Reading Into the Past: Week of 3/19

It's Sunday, so the dice roll again. This time I got a 14, which sends me back to 1992, nearly the beginning of my reading notebook:

• Unquenchable Fire by Rachel Pollack (3/15)
  An absolutely brilliant fantasy novel by a writer who I wish would write more books like this. (The semi-sequel was also wonderful, but her novel after that left me very cold.)
• The Names by Don DeLillo (3/16)
  I can't even remember which DeLillo novel this was; I ran through all of them in 1992-1994, as I recall. (Amazons it: oh, this is the one set in Greece. I still don't remember it.)
• Dave Barry's Only Travel Guide You'll Ever Need (3/17)
  One of the most lightweight of Barry's books, but amusing as always. If you like him, you'll enjoy this (slightly less than some of his stuff). If you can't stand him, this will be essence of chalkboard nails to you.
• God: The Ultimate Autobiography by the Author of All Creation with Jeremy Pascal, the holy ghostwriter (3/18)
  We sold a ton of these in the SFBC, and had been selling them by the metric shitload for a couple of years when I arrived, so I took a look at it after I'd been with the club about a year. It was pleasant religious humor, on the iconoclastic side, but it wasn't that funny. Of course, this was during the years when Ellen Asher kept saying we should do a "Blasphemy" flyer, with books like this and Jim Morrow's Only Begotten Daughter. (There were more than that, as I recall; we had a tidy little corner on blasphemy in those days.) It also has the distinction of being the only book that was both featured in the SFBC and had questions asked about it in the British House of Commons.

And then on the 20th I finished both Light Elements by Judith Stone and Count Geiger's Blues by Michael Bishop. The latter is one of the better prose super-hero stories; the former has completely escaped from my mind. (One quick trip to Amazon later, I see that it's a collection of short science essays.)