Reading Into the Past: Week of 4/2

Every Sunday, I roll some dice, look up a randomly-chosen year in my reading notebook, and see if I can remember the books I read this week in that year. This time, the year is fabulous 1999, and the books I read were

• Dark Cities Underground, Lisa Goldstein (3/26)
  A contemporary fantasy, set in Northern California (Oakland, I think), with at least one scene set in a fantastic subway. That's about all I can remember, but I did enjoy it at the time. No, wait -- aren't the Egyptian gods in this one, too? (They get everywhere if you're not careful.)
• The Year's Best Science Fiction, 16th Annual Collection, edited by Gardner Dozois (3/27)
  A big fat collection of good stuff. (I found a ToC through the Locus Index.) This one has "Oceanic," "Taklamakan," "Story of Your Life" and "The Summer Isles" in it, which makes it a quite good year.
• The Haunted Tea-Cozy, Edward Gorey (3/27)
  Every so often, I think that I should do some serious research and make a list of all of Gorey's little books, then compare that list to the three Amphigorey collections, so I can figure out what's missing and track them down. But I haven't done it yet (and a fourth Amphigorey books keeps looming out in the future, like some Victorian iceberg), so I get things like this as I notice them. This is the "pornographic" one, as I recall, and it's one of his best (up there with Gashlycrumb Tinies, I think).
• Don't Step in the Leadership, Scott Adams (3/28)
  A random Dilbert collection. Well, it wasn't random then: it was the new book. But now it's pretty random.
• Miracle and Other Christmas Stories, Connie Willis (3/28)
  I don't think Connie's ever written a bad story (though I've never managed to find a copy of "The Secret of Santa Titicaca"), but this collection is pretty much minor Willis. Everything is Christmas-themed, and quite heartwarming in a non-nauseating way, but it's not her best work. And reading it in late March (as I did) kept it from feeling really timely.
• Bad Boy, Jim Thompson (3/29)
  One of the last Vintage/Black Lizard reissues of Thompson's books; by this time, they'd made it down to the oddball early and late novels. This is one of the early ones: an autobiography, of a sort (how fictionalized is something I'll leave up to his biographer), which tells you more than you want to know about being a bellhop during the Depression. If you've already read a bunch of Thompson, it's a very interesting book, but it's really just for Thompson fans.
• South of the Border, West of the Sun, Haruki Murakami (3/30)
  It's a small-sized book, and that's about all I remember. Oh, and that Murakami is always worth reading. But I think this is a minor work.
• The Outfit, Richard Stark (3/31)
  Reissue of a '60s "Parker" novel, by Donald Westlake under a pseudonym. I wish Warner (or, should I say, the newly rechristened Hachette Book Group US) would do more of these: there's at least a dozen Parker books that only exist as old, expensive mass-markets -- and I want to read all of them! I'm sure I've mentioned this series in the past: Parker is a professional criminal and is very good at his job (and exceptionally focused, which is one of the great joys of this series). Each book sees Parker through one caper or another, painted in the blackest shades of noir; Westlake has comprehensively proved that not only is he as funny as anyone on the planet when he wants to be, he can do the exact opposite just as well.
• Camp FoxTrot, Bill Amend (4/1)
  Collection of the comic strip FoxTrot, in the not-as-portable-but-containing-full-Sunday-strips-in-color "treasury" size. I generally enjoy FoxTrot, though I don't love it as much as I did once. (Of course, most strips are like that: they find a groove, which starts out interesting, and then gets worn down to a mile-deep trench as the strip goes on and on down the decades.)
• Little Green Men, Christopher Buckley (4/2)
  One of the funniest novels of the last decade -- not quite as wonderfully nasty as Buckley's Thank You for Smoking, but a close second -- in which a thinly-veiled George Will gets the alien-anal-probe treatment. Various hijinks ensue, but they're not "wacky" in the pejorative sense: this is a smart book about people and politics, and the fact that it's funny, fast-moving and snarky only makes it that much better. In my ideal world, Buckley would be a massive bestseller and put out a funny novel a year.

It took a couple of days to get to this, and I see I managed to miss another day of posting. Gosh, I'm really falling down on the job. (Oh, wait, this isn't a "job" of any kind -- it's a dumb self-aggrandizing tool. Whew!)