Reading Into the Past: Week of 1/15

Every Sunday, I roll some dice and pull out one of my old reading notebooks, in an attempt to remember what I was reading this very week in some past year. (And thus prove, I hope, that reading actually has some utility, and isn't just a way to waste time.)

This week, the dice read 12, and so we head back to the year 1994:

• Mary Gentle, Rats and Gargoyles (1/14)

Well, that wasn't very interesting. I mean, Rats and Gargoyles is a great book, and I did take nearly two weeks to read it, but it leaves this post a bit short. So let's look a bit before and after, too:

• Charles S. Sykes, A Nation of Victims (1/4)
  I don't remember this book specifically, but I must have heard about it in National Review (which I subscribed to for, essentially, Clinton's first term). And I can guess what it was about. I think it was somewhat more thoughtful than the those-guys-are-all-traitors books clogging up the bestseller lists today (from both sides; I don't read any of 'em now), but I'm sure it was a "liberals are responsible for all of the ills of the world" book.
  
• Harlan Ellison, Mefisto in Onyx (1/4)
  I'm a big Ellison nut, from way back. So getting to read his stuff professionally -- especially a really strong novella, like this one -- was a thrill. But the publishing situation of this was the usual high drama (I think it was intended for a tribute-to-somebody anthology, but Harlan pulled it for reasons I don't now know, and wrote a very nasty foreword to this edition to criticize anyone who had anything to do with the tribute book), and, as I recall, there was no chance we could buy it for the club. I'm not sure if it's appeared in one of his collections since, though I hope it has -- it's one of his best stories, probably his longest best story, and one of his later best stories, too. Oh, and if anyone has a spare dustjacket for this, e-mail me: Thing 1 went through a period of using a letter opener on my books, and this was one of the ones he chose to attack.
• G.B. Trudeau, Welcome to Club Scud! (1/16)
  A Doonesbury collection, of which I have the entire set. (It took a few years of looking to find Doonesbury: The Musical, and it wasn't really worth it, but I've got it.) I've found that the funniest stuff, to me, was the cartoons from before I knew anything about politics -- which probably just means that he's goring my ox some of the time these days, and I don't like it -- but it's always readable and I love the way he has handled the very large cast over the years.
• George Alec Effinger, Maureen Birnbaum, Barbarian Swordsperson: The Complete Stories (1/17)
  Silly fluff, though quite well-written and satirical silly fluff, which we sold like gangbusters in the club for a number of years. I wish Effinger had done enough for a second volume, but, then, I wish Effinger had been able to do a lot of things, this last decade. I wish he was still around and writing now. This isn't a bad place to start with Effinger, actually, and I hope some of the SFBC hordes moved on from this to What Entropy Means to Me or the Marid Audran novels.
• Martin Amis, Visiting Mrs. Nabokov and Other Excursions (1/17)
  I was still in my utterly worshipful Amis phase at this point (until the dreadful "I am a police" book came out a few years later), so I devoured this whole, trying to impress Amis's literary prejudices onto my brain to supplant my own. I'm not sure if they all (or any of them) took, but he's an engaging, thorny writer, and I've always loved reading the occasional nonfiction of novelists, for no good reason I've been able to figure out.
• Mitch O'Connell, Good Taste Gone Bad (1/17)
  Retro-fab-o-50's-esque art from a guy I think I first saw doing comics covers. I like me my art books, yes I do.

That stretches the period to thirteen days (from my usual eight -- I'm always cheating, actually, since I'm inclusive on both ends of the "week"), but at least gets us more than one book. The good news, from 2006's perspective, is that even as a younger, less encumbered guy, I still got stuck in one book for ten days at a time. So there's hope for me even now, and thus hope for all of us.