Itzkoff Itzkoff Itzkoff -- There! I Said It Three Times!

Our buddy Dave Itzkoff is back in tomorrow's New York Times Book Review (which subscribers, like me, get a day early -- but it's also on sale as a separate periodical a week early, so I can't gloat much) with his third regular "Across the Universe" column.

This time, he reviews Charles Stross's Glasshouse and Justina Robson's Living Next Door to the God of Love. He liked the latter better than the former, and I can't argue with that, not having read the Robson novel. (Though Glasshouse is pretty damn good, and the one Robson novel I did read, Natural History, left me a bit cold.)

He also shows signs of having read all of Robson's previous novels, which is very encouraging. If he keeps up like this, I may have to stop picking on him. Honestly, I didn't find anything in this column to start a fight about -- and, if you know me, you know that I was looking hard.

Another very good sign: this is apparently a monthly column (much more often than Gerald Jonas, the previous Times skiffy reviewer), and is a full page (also an improvement over the space Jonas was begrudged). Itzkoff's remit seems to exclude fantasy (unlike Jonas's), so perhaps I can dream of a similar monthly columnist to cover fantasy in a similar manner.

Hey -- I have to have something unbelievable in these Itzkoff posts...