Reading Into the Past: Week of 1/8

Every Sunday, I dig out one of my old reading notebooks and try to make sense of what I was reading this week in some randomly-chosen year of the past. This time the dice read 9, so I'll be heading back to the year 1997:

• David Hood, Beggar's Banquet (1/1)
  This would, I think, be the third in the "Fanuilh" series, a fun sequence of essentially PI novels in a fantasy world. Once there were three of them, I read 'em, liked 'em, and did a 3-in-1 for the club. Then we were waiting around for three more; there were two, eventually, but a third never appeared. (I think I remember hearing that his publisher, Ace, rejected what would have been book #6.) These were another example of something I think Ace does better than anyone else, and has done for a couple of decades now: a series of decently-written, usually fantasy books with plot spines borrowed from mysteries.
• David Mack, Kabuki: Circle of Blood (1/1)
• David Mack, Kabuki Compilation (1/1)
  If you asked me yesterday, I would have told you that I'd never touched a Kabuki book (and thought it was the truth). Now I can vaguely recall the moody, muddy art, though I think they didn't have as much nudity as you'd expect. Not something I really remember well, though.
• Paul Fussell, Abroad (1/2)
  This read like an academic work spruced up just a bit for publication (and it might have been), but it was interesting -- an examination of "travel books," mostly written by Brits, between the two World Wars, and what they showed about contemporary society and the British view of the wider world. I came to this from two directions: from reading better Fussell books like the essay collection Thank God for the Atom Bomb and the jeremiads Bad and Class, on the one hand, and from hitting the grumpy, fascinating, and very-of-its-time travel compilation When the Going Was Good during my run through most of the works of Evelyn Waugh.
• Harlan Ellison, Spider Kiss (1/3)
  There still are a couple of Harlan's books that I've never read (The Other Glass Teat is probably the one I'm most interested in digging up), but, by this point, I don't think I'd read an old Ellison book for the first time in about a decade. This is the Rock 'n' Roll novel, if I remember it rightly.
• John Barnes, Patton's Spaceship (1/4)
• John Barnes, Washington's Dirigible (1/5)
• Wayne Douglas Barlowe, Barlowe's Guide to Fantasy (1/6)
  A perfectly pleasant, well-researched and put-together book by an excellent illustrator, that only served to prove that lightning never does strike twice. (His original Barlowe's Guide to Extraterrestrials was a massive hit for the club -- I have no idea how it sold in the trade -- moving thousands of copies a year, mostly to new members, over about twenty years.) This book is just as good as Extraterrestrials, and the creatures are chosen somewhat better (i.e., they're not just a bunch of random aliens from books that someone had read recently, but specifically chosen to illustrate most of the most important books and writers in the field). But it only sold mildly well, and went out of print before Extraterrestrials did, at least through the SFBC. (Though the latter is gone from our ranks now too.)
• Anthony F. Smith and Eric Vincent, Alien Fire: Pass in Thunder (1/7)
  Some kind of SF comic. I didn't keep it, so I can't say much more than that. Though I guess not keeping it is a comment of its own.
• Robert H. Bork, Slouching Towards Gomorrah (1/8)
  I don't recall the exact policy suggestions Bork brought down from the mountain here, but this book was like Das Capital in at least one way: I thought both books combined a very interesting close analysis of their subjects with unreasonable conclusions that really didn't follow from the analysis. I tend to be a curmudgeon anyway, and Bork has a great curmudgeonly voice; anyone who's not doctrinairely leftist and thinks the world is all going to hell would probably find a lot to chew on in this book.
• John Barnes, Caesar's Bicycle (1/8)
  Barnes is a sneaky writer who is very good at eliciting reader identification with his characters and then twisting things around unmercifully. I don't really read to identify with characters, so this never bothers me, but I've seen others complain endlessly about him. These three books were a fluffy time-travel trilogy poised uncomfortably somewhere between "men's adventure" and SF proper. They were splendid entertainments that I stuck into one volume for the club, and the thing I remember best about them (and enjoyed a lot at the time of reading) is the deliberate, careful de-escalation of violence as the trilogy went on, from an even-bloodier-than-the-original WWII in the first book down to just some minor skirmishes in this one. Barnes strikes me as a writer who never does anything without thinking it through at least twice, and that's the kind of author I really appreciate.

I'm stunned that I managed to read something as massive and dense as Slouching over the course of about a week (since I'm sure I read it on my commute, and started it after finishing Spider Kiss), and still got through a skiffy trilogy and other stuff at the same time.

Once again, I must curse my children and the Internet for stealing all of my time these days...