Sunday, November 18, 2007

Reading Into the Past, Week of 11/18

I haven't done this in a while, but content has been sparse lately, so I'm trying to make myself write about bookish things more often. So, with luck, "Reading Into the Past" will make a major return.

This week the number is 9, so these are the books I was reading this week in 1998:
  • Mark Schultz, Cadillacs and Dinosaurs (11/11)
    The first collection of Schultz's gorgeous-looking Xenozoic Tales series; I read the next two later in the week (see below). By the time I got to this series, the initial acclaim had died down, and it had been clearly stalled or defunct for a while; even the short-lived TV show had come and gone a few years before. I think I got the three of them cheap as remainders from Edward Hamilton (a great mail-order bookseller from Connecticut from whom I used to buy giant boxes of books). The plot is decent action-adventure stuff with a goopy ecological center; it's set a few hundred years in the future, after an ecological collapse sent most of humanity into underground cities, from which they emerged to find a lush, dinosaur-filled jungle. (Which makes it a weird ecological message, too.)

  • Patrick O'Brian, The Hundred Days (11/12)
    The nineteenth Aubrey-Maturin novel. I read them all starting in 1993-1994, and then the last four or five as they were published, but I'm afraid I can't remember clearly what happened in which book. Some day, when I have time again, I hope to re-read them all -- but that will have to wait at least another decade.

  • Mark Schultz, Dinosaur Shaman (11/13)
    Volume two of the collected Xenozoic Tales.

  • Roz Chast, Childproof (11/14)
    A collection of New Yorker (and New Yorkerish) cartoons about parents and children. Single-topic cartoon books, especially those by one cartoonist, tend to get a bit same-y, but this is quite good -- though Chast does have quite a few recurrent themes and scenes.

  • Mark Schultz, Time in Overdrive (11/15)
    Volume three of the collected Xenozoic Tales.

  • James Thurber, Lanterns & Lances (11/16)
    I don't seem to still have this book, and I'm not completely sure what was in it. I'd read the big Library of America Thurber collection the year before (at Worldcon, actually), and had been picking up other Thurber books where I could. (And that was difficult, since the LoA volume was very big, and had cherry-picked Thurber's best stuff out of all of the books with his name on them). Lanterns & Lances seems to be the last book of Thurber's work published before his death, so it's probably not his best stuff. (The fact that I do have several other Thurber books, and don't have this one, tend to imply that I thought that way in 1998.) Still, Thurber is a great American humorist, which means that he can still make readers laugh and think half a century after he died.

  • K.W. Jeter, Star Wars: Slave Ship (11/17)
    First in a trilogy that I didn't manage to finish reading, partly out of the press of time and partly out of lack of interest. I've read a few Jeter books, here and there, and never loved any of them. (Though he's always seemed like a writer I should love, so I tried a number of times.) Maybe I never hit the right books; I did read more of his sharecropped stuff than his original novels. But, nearly a decade later, this does not stand out as more than a mediocre tie-in novel; I could name a dozen Star Wars books off the top of my head that I'd recommend long before this one.

  • Nick Hornby, About a Boy (11/18)
    I've always liked Hornby's books; possibly more than they've warranted. There is something slippery and facile about them; possibly more and more as he's gone along. But I found this novel emotionally true, if not the deepest thing in the world. It later turned into a decent Hugh Grant movie. (I know there are those for whom the phrase "a decent Hugh Grant movie" is an oxymoron, but I'm not one of them.)
A pretty typical week from back in my salad days of reading. (Said salad days stretched from about 1991 through 1999 or 2000, either when I suddenly had two kids or the older one started demanding more time and attention. I also started interacting with other people via the Internet about that time, which didn't help.)

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