Friday, June 22, 2007

Incoming Books: Week of 6/22

About a week ago, I obtained a copy of Ian McEwan's On Chesil Beach, which is ridiculously short, and which thus I will read quickly.

Yesterday, a copy of Austin Grossman's debut novel Soon I Will Be Invincible arrived in the mail. (I'm already about 70 pages into it; with luck, I might finish it over the weekend.)

And, today, I got a box of books from Tachyon, in hopes (the hopes of myself and the good folks at Tachyon) that I'll review them here. (And I certainly intend to -- I'll start off by saying that Tachyon have recently published a new edition of Peter S. Beagle's wonderful first novel, A Fine & Private Place, which every fantasy reader should own a copy of. If you don't have the old Roc trade paperback -- with the subtly odd Darrell K. Sweet cover -- or the money-saving 2-in-1 with The Last Unicorn that Some Fancy Book Club published a few years back, then you need to run right out and get this one. It has a very classy cover, one even Dave Itzkoff could read on the bus without cringing.)

First up from that box, though (probably, and possibly after On Chesil Beach or other things already on the shelves), will be a bound galley of Michael Swanwick's new collection The Dog Said Bow-Wow. Interestingly, it has a bindery error in common with my copy of The Best of George Plimpton (which I picked up earlier this year and still haven't read) -- the book block went into the binder the wrong-way round, so it was bound on the wrong edge. So that will make it a somewhat manga-ish reading experience (since the right-hand page should be read before the left-hand page on each spread).

(I've just spent about ten days slowly savoring Tom Perrotta's The Abstinence Teacher -- or maybe putting it down a lot to think about it; I'm not sure which -- so I'd like to speed up my fiction reading a bit.)

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