount of money to Subterranean Press and Night Shade Books for some of their fine editions. They seem to print a lot of stuff that I want to have–hitting both my tastes in literature, in that they print books I want to read and own, and my tastes as a frankly insane collector type in that… Read more →
Bookish Bits: Vance Integral
That’s Jack Vance over there. I’m a fan. I’m enough of a fan that I wanted to sign up for the Vance Integral Edition when they were taking subscriptions. It played into my two compulsions: collecting all the good writing, and collecting fine or rare editions of the good writing. At that time I didn’t have the money sitting around.… Read more →
A Humument
I was recently in a discussion of books as art object. Usually when I’m in a conversation like that it’s about fine limited editions, but this time it was about books that are works of art in a more conventional sense. I cited the Codex Seraphinianus, and the person I was talking to cited A Humument. I admit I was… Read more →
More Santayana
While that last piece was read at Santayana‘s death, I’m slightly more enamoured with a piece he wrote on the death of a friend, simply entitled “To W.P.“. It’s not too long, so you could go read the whole thing. Here are two bits that particularly resonate with parts of my personal philosophy: Another, if I would, I could not… Read more →
The Poet’s Testament
George Santayana began as a poet, and, though he came to be known as philosopher, teacher and critic, a poet he remained. There was nothing blank, free or modern about his verses’; they rhymed, and what he had to say often sounded like a translation from the Latin classics, with which he was intimately familiar. When he died in Rome… Read more →
