SF Book Meme

How could I not do this one? I got it from The Tensor.

1. Science fiction, fantasy, or horror?
   These days, I think fantasy noses out SF in my reading tastes, but not by much. The dreary SF is annoying me more than the paint-by-numbers fantasy, at the moment, but that can shift quickly. Horror isn't in the running at all, though I do come across a horror story or novel I can stand occasionally.
2. Hardback, trade paperback, or mass market paperback?
   Trade paperback by preference: I like the larger type and page size, but soft covers makes it easier to carry. (This somewhat mirrors my usual reading pattern: bound galleys to read, hardcovers to keep.)
3. Heinlein or Asimov?
   Heinlein; he's a more interesting writer to begin with, and an immensely better prose stylist.
4. Amazon or brick-and-mortar?
   I use both, and it depends on what I want. If I need to get a specific book (usually for work purposes), I'll either order it from BN.com to the office (same-day shipping in Manhattan) if it's in print, or search up copies on ABEbooks if it's not in print. For myself, I usually do my personal book shopping at Midtown Comics and the Montclair Book Center, because I like browsing through books.
5. Barnes & Noble or Borders?
   No preference; they're the same thing, as far as they affect me.
6. Hitchhiker or Discworld?
   Discworld. Even Douglas Adams didn't like the Hitchhiker series that much, and it shows in the later books. Pratchett likes writing stories, and has a lot of stories to write.
7. Bookmark or dogear?
   Bookmark. I mark up books for production pretty regularly, but otherwise I try not to damage them.
8. Magazine: Asimov's Science Fiction or Fantasy & Science Fiction?
   I know both Gordon and Sheila, so I can't answer this honestly. (I also haven't had time to read fiction magazines for ages, though I did subscribe to F&SF for a year or two in the mid-90s -- and, I think -- read about three stories that whole time.)
9. Alphabetize by author, by title, or random?
   Unread shelves: by genre and size (roughly -- I have sections for mass-markets, mysteries, mainstream, and SFF, and the latter two are divided into larger and smaller format books), and then by author.
   The main bulk: by format (oversized books on the bottom shelves, otherwise hardcover/mass-market/trade paperback sections), except for classics and a couple of reference shelves. Then by author. Within author, by date of first publication (though series stay together).
10. Keep, throw away, or sell?
    Keep, far too much. Sell, quite a bit. Donate to library sales, every year or so when I get up the energy.
11. Year's Best Science Fiction series (edited by Gardner Dozois) or Year's Best SF Series (edited by David G. Hartwell)?
    I mildly prefer Gardner's books, but that's only partly because his tend to be slightly more literary -- the other reason is because they're so huge, and usually contain a few novellas. But I've been reading both since David started doing his book, and I expect to continue to read both as long as they both are published.
12. Keep dustjacket or toss it?
    Keep, of course.
13. Read with dustjacket or remove it?
    Usually with, unless it's a particularly big book that I'll be reading for a while (and I'm worried that it will get dinged up).
14. Short story or novel?
    I read novels more than short stories, I think. But I read a fair bit of short stuff, too, and I usually want to read more short stuff than I do.
15. Harry Potter or Lemony Snicket?
    I like the Potter books, but Lemony rules.
16. Stop reading when tired or chapter breaks?
    Stop reading when: a) the bus has arrived at its destination, b) my lunch hour is over, c) the children/wife/cat require attention, d) some other calamity has occurred. I don't get to choose when I stop these days.
17. "It was a dark and stormy night" or "Once upon a time"
    "All this happened, more or less."
18. Buy or borrow?
    Buy. Actually, by preference, get a publisher to send me for free or order from my company's warehouse, but those aren't options open to most people.
19. Buying choice: book reviews, recommendation, or browse?
    I'm so plugged in to reviews and recommendations that nothing surprises me. For a new (to me) writer, it's generally personal enthusiasm from people whose opinions I respect (whether they're reviewers, readers, editors, or whatever).
20. Lewis or Tolkien?
    Tolkien, by a country mile.
21. Hard SF or space opera?
    Space opera. I don't like equations in my fiction, and I do prefer characters that have at least one dimension. (This only applies to stories written while I was alive; I've found I can't stand space opera from before the '60s, so my preferences invert for older works.)
22. Collection (single author) or anthology (multiple authors)?
    I read collections much more than anthologies, and rarely read original anthologies at all.
23. Hugo or Nebula?
    Hugo, but it's a mild preference. It's more that I'm annoyed by the Nebula's best-works-of-two-years-ago rotating eligibility system than anything else.
24. Golden Age SF or New Wave SF?
    New Wave, baby. I grew up on Moorcock and Ballard, Ellison and Silverberg. That is my Golden Age.
25. Tidy ending or cliffhanger?
    I can take a slingshot ending if it's done well. Otherwise, I prefer something in between -- not tying up all of the ends tidily, unlike real life, but not ending at what feels like a chapter break, either.
26. Morning reading, afternoon reading, or nighttime reading
    Whenever is good for me. I don't tend to read in the evenings these days, but otherwise it's throughout the day, when I have time.
27. Standalone or series?
    I don't have a simple preference here; it really depends on the author and the subject.
28. Urban fantasy or high fantasy?
    How about non-epic secondary world, can I choose that? I don't have any simple preference here, either.
29. New or used?
    New by preference, though, at this point, I've read or studiously avoided reading everything published in the field for the past fifteen years.
30. Favorite book of which nobody else has heard?
    Hard Landing by Algis Budrys. A short novel, published quietly in the mid-90s, which is one of the best "aliens among us" books ever written.
31. Top 5 favorite genre books read last year? (in no order)
    Farthing by Jo Walton
    The Lies of Locke Lamora by Scott Lynch
    20th Century Ghosts by Joe Hill
    The Jennifer Morgue by Charles Stross
    The Fair Folk edited by Marvin Kaye
32. Top 5 favorite genre books of all time? (in no order)
    Creatures of Light and Darkness by Roger Zelazny
    The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester
    The Eyes of the Overworld by Jack Vance
    The Stress of Her Regard by Tim Powers
    The Dunwich Horror and Others by H.P. Lovecraft
    
33. 5 favorite genre series? (in no order)
    Steven Erikson's "Malazan Empire"
    Gene Wolfe's interconnected "Sun" series
    Jack Vance's "Demon Princes"
    Zelazny's (first) "Chronicles of Amber"
    Robert Silverberg's original "Majipoor" trilogy
    
34. Top 5 favorite genre short stories? (in no order)
    "Fondly Fahrenheit" by Alfred Bester
    "Prayers on the Wind" by Walter Jon Williams
    "The Man Who Walked Home" by James Tiptree, Jr.
    "The Deathbird" by Harlan Ellison
    "With Folded Hands" by Jack Williamson
    

For a meme, this stays remarkably on-topic, and seems even to have been created by an adult. I'm impressed.

Book-A-Day #199 (1/31): Galactic North by Alastair Reynolds

This was Reynolds's second collection of last year (along with the essentially simultaneous Zima Blue and Other Stories), and I'm now, once again, essentially caught up on his books. (If you don't count the fact that I never finished Absolution Gap.)

This one was originally published in the UK -- the American edition is coming along in June -- and it contains stories set in his "Inhibitors" universe.

There are only eight stories here, but I think six of them -- all but "A Spy in Europa" and "Dilation Sleep" -- are novella-length. In fact, three of those novellas are original to this book, which is pretty uncommon. (They add up to nearly half the total length of the book.)

(The other reprinted stories are "Great Wall of Mars," "Glacial," and the title story, for those counting on their fingers.)

If you like modern space opera, you should be reading Reynolds. He's less violent than Asher, less depressive than Baxter, and I wish I could think of something else he's less of than another British writer whose name starts with C. (Oh, well.) More importantly, he's a good, thoughtful writer who can do both characters and Big Space Stuff. And, for those to whom this matters, the Inhibitors universe is obsessed with the Drake Equation in the modern manner and relies on purely STL travel.

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Is Harry Potter Urban Fantasy?

In a comment on this post, Johan Larson asked:

Speaking of urban fantasy, there was a brief thread on rec.arts.sf.written recently on whether the Harry Potter series should be considered urban fantasy. What's your take on this?

Now, I could have answered with another comment, but I figured I'd move it up here, in case anyone else cares.

I've agreed, mostly, with the rasfw consensus, which is why I haven't posted there: the Harry Potter books don't show any of the usual accouterments of urban fantasy (in either its original, Charles de Lint/Emma Bull form, or the modern, Hamilton/Harris/Harrison/Buffy version), so I don't think it makes much sense to think of them that way.

But let's take them one at a time:

1) The original definition of urban fantasy was, to dumb it down, "Rock 'n Roll Elves" -- traditional mythological creatures (usually Celtic, though occasionally of Greek or other continental folkloric origin) in the modern world, interacting with modern people. Those modern people also usually were on the fringes of society -- runaway kids, itinerant musicians, and the like. There's still plenty of books like that out there -- I recently read Holly Black's "faerie" novels, which are very much in that vein -- but it's been eclipsed by the massive popularity of the newer type.

The Harry Potter books could superficially fit into this category -- they have some very traditional folklorish tropes, and Harry starts off as outcast and downtrodden as anybody -- but they're not about the intersection of the magical with the everyday, as that kind of urban fantasy usually is. Harry Potter is a Fans Are Slans story, a Lost Prince story, yet another retelling of the King Arthur story. There's nothing ordinary about Harry: that's the point.

2) The modern type of urban fantasy -- which I prefer to call "vampire shagging," though that's probably derogatory and not always accurate -- is more focused: almost always about vampires and/or werewolves in the modern world. Where de Lintian urban fantasy looks back to Andrew Lang, the Grimms, and a thousand other folklorists, the vampire shaggers look back to '30s horror movies, and, occasionally, to Bram Stoker. (Fairies and other folkloric folks do pop up in vampire shaggers, but they're just one more magical thing, not the point of the exercise.) Type 2 Urban Fantasy relies on the appropriation of horror tropes for mystery or romance plots, so calling them fantasy can be seen as a little odd. (Though they do solidly fit in fantasy; fantasy is a large and capacious genre, willing to go along with a lot of things.)

Harry's world has werewolves and vampires in it, but they're set dressing; they exist because the Potter books operate on the assumption that every magical thing really exists (and the better-known a magical thing is, the more it exists and the more important it is). But vampires aren't (to borrow a feminist comics term) Sexy Sexy Danger in Harry Potter, which is definitely their purpose in the vampire shagger novel. Also, the vampire shagger is primarily a woman's domain -- the main characters are overwhelmingly young women -- and that's not the case with the more traditional, male-dominated world of Harry Potter.

So I don't see Harry fitting into either version of "urban fantasy" -- his stories start from different premises and go to different places. I'm sure there's some current urban fantasy that's responding to Harry Potter (and that there will be more, as the younger generation of readers grows up and starts writing their own fantasy novels), and that sub-genres will continue to merge, coalesce, and re-form. But, for now, they look like different things from here.

Book-A-Day #198 (1/30): Alias, Vol. 3: The Underneath by Brian Michael Bendis and Michael Gaydos

Yes, another one. I do like the dialogue, and I like Jessica Jones's narrative voice. And the fact that the only super-folks who show up are third-stringers at best (two different Spider-Women! Speedball!) is also nice.

It's got that gigantic "Parental Advisory EXPLICIT Content" purely because people swear -- the violence is less explicit and common than most longjohns comics, and the sex is mostly implied (there's no "nudity" that I can remember -- people are naked, but they're movie-naked, and you never see anything). Yes, if it were a movie, it would be R-rated, but only because Jessica's every fifth word is "fuck." (Let's see -- it would say "R for Sexual Situations and Pervasive Obscenity.") Mainstream comics, as usual, are desperately conflicted about creating stories for grown-ups, but they can do it, now and then, if they really want to.

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Today's Quote

From Chris's Invincible Super-Blog:

"So: A Star Trek comic that re-tells classic episodes from the Klingons' point of view, and there's a Klingon language variant? If you're a guy who collects comics and you find yourself still able to have sex with a woman, this is the sort of thing that'll clear that right up."

Oddities of the Online World

There appear to be three separate LJ feeds for this blog -- antickmusings, andrewwheelersf, and gbhhornswaggler. Just another one of the efficiencies of the modern world, I suppose.

(I check these things because I want to know if people are commenting there on my posts -- though, so far, the answer is mostly "no.")

Book-A-Day #197 (1/29): Now We Are Sick edited by Neil Gaiman and Stephen Jones

This is a collection of horror poetry -- well, jokey horror poetry really. It's mostly doggerel, and I don't generally like horror to begin with, and my tastes in poetry are a bit odd as well.

Which is all to say that I couldn't stand this. It's exceptionally lightweight (by design), so saying any more than that would be overkill. It wasn't for me, but it was short, and it only hung around the house for about a year before I managed to read it.

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My Boskone Schedule

This year, for the first time ever, I'll be at the renowned Boskone science fiction convention in Boston, which is coming up in just about two weeks. In case anyone else is going to be there, and wants to say hello -- or is interested in seeing me pontificating about things -- here's what I'm scheduled to do that weekend:

Sat 12:00 noon
Other neglected authors
Small presses are doing a good job getting a number of authors in print, yet some great SF authors, who everyone should read, are still neglected. Even authors who have some stuff in print can be considered "neglected." To start, each panelist will take one author and make a case for him or her. Some we might consider -- though that's up to the panel -- are Pangborn, Lafferty, Kornbluth, Leiber (yes, Leiber can now fairly be called that). Even Sturgeon probably qualifies. Gwyneth Jones, Joanna Russ.

Sat 3:00pm
The Fantastic and the Mundane: A Look at Urban Fantasy
What is urban fantasy? A discussion of definitions dealing with what is essentially another umbrella term: we have vampires, werewolves, wizards, elves, ghosts and more all falling under the concept of urban fantasy or authors identifying themselves as urban fantasy writers. Is
it new? Who is writing it? Some people self-identify as urban fantasy writers. Some think of themselves as something else. And some reject the categorization. Is Neil Gaiman urban fantasy? Margaret Atwood? Anne Rice? What makes them different or same as Simon R. Green, Jim Butcher or Laurell K. Hamilton?

Sun 2:00pm
The New Millennium: SF and Fantasy in the 21st Century
We're now more than five years into the new century. Who are the major authors writing SF and fantasy today? What are the major works so far in this century? And who will be the major forces and what will be the major trends in the next 10 or 20 years?

Book-A-Day #196 (1/28): Death's Head by David Gunn

It's a first novel, in the MilSF vein, and it publishes in May. That, really, is about all I should say.

Maybe I can add one thing -- I don't think of myself as someone who particularly likes MilSF (or military Fantasy), but I keep enjoying specific books in that area. (Steven Erikson, for one big example. John Scalzi's first two novels. And so on.) I mean, I'm not generally choosing to read books in which rejuvenated Nazis save the world, but, in general, I have a much higher tolerance for "Sir, yes, sir!" and detailed weapons descriptions than I thought I did.

Well...and I can't say I'm thrilled about that cover. Nothing about it says "SF" to me. (Maybe that's the idea?) It just looks like they're trying to trick people who liked Jarhead into picking up a SF novel, which seems like an odd strategy to me. But I don't sell books into bookstores, and I'm sure plenty of people hate the covers I do, so I'll just register mild bemusement, and leave it at that.

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Book-A-Day #195 (1/27): Give Up? by Whitney Darrow, Jr.

OK, this is going to look like another one of my cheat books -- and it is, in a way -- but it became today's book-a-day very naturally.

Our last pile of kids books were due back at the library today, so I chucked the Things in "the dark car" (remind me to explain that some time) and set off to the library. There, as usual, I was the one poking around and finding books (for them to read, I hope), while Thing 2 played educational computer games and Thing 1 read issues of Nintendo Power magazine.

I was trying to find some Garfield books, since they both love that strip right now. (Six to eight-year-old boys -- sounds about right, yes?) The computerized card catalog said a few books were on the shelves, but it lied to me -- lied! But looking for them got me right into the middle of the shelf or two of comics/graphic novels/whatever. I almost took out Epileptic for myself, but, as always when I pick it up, I felt a great urge not to read it, and so I put it back down. But I did find this book of New Yorker cartoons, and -- since I love those -- I took it.

Reading a 128-page book, where each page contains at most two gag cartoons with a single-line caption, does not take very long, so I poked through it at the library, at my mother's before and after dinner, and then once I got home. It was published in 1966 by Simon & Schuster, and every single cartoon in it originally appeared in The New Yorker.

Darrow is not generally considered one of the great New Yorker cartoonists, and this book shows why. It's pleasant and often funny, but it's very much of its time and milieu ('50s suburban America, middle-class and white as you can get). The Peter Arno-ish art is the best thing about the book; it's nicely loose and loopy -- not timeless, but more interestingly an artifact of its time than the writing is. There's a long parade of guys in suits and their frumpy wives, and the cartoons mostly take place in either offices or living rooms (with a smattering of doctors, lawyers, sales clerks, and beatniks) -- which is just a longer way of saying that they're middle-rank, mid-century New Yorker cartoons.

The copy I read had been rebound at some point (I think 1973), so scanning the cover wouldn't help anybody. So, instead, I scanned the first, title, cartoon.

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Incoming Books: 27 January

What, again?

I can explain: the boys wanted to go to what they call "the card store" (because it sells Yu-Gi-Oh and other trading cards, though it's really more of a comics shop), and we were going to be in the neighborhood anyway, so I caved in.

Thing 1 bought five packs of Naruto cards (which he was disappointed to discover are not a game, but the old-fashioned kind of collectible trading cards); Thing 2 bought a Pokemon plush (he has a couple dozen of them now, but this is the first one he bought with his own money), a Pokemon board book, and a pack of Yu-Gi-Oh cards. And I just had to buy something, too, right?

I did find Vol. 4 of Path of the Assassin (which my normal comics shop had been out of yesterday). But did they have The Grave Robber's Beautiful Daughter? (The shop guy said no, and seemed never to have heard of it or Richard Sala...or, worryingly, Fantagraphics at all.) Did they have The Push Man? (Still no luck, though he admitted that he'd heard of Drawn and Quarterly. OK, this is a small strip-mall store catering to twelve-year-old boys, but come on!) I wanted to buy something else, but they didn't have Ode to Kirihito. I didn't even consider looking for Fun Home. I've been vaguely looking for Ragmop and Shenanigans -- I've never seen either in person -- and, well, I still am. But this shop did have Alias Vol. 3, so I got that.

I also looked for Fortune & Glory, so I guess Bendis really is growing on me at this point. I think there's only one more volume of Alias after this, though I seem to remember that Jessica Jones turned up elsewhere in the Marvel Universe afterward. (Though, if she's in Civil War or some equivalent stupid mega-crossover, I really don't care in the slightest. Those things are just pure idiot bait.)

Book-A-Day #194 (1/26): Alias, Vol. 2: Come Home by Brian Michael Bendis & Michael Gaydos

See Vol. 1 for my boring thoughts on that subject.

In this volume (mostly concerned with a case about a missing teenage girl in upstate New York), we learn that Jessica Jones is a self-destructive alcoholic. (We suspected it in the first book, but we could have put that down to her having a bad day. Something that happens once could be coincidence. A pattern of behavior is more worrying.)

The dialogue is much less fragmented here than it was in Powers, which is probably why I went on to Vol. 2 of this rather than Vol. 6 of Powers (though I expect I'll get there, eventually). This is also more of an everyday-life kind of series, which I like -- I guess I don't mind superheroes in my funnybooks, as long as they know their place and don't start angsting or emoting all over the place. (Yes, that was a veiled reference to the fact that Superman is crying again.) Super-heroing is in the background here; characters either appear out of costume (Luke Cage, Scott Lang) or wander across the background (there's a nice passing fight scene among Spider-Man, the Human Torch, and Doctor Octopus).

I still think the "mutie" thing in the Marvel universe is overdone -- as I've said before, MU people have the infallible ability to tell mutants from other kinds of super-beings, and just hate the former (up until Civil War, I guess, and probably again as soon as that reboots). That is dumb, but I guess it's too deeply ground into the carpet of Marveldom to come out now without major steam cleaning.

My qualms about the deeply silly fictional universe it's set in aside, I liked this book, and I'll probably be back for Vol. 3 next month.

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Incoming Books: 26 January

Went to the comics store today, and, despite the fact that I couldn't find a whole bunch of things I was looking for (The Push Man and Other Stories, Vol. 4 of Path of the Assassin, The Grave Robber's Daughter by Richard Sala, and Vol. 6 of The Legend of Grimjack), I still managed to spend a lot of money.

My last trip was before Christmas, though, so that was one reason. I got two issues each of Sonic the Hedgehog and Teen Titans Go! for the boys, and five little digests (mostly Marvel, and many from the 70% off shelves, so they were pretty cheap) for them as well.

For me, I got two actual pamphlet-type comics (Castle Waiting and Gumby), and a number of book-shaped objects:

• Spider Kiss by Harlan Ellison
  It's a nice edition, and it's one of the few Ellison books I don't already have, in one form or another.
  
• The Cartoon History of the Modern World by Larry Gonick
  Wasn't this supposed to come out in October? I've been waiting forever for it to turn up at the comics shop, since I pre-ordered it there.
  
• B.P.R.D.: The Universal Machine
  More Hellboy spin-offs.
  
• Queen and Country: Operation: Storm Front by Rucka and somebody
  Goddamn! I thought this was an old one, but it was in my pull file, so I took it. Looking at the shelf now, I see I already have it. Someone's getting a Queen and Country present soon, I guess.
  
• Alias, Vol. 2: Come Home by Bendis and Gaydos
  Which I read on the ride home, so it will be the next post.

And when is League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: The Black Dossier going to come out? I need me some more Victorian super-team action!

Quote of the Week

"Opportunity knocks only skin deep."
- Launchpad McQuack

More Bizarre Searches

I think I'll try to leave this one as a draft for a while, to pick up more of the oddball ones:

• Someone in Orange county, California, at about 6 AM local time on 1/22, desperately needed to know about "fritz that's 2 anaheim holly redhead," but got to my June archives.
• Google Romania led one surfer from "weekend by fay weldon analysis" to my Fan Fiction label.
• A person in Rochester, NY -- who apparently cannot spell -- wanted "gent warts picture" and got to my root page. That's terribly dispiriting for all sorts of reasons. (What makes it worse is that he used WebMD for his search.)
• A websurfer in Urbandale, Iowa wanted to find "matchstick men and stephanie seymour," and got here.
• In Swansea, England, they're eager to know about "dragonby treacle mine," and I guess my "You Know: For Kids" label fits, somehow.
• Someone from Korea searched for "club. book 46" and got my Book-A-Day post about Yoshitaka Amano's Fairies.
• A person smack-dab in the middle of Spain wanted to know about "birthday presents for 80 year old," but found my post about Thing 2's birthday presents. (Thing 2, by the way, is 6.)
• Someone at the Directorate of Logistics in Fort Rucker, Alabama, firmly believes "little miss sunshine boring!!!!" Sadly, I didn't agree.
• On January 25th, two separate people clicked over to me from the friends page of a LJ user named eldritchhobbit. (I thus discovered that this blog has at least two LJ feeds, since the one Mr. Hobbit was using wasn't the one I'd previously known about.)
• I also learned that eight people have saved this blog's URL on del.icio.us.
• The question on the mind of one person in Greenville, South Carolina: "is jenny mccarthy and gena lee nolan the same person"? The unhelpful answer: my "Smutty" label.
• One of my LJ feeds has also been "friended" by hapendfro, who otherwise seems to read a lot of Harry Potter fanfic. Looks pretty slashy, too. I have no idea what the connection there is...
• In the quiet town of Lake Oswego, Oregon, there once was a little old lady who desperately wanted to know about "advance search antick furniture." Alas, like so many accidental visitors here, she had a little trouble spelling "antique." And so she got to some of my publishing posts. (How do I know she's a little old lady, or that Lake Oswego is sleepy? I don't, but it makes a better story.)

And that's about a week of vaguely amusing and/or interesting links, so I'll post them now.

Book-A-Day #193 (1/25):A Box of Matches by Nicholson Baker

Books do tend to sit around unread for long periods of time at La Casa Hornswoggler. One of the reasons I go on a book-a-day tear is to shake up those stacks, and pull things out and actually get them read. Sure, those tend to be very short things, but it's the thought that counts.

(Books tend to be vaguely triaged here: some things I read immediately, or at least as soon as I can get through work reading. Others, usually classics, are picked up because they're a nice edition, or back in print, or whatever -- and I don't seriously intend to read them anytime soon, though I always have hope. The vast middle category is made up of books I want to read "soon," but, as Toad once said, soon was over a long time ago, and now it is later.)

This is exactly one of those cases -- a book from the vast middle (I've had it since late 2002 sometime, since what I have is a bound galley, and it was published in January 2003), which is short enough (178 pages) to be read easily in one day. And now it's done.

I've only read Baker's work a bit before; I know I read Double Fold, the book about libraries getting rid of newspaper archives. (I was reading it on 9/11, so I remember that I read it.) I think I read Vox, but maybe I just remember that copies of that were on the discard piles around the office for about two years. Other than that, I don't think I've read him before.

This seems to be in the vein of his first two novels (The Mezzanine and Room Temperature) -- close looks at very small parts of life, with lots of introspection and a fair bit of close observation of (the narrator's) behavior and foibles. OK, let's be specific: this book has thirty-three short chapters, in each of which our narrator lights a fire, very early in the morning, and thinks about his life. (I know certain folks from rasfw are recoiling in horror, if they're reading Antick Musings to begin with.) There's no real plot, no larger story: it's just a series of views of one man's life, over just more than one winter month.

But I liked it; Baker is an engaging writer, and I read for character and ambiance as much as plot to begin with. And, most importantly, now it's off the to-be-read shelves.

(Side note: that's a perfect cover, and it has exactly thirty-three matches on it. The galley doesn't credit a designer, but, whoever it was: very nice, sir or madam. Very nice.)

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Gorilla Suit Day is Coming Around Again

And I thought you folks might want to know about it. You may now go about your daily business.

Incoming Books: 24 January

Four things this week (so far):

• The Other Book...of the Most Perfectly Useless Information by Mitchell Symons
  Third in the series; to go onto the bathroom book back-up stack. (Which is itself getting a bit out of hand -- I've got at least five books over there already, which means they'll last for at least this whole year.)
  
• Secret Life: The Select Fire Remix by Jeff VanderMeer
  OK, confession time: I now have this, Shriek, City of Saints & Madmen, Veniss Underground, and (goes to check) yes, the original edition of Secret Life piled up in various places. I've read about half of Veniss. (I'm almost as bad on Gene Wolfe; I have Soldier of Sidon and his last three short-story collections still to read.)
  
• Totally Weird and Wonderful Words by Erin McKean
  Probably also for the bathroom book stack.
  
• On the Wealth of Nations by P.J. O'Rourke
  This I'll probably get to quickly; it's short and I love O'Rourke's writing. (And I do seem to get to non-fiction faster than fiction these days.)
  

And, someday soon, I need to get out to my usual bookstore to buy Calvin Trillin's About Alice and Martin Amis's House of Meetings...and I bet I won't manage to walk out buying only those two books.

Book-A-Day #192 (1/24): I Shouldn't Even Be Doing This! by Bob Newhart

I read a bunch of the deluge of comedian's books in the mid-90s, so I felt morally obligated to read this one, especially since my company was doing it and I could get a copy for free. (Well, "morally obligated" is awfully strong. How does "it sounded like a short, funny book" strike you?)

This is clearly an as-told-to book; Josh Young is credited in the acknowledgements as "who gave structure to my 'Stew'". (For those of you out of the publishing loop, words like that in the acknowledgements exist to explain to the in-clued who actually wrote the words in the book. I bet Newhart talked to Young, and Young taped it all and boiled it down; that seems to be the usual process.)

This is clearly a memoir: it's loosely structured, skips about in time, and very surface-y. It's really a collection of anecdotes and bits of routines -- the written equivalent of watching Newhart on various talk-show couches for three or four hours. Of course, who expects anything more than that from a comedian's book?

It was pleasant and I got it done in one day. At this point in book-a-day, that's all I'm looking for. Tomorrow: a collection of jam-jar labels, or something equally mentally demanding.

The Fabulous Book-A-Day Index!

AKICIF: What Clark Ashton Smith Texts Are Preferred?

Explanation of title.

Let's say you had your choice of texts of Clark Ashton Smith stories. Which are the "good" ones? As they were originally published in Weird Tales and elsewhere? Some cleaned-up later edition? His manuscripts, which have never been published in their intended form?

Or what?

(Yes, I'm asking for help with my homework.)

Wha?

Glenn McCoy's political cartoon for today confuses me. I'm a nice guy, so I won't steal it for my own convenience -- you folks can click on the link, then come back.

Who is that supposed to be? Hilary? Bush? Someone else? I'm stumped.

Book-A-Day 191 (1/23): Year's Best SF 12 edited by David Hartwell & Kathryn Cramer

The first of at least three "best of the year" collections I expect to read this year is the mass-market paperback from Hartwell & Cramer, publishing in June from Eos.

Since the version I read might not even have the final line-up of stories, I won't say a thing about what's in it. (I will mention that reading a book of short stories where they all run together, and the section breaks seem to have disappeared in the formatting, is an interesting experience. I got a very early version of this, and it shows.)

I did scan the cover flat (which also might not be final), so there's a little visual interest.

The Fabulous Book-A-Day Index!

Book-A-Day #190 (1/22): Michael Swanwick's Field Guide to the Mesozoic Megafauna

Yesterday was as close as I'd come to breaking the book-a-day streak: the book I'm reading for work (and thought I'd be able to finish today) had to be set aside at lunchtime, since I had an interview to do (with the Adventures in SciFi Publishing podcast; watch for it in a few weeks). And I'd cleared out the last of my emergency back-up half-read pile over the weekend.

Things looked bleak for the ol' book-a-day.

But then I remembered the super-secret pile of quick reads, and pulled this out of it. It's probably the thinnest excuse for a "book" that I'll ever commit, but it looks like a book, so I'm counting it.

This very slim stapled volume (32 pages, I blush to mention) contains two short-short story cycles: "A Field Guide to the Mesozoic Megafauna" (originally posted on Swanwick's publisher's website to promote his then-new novel Bones of the Earth) and "Five British Dinosaurs" (from Interzone). There are eighteen different stories here, but they are all, of course, very, very short.

But they're also Swanwick stories, so they're witty and fun. I don't recommend this to anyone but a huge dinosaur fan (or Swanwick completist), though I should add that Bob Walters makes a cameo appearance in one story.

The Fabulous Book-A-Day Index!

Book-A-Day #189 (1/21): The Best American Comics 2006 edited by Harvey Pekar

Certain nefarious forces on the Internet (I'm not being more specific because I don't actually know who they are or what their problems are) have been dumping on this book, and praising the Ivan Brunetti Anthology of Graphic Fiction, Cartoons, and True Stories instead.

I'm not done reading the Brunetti book (which has its strong points, but some very glaring weaknesses as well), but I don't get it. Apparently the series editor of Best American Comics, Anne Elizabeth Moore, is a divisive figure in some comics circles for reasons everyone is supposed to already know -- maybe that's the underlying reason for the hating.

I'll get to the Brunetti book when I finish it (for now, check out Jeff VanderMeer's review of it at Bookslut), but The Best American Comics 2006 is a very nicely put together, cleanly designed, and well-chosen collection of comics stories. There's nothing here I found embarrassing (unlike the Brunetti book), only a couple of excerpts of longer works (which don't really work well in an anthology), and some really good work by people I hadn't heard of before (like Joel Priddy's "The Amazing Life of Onion Jack" and Jesse Reklaw's "Thirteen Cats of My Childhood"). Since Pekar was the editor of this edition, there's a lot of autobiographical and journalistic comics, and a bit of pure left-wing agit-prop (like Lloyd Dangle's "Street-Level View of the Republican National Convention"), but that's to be expected. The whole point of having guest editors in a series like this is to let those editors view the year through their own lenses.

The notes on the contributors (and their own notes on their works) are long enough to be useful, and the fact that they're in the backmatter (so they can be on slightly cheaper paper, I imagine) is OK. I hadn't thought about the problems of headnotes in comics anthologies before, but, now that I have, I imagine that you either have to devote a full-page for the notes to each story, or move all of the notes into front- or backmatter sections. (This is because comics stories are already, and inherently, organized into pages in a way that prose or poetry are not.)

All in all, I liked it a lot. I hope the series continues, and does well; I'd like to keep getting these every year.

The Fabulous Book-A-Day Index!

Gala 1000th Post!

Actually, there's nothing special about this post, but -- since, like most of humanity, I have an inordinate affection to large, shiny, round numbers -- I figured I should mark the occasion anyway.

You could go back and see my 100th post, which features my favorite political joke, if you want.

Odd fact: even though it started more than six months later, the SFBC Blog is also nearly at its 1000th post. (That's because posts there tend to be short and punchy, and posts here tend to be long, discursive, and pointless.)

And that's all I've got here. So we'll just move on to #1,001, and so on...

Tomorrow We Begin the Snake-Handling!

I ran across this three times in my Bloglines feeds before I broke down and did it myself:

You know the Bible 95%!

Wow! You are awesome! You are a true Biblical scholar, not just a hearer but a personal reader! The books, the characters, the events, the verses - you know it all! You are fantastic!

Ultimate Bible Quiz
Create MySpace Quizzes

Yep. That's the boy who won the Bible Olympics two years running; he's still in the back of my head, somewhere. (But most of the questions are actually really easy -- and at least half of the possible answers are obviously wrong. I just wish I knew which questions I missed.)

I Am Flabbergasted

...to realize that no one has published a biography of Maggie Thatcher under the title The Greatest Tory Ever Sold.

On second thought, that might be more appropriate for a book about John Major...but, still, it seems to have only been used for the title of a profile of Jeffrey Archer in an Australian paper, and it's a better pun than that.

Today's Tongue Twister

Picky Nicky nitpicks picnics.

Four adults spent much of today's belated 6th birthday dinner for Thing 2 putting various permutations of that together, but I like this one. It's not quite as tough as it should be, though. I'm still thinking.

Movie Log: Lone Wolf and Cub: Baby Cart at the River Styx

Lone Wolf and Cub: Baby Cart at the River Styx is the second in the series of six movies made in Japan in the early '70s from the manga series of the same name by Kazuo Koike and Goseki Kojima.

I liked the first one quite a bit, so I figured I'd run through the rest -- they also all seem to clock in just under ninety minutes, which is nice.

This one also adapts some specific stories, but I'm not going to try to track them all down in the twenty-eight volumes of Lone Wolf and Cub, since I don't think anyone really cares. There are three major stories adapted here, I think -- one where Ogami Itto battles a family of female ninjas, one where he's feverish and holed up in a shack, and one where he fights three samurai brothers to kill an informer.

The kid who plays Daigoro is still amazing -- he can't be more than three, but he's either completely natural or actually acting. (According to IMDB, his name is Akihiro Tomikawa, and he appeared in these six movies as Daigoro, and nothing else.) The rest of the cast is at least solid, as far as I can tell without being able to understand a word anyone says.

But this movie felt a bit more like a pedestrian action movie than Sword of Vengeance did; there are a lot of scenes of flashing swords, spurting blood, and dropping body parts, but it didn't add up to as much as the first book did. It's funny, but the violence is actually more comic-booky in a movie than on a comics page -- as strokes of ink, it has a stylized, designed look that keeps it from seeming quite as dumb as red fountains of blood. Still, I think I'll keep going, since there's interesting stuff going on here.

Book-A-Day #188 (1/20): Luba: The Book of Ofelia by Gilbert Hernandez

This isn't actually the latest Gilbert collection of Love & Rockets stories, since the next book (Luba: Three Daughters) has already been published, but I finally finished it -- it had been sitting around for a while.

(In my defense, I tend to arrange the comics-and-such stack by size, and these books are album-sized; so all of the trade-paperback-sized books were on top of it, weighing it down. And there were a lot of them for a while -- all of the comics-y stuff from Book-A-Day came off that pile.)

I've said some of what I have to say about Gilbert when I read Sloth (his first standalone, non-porn graphic novel) a few months back. That would probably be a better place to begin with Gilbert than this book; there are five full-length Gilbert
books that came before this one (plus his half of more than half a dozen shared books). He does make a strong effort to explain the tangled relationships up front, and the series did have a major dislocation a few years back (moving from the fictional Latin American town of Palomar to southern California), but these stories still build on a multi-generational soap opera, and it's better to know the backstory first.

There's that big Palomar book to dive into, if you're so inclined -- it reprints all of the stories in this world up to three years ago -- and there's also a new series (starting in March) that will reprint all of those earlier stories in fat little manga-like volumes. But Gilbert Hernandez is one of the masters of modern comics, so, if you're interested in comics stories about people who don't wear their underwear on the outside, you should check him out.

The Fabulous Book-A-Day Index!

Book-A-Day #187 (1/19): Dark Mondays by Kage Baker

I don't really have much to say about this book; it's a new collection of Kage Baker short stories (all unrelated to her "Company" universe, and pretty much all dark fantasy), and it's quite good.

The amazing thing, for me, is that five of the eleven stories here -- including "The Maid on the Shore," which just sneaks over the border to novel-length -- are originals. So anybody who likes Baker has no excuse not to buy this; nobody but her, her agent, and the Night Shade boys saw these stories before this book was published.

(I'm not sure how Baker manages to produces so many short stories, especially when they're all such high quality, but, given the evidence here, I wouldn't rule out a deal with some infernal power.)

The Fabulous Book-A-Day Index!

Quote of the Week

"Conservative, n. -- A statesman who is enamored of existing evils, as distinguished from the Liberal, who wishes to replace them with others."
- Ambrose Bierce

The Other Place

Oh, in case anyone has been trying to access the SFBC Blog over the last day or two, the server move is going on right now, so you're probably getting either error messages or a page that's more than a week old. The experts in this area know about this already, and assure me that everything will be fine, Real Soon Now.

(Maybe today, maybe tomorrow -- but Soon.)

Pondering

A question for the masses:

If you came across an application for a job under the name of a major boss from a relatively popular video game -- said name being a perfectly respectable American-type name, though -- would you:

• a) assume it was some kind of odd joke?
• b) feel really sorry for this person and try to forget about it?

I'll almost certainly do b), but I just had an odd moment.

Book-A-Day #186 (1/18): Phaic Tan

The cover credits Santo Cilauro, Tom Gleisner & Rob Sitch as writers, and gives a subtitle, "Sunstroke on a Shoestring." Oh, and there's one of those shallow-u accents over the "a" in Tan.

Phaic Tan is the "sequel" to the fake travel book Molvania, which was about a fictitious Eastern European country. This one takes the same approach to Southeast Asia.

It's not as funny as Molvania (since there aren't that many different jokes in this area), but it's attractively designed, and it's still pretty funny. Quite a lot of the humor is based on punny names (such as my favorite, the Donkekong River), so one's tolerance for that will determine the reaction to the book as a whole.

I see the line is still expanding -- I admire their capitalist drive, but I do wonder about quite how much more punishment this particular equine can take. I know I'll keep reading them if I can find them for free, but I'm not sure I'd spend any actual money on the things.

The Fabulous Book-A-Day!

Movie Log: Arthur and the Invisibles

The boys and I hadn't seen anything in the theater for a while, so I gave them the choice of Happily N'Ever After and Arthur and the Invisibles on Saturday. This is the one they chose, and I can't really complain, since neither one is supposed to be very good.

I should say that this wasn't a bad movie, just a bit slipshod and hurried. The live-action acting is perfectly acceptable, and the character designs for the CGI characters are interesting and move well. But the movie suffers from an excess of stunt voice casting, can't decide what it's audience is (or how to target that audience), and has a tin ear for dialogue. (Particularly of the I'm-talking-too-much-too-fast-to-get-all-of-my-words-in style.)

The CGI scenes also often seem rushed, especially during action sequences and as scenes change -- I'm not sure if that's a reflection of a tight budget, or an eagerness to get to the "good stuff" -- but it makes parts of the movie hard to follow visually. Arthur seems to have a little too much plot in general for its length; it should have either been ten minutes longer or a bit more simplified.

(And, as others have pointed out, casting Madonna as the love interest -- yes, it's more middle-school infatuation than anything else, but her CGI character does appear fully grown up -- for ten-year-old Freddie Highmore is more than a little squickworthy. The camera also seems to linger on CGI-Madonna's butt much more than is strictly necessary.)

Still, I'm glad I saw it on a big screen. Given the pacing problems with the CGI scenes, I expect this will not play well on normal-sized TVs; a lot of this movie will turn into visual mush at home. It's most interesting as a CGI test-bed; to see what this particular studio has done with the form -- there's some nice animation here and there. If your kids drag you to see it, try not to let the dialogue annoy you too much, and don't think too hard about the dropped plot points -- just watch the pretty pictures.

Minion Update

The Editorial Assistant job has been posted; anyone who wants to apply can click on that link and try to get a job in the glamorous, high-paid world of book publishing.

C'mon, it'll be fun!

Book-A-Day #185 (1/17): The Ghost Brigades by John Scalzi

I run hot and cold about reading genre books for pleasure -- sometimes, there are so many things I want to catch up on (like this, and the two Al Reynolds collections, and Kage Baker's Dark Mondays, which I think will be next) that I jump from a work SF book to a pleasure fantasy novel, or vice versa. Other times -- usually when I'm reading things for work that are not entirely to my taste (he said, politely) -- I find I have to run as far away from genre for my other reading as possible.

No points for guessing what kind of week this was.

So far Scalzi is writing zippy novels that are fun and quick to read. (I've read Agent to the Stars, Old Man's War, and now this.) This one is a bit more serious and resonant than Old Man's War, though it's set in the same universe (and could be called a sequel, if one was being loose with the term).

Parenthetically: I'm still hoping that the Old Man's War-iverse is not exactly as we have been led to believe. When I think about the background, there's a lot of stress on my suspension of disbelief: see my post on Old Man's War for the details. To make it worse, in this book we learn that there are six hundred intelligent starfaring races in our neighborhood (without quite defining how large that neighborhood is or how many inhabitable planets there are), all of which are at roughly technological parity and a large fraction of which are at least at cold war with everybody else. Somebody's thumb is on the butcher's scale there, and if it's not some entity in this universe, then it must be Scalzi, which would be too bad.) On the other hand, we learn in this book that the human government has been explicitly lying about/covering up some important information about the wider universe, so Scalzi may have an answer to this dilemma up his sleeve. I hope so.

Ghost Brigades has many of the virtues of Old Man's War, as well: it's a book that's easier to just keep reading than to put down, which is rarer than it sounds. It's written in limited third person, with several important viewpoint characters, but it still moves along as swiftly as the first-person Old Man.

I liked it, and I'll keep reading more Scalzi books, even though my boss is the one who acquires him for the SFBC. That's a pretty serious recommendation from me; he's a writer in the genre who I'll go out of my way to read when I don't have to.

The Fabulous Book-A-Day Index!

Book-A-Day #184 (1/16): Abandon the Old in Tokyo by Yoshihiro Tatsumi

Abandon the Old in Tokyo is the second in a series of books reprinting the comics work of Tatsumi (or should I say Yoshihiro? I'm not sure which one is the family name). The first one, The Push Man and Other Stories, came out about a year ago, and got excellent reviews, but I managed to miss it. This one collects short stories Tatsumi published in 1970, as I believe Push Man covered 1969.

These are dark, adult short stories -- very different from the big manga series that we're used to seeing. Tatsumi was one of the founders of the underground comics movement in Japan; he even coined the usual term for describing these kind of stories, gekiga. (The timing of his career makes him seem like the Japanese R. Crumb or Gilbert Shelton, but I suspect he's more like a Japanese Will Eisner -- someone trying to use the tools of a broad, youth-oriented popular medium to tell very specific, grown-up stories about more rounded, less savory characters.)

I recommend this guy highly to anyone who reads modern American alternative comics -- the Hernandez brothers, Chris Ware, Seth, Craig Thompson, Dan Clowes, and particularly Charles Burns. Tatsumi was doing something not too far removed from them over thirty years ago, on the other side of the world. They're still great stories (though some of them are very dark; he could be the manga Joyce Carol Oates), and the warts-and-all look at a very different society is fascinating. (If "Beloved Monkey" isn't in the next Best American Comics annual, there's no justice in this world.)

I'll be looking for Push Man the next time I'm at my comics store, and I hope Drawn & Quarterly continues with this series -- I want to see more of this guy's stuff.

(Oh, and today is the six-month anniversary of Book-A-Day; I've now been doing this for half a year. So how come the stacks of books don't seem to be getting any lower?)

The Fabulous Book-A-Day Index!

Book-A-Day #183 (1/15): Alias, Vol. 1 by Brian Michael Bendis and Michael Gaydos

I must be liking Powers more than I think, since I seem to be seeking out other, similar comics written by Bendis. This is the next obvious step -- Powers is "cops in a superhero world," and Alias is "ex-minor superheroine as PI in the Marvel Universe."

This is a somewhat grown-up version of the MU: sex and bad language exist here, as they don't in most of the regular MU comic books. That has horrified some Internet commentators (and thrilled others), but, coming to this soon after Kim Deitch, the mere existence of those things in comical-book form doesn't mean anything in particular to me. Oh, my, the F-word and Captain America on the same page; aren't we cosmopolitan?

Bendis's dialogue is growing on me, or maybe I'm just getting used to it. It is generally speaking naturalistic, but it's a very stylized kind of naturalism -- I suspect Bendis deliberately styles his dialogue on David Mamet. The swearing works in context, because the people here swear like normal people (or, rather, the ones who do swear do so as part of their regular speech, and the characters who wouldn't swear don't toss in some curses just to keep up). The overlapping speech isn't used as much here as in the early Powers issues, and Bendis has limited himself to only having people repeat themselves three or four times, for the most part. It reads a bit like dialogue that's meant to be performed rather than read, but it works most of the time. It's a very talk-heavy series, so Bendis does some layout tricks to make it all work. (That's not quite code for "a lot of talking heads," but close.)

The viewpoint character is Jessica Jones, a PI who used to be the very minor superheroine Jewel (apparently she was briefly partner or sidekick to the Carol Danvers Ms. Marvel in the '80s -- this is all retcon, though; the character didn't really appear at that time), and who now mostly investigates straying spouses, alone, in New York. It pays badly, but she seems to be OK at it. As the series starts, it's not clear how long she's been doing this, though it does seem that she doesn't try to trade on her minor superhero contacts or to use her powers (low-end brick: limited flight, strength, probable invulnerability on some level) in her work.

This book collects the first nine issues, which cover two cases: Captain America's secret girlfriend and Rick Jones's abandoned wife. (The series isn't really set up that cleanly, though, and I like that: it meanders in and out of the cases as they come up, and her private life, such as it is, also comes in and out as thing happen.)

I like the character of Jessica Jones, though she's a bit passive. On the other hand, that may be deliberate -- she's a character in a universe where the usual reaction to anything is to punch someone through a wall, so her occasional lack of affect and reaction is clearly different from what we expect in a Marvel comic. And she feels much more like a real human being, with conflicts and doubts, than the usual long-underwear types. So I'll probably look for more of these; I think the series is collected in three more volumes.

The Fabulous Book-A-Day Index!

Book-A-Day #182 (1/14): Slan Hunter by A.E. van Vogt and Kevin J. Anderson

This is the upcoming sequel to Slan (which I read yesterday). I haven't seen a cover for it yet, and can't find one on the web, so this entry will be text-only.

Slan Hunter is coming in July, and it picks up as if the end of Slan was a chapter break and as if sixty-five years hadn't intervened. According to interviews with Anderson I've seen, he worked from a full outline and about a hundred manuscript pages of text from van Vogt (which van Vogt wrote about 1990). That seems right to me -- it's plotted like a van Vogt novel and it read more like van Vogt than like the KJA novels I've read.

I won't say anything about the plot, other than to mention that, if you know anything about van Vogt's method of plotting, you can assume that the status quo at the end of Slan does not last very long once this book gets going.

One last note, to all of the people who complain that modern SF is too long and talky: this is the book you want.

The Fabulous Book-A-Day Index!

Book-A-Day #181 (1/13): Slan by A.E. van Vogt

If you don't know what this novel is, you're reading the wrong blog.

I'd read this as a teenager, and I found that I'd forgotten most of the van Vogtian twists and turns of the plot (which I guess was a good thing, since it made it surprising this time through). I've found that a lot of old pulpy books (like Burroughs and "Doc" Smith) leave me cold, but I enjoyed this, and read it straight through pretty quickly.

Oh, sure, it's dated -- any SF story from 1940 is going to be dated now -- but it's a lot more readable than I thought it would be. I was pleasantly surprised.

(And the copy I read was a couple of years old, so it didn't have the new Kevin J. Anderson introduction that I see is now included.)

The Fabulous Book-A-Day Index!

Movie Log: The Matador

Somehow, when I wasn't paying attention, Greg Kinnear became one of our better actors. (I know -- who'da thunk it?) I realized it after watching Little Miss Sunshine last month and now The Matador.

This movie was billed as "Brosnan tries to move beyond James Bond," and I remember some critics talking about how daring he was to be so ugly in this movie. Now, Brosnan does have a mustache, but he's still in good shape (as we see when he walks through a hotel lobby in a small bathing suit and boots), and the mustache isn't that bad, anyway. So if this is "ugly," I can only hope someday I can get to look that good.

The movie itself is more oddball indy buddy comedy (two guys meet cute, and help each other out) than the high-action thriller that very misleading cover off to the left would make you expect. There's very little action in The Matador, and the R rating apparently has nothing to do with violence. (Is that a first for a movie about a hit man?)

So this is a black comedy (in case I have to spell that out -- I though perhaps "comedy" plus "hit man" would pretty obviously not equal "warm and cuddly"), though it's the kind of black comedy in which the blackness is generally outward-directed, not back towards the main characters. It's a funny movie, with great dialogue, and two enjoyable performances from Brosnan and Kinnear. But you have to be able to take hit men who look like Pierce Brosnan in a mustache.

Book-A-Day #180 (1/12): Shadowland by Kim Deitch

Deitch is another comics writer-artist with a very idiosyncratic subject matter; he's a little like Richard Sala (whose The Chuckling Whatsit I read a couple of months back) that way -- though their specific idiosyncrasies are quite different.

Sala's books are all about mysterious plots, femmes fatale, large casts of noir people slaughtering each other for murky reasons, and inky, inky blacks.

Deitch is a bit sunnier, with books generally focused on old Hollywood (and similar entertainments, like circuses, freak shows, and carnivals), buried secrets, and some kind of supernatural element (usually either aliens or demonic cartoon cats). His art is a bit fussier than Sala's, with lots of shading and background details, but relatively cartoony figures.

This book collects a bunch of related stories about the Ledicker Circus, the early Hollywood starlet Molly O'Dare, and the Grafton Curse. (Deitch's most famous character, Waldo -- the aforementioned demonic cartoon cat -- doesn't show up here, but we do have aliens and and race of strangely-powered pygmies.) This is not a comic for kids -- there's quite a bit of violence and sex in it -- but you'd expect that it someone who came out of the world of the undergrounds (as Deitch did).

I think I like the Waldo books best, but they're a bit sprawling at this point, with no obvious center. This is a good one-volume introduction to Deitch, collecting all of the important stories in one of his cycles, and shows off the things he does best.

The Fabulous Book-A-Day Index!

Book-A-Day #179 (1/11): Zima Blue and Other Stories by Alastair Reynolds

Would it be terribly bad form if I namedropped just a little bit? Oh, well: I'll do it anyway. Michael Dirda asked me the other day who I liked in SF these days (he was part of the Secret Cabal I mentioned in my last post), and I of course said "Al Reynolds."

That was partly because I was in the middle of reading this book -- I finished it the day afterward -- but also because Reynolds writes solid stories, with actual science integrated nicely into them, that are only depressing some of the time (for these days, and for a writer who came from the UK, that's a big deal). Oh, and he knows both how plots work and how human beings actually talk to each other and react to common situations (this has been historically lacking in writers who understand real science, as if a mind can only hold one or the other at a time). In other words, he writes Real SF (often With the Net Up, if that matters to you) and Real Stories at the same time.

This is one of two Reynolds short story collections published nearly simultaneously. (So one of them is his first collection; I think this one was a few days earlier than Galactic North.) The other one -- which I might get to later this month, if time allows -- has the short fiction related to his first four novels and set in the Inhibitors universe, while this book collects the miscellaneous stories.

I had both of the Reynolds collections on my shelf, and I think I picked this one up first because it looked shorter. (That's probably not true; the gutters are pretty narrow, so there are a lot of words on the pages here.) And, of course, also because this one is published by Night Shade Books, and I both like those guys and the books they do. (Grey, which I read earlier in the week, was another one of theirs, and I read it almost entirely because they published it.)

I don't feel like running through all of the stories here -- there are nine of them, including "Beyond the Aquila Rift" (which was robbed at the Hugo nominations last year, robbed I tell you) and "Zima Blue" and a new near-future on-earth (something unusual for Reynolds) novella, "Signal to Noise" -- so I won't. They're not all equally good -- some are from quite early in his writing career, and it shows -- but they're all decent, and the best ones are up there with anybody's stories.

To sum up: Well-written stories. Space Adventure. Good Science. What else is there to want from SF?

The Fabulous Book-A-Day Index!

Book-A-Day #178 (1/10): Doom Patrol, Vol. 4: Musclebound by Grant Morrison and various artists

Wednesday night I had dinner with The Secret Cabal (well, one of the Secret Cabals, I guess), so I got home late and had no time to blog then. I'd tell you what we planned, but this was my first Cabal meeting, so I really don't think it's my place. You'll have to wait and see.

Anyway, I finished this off when I got home. It's the fourth volume reprinting Grant Morrison's late '80s/early '90s run on Doom Patrol, with art mostly by Richard Case. By this point, we're up to the middle of 1991, so Morrison was no longer the shock he was in 1989 when his Animal Man started (with Doom Patrol about six months later, if I recall correctly). And we were all used to the bizarre epistemological villains of Doom Patrol by this point (and starting to wonder how many different ways Morrison could threaten consensus reality).

Here we have the big Flex Mentallo plotline, a couple of other weird reality-changers, and the big return of the Brotherhood of Dada at the end. It's fun stuff, and, at the time, it felt like it (this and Animal Man and Shade the Changing Man and Swamp Thing -- all the stuff that turned into the Vertigo line a couple of years later) was going to kick at least part of mainstream superhero comics into something like adulthood. Instead, Image happened soon afterward, the '90s went first grim & gritty and then into distribution hell, and Morrison ended up doing incredibly mainstream comics (Justice League, The X-Men) that I've never been able to bring myself to look at.

So there's a whiff of lost chances here, but only for those who were there at the time. And serialized American comics are all about lost chances now, anyway -- take any long-underwear comic at least fifteen years old, and I can guarantee you that whatever was going on then (new costume, new love, new planet, new cross-over, new team, new powers, new new new) has nothing at all to do with whatever's happening to him now. Long-term continuity is dead, and short-term continuity only exists to sell crossovers.

If the idea of superheros fighting existential horrors intrigues you, start with the first volume of Morrison reprints, Crawling from the Wreckage. You might get to this book eventually, but it's no big deal if you don't.

The Fabulous Book-A-Day Index!

The Outer Limits of Itzkoff-iana

One of the hallmarks of a bad thinker is that he is not only muddle-headed in himself, but that he induces stupid thoughts in others.

Today, we have evidence (via Niall Harrison at Torque Control) that someone named Dan Green has been reading Itzkoff, and taking all of the wrong lessons from him.

Tsk, tsk. Bad form, Itzy.

Son of Things People Searched for and Found Hornswoggler

This was fun the first time I did it, so let's see what's going on now. I get a lot of {famous name} + naked + Playboy searches, because of Playboy: The Celebrities, and a fair number of people who seem to be looking for me or someone like me. But then there are things like these:

• "adolph hitler" swiss salesman fiction -- someone in Cincinatti at about 7:30 on 1/10/07 desperately needed to know about Hitler's career as a salesman in Switzerland, but was unsuccessful.
• Aparrently this picture (work-safe, though it's probably part of a series that isn't) led to this page of mine. Why, I have no idea. Someone in Hockenheim, Germany followed that link.
• Someone from the city of Sana in Yemen searched for "English language books" and got here.
• A reader from Illinois was looking for "birthday fades" and got this.
• Someone else used google.de to find "six day gent 2007" and got me instead.
• Paramus, New Jersey's own someobody-or-other wanted to know about "new jersey syrup smell," but I don't think I was much help.
• Someone from the Midwest wanted "loose sex" -- I know, don't we all? -- and ended up at my post about Ghostbusters and Fast Times at Ridgemont High.
• In Stamford, Connecticut, millions clamor to know about "captain the underpants lego." (None know why.) They are dejected when they wind up here.
• Another German, also from Hockenheim, was on this page listing episodes of the anime series Inuyasha. Somehow that led to me.
• A Google.ca user wanted "70s porn movie," found my post about Inside Deep Throat, and was intruiged enough to move on (two and a half minutes later, implying he/she actually read the darn thing) to my post on Chuck Klosterman's Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs.

All of this fascinating, useless information I found out through SiteMeter, which has now wasted far too much of my time this morning.

Book-A-Day #177 (1/9): Theories of Everything by Roz Chast

First of all, I'd like to begin with a sentence that has never before appeared in the history of the English language: Roz Chast fucking rocks.

This is more-or-less her complete cartoons; the subtitle is "Selected, Collected, Health-Inspected Cartoons by Roz Chast: 1978-2006." If you've ever thought you might want a Roz Chast cartoon collection, this is the one. And if you've recently thought you might want somebody's cartoon collection, might I suggest this one?

There are plenty of good New Yorker cartoonists, but most of them are very New Yorker-y (all those Thurber-derived couples in their living rooms, with the occasional bar scene or talking animal). Chast isn't like that at all. Her cartoons are deeply New York without being the product of seventy years of guys making little drawings at the bottom of the page. (Don't get me wrong -- those guys are really good, and really funny. But Chast is at least as funny, and she takes an immensely wider world as her subject.) David Remnick talks about this a bit in his introduction, saying "Roz is always creating something different: fake greeting cards, a triptych of fake Sylvia Plath poems, a three-page strip in the form of a family car vacation." Chast can switch gears from pseudo-Mankoff to four-times-as-good-as Guisewise within a page. Because she's a woman, she sometimes gets typecast as "domestic," and her cartoons are usually about people's regular lives (as opposed to astronauts, big businessmen, or bartenders) -- but that's because her cartoons come out of real life, rather than other people's cartoons of already cartoony professions.

Chast's drawing style is deliberately loose and stylized -- she's a cartoonist, not an illustrator -- which may annoy the kind of people who like to sniff about how "bad" the drawing is in modern cartoons. (Like Saul Steinberg's anatomy ever made much sense -- drawing can be great even if it doesn't reflect the real world.)

In conclusion: Roz Chast is the shit. And this book is about 400 pages (it's not paginated at all) of Roz Chast goodness.

The Fabulous Book-A-Day Index!

2006: Reading Year in Review

I just closed the books on 2006 (bringing my reading notebook up to date), ending with 345 books read. A lot of those are comics collections and similar stuff, so that's not as impressive as it looks. I won't list them all here, since I have mentioned nearly all of them in this blog at one point or another (and the last six months worth has been covered by Book-A-Day).

I don't have a separate record of "real" books, but I do keep track of stuff I read for the SFBC, which was 91 for 2006. (That's a little low, mostly because the pace of business now means that I rarely have the time to read something unless I'm sure I'm going to buy it.)

My current reading notebook goes back to 1997, and I've fluctuated from a low of 259 books a year (in 2000, after I stopped buying comics for the club and when my first son was young) to a high of 361 in 2002 (when I think I did book-a-day a lot to get rid of short books). I've been over 300 books in a year for eight of the past ten years -- 1999 (the first full year with Thing 1) was the other exception, at 268.

Reading for work has similarly fluctuated, from a high of 159 in 1998 (a lot of that was comics and art books that I was deciding among for the club, but that was also the year I finally broke down and stopped being the SFBC's most prolific report-writer) down to a low of, well, this year. I've also noticed books getting longer, which is a real pain when I need to buy about 65 books a year (and when I'd prefer to read them all first).

Movie Log: Clerks II

Once upon a time, this guy made a movie called Clerks, and it, in turn, made his career. Ten years later, after the failure of a certain big-budget romantic comedy, Kevin Smith retrenched with a sequel. I haven't caught up on all of the Smith films in between yet (he's a geeky New Jersey filmmaker; I feel compelled to see all of his movies -- and, honestly, I have enjoyed all the ones I've seen so far), but I watched Clerks II last night.

It's very nearly an unreviewable movie, and hard to describe, too. The two slackers from the first movie are ten years older, and still haven't done much of anything. (They're also weirdly unconnected to any other friends or family, which the movie keep from being important by taking place all in one day.) Stuff happens, and there is something like a plot, but that's all there as an excuse for the movie -- it's not the movie itself. The movie itself is a series of bizarre conversations about unlikely things, and it's pretty funny, if you can laugh at ATM, porch monkeys, Pillow Pants the troll, and donkey shows. If you can't, you shouldn't be in a Kevin Smith movie to begin with.

Book-A-Day #176 (1/8): Grey by Jon Armstrong

A near-future satire of capitalism, publishing next month, from a new novelist. I didn't love it, but it's a worthy entry in the line of The Merchants of Venus, "Coming Attraction," and "The Sliced-Crosswise, Only-On-Tuesday World." The neologisms are particularly inventive here.

The Fabulous Book-A-Day Index!

The New Model Hornswoggler

As hinted in past posts, the Hornswoggler household is increasing by one -- the boys "convinced" me to let them get a cat (with aid from The Wife).

Her name -- for now at least -- is Marbles, and she joined the household today. So I got a lot less done today than usual, since someone responsible had to stay in the room she's confined to (we're introducing her to the house gradually) to keep an eye on her and provide company. She also seems to...like me.

Anyway, this is her. Her name may change (it was "Marble" at the shelter, but the boys have semi-inadvertently added an -s to that already), and she'll only get bigger. She's roughly fifteen weeks old, an interesting tortoiseshell color, and was from the PATCH shelter in bucolic Pompton Lakes.

Book-A-Day #175 (1/7): Ironside by Holly Black

Book three of the loose YA contemporary fantasy series, featuring mostly the main characters from Tithe, with a couple of the people from Valiant showing up in important roles.

I like the way Holly Black writes, I like her world; my thoughts about some of her characters are, on the other hand, mean-spirited and unprofessional, so I've deleted them. (The two main characters from Tithe return as the main characters of this novel, and I'm not entirely fond of certain stereotypically teen aspects of their personalities, nor can I completely believe that their behavior would lead to their survival.)

There's a strong strain of teen relationship book mixed up in the fantasy here, which I note for those who may have reactions similar to mine.

The Fabulous Book-A-Day Index!

Book-A-Day #174 (1/6): The Complete Calvin & Hobbes, Book Two by Bill Watterson

I read the first of the three volumes in this handsome slip-case quite some time ago, and Book Two has been sitting next to my computer (occasionally under other things) pretty much since then. I've read it in bits and clumps for the past few months, and, last night, I sat down and read over a hundred pages to finish it off, just because I was enjoying it so much.

This one collects all of the Calvin & Hobbes strips from October 1988 through April 1992 (with Watterson's first eight-month hiatus in the middle).

Everything I said about the first volume still applies here: it's a gorgeous book that reprints a great strip excellently. Would that all great strips could get a collection like this, or that all strips would merit one.

The Fabulous Book-A-Day Index!

Welcome to the 21st Century

Yesterday, while driving my boys over to my mother's house for the weekly dinner, I saw a great sight -- a mother (in her early '40s, I think) out in the front yard, playing football with her tween daughter -- on January 6th.

You got your global warming and your shattered gender roles all there in one neat package. I smiled.

Itzkoff Goes Next

It's not an "Across the Universe" column, but I'd be remiss in my duties if I didn't point out that Our Man Itzkoff has a review in tomorrow's New York Times Book Review.

It's for Michael Crichton's current skiffy thriller, Next, and, no, sir, Itzkoff didn't like it.

The over-reaching quote to pull apart this time:

All science fiction has some element of titillation -- a strategy of taking known facts and stretching them to the limits of credulity, for the purposes of both entertaining and enlightening.

I have to run Thing 2 to his gymnastics class now, so I'll leave it as an exercise for the reader to provide counter-examples.

Movie Log: Kind Hearts and Coronets

The Wife and I watched Kind Hearts and Coronets on New Year's Eve, because I'd put it on top of my Netflix queue. (After the debacle of But I'm a Cheerleader!, I wanted a guaranteed funny comedy.)

And, again, it's been a week, so my memory is a bit fuzzy. It didn't start out as funny as I hoped it would, but it settles into a low-key black comedy at about the half-hour mark, and goes along nicely in that vein. I'd hoped for one last twist at the end, but I guess even a black comedy couldn't have a woman murdering her husband (for gain, and getting away with it) in 1947.

Oh, just in case you don't know: this is a British comedy, made just after the war, in black and white, about a young man who murders his way into a dukedom (the film opens with him to be hung for murder the next day, so this is no spoiler). All eight of the people he kills are played by Alec Guinness.

There's a notable extramarital affair in this movie which contrasts interestingly with the one in The Painted Veil (which is set in roughly the same time period -- it's not entirely clear to me when Kind Hearts is supposed to be set, but it feels inter-war).

If you don't expect a laugh-riot comedy of the modern school, and like black comedy, you'll probably enjoy this. It does start slowly (as if it were a straight interwar family saga), but that's just to set the knife.

Movie Log: The Painted Veil

We got the kids out of the house and to sleepovers at the respective grandmothers' on Friday night. (The kids love to do this, and the grandmas almost as much, but timing and logistics are sometimes difficult to arrange.) So The Wife and I were going to see something in a theatre, since we had a free night. The Good German? Only in the city. Letters from Iwo Jima? Ditto. Little Children? The Wife wasn't as hot on it as I was. So we compromised on The Painted Veil, which looked good and which was a period piece. (As The Wife said herself, she'll see anything if it's a period piece.)

It turned out to have more in common with Little Children than I expected, but that was fine. It has the every-shot-a-painting look of the classy slow-moving Merchant-Ivory style of film, but the message is about the opposite of the Merchant-Ivory movies I've seen (which always seem to come down to "follow the instincts of your heart, and everything will come out right"). This one is more about shutting up, knuckling down, and doing what you're supposed to do. (With a side lesson in blackmail and emotional cruelty.)

...and that much has sat here, as a draft, for about a week. I guess I should admit I don't have anything more to say about this movie, and just post the darn thing.

Book-A-Day #173 (1/5): Valiant by Holly Black

A very loose sequel to Tithe, the Holly Black book I read a couple of days ago. A third one, Ironside, is coming -- if all goes well, I'll read that tomorrow.

This won the very first Andre Norton Award (which is to the Nebulas what the John W. Campbell Memorial Award is to the Hugos -- given at the same time, and administered the same way, but Not The Same Thing At All) for YA Fantasy fiction, and I have to say that I liked it much better than Tithe (which was a bit too YA for my tastes -- filled with utterly self-absorbed teens who I wanted to batter heavily with a clue stick).

Anyway, these books are sort of the fantasy version of the YA problem novel, with runaways, teen sex, and drug abuse -- which, of course, has led to much public clucking about them from the kind of Southern librarians/teachers who had wooden poles inserted anally at the beginning of their careers. (I was reading the Amazon reviews a minute ago, and, if they think this book has bad language, those people are ridiculously sheltered.)

I probably wouldn't have gotten to these books if not for work -- the kind of problem novels I read as a teen tended to be the "I'm rich and my parents are divorced and my life is full of Stuff but still sucks until I learn that what's important in life is Good People" type -- but this one is really good. I am so much not the audience for it, though. So take anything I said above that looks negative with about three metric tons of salt.

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I'm Getting a New Minion!

Finally, after months of high-level talks and consultations, we've finally gotten approval to hire an assistant to replace Austen Farrell, who left over the summer.

Given the way the Mills of the Gods grind around here, I doubt I'll even talk to HR about the possibility of placing ads to get some resumes to talk to people to possibly hire one of them until the end of next week at best. Still, I'm on track to finally having someone to do my filing!

If there's anyone out there who thinks he/she/it is qualified to be an Editorial Assistant, and lives within commuting distance of Madison Square Park North, drop me a line at my work e-mail. (Your first test is finding that e-mail address -- it's on this page somewhere.)

(The job itself is mostly soul-crushing office work, but we pay decently for publishing, there could be the potential for advancement eventually for a person who really wants to be an editor, and I'm desperate to get someone in the office to do some of the first-reading. The position supports the SFBC and Military Book Club, so the ideal candidate, I guess, would be an obsessive-compulsive recent Harvard English B.A. who is the world's biggest Baen Books fan.)

I probably won't mention this again until I actually hire someone, but I've been six months assistant-less, so I just had to gloat -- ha! someone else will get to do all of the brain-devouring CMS entry!

Quote of the Week

"All movements go too far."
- Bertrand Russell

Book-A-Day #172 (1/4): Jam-Packed FoxTrot by Bill Amend

It's the latest treasury-sized collection of the comic strip FoxTrot, which I've been reading on and off for a few weeks. There's not much more to say about a book like this, so I'll leave it at that.

The Fabulous Book-A-Day Index!

My Name in Flickr

I got this meme-ish thing from Kathryn Cramer, who has forgotten more about the web today than I ever knew:








Want to try it yourself? Hey, it's fun to Spell with Flickr!


Here's me again:

A Quick Question

Has anyone seen any feeds from this blog since I went over to New Blogger? I don't think I've seen any at Bloglines (though I seem to be spamming LJ with every single one of my old posts every time I added a label).

Under New Blogger, there's supposed to be a posts feed, and a comments feed, but I haven't found new feeds for either of those and (as I said) the old posts feed might not be working.

Book-A-Day #171 (1/3): Tithe by Holly Black

I read this for work, and I'm in the middle of the sequel (Valiant) right now, so I'll just give you this nice cover to look at.

The Fabulous Book-A-Day Index!

Because I Like Answering Long Lists of Questions

There are minor variations on this list, depending on its vector, but I'm using the one I saw Liz Williams answering. If that makes any difference whatsoever...

1. What did you do in 2006 that you'd never done before?

I was a World Fantasy judge.

I'm sure there was something embarrassing related to the kids, but I can't think of anything specific.

2. Did you keep your New Year's resolutions, and will you make more for next year?

I never make 'em, so I don't have to keep 'em.

3. Did anyone close to you give birth?

No, but my cousin will give birth, in another three months.

4. Did anyone close to you die?

No. (Then again, I'm not close to many people, so that's easy.)

5. What countries did you visit?

Aside from the People's Republic of Austin, none.

6.What would you like to have in 2007 that you lacked in 2006?

Plausible, or not?

If plausible, then I'm aiming for a more realistic waistline.

Otherwise, it's the same ol' mansion and yacht.

7. What date from 2006 will remain etched upon your memory, and why?

Nothing comes to mind.

8. What was your biggest achievement of the year?

Nothing I can think of. I'm a professional in his late 30s with an office job and two small kids; it's all a blur of Republicans and meat at this point.

9. What was your biggest failure?

I still haven't won the lottery. Gotta work on that.

My mind-control ray is also still awfully buggy.

10.Did you suffer illness or injury?

No; I'm still slowly clawing my way back from my heart failure in 2002, so I can do without anything on top of that.

11. What was the best thing you bought?

I started giving the boys an allowance; I think that's the best thing I spent money on in 2006.

12.Whose behavior merited celebration?

(Whose syntax elicited incredulity?)

I dunno -- you tell me, you're so smart.

13. Whose behavior made you appalled and depressed?

Most everyone's, starting with anyone who appeared on TV more than twice during the year.

14.Where did most of your money go?

Ah, yes. I'd forgotten my first rule of long-list-of-questions memes: they are aimed at teenagers. For an adult, the answer to this question is always shelter (a mortgage, in my case), with food and similar necessities coming up behind.

15.What events did you get really, really, really excited about?

I don't get really, really, really excited. I topped out at really excited when my first son was born, and that was nearly nine years ago.

16. What song will always remind you of 2006?

I don't listen to the radio, so let's say "Rabbit Fur Coat" by Jenny Lewis.

17. Compared to this time last year, you are

Yes. I am.

18. What do you wish you'd done more of?

Reading, carousing, chasing wild women. (Re: that last. When I was about sixteen, my father -- divorced from my mother at the time, and only very very slightly inebriated, solemnly told me that his current girlfriend was "it," and that he had stopped chasing wild women. So it's probably my turn by now.)

19. What do you wish you'd done less of?

Work, of course -- especially the useless, tedious big-company piffle that steals time for no good reason.

20. How will you spend Christmas?

Will? I see I'm a bit late getting to this meme. I spent it first at home, then at my mother's (for brunch) and then at the in-laws (for dinner).

21. Did you fall in love in 2006?

Nope.

22. What was your favorite TV program?

Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends.

23. Do you hate anyone now that you didn't hate this time last year?

No; my hates tend to persist.

24. What was the best book you read?

I'll say The End is the one, but I've got a whole list.

25. What was your greatest musical discovery or rediscovery?

Rilo Kiley and Ivy.

26. What did you want and get?

I'm pretty settled; I don't have those yearning, I'm-sixteen-and-the-world-needs-to-accommodate-my-needs-right-now desires. My kids love me, but that's not new.

27. What did you want and not get?

Oh, so many things. Let's go with "more reading time," to forestall a long, boring list.

28. What were your favorite films of this year?

Little Miss Sunshine, Thank You for Smoking, Tristram Shandy.

29. What did you do on your birthday, and how old were you?

I don't remember, but it was a Sunday, so I think I slept late. I was thirty-seven.

30. What one thing would have made your year immeasurably more satisfying?

Several million untraceable Nigerian dollars.

31. How would you describe your personal fashion concept in 2006?

Stuff that fits and is clean.

32. What kept you sane?

I don't need to be kept sane, dear. I define sane.

33. What political issue stirred you the most?

Nothing.

34. Whom did you miss?

No one in particular; there are usually more people around than I want to begin with.

35. Who was the best new person you met?

It has to be my fellow WFA judges Barbara Roden and Victoria Strauss. (I'd already met Jeff VanderMeer, and still haven't met in person our mysterious fifth judge, Steve Lockley.)

36. Tell us a valuable life lesson you learned in 2006

If your six-year-old son really wants a cat, you're going to get one.

Today Latveria, Tomorrow the World!

Yet another meme -- this one I got from James Nicoll.

Your results:
You are Dr. Doom

Dr. Doom 71% Lex Luthor 61% Apocalypse 61% Kingpin 59% Mr. Freeze 57% Juggernaut 56% Magneto 54% Dark Phoenix 52% Green Goblin 52% Venom 51% Riddler 47% The Joker 44% Two-Face 44% Catwoman 29% Poison Ivy 27% Mystique 20%

Blessed with smarts and power but burdened by vanity.

Click here to take the Super Villain Personality Test

Hm. Doom, Lex, Apocalypse, Kingpin...I sense a theme going there.

Book-A-Day #170 (1/2): This Book...of More Perfectly Useless Information by Mitchell Symons

Today was a tough day. First I thought I'd finish the novel I was reading, but I had to run out at lunchtime to buy a new palm-top (my old one died over the vacation, and now my schedule is in utter disarray) instead of reading -- so that book will probably get done tomorrow. Then I was reading a graphic novel at home this evening (in between checking Thing 1's homework), but I wasn't going to finish that, either.

So I went to the trusty emergency back-up shelf, pulled this (formerly a bathroom book) off of the top, and read the last twenty pages or so. It's another in that long line of basically disposable books of odd facts; this one is organized very well for glancing through, though it's awfully British. (Nearly all of the lists of celebrities who have done whatever include "Mel B," whoever he/she/it is.) It's also the second of three that the author has compiled -- That came before This, and The Other inevitably followed.

I'm beginning to get tired of Book-A-Day, so it may end soon. Originally, I was aiming to hit the end of 2006, and I've now done that. I'm not sure now whether I should aim for a full six months (which would be January 16th, #184) or just hold out for the nice round number of #200 (which would be, I think, February 1st, a pleasing date as well). It may die before that, but I think I can hold out until at least the first of those dates.

The Fabulous Book-A-Day Index!

Book-A-Day #169 (1/1): Path of the Assassin, Vol. 3: Comparison of a Man by Kazuo Koike & Goseki Kojima

Third in the historical-fiction series about the youth of a guy who, I think, eventually unites Japan. (Previously on Antick Musings: Vol. 1, Vol. 2.)

This one has some serious military-political maneuvering going on, but it's mostly among on-stage people, so I didn't have as much of a problem with this as I did with Vol. 2. There's also some pretty serious sex and violence (separately and in combination); this is not a story for kids.

I still like the Lone Wolf and Cub stories best of the Koike-Kojima stuff I've read (though I really enjoyed Samurai Executioner, especially towards the end) -- though that's understandable, since it's generally considered their masterwork -- but this is different and interesting. It's a very immersive historical fiction, and might be of interest to SFF readers for that reason (and I'm even getting used to reading it right-to-left, though it's still not natural).

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Book-A-Day #168 (12/31): Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs* by Chuck Klosterman

The asterisk is in the title on the cover and the titlepage (though not the spine or the CIP data), and I am exactly the kind of geek who would not only check all four places, but to decide, on the inconclusive evidence, to include it here. (It leads to the subtitle: *A Low Culture Manifesto (Now With a New Middle).)

Anyway, this is my third Klosterman book in about two months, but I'm afraid it's the least of the three. Killing Yourself to Live was a thoughtful travelogue about trips to places where famous rock stars died, and Fargo Rock City was a history of '80s hair metal disguised as a memoir. Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs* is structured like a "mix CD," and, as far as I can tell, is supposed to be Klosterman's manifesto for his over-arching theories of pop culture. However, it feels more like the non-fiction equivalent of a fix-up (even though only two of the pieces are credited as previously appearing, they all feel like individual magazine essays).

I also don't trust Klosterman's judgments when he comes within spitting distance of anything I know anything about. When he's writing about popular music (usually of types I don't really like myself), he's very entertaining, but his whole shtick is that he's the critic who really likes the popular stuff, and explains why that popular stuff is not just popular, but more important than the stuff critics usually like. That works much better with rock music, where the self-absorbed critic -- who only likes the most obscure, unenjoyable crap imaginable -- is an established stereotype. But when Klosterman turns his talents to the early '90s crap-com Saved By the Bell, or spends close to ten thousand words on his The Real World obsession, he just seems like a creepy loser who needs to get out more. (And his cultural assumptions of what "everybody" cares about are generally those of a poorly socialized Midwestern farm boy.)

I think this means that I'll wait for his fourth book (the recently published Chuck Klosterman IV, which is explicitly a collection of previously-published pieces) to come out in trade paperback instead of buying it in hardcover. Not only will it match the other three that way, but the lower cost will help manage expectations.

The Fabulous Book-A-Day Index!

How I Spent My Vacation, By Andy Wheeler (Age 37)

I mentioned earlier that I migrated this blog to "new Blogger" -- mostly for the ability to label posts -- and now I'm happy to say that I've gone back through all 951 posts to date and given them appropriate, if odd, labels.

I found this very amusing to do, so I hope it's at least slightly interesting or useful to you folks out there.

My Favorite Books of the Year

I did this last year, and it was an interesting exercise, so I'm doing it again: here are my favorite books for each month of this past year, with some runners-up where necessary.

Mark Kelly wondered a few weeks ago why I was so dismissive (in various posts at the SFBC Blog) of the slew of year's-end "best of" lists coming out in late November. Mark made the good point that reviewers had already seen pretty much everything publishing in 2006 by then. That's true, but I think beside the point -- there were still six good weeks of reading time left at that point, and I'm certain that none of those list-makers had read every strong contender for their lists by then. (I know this because I know I could have read another couple of dozen good books this year -- and possibly altering the below list quite substantially -- and I'm sure they don't read that much faster than I do.) Closing down the accounts on a year six months early is like knocking off work at two in the afternoon -- it feels good, and is quite refreshing, but let's not pretend that it's a full day's effort.

For better or worse, I waited until the very end of the year to decide on what was the best. (But I also did my list in a very idiosyncratic month-by-month way, even though the second-best book in one month might actually be better than the "best" book from another month. I have no real excuse for this system, except that I did it that way last year, and that it works for me.)

January: Kelly Link's Magic for Beginners was good, as was Greg Keyes's The Blood Knight, but the best thing I read to begin the year was Jo Walton's Farthing.

February: Alex Irvine's The Narrows was very enjoyable, and I liked all of the pieces of A Feast for Crows (while not entirely believing they cohered into a single novel). Alastair Reynolds's Pushing Ice was his most readable novel to date, with a great narrative drive. But the book I remember best from this month was volume six of the collections of Bill Willingham's Fables comics series, Homelands.

March: This is a tough one -- I read both The Lies of Locke Lamora (Scott Lynch) and Glasshouse (Charles Stross) this month. Lynch wins on points, since The Lies of Locke Lamora was purely enjoyable from beginning to end, while the cheap "hey! traditional sex roles are evil!" laughs in Glasshouse kept annoying me. I was also quite impressed by Lies's structure, especially since it was a first novel.

April: Another tough choice, since I read a number of good collections for World Fantasy, plus three very different good novels: Lunar Park (Bret Easton Ellis), Three Days to Never (Tim Powers) and House of Chains (Steven Erikson). But I have to give it to Joe Hill's 20th Century Ghosts, which I fully expect will be the Dark Carnival of our generation.

May: I could say Haruki Murakami's Kafka on the Shore, but that's a bit of a cheat, since it was on my list for 2005 from the first time I read it. There's also Hal Duncan's Vellum, but my feelings about that are more mixed -- it's a tremendous achievement, but I don't love it. No, I think the best book I read in May was another comic: Andi Watson's transcendently everyday Little Star.

June: I could almost say Terry Pratchett's Wintersmith or Tom DeHaven's It's Superman!, but I actually liked best a novella from a small British press (and an author I hadn't heard of before) -- Simon Morden's tough-minded military Lovecraftian tale Another War.

July: John Scalzi's Old Man's War was tremendously entertaining, and Peter Watts's Blindsight was much like Vellum (technically amazing and bursting with ideas, but not a book I could honestly call my favorite). But the favorite slot has to go to the Marvin Kaye-edited The Fair Folk, a book I finally read after my fellow WFA judges told me it was really good.

August: I read a lot of pretty-good books this month, but the only real outstanding one was Peter Carey's semi-fictionalized travelogue Wrong About Japan.

September: Daniel Handler's Adverbs (somewhere between a fix-up and a novel) wasn't quite as good as I hoped, as was Haruki Murakami's collection Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman. Joe Hill's debut novel Heart-Shaped Box was an amazingly readable supernatural thriller that dragged me headlong through it, and would have been my fiction pick this month, but...the top book has to be Chip Kidd's Book One: Work 1986-2006.

October: The runner-up is Matt Haig's The Dead Fathers Club, a touching retelling of Hamlet with a great voice. But my favorite, and one of the best series-ending books in a long time, is The End by Lemony Snicket.

November: Best of what I read this month, by a wide margin, is Charles Stross's The Jennifer Morgue, which manages to integrate an extended piss-take on James Bond into the already gleefully complicated structure (of Lovecraftian horrors, brain-sucking bureaucracy, and ground-level spycraft) established in The Atrocity Archives, like a juggler showing off by tossing up a rake to join the flaming torches, cream pies, and iron bars already in the air.

December: It has to be Midnight Tides, the latest (for me right now, and soon for US readers who don't buy books from overseas) in Steven Erikson's ridiculously ambitious epic fantasy "Malazan" series.

So, to sum, up, the Top 10 12 of the year were:
Jo Walton, Farthing
Bill Willingham and various artists, Fables Vol. 6: Homelands
Scott Lynch, The Lies of Locke Lamora
Joe Hill, 20th Century Ghosts
Andi Watson, Little Star
Simon Morden, Another War
Marvin Kaye, editor, The Fair Folk
Peter Carey, Wrong About Japan
Chip Kidd, Book One: Work 1986-2006
Lemony Snicket, The End
Charles Stross, The Jennifer Morgue
Steven Erikson, Midnight Tides