Best Served Cold is hella entertaining.
I’ll probably pick up the first law books at some point in the future.
I chose as a chaser for The Red Wolf Conspiracy, Winterbirth by Brian Ruckley and I’m digging the mood and tone and all the stone and sword-ery, but I’m still waiting to find out how he feels about Women. In the first 100 pages they don’t do anything more than squirt out babies and tidy up messy rooms, so if it turns out Mr. Ruckley is an author who isn’t interested in putting into his books any Women with agency, this will be short visit to the world of Thanes.
I finished The Long Goodbye by Raymond Chandler earlier this week, finally. Really, really amazing stuff. It’s the first book of his that I’ve read, and I’ll surely be reading more. I gather that there’s something of an effort being made to rehabilitate his reputation a bit and get him recognized as the literary author that he was, and based on this book, it’s definitely deserved.
This week was a Vonnegut double-header: Armageddon in Retrospect and Look at the Birdie. Armageddon in Retrospect is just ok… it has some good pieces, but the theme wears a little thin at some points. I really recommend Look at the Birdie, though. There are a couple of weak stories, but most of them are really good, and it’s neat to see stories that, while clearly in Vonnegut’s style and at his level of quality, are bright and upbeat and have none of the jaded cynicism of most of his work. Which I love, don’t get me wrong, but as a fan, it’s pretty cool to see a different side of the man.
I just finished Odd Girl Out by Timothy Zahn, the third book in what is now apparently called the Quadrail series that started with Night Train to Rigel. The new book comes out next month. Can’t wait!
I just finished American Gods by Neil Gaiman. I liked it a lot! Before that I finished The Great Derangement by Matt Taibbi. Reading both books together was kinda weird!
Now I am off to read some post-apocalyptic short story collection called Wastelands, stories of the Apocalypse. It has a Stephen King story in there, which will be interesting since I haven’t read anything of his in a long time.
Wastelands has some good stuff in it. The Orson Scott Card story was surprisingly good, and the one about the People of Sand and Dust (or something) is amazing.
I just started something called Winter’s Tale by Mark Helprin, and WOW. What an amazingly written book. It’s wonderfully poetic but still totally grounded, and always relates to the ways the characters see the world. Really wild stuff happens, too. The book opens with a horse escaping his stable and running through the dawn streets of a seemingly turn-of-the-century Manhattan. Then a dude who’s getting chased by a gang of thieves (and who is himself a master thief) jumps on it’s back and rides it thru downtown, escaping the police by riding into a vaudeville theater and interrupting a stripper by riding the horse onstage, wowing her with dashingness, then galloping off into the street again.
There’s also already the aforementioned gang of thieves plotting to steal a gold shipment to make a purely golden room high above the city, and the plotting is taking place in a flooding system of highly pressurized tunnels far below the city.
It’s a totally original book. Crazy shit keeps happening, but doesn’t seem that crazy in the story; Helprin plays it matter-of-fact and a little magical, so it seems like a natural thing for a desperate father and mother to hollow out a small model ship and place their baby into it so he can be guaranteed a good life in America. I really can’t wait to read more.
Yes, it was a wonderful book. Unfortunately, nothing else by him that I read was as good :-(.
I just finished the first Joe Pitt book, because it was a kindle freebie. It was OK, but I think I’m off Charlie Huston – I loved “Caught Stealing”, and I thought “Six Bad Things” was very good, but the third book was just more of the same. And this one was fine, but didn’t really do much for me.
I’ve started Peter Watts’s “Blindsight”, and it’s interesting so far. I almost wasn’t going to bother with it – I liked “Starfish”, thought “Maelstrom” was dull, and couldn’t finish “Behemoth.” But I’m glad I decided to give it a shot.
Helprin is a little inconsistent, though his writing is always phenominal. I actually like Soldier of The Great War better than Winter’s Tale. (The first half of Winter’s Tale taken by itself would be my favorite book but it falls off in the second half whereas Soldier of The Great War is solid front to back.) Refiner’s Fire is also really good.
Freddy and Frederika was beautifully written but a bit too silly for it’s own good. Memoirs of Antproof Case I couldn’t finish in two tries.
That said, Helprin is still one of my favorite authors on the basis of Winter’s Tale, Refiners Fire and SOTGW. I can’t think of another author who stimulates my mind’s eye the way Helprin does.
Finished Neuropath. It was pretty much as expected - lots of hammering on the idea that we exist simply as biological processes in our brain, which seems pretty clearly behind the Dunyain in the Prince of Nothing books. Also very dark. It was an okay read but I think if Bakker doesn’t find something else to write about soon I’m probably going to pass on his books in future.
I loved Winter’s Tale too. I read SOTGW and his book of short stories, Ellis Island and he never really got that magic back. Then I stopped reading his stuff because I didn’t want to be further disappointed.
I loved that consumption somehow makes you beautiful, so you’re going to die, but your life force is somehow shining out of you while you’re alive, like a sparkler vs. a candle.
Also, didn’t he do a bunch of kid’s books with the Polar Express guy?
Weird thing about that Wastelands collection … either I’ve read it before, or the Stephen King story is in some other collection, because as soon as I started reading it I knew what the story was. I went on to the next story though and it didn’t have the same sense of familiarity.
Just started Blindsight by Peter Watts. I can already tell I’m in for a heck of a read-- I don’t mean ‘enjoyable’ (although I have it on good authority it will be) so much as ‘Ok, I better get up to speed with emergent trends in transhumanism and nanotechnology if I’m going to keep up’.
“The End of the Whole Mess” is a short science fiction story by Stephen King which was first published in Omni Magazine in 1986, and later published in the Nightmares and Dreamscapes collection.
Ah HAH!
Thank you, that makes sense then, as I am pretty sure I read Nightmares and Dreamscapes. I really thought I was going more bonkers than usual.
King’s story is taken from his Nightmares & Dreamscapes collection, which came out in the early 90s. I’m still interested in the book, though, so please share your overall take when you’re done! (It seems DoomMunky liked it and how can I not trust a DoomMunky?)
EDIT: Weird, the two previous posts didn’t show up for me until after I posted, making me look teh slow.
I picked up Jonathan Lethem’s The Fortress of Solitude. The main character is only a few years older than me, so it was pretty incredible reading about what was basically my lifespan in the book. Plenty of parallels, although his experience was basically the mirror image of mine.
Honestly the book was cathartic for me in a way, and the conclusions reached the character actually answered some questions I’ve been asking myself about how I can put my own past into perspective.
There’s a bit of magical realism in the book that happens to parallel a plot I’d had kicking around in my head for a long time. One less story to worry about getting to. I’ve got plenty of other ideas.
I’m about halfway through now and I will say that some of the stories are extremely depressing. “The People Of Sand and Slag” is one of the first stories that’s made me cry in a long time. The collection is very good and there haven’t been any really weak stories so far, at this point I would recommend it but make sure you have some Zoloft handy.
I finished David Weber’s By Schism Rent Asunder, the second installment of his AAR of some lame EU3 mod. His kingdom, Charis, got some good alliances and he’s racing up the tech tree. OMG, he’s using some blatant hacks, though. There’s no way he should be able to level that quickly AND attack other nations w/o a badboy penalty AND get some incredibly helpful Event triggers. If he’s going to cheat like that he should be playing on a higher difficulty level. Plus he pauses the game just before a huge battle next turn–why didn’t he just update the AAR after the battle? I might check out the next one from the library to see what happens next.
I also breezed through Larry Gonick’s The Cartoon History of the Modern World, Part II. I’ve been reading and adoring the Cartoon History series since my freshman year of high school, when I found Volume 1 of Cartoon History of the Universe on a library shelf. This last volume brings us up to the present. As he rushes through the 19th and 20th centuries, it’s almost as interesting to see what he leaves out as what he includes. Aside from some weird editorial errors (typographical mistakes and one strange duplication of phrases in juxtaposed panels), this is a great capper to a highly recommended series.
I’m reading Warren Ellis’ Crooked Little Vein on a coworker’s recommendation. So far (about page 60) it’s like listening to Margaret Cho trying to describe the plot of American Gods, except without the gods. I don’t think I like it.
I thought it wasn’t all bad, but the wide-eyed description of absurd fetishes found on the Internet gets old fast, and the plot is just dumb, such as it is.
It’s very difficult to write a wacky absurd story; I think one pitfall is treating the story like it’s a joke so the events don’t matter and there is no internal logic.