Reading Into the Past: Week of 7/2

Rolling high yet again, with a 12, which send me back to the books I was reading this week in 1994:

• Mercedes Lackey, By the Sword (6/25)
  These were the days when we (meaning the SFBC) were romping merrily through the Valdemar backlist, doing one or two new (old) books a year. I enjoyed them all while reading them, but I've never gone back to re-read any of them. This one is less horsey and magickal than the usual, and also forms a monology all by itself, so people wanting to know what's up with Lackey and Valdemar might find it a good entry point.
  
• Charles de Lint, Memory and Dream (6/26)
  Now, I haven't read all of de Lint's books by any means, but this and The Little Country are easily his best novels out of the ones I have read; both are excellent. (de Lint, in general, is someone whose common themes and ideas tend to grate on me more and more as I read more of his stuff, so I have to take him in small doses.)
  
• Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Vol. I (6/29)
  I am intermittently a Serious Reader, intent on Bettering Myself and Learning About the World and Its History, and this was one of those periods. But de Tocqueville is actually very readable (though these books don't go quickly -- I find I put them down every three or four pages to think about something else), and his details of early 19th century American life are fascinating. After a short break (for the following books), I jumped back into de Tocqueville, and finished Vol. II on 7/6. (I may have been aiming for the 4th; I'm not sure at this late date.)
  
• Sam Hurt, Eyebeam: Teetering on the Blink (6/30)
  Collection of a minor comic strip no one else I've talked to has ever heard of, but which I enjoyed quite a bit. (I only discovered it in collected form, after the strip had died and all of the collections were out of print.)
  
• Robert Silverberg, The Mountains of Majipoor (7/2)
  One of Silverberg's best recent books, I think: a short novel about Majipoor that came out in between the two trilogies and has mostly been forgotten since. Silverbob is often devastatingly good at novella or short-novel length, and this is another example of that.
  
• Stephen Baxter, Anti-Ice (7/2)
  Baxter is an interesting writer in that his career seems to fall into very clearly defined "periods" in a way most writers' careers don't; he does a couple of novels in a row with very similar ideas, and then goes off for another batch on different premises. This novel is from what you might call his neo-Victorian period (along with The Time Ships, his authorized sequel to some old novel by a guy named Wells), and I liked it at the time, though now I mostly just remember the steampunk furniture.
  
• Jean-Michel Charlier & Jean "Moebius" Giraud, Lieutenant Blueberry 3: General Golden Mane (7/2)
  
• Jean-Michel Charlier & Jean "Moebius" Giraud, Marshal Blueberry: The Lost Dutchman's Mine (7/2)
  I think I've said before that Moebius's solo work doesn't do all that much for me (although I have half a shelf-full of it; perhaps I'm a slow learner), but the western comics he illustrated from Charlier's scripts are great. Moebius has a great visual eye, and a wonderful sense of page layout, so these books turn into impressive Western movies on the page. It's odd to think that two French guys could excel at such an American medium, but there it is: they did at least ten volumes of "Blueberry" stories (I have that many myself), and all of them are good.
  

I was also finishing up the first edition of Alberto Manguel and Gianni Guadalupi's The Dictionary of Imaginary Places that week (finished it on the 4th). And just before this week started (on the 23rd), I'd finished James Hogg's The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner. I certainly did jump around genres a lot in those days.