Reading Into the Past: Week of November 12, 2001

Can I admit that I'm doing most of my posts well in advance these days? (I mean, I think that's clear for the book-review posts, but maybe not for things like this.) I like to be prepared; I don't like things sneaking up on me, so I prefer to get things done early. That has nothing to do with what I'm about to type, but I guess I'm feeling confessional this morning.

The RNG gave me 2001, and my old reading notebook shows I was very active that week - looks like I was in one of my intermittent read-a-GN-a-day binges to reduce the size of the stack of books on the printer - so I'll see what I remember about this stuff:

Eddie Campbell, Alex: Three Piece Suit (11/6)

I should probably just point you at my 2011 post about the giant omnibus of (nearly) the whole series of Alex stories, "The Years Have Pants." This book collects a chunk of that work; I think the second batch of stories? Anyway, it's an outdated version at this point; look for the big book.

Scott Adams, When Did Ignorance Become a Point of View? (11/7)

I could say something rude about Adams following up on that title, but he was never ignorant. Nutty, misinformed, utterly wrong-headed, stuck deeply inside a bizarre news bubble, yes, but he always knew stuff. It was mostly false stuff, agreed, but calling that ignorance would be a misuse of the word.

Millennials probably disbelieve Dilbert was ever less than tendentious and horrible, but, for almost a decade, it was really good, and electric in the ways it could crystalize the ways people worked and talked in offices. This is about the point when that started to falter, in retrospect: Adams had been out of a cube for several years, and his correspondents started to tend to the techy and the opinionated. Sin transit gloria mundi.

Lawrence Block, Hope to Die (11/8)

Block is one of my favorite writers, and this is a book in probably his best series: the mysteries about Matt Scudder. But I'm not going to be able to tell you anything about the plot twenty years later. I recommend the series, but don't start here. Start at the beginning, or maybe at When the Sacred Ginmill Closes, the best book. You might get here, if you have the time and inclination: this is #15 of 17.

Michael Dowers, editor, The Tijuana Bibles, Vol. 2 (11/8)

You know what these are, right? Pornographic comics using then-popular characters, created in the early to mid 20th century, sold very much under the counter since they were doubly illegal. There was a big hardcover collection of them around that time, with an actual scholarly apparatus, and a series of paperback collections as well. This is part of the latter; I followed both of those for all of the obvious reasons (quirky comics history, prurient interest, wacky stuff, often surprisingly good art). No idea if this one has Moon Mullins or Popeye or Jiggs in it at this late date; they're all pretty much the same thing.

Richard Stark, The Mourner (11/9)

This was a random book in the Parker series; I later took a month and read through all of them. So let me point you to my later post on this same book and to my introductory post on that blog series.

Andi Watson, Skeleton Key, Vol. 4: Cats & Dogs (11/9)

This may have been new at the time, but I've since gone back and did a re-read of the whole Skeleton Key series. So let me point you there for anything coherent I have to say about that excellent comics series.

"divers hands," Harlan Ellison's Dream Corridor, Volume One (11/10)

This was definitely a comics series based on Ellison stories - kind of a nutty idea, frankly, even at the time - and I think, from my weird editor-credit, that it wasn't clearly assembled or managed by anyone, to keep H*A*R*L*A*N at the center of all the publicity and hype, as he always insisted. I have no idea who the artists were, or what Ellison stories they adapted, and, at this late date, I don't actually care. My copy of this was destroyed in my 2011 flood, and it's now super-expensive, so I don't think I will ever read it again.

Various Artists, Expo 2001 (11/11)

What on earth is this? Let's see if google is any help, but that's a very vague title.

OK, so the Comics Legal Defense Fund seems to have done a benefit anthology for a few years, associated with and published at the time of the Small Press Expo of Bethesda, MD. This was that book for 2001.

On the positive side, it's clearly a worthy cause. But the first-credited person is editor Charles Brownstein, and I'm not going to try to explain anything to do with that. I have no memory of this, though the cover is vaguely familiar, and it would be difficult to find today if you wanted it.

David Clement-Davies, The Sight (11/12)

OK, this is going to sound crazy, but I'm going to guess before I look. I think this is a fantasy novel (maybe YA?) about a deer or elk, something like that, set in the UK though I think in some long-ago historical period. If it's the book I'm thinking of, I liked it, and remember it vaguely two decades later.

But I'll check: Oh, so close! Fire Bringer, Clement-Davies' first book, was the one about the deer (Red Deer, 13th century Scotland, mostly YA, check). This one was his follow-up; it was about wolves in the Carpathians. 

And it looks like Clement-Davies has continued to write dark animal fantasies for younger readers: he's got another three or four since these two. I like quirky writing niches, especially when I enjoyed at least one of the books, so good for him.

Chip Kidd, Peanuts: The Art of Charles M. Schulz (11/12)

I feel like I've picked on this book a lot here, even though I read it well before the blog existed. Kidd is a fine cover designer, but when he edits books of comics and cartoon art, he always presents the images as aged and battered artifacts instead of trying to present the artwork cleanly and clearly. To my mind, it's the take of a nostalgist: what's interesting is that this thing is old and worn, full of memories and related to moments in the past, rather than something specific and vital and valuable by itself.

I disagree entirely with that stance: it's distancing and prioritizes the Boomer viewpoint over every other potential opinion. So I've complained loudly whenever I see Kidd doing it. (See my post on a book about Jack Cole that Kidd did with art spiegelman for an example.)

So it's unfortunate that this is the standard Schulz art-book for this generation; it's more Kidd than Schulz. But, it's been almost another generation now, so maybe someone else will edit a book of Schulz's art - which is tight and precise, and has been a model and inspiration for hundreds of other cartoonists - and focus it on the work rather than his own memories.

That's what I was reading "this" week twenty years ago; how has time be treating you?

Reading Into the Past: Week of September 24, 1992

When I get new books, I write for Monday mornings on the new book. When I don't, instead write about old books, picking a random year and seeing what I read "this" week that year. Today, we're hitting the WABAC Machine for 1992:

Marc Laidlaw, Kalifornia (typescript, 9/17)

I feel like I'm being horribly dismissive if I call Laidlaw "a minor cyberpunk," but that's what pops into my head: he was part of that circle, I think more from the literary end, and he didn't publish as much or yell as loudly as some. (Looking at Chairman Bruce in both cases here.) I remember liking his books and stories, but I'll have to dig to figure out what this one was.

(One quick refresher later.)

This is the one set in 2050, with people who livestream their lives (directly from a brain interface, I think?) out to the world, and get massive audiences for it. A baby has just been born, the first to be thus wired up from the beginning, and is immediately kidnapped - so her uncle, the ne'er-do-well of the wired-up family, goes after her, I think with millions of people watching his every move. I remember nothing of the plot, but the premise sounds pretty spot-on prescient almost thirty years later.

Stephen Jay Gould, Bully for Brontosaurus (9/18)

I was reading through Gould at the time; I'm not sure if I managed to get through everything, or if I kept reading him for the new books afterward. But I did hit at least half-a-dozen Gould books over the early '90s.

At the time, I think it was part of a whole cluster of interests or self-image pieces: CSICOP, the day-job in SF, relatively serious scientific nonfiction like this. I was a Serious Person interested in Serious Things, and wanted to focus on the true and the real. (I later on soured on SF in a lot of ways, and tend to prefer various flavors of fantasy these days, but it isn't now and never was a simple dichotomy.)

This was his brand-new book, published in 1992. And if you don't know who Gould was: he was a paleontologist and biology professor (mostly associated with Harvard) who also wrote a long series of essays for Natural History magazine on mostly evolutionary topics. He was a fluid, entertaining writer who was also deeply knowledgeable and thought-provoking; a rare combination. And those essays were collected into a series of best-selling books, one of the few signs in the '80s and '90s that the world was not horrible and entirely made up of stupid people. (Those signs are even fewer nowadays, of course.)

Gould is worth reading, I think. Some details of some essays are certainly outdated, since he died - way too young at 60 - twenty years ago. But the style and the concern for science and the principles will always be good. I think I lost all of his books in my flood; I might need to read him again.

Mark S. Geston, Mirror to the Sky (typescript, 9/25)

Another awfully-literary SF writer! I definitely had a type. (Other things I read for the SFBC within a month of this date: Silverberg's Kingdoms of the Wall, Turner's The Destiny Makers, Wolfe's Nightside the Long Sun, Womack's Elvissey, Brust's Agyar, Witches Abroad, and, um, The Gripping Hand by Niven & Pournelle. Some things you can't avoid.)

I seem to remember this was Geston's return to SF after a long quite time - maybe since a couple of novels in the '70s? I also think this was from Michael Kandel's line at HBJ (or was it just HB at that point? They had so many name permutations over the years), which I always loved but often had difficulty convincing others the books would sell for us in the SFBC. (And even when I did convince people, I was not necessarily correct.)

Let's see if I was right about any of that.

Return to SF? Yes.

Harcourt Brace? No - William Morrow. Not sure at this late date who his editor would have been.

As I remember, and the reviews on Amazon bear me out, this was a quite literary book which was not entirely positively received, and Geston has not published another novel since then. (But he only had four in the 1967-1976 main phase of his career, so he was never prolific.)

This is a First Contact book, subcategory godlike aliens, sub-sub-category where they show up on Earth and are strange and enigmatic. In this case, they give humans some of their art - maybe inadvertently? - and that causes massive disruptions. I don't remember it well at all.

Reading Into the Past: Week of August 29, 2002

So this blog series is silly; I know it. When I don't have new books to write about for a Monday, I instead use a random-number generator to pick a week from the span 1991-2007 (when I was at least nominally adult, kept a reading notebook, and hadn't yet started putting up blog posts about everything I read) and write up quick memories of whatever I was reading "this" week that year.

It's puckish, and usually an exercise in demonstrating just how fallible memory is. But here we go again...and I first got 2006 (middle of a Book-A-Day run! posts already existing for all books!) and then 2007 (almost as bad, a week I was reading two books a day and writing about all of them!) until finally getting 2002:

Tamora Pierce, The Woman Who Rides Like a Man (8/24)

At the SFBC, we liked to think we were ahead of the hoi polloi, but we couldn't keep track of everything and probably had as many blind spots as any other group of readers. In particular, I think we were only intermittently plugged in to YA/middle-grade publishing - we always saw the gigantic things (usually because they came into the larger, more prestigious clubs), but didn't always realize someone was doing awesome work until they started being GoHs at major cons and similar giant flashing lights alerted us to their presence.

Which brings me to Tamora Pierce, who was on a roll at this point - she'd been writing books about Tortall (mostly in four-book series) for nearly twenty years, and had recently expanded into a second fictional universe. I don't know remember exactly what triggered us to check out her books - could have been colleagues in the kids' clubs, could have been a conversation with her publisher, could have been any of a dozen things - but I read her first Tortall series that August, and we turned them into a SFBC omnibus later that year. (Only about a dozen years after the fourth book came out, but better late than never.) I went on to do two more 4-in-1s of the next couple of Tortall series, but the books after that (Beka Cooper) were in progress when I was canned, and I think the club never did them.

So this is a good series, aimed at younger readers and particularly good for girls, especially those who are maybe not as "girly" as some people in their lives want them to be. And it's, I think, still the best place to start with Pierce.

Los Bros. Hernandez, Music for Mechanics (8/24)

I don't think this was the first time I was reading Love and Rockets, but maybe I was doing a re-read from the beginning. My sense is that I discovered it in my Iron Vic years (Iron Vic's was my local comic shop while at college in Poughkeepsie, where I discovered and was reading mostly indy stuff, on the grounds that I was a college student and that was expected) and read new L&R stuff as it came out more or less from that point on, filling in the gaps before randomly.

Anyway, this is where it all began, with stories originally published started in in 1980. This edition is out of print, I think - the current set of reprints puts each brother's work separately (which makes more sense; they never told stories together, just side by side). If you wanted to start reading L&R these days, you'd pick up either Maggie the Mechanic (for the Jaime side) or Heartbreak Soup (for the Gilbert side).

Tamora Pierce, Lioness Rampant (8/25)

See above; this was the fourth book of the same series.

Joseph Heller, Catch-22 (8/27)

This is a classic of world literature; I hope you've heard of it. I re-read it just a couple of years ago (for the second time? or was the 2002 reading the second?) and so let me just send you to that link for more coherent, better informed natterings.

Robert A. Heinlein, The Door Into Summer (8/28)

A lot of people in SF have a love-hate relationship with Heinlein these days. (Well, that leaves out the ones who only hate him and the ones who don't care - probably much larger groups these days, thirty years after his death.) He was always a smooth, facile writer - the cleanest, clearest, most pleasant and readable major SF writer for decades, and massively popular because of that - but he was also the King of Hobbyhorses, and the epitome of the writer whose characters are Right Because They Agree With Him.

But, generally, his earlier and shorter books are better - the ones where editors could still keep him focused, before he became Robert! A! Heinlein! This is one of those, an early-'50s time-travel story with problematic elements you can ignore if you squint and a relative lack of infuriating old windbags. Like so much Heinlein, it's hugely readable, and, as I recall, the world-building still holds up pretty well.

You don't have to read Heinlein. (You kinda did in the '70s and '80s, if you cared about SF, but no more, unless you're studying the history of the genre.) If you want to, this is a decent choice. The mid-period juveniles are the other good place to start.

Poul Anderson, Three Hearts and Three Lions (8/29)

I find Anderson books drop out of my head with blinding speed. They're pleasant to read, and he's good at plotting and his characters have more blood and less cardboard in their DNA than most of his contemporaries, but I tend to retain only the most obvious thing. This is the one about a Danish Resistance fighter in WWII who gets whopped on the head and ends up in a fantasy world: that's pretty much all I ever retained of it.

Anderson told good stories, and did a whole bunch of major plots and ideas first in SFF, so he's worth reading for those reasons. (Also: he wrote in the era when books were short, so you can speed through a half-dozen Anderson classics in a week without a problem, if you want to.) 

In case you're wondering why I hit those last two books in a row; I was clearly reading for the first series (collecting eight 1950s novels) of the SFBC 50th Anniversary Collection, which I was editing over the next five years. Following these two books, I continued with The Space Merchants, The City and the Stars, City, More Than Human, Under Pressure, and The Stars My Destination within the next eight days. And those eight books did become the first series of that project, meaning I actually got all of my first choices - go, 2002 Andy!

Reading Into the Past: Week of May 30, 2004

This post will go live on Memorial Day, so excuse me if I'm hoping for a week with just a couple of books; I'm not expecting  a whole lot of eyeballs on this. (Not that anyone cares in the best of times; I do these to have something to post on Mondays and because it amuses me.)

This time, let's see what books I was reading "this" week in the fabulous year 2004:

James Alan Gardner, Radiant (typescript, 5/25)

This was one of his "League of Peoples" books, which were smart and well-written and interesting and fun to read and though-provoking and which I hear he will never, ever write any more of. (And I wonder how happy his publishing experience was; sales clearly did not grow as people who liked those books - me, for example - might have hoped.) I think I made every single book in the series a SFBC Selection, and wrote personal blurbs for several, so I like to think I did what I could.

But which was this one? Let me check.

OK, it was the seventh and last, which somewhat wrapped up the series, but not really. (It was a very loose series to begin with - all the same galactic setting, a character or two that showed up again in the background, but almost always completely different stories.)

Read this series, if you find it. Good, entertaining, fun SF that might even make you think.

Terry Brooks, Tanequil (bound galleys, skimmed, 5/25)

I'm afraid I don't remember exactly what this is; I'm sure it was a piece of some Shannara series, but I read a lot of epic fantasy in those days, and I read most of it at speed. (When I was writing reports, I read with a notepad at hand to write down names of people and places and then cryptic notations like "MG & DW to Fal to find Sword of R, fight with forces of Ma." The rest of the time, I read the first fifty and last fifty pages pretty closely but tended to go at great speed through the middle.)

This is the middle book of the "High Druid of Shannara" series, crammed in between the equally-entertainingly-named Jarka Ruus and Straken. I try not to pick on Terry Brooks, since by all accounts he's a nice guy, he's been telling the stories he wants to for decades, and lots of readers love his stuff. But I've found his work perhaps just a tad on the standard side.

Robert Siegel, editor, The Onion: Dispatches from the Tenth Circle (5/26)

This was a collection of articles from The Onion, back when that existed on paper, was a force to be reckoned with, and collections of periodicals were still a thing that could exist in the world. The Internet has destroyed all of that; The Onion is owned by someone else now - I want to say a bunch of osteopaths from Oshkosh, or something equally horrible - and it's entirely an online thing where it's difficult to say if any material is new. I also get the sense all of the writers from their classic days are long gone, not that it was ever a place for bylines: The Onion was all about that very specific tone and point of view.

You probably had to be there. I see newer reviews of this book tend to use the phrase "not politically correct," which is entirely backwards in an attempt to coopt what was largely very angry lefty humor for right-wing ends. Onion jokes cut very close to the bone, but they always punched up.

Robert Benchley, Benchley Lost and Found (5/27)

I've read bits and pieces of Benchley here and there, but never dug into reading all his work the way I did with Perelman. (For that matter, I don't think I even did a concerted effort to read Thurber: it was Perelman, of the great humorists of that era, that I imprinted on.)

This particular book was a posthumous "hey! this stuff was never collected! we can make some money off it!" collection, or at least that's my cynical take on it. I remember precisely nothing about this book in particular.

Anonymous, editor, Playboy 50 Years: The Cartoons (5/28)

Playboy was always great for cartoons. Sure, most of the time they had to be "sexy," and it was a particular mid-century view of what was both "sexy" and "funny," but every market has its idiosyncrasies. Playboy ran a lot of cartoons, they ran a lot of cartoons large (many full-pagers for most of their run), they paid really well, and they had a bunch of regulars who were in every or nearly-every issue.

Only the New Yorker is in the same rough category: they trade off money for prestige, and might be roughly equal in number of cartoons. (And the "who is more circumscribed by tradition" debate could run for years without answer.)

This was published when Playboy was on the downward trend, but only gently: the Internet hadn't entirely revolutionized porn or murdered magazines yet. And it was a gigantic celebratory book for the 50th anniversary of the magazine, featuring lots of great cartoons and lots of cartoons with lovingly depicted naked female flesh, with those two things sometimes but not always being the same.

Andi Watson, Love Fights, Vol. 1 (5/29)

A great book by a great creator, though only half of the full story, as the title implies.

I've re-read it more recently, and wrote about it then, so let me just say go to that link instead of trying to remember the book here.

Peter Robinson, Playing With Fire (5/30)

I'm going to guess that this was part of his series about a police detective - in Yorkshire? I want to say somewhere in the North of England, but I could be massively wrong - but I can't tell you more without looking it up. So I will.

OK, the main character is Inspector Alan Banks, this was the fourteenth book, and there have been thirteen more since then, so it's exactly the middle of the series at the moment.

This is the one about an arsonist, as the title implies. And I may have failed to keep up with Robinson for the last decade or so, but all of the books of his I read were really impressive: he's one of those police-procedural writers who is a novelist first, so they're compelling, well-written books about people in complicated, dangerous situations, not just puzzle-books.

Reading Into the Past: Week of May 25, 1991

Here's how this is going to go. I'm going to use a random number generator to pick a year, from 1991 to 2007. I'll look up in my reading notebook to see what I was reading at that time in that year. I'll list those books here. I'll write something about what I remember about those books, if anything.

And then we'll all move on with our lives, with a new, probably not all that profound, appreciation of the vagaries of memory and the destructive power of accumulating years.

And...scene!

The year is 1991. See my post from 2006 for the weird quirks of my very early reading notebook (including those random numbers, which are pages, my early trackable metric), if you care. Here's what I listed as "Week Ending 5/25":

Harris, The Silence of the Lambs (386)

We all know what this is, right? "Harris" is Thomas Harris, and this is the second of his thrillers set in the Hannibal Lecter-verse. It's a very good thriller, as I recall.

My only real question is whether I read it after seeing the movie, or if I read it because I was expecting to see the movie. I know I saw the movie first-run, and that opened in February of 1991, so, on preponderance of evidence, and noting that Young Andy was 22 years old at this point, I'm going to say I saw the movie first (something which has tended to reverse in the years since).

Jennings, The Ambiguous Iroquois Empire (end, 208)

I am pretty sure this was a big, relatively serious history book about early America. I was probably interested in it because the Iroquois nation extended across the places I grew up (and have lived since then). Let me see if I can find it and validate my memory.

Looks like I remember correctly: it's Francis Jennings, the book won at least one award, and it was fairly new at the time, having come out in 1990. And it's part of a three-book series (maybe the middle one?) by Jennings about various ways Native nations coped and dealt with settlers in North America - those all adding up to "not well" in the end, but it took a couple of hundred years to get there.

Rucker, The Hollow Earth (308)

A great, though less typical, novel by one of my favorite authors, Rudy Rucker. Edgar Allan Poe adventures into the Symmesian hollow earth! This was, I think, pretty new at the time, but - from the fact that I seem to have read the finished book - I assume that I was not reading it as a potential SFBC offering. It, or Rucker, may have been just too weird. 

Ballard, The Day of Creation (254)

One of the many apocalyptic novels by J.G. Ballard, who I was working my way through at the time. (I don't think anything of his was ever considered for the SFBC during my years there; most readers are philistines, as always.)

I thought this was one of the early books, from the '60s, but I misremembered: it was his 1987 novel, so fairly new at the time. It is an apocalypse, about a driven doctor in Africa obsessed with making the Sahara bloom. I don't remember the details, but I bet he does it while drinking a lot, and downed airplanes and drained swimming pools somehow are important. My flippancy aside, all of Ballard is worth reading.

Eco, Travels in Hyperreality (307)

I read Umberto Eco's big smart-people novels - The Name of the Rose and Foucalt's Pendulum - like everyone else in those days. And I liked them, so I moved into his non-fiction to see if I could find some of the same kick. 

This collection of essays came out in 1990 - at least, the English-language edition did; I'm not sure if it was a new assemblage for the American market or a straight translation of something existing in Italian - and was marketed heavily to people like me. (It succeeded, not just with me.) My memory is that this one is his "essays about America" book, which shows marketers and editors were just as cynical then are they are now.

O'Brien, Going After Cacciato (338)

One of the great novels to come out of Vietnam, though that's about all I remember about it. The author is Tim O'Brien, and I should probably re-read it someday. (I do have his If I Die in a Combat Zone, which I think is a memoir, on my to-be-read shelves for something different, if I want that.)

Norton and Lackey, The Elvenbane (typescript, end, 454)

I read a lot of Andre Norton and Mercedes Lackey in my years at the SFBC. I was not a huge fan of Late Norton: I thought her style got clotted and she spent a lot of time on tedious fantasies that didn't show her strongest writing. But she was super-popular, so I guess I was the outlier. Lackey I thought of as a guilty pleasure for a long time, I guess largely because her books were so "girly," about telepathic bonding and relationships and magical sparkly horses and so on. But, at some point, I realized there was nothing guilty about it: she wrote fun books that I enjoyed, and she did a bunch of them in the '90s. So I guess I grew up, at least a little bit.

This was planned to be a Big Deal, and I think was at least a Moderate Deal. It was the era of engineered fantasy Events, like Black Trillium, in which editors brokered treaties among big fantasy writers to have them write Even Bigger fantasies together. As I remember, this launched a trilogy, which was pleasant but not as wonderful as anyone hoped it would be. And it seems to now be out of print, in the way of all things.

Various periodicals (438)

Yes, I kept track of pages read in magazines in those days. (OK, this would also include Comics Buyer's Guide, a weekly in newspaper broadsheet format, but it was mostly glossy magazines.) No idea exactly what it was, nor would I or anyone else care.

Reading Into the Past: Week of May 9, 1997

When I get books in the mail, I write about them here. When I don't, I write about stuff I read years ago, daring my memory to work.

This time out, it's 1997. What were we all doing and thinking and reading twenty-five years ago? Well, here's from me:

Daniel Pool, Dickens' Fur Coat and Charlotte's Unanswered Letters (5/2)

I'm pretty sure this was a nonfiction book of quirky facts about 19th century writers, probably centered on their stuff. But that's about all that comes to mind from the title. Let's see if a search will jog my memory.

OK, this is more specifically a book about publishing, which explains why I read it. (We all love the secret minutia of our own worlds.) Pool had previously written What Charles Dickens Ate and Jane Austen Knew, so he was the go-to guy for random facts about Victorian novelists in the mid-90s. I still don't remember much about the book itself, though.

Harry Turtledove, How Few Remain (typescript, 5/4)

Turtledove has specialized in long books (often in long series) of alternate history, minutely detailed and well-researched, moving forward slowly in time from a hinge-point. I read a lot of them during my time at the SFBC, and generally enjoyed them, though I cursed long books floridly in those days, since I had a never-ending editorial maw to feed and the books in the field just kept getting longer and longer for the same quantity of plot.

This book is the beginning of what I think is his longest series - this book, then two trilogies and a tetralogy - starting from that durable old saw, "what if the South won the Civil War?" It has lots and lots and lots of stuff happening, over the course of eleven books, most involving famous people you will have heard of (even in the later books, when one might assume the winds of fate would have blown elsewise). I'm not always as thrilled with Turtledove's people as his extrapolation, and there does sometimes seem to be a grinding element in his books, as if he is milling them out of refined history, and there's only so much personality he can manage to get into them. But, especially if you really like alternate history, hit this one, and know you have ten more coming.

Christopher Finch, The Art of Walt Disney (5/4)

Some kind of art book; my main memory is that the cover was a bluish-purple. Let me search and see how wrong I am.

Well the current edition is from 2011, and the hegemonic Internet retailer lists earlier editions in 1973 and 1988, but not one in 97-98. I'm pretty sure there was a new edition then, but I cannot find proof of it, or the color of its cover. In any case, this was a book about Walt the man and Disney the company, in a hagiographic mode, with lots and lots of art and even more gushing about how wonderful every last bit of that art was. I enjoyed it, but you may faintly detect that I did not entirely drink the Kool-Aid.

Various, The Amalgam Age of Comics: The Marvel Comics Collection (5/4)

This was a goofy thing, which seems to be half-forgotten now. Marvel and DC had a big weird crossover event in the mid-90s - subtext: the direct market was imploding and sales were plummeting, so everyone was throwing every last idea at the wall to see if anything would stick - in which there were a whole bunch of one-shots with "Amalgam" characters who were all one DC hero + one Marvel hero in the same person.

It was massively gimmicky, hugely inside baseball, and only within waving distance of seriousness - I thought it was fun at the time, but it was very much for people who knew all the details on both sides and wanted to see talented creators ring changes on those details.

The stories were collected into two trade paperbacks, one each from the two companies: this was the Marvel book. Both are deeply out of print, probably for we-don't-work-together-anymore reasons, and almost certainly not worth what you would have to pay for them. Someday some giant conglomerate will buy both companies and this will be in print again (in a lousy edition missing important sections and with an introduction from someone currently hot and twenty years too young to have any useful things to say); wait to get it at that point.

Matt Groening, The Huge Book of Hell (5/5)

I think this was the massive omnibus of Life In Hell, which came out after Groening admitted that the strip was dead and Simpsons would be the entirety of his life until the sweet release of death. (Or something like that.)

And it's another book that seems to be deeply out of print, oddly. It also does not seem to be as comprehensive as I was thinking: it may have just been the new Life In Hell book, or a mixed old/new collection, or something like that. I tend to want to say that you should go to the original books - Love Is Hell, Work Is Hell, School Is Hell - and leave it at that if you want to read Groening. In fact, yes. I do still say that. Go there instead.

Tim Cahill, Pass the Butterworms (5/6)

Cahill was - probably still is; it wasn't that long ago - a travel writer with a vaguely gonzo reputation; I remember reading a bunch of his books in the '90s. I believe this was his new book at the time, and it may have been the last book of his I read. (I don't think those two facts are connected.)

I see that Cahill only had one more book of travel essays after this one - 2002's Hold the Enlightenment - and that he's in his upper seventies now; he was older than I thought. (Another one of those Boomers who were so ubiquitous in everything when I was younger.) I may have actually kept up with his books, then, he just didn't have as many as I thought. (He was an editor for Outside for ages, so he had a day-job besides running off to odd corners of the world and writing about it.)

My memory is that Cahill is always entertaining, and that his books can be roughly ranked by how outrageous their titles are - so Jaguars Ripped My Flesh is at the top, then A Wolverine Is Eating My Leg, then Pecked to Death By Ducks, and so on.

Ian McEwan, First Love, Last Rites (5/7)

Did I read this book that late? My memory is that I caught up with McEwan much earlier in the '90s than this, but I guess not. This was, I think, his first short-story collection, way back at the beginning of his career, so my guess is that I was working backwards, and finished here.

McEwan became a better writer, technically, from this point. But I don't know if he has ever been a stronger writer: these are dark, harrowing, compelling stories, with the fierceness and power that only a young man can muster.

Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean, The Day I Swapped My Dad for Two Goldfish (5/7)

I see I was reading picture books even a year before my first son was born; this would have been well before we had any idea Thing 1 was coming. This was the first of two picture books from Gaiman and McKean, following various other collaborations from the Sandman covers to Violent Cases and Mr. Punch. (Did they ever work on a movie together? I don't think so.)

I still think The Wolves in the Walls is a better book in all ways, but this is a lot of fun, and I recall it being a hoot to read aloud, which is a huge bonus in a picture book.

Reading Into the Past: Week of April 24. 1999

Well, I screwed this up two weeks ago, so let's see if I remember how to do it. The way it's supposed to work is: if I get books in the mail, I write about them here.

If not, I hit up a RNG online, pick a week from the stretch of sixteen years when I was keeping up a reading notebook but not doing this blog yet, list the books I read then here, and try to write about them, dredging the depths of my memory. It's a silly thing, but I enjoy it.

Wait: do I enjoy it? Man, if I get that deep into my own motivations I'll never get anywhere. I don't dislike it, which is as good as I get most days.

Anyway, this time out we're hitting 1999:

Greg Bear, Darwin's Radio (typescript, 4/18)

I can't remember the last time I read a Greg Bear book, and I used to like his stuff a lot. Getting off the merry-go-round of SF changed my reading life, first immediately, and then slowly, but it has utterly changed it. (Well, it's also been more than a decade: things change anyway in fifteen years.)

I think this was one of a cluster of contemporary-set novels, closer to thriller than to the big-idea SF I always loved best from Bear, that he was doing at the time. (Writers aren't obliged to do anything their readers want - they're not obliged to do anything their editors want, or their agents want, either, but those latter folks are usually closer and louder in the discussion.)

I see this was the epidemic novel, about "something sleeping in human DNA" that "woke up" - I don't know if Bear was trying to do Crichton, but I suspect he, or someone close to him, pointed out that his skills and strengths were really close to a kind of thriller than regularly sold a bazillion copies. There was a sequel, and this one was nominated for the Hugo, so it was not unsuccessful, but I don't think Bear broke out the way some people were clearly pushing.

William Barton, When We Were Real (typescript & finished book, 4/21)

First up, not sure why I read this in two formats - my guess is that the UK edition came through while I was in the middle of it. (It was a June paperback, so it's not impossible I got the US book, though the question is why I was reading a June book in April for the SFBC. I suspect we were in one of our very-common times when there seemed to be a dearth of "good" SF, so we were checking out everything published anywhere near the right time.)

And I don't remember it at all: I know Barton mostly as a collaborator, and had forgotten I'd read any of his solo books. Looking at it now, the cover is vaguely familiar. I have only very vague recollections of it, even after looking at the blurb now - but I do think it was smart and interesting, a far-future space opera crammed full of stuff, the kind of book about post-human immortals of various types who are also doing exciting things. I bet it, or similar Barton books, would scratch that Big Idea SF itch.

Nicholas A. Basbanes, A Gentle Madness (4/22)

This was a moderately big bestseller in the day - I think this was after Patience & Fortitude, but I could have it backwards - and is one of the better books-about-people-who-love-books available. It's a history of book-collecting, more or less, though very digressive as I recall. If you're a big reader, and anywhere near my age, you've probably heard of it, and maybe picked it up in a bookstore. As I remember, it's fun, though reading it can feel self-indulgent.

Robert B. Parker, Hush Money (4/23)

One of the Parker novels; I'm going to guess the new one that year, since I was basically keeping up with them in those days. (They were all short and zippy - I could read one in barely two hours, so why not keep up with them?)

It's was 26th in the series, and even reading the plot synopsis doesn't bring it back to mind. There were about a dozen more by Parker before his death, and a further dozen by sharecroppers, since Putnam is addicted to their annual hit of Parker income. (And perhaps his heirs are, even more so.)

I've written a lot about Parker's books here, though mostly in passing. He was good, and then got really stripped down, which was either good or bad, or maybe both in turn. He sold a lot of books. Now he's dead. C'est la vie.

Terry Pratchett, Carpe Jugulum (typescript)

I don't think I've written much about Discworld here: I avoided talking about SFF when I worked in the field, and then there were only a few years left of Pratchett. I have hit some of the pseudo-nonfiction spin-offs, since I love those kinds of books anyway and the huge popularity of Discworld has meant they were really good of their type. 

This is one of the novels from the prime era of Discworld - even more so, one of the better books in the series overall. I don't know if it's quite Small Gods-level, or Guards! Guards!, but it's close. It is damaged slightly by being really obviously a re-run of almost exactly the same plot and theme as Lords and Ladies, but Pratchett's vampires are ferocious in their own way, and I recall the end of this book is particularly strongly plotted and exciting.

Anyway, if you're reading my blog, I expect you have an opinion on Discworld. You've probably read at least a few of the books, even if you decided you hate them. So my opinion may not mean much.

Reading Into the Past: Not Today

So, I was working on a "Reading Into the Past" post, and first I noticed I'd hit the same week twice before, which was not a good thing. (Showing my work: post from 2007, post from 2011.)

And then I noticed I was working on the wrong week - as in, the week of March 11, not April - after I was mostly done.

So I'm calling a mulligan; I'm clearly not doing this right today, so it's time to stop.

Reading Into the Past: Week of 3/7/91

Here's how I do it: I post a list of books every Monday. If I got anything new in the past week; that's the list. If I didn't, I pick a week from my reading notebook (from the years 1991 to 2007, for those who care) and write about those books.

In the latter case, there's a lot of trying to remember what something was. But that's the way of the world, and it amuses me: everything falls apart, everything is forgotten, everything goes away and is irretrievably broken eventually.

This time, the year is 1991. I'm looking at the fourth page of my first reading notebook, almost the very beginning. Here's what I read then:

Jimmy Breslin, The Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight

I didn't entirely articulate it at the time, and I would have been a horrible reporter, but I had a serious desire in my youth to be a newspaper columnist. I devoured and loved a lot of Royko and Baker and Buchwald, and had vague dreams of being that kind of guy: living in a big city somewhere, coming into a bustling office everyday to sit down and pound out semi-funny, semi-serious copy about Whatever Was Happening, and see it in print before the earth spun around the sun another time. It obviously never happened, and since journalism had an even bigger extinction event than book publishing, that was definitely a good thing for me.

But I'm pretty sure I was reading this book because of that. Breslin was another one of those guys who I thought I wanted to be like, and this was his famous novel, twentyish years old when I read it but still funny and dynamic and energetic. It's also a comic novel about crime, and I was reading a lot of mysteries then - I think I'd already started reading Donald Westlake's Dortmunder books, which are in the same general area. This is probably really old-sounding at this point (the book is exactly as old as I am), and I bet many of the social attitudes will raise eyebrows: I think it's all white people, thank goodness, but I don't think Italians and Jews and Irish come out well, or non-stereotypically.

Poul Anderson, The Earth Book of Stormgate

I was reading a lot of random SF in those days: intensely and in multiple directions but not necessarily seriously or with a purpose. I might have had my first interview for the eventual SFBC job in early March, since I started there on Tax Day, but I think I was just reading fantastic stuff because that's what I liked and cared about. I was still used to reading a lot quickly from my youth and English-major days (I was mostly a Victorianist, I guess, which meant a lot of really long novels to read quickly), which was good practice for that job.

This particular book is a relatively minor collection by Anderson - it's part of the Polesotechnic League series, which looked like his major work for a while, but the pull of series of novels in the SF world was too intense, so these are read pretty much just by Anderson devotees lately. My memory is that he, like a lot of mid-century SF writers, was better at short-fiction lengths (especially novelette to novella, which I think most of these were) than at novels. I'd say this is worth reading, if you find it, but it's pretty deep in that particular series. On the other hand, old series made up of short fiction were much more modular than the series standard these days; you wouldn't lose much starting here.

Brian Aldiss, Starship

At some point, the US edition smartened up and used the title the UK had been using all along, Non-Stop. (You see, the fact that this is a generation starship is meant to be a surprise in the text.) But that was later; I read this pre-spoiled. Frankly, I probably read it because I saw it mentioned while poking through the original SF Encyclopedia, so it was pre-pre-spoiled.

This is a short and relatively straightforward 1950s novel; Aldiss got more literary and baroque later but here he was mostly just a good writer telling a good story. It is post-apocalyptic, and fairly generic, but, as I remember, Aldiss handles it all pretty well. Not a major classic of the field, but a solid book by a writer who did even better things.

Pierre Boulle, Planet of the Apes

Yes, my taste in SF always tended to the literary and odd. Also - another pattern that has recurred a lot since then - I don't think I ever seriously watched any of the movies, neither the '60s string or the recent ones, but I did, obviously, seek out the original novel.

I have not re-read this book since then, though I still have a clear sense of reading the astronauts' first view of the ape-world. As a million people have said since then, this is deeper and more philosophical than any of the movies, and clearly set on a different planet, without the twist ending of the movie.

Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote

And I was still catching up on major classics that I somehow missed during my schooling. Well, I'm still doing that, but it's much slower these days. (I was reading late Dickens, about one book a year, in the '90s, expecting to round the corner back to early Dickens and finish up, but I'm still staring down Edwin Drood today.)

I have nothing coherent to say about a world classic that I read in translation - come to think of it, I don't know which translation, which could be important - more than thirty years ago. It is a world classic; if you haven't read it, you should. Put it on the list.

"Various Periodicals"

This was typically "various magazines" other weeks, so I may have caught up on something that wasn't a magazine - back this far I listed the number of pages, and there's a whopping 1260 pages here. (Though remember this was the pre-Internet era, when magazines were fat and happy with ad pages.)

I'm going to guess this was a combination of movie magazines, SPIN, maybe National Review (I think I was reading that by this point), almost certainly Comics Buyer's Guide, Entertainment Weekly, National Lampoon (if it hadn't already died) and probably a couple of other things I've completely forgotten about. Most of the throwaway journalism that these days is online was in magazines back then, on about the same level of seriousness and professionalism but (I think) generally substantially better-paid.

Reading Into the Past: Week of 2/21/05

Mondays are for lists. New books, if I have them. This week, there's nothing new, so instead I'll pull up what I was reading "this week" some time in the past, and see what I remember of them.

And the year is 2005.

Tom Perrotta, Little Children (2/16)

I didn't blog about the book when I read it, but I did see the movie a couple of years later, and wrote about that. There's some comparison-to-the-book buried in there, written by someone fifteen years closer to reading that book than I am today.

I have a complicated relationship with Perrotta's books. He writes well, and his characters are often hugely like me, generationally and in their concerns and places in life. I think every major reader has some writers like that: the ones that hit bulls-eyes with you almost without trying, because you came so much out of the same worlds. On the other hand, there's something deeply middle-brow about Perrotta, so there's an elitist part of me that feels bad for liking his books so much. But, at the base, he's a strong writer who writes about things that are electric in the culture and resonant for huge audiences.

This is the one about an affair among suburbanites with young children, to be reductive. Perrotta's books are always more complex than their reductive descriptions, though - and what the movies never quite capture is the psychological, individual depth of his secondary characters; a lot more people get the narrative to run through their heads in a Perrotta book than ever could in the movies made from them.

So I still think this is a good one. I don't know if I'll ever re-read it.

Roald Dahl, Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator (read to my older son, 2/16)

This was the middle of my big reading-to-kids era. My older son was born in 1998 and the younger one in 2000, so I read a lot of bedtime books starting about 2000-01 until maybe 2008-2009. For roughly a year before this, I'd been intermittently reading longer books (Wizard of Oz, The Hobbit, Narnia - the usuals) to Thing 1, but he was and still is a very antsy person, so that didn't always work well. The routine moved to Thing 2 alone, mostly, for the last few years, and I think I had a second burst of trying to read longer books that also didn't last long. (Thing 2 was a bigger reader of fantasy novels to begin with, though - I basically pointed him toward Pratchett, had some conversations about other writers, and helped facilitate his own reading from that point.)

Great Glass Elevator is a weird book, as I recall, episodic like the first one but set mostly on a space station - of course a candy magnate would fly his space-worthy elevator to an alien-infested space hotel, why would you think he wouldn't? - and it does not get mentioned as one of Dahls' best books for good and sufficient reasons. But I've always liked the weirdness.

Jennifer Fallon, Harshini (photocopies of Australian edition, read beginning & end, 2/18)

For no good reason, at this point in my career I'd weirdly slipped into the role of being the SFBC editor who handled pretty much all of the Australian authors that we acquired - Sean Williams, Sara Douglass, Isobelle Carmody, Sean McMullen, George Turner. Neither then nor since have I ever been to Australia; it was just a random thing. But it did mean I read a lot of fun writers.

Jennifer Fallon fell into that bucket: she did a couple of solid epic-fantasy series that we did in the club and I enjoyed reading. This was the end of what I think was the second trilogy we did, and clearly I was feeling the press of time. (Third books of trilogies being huge and often serving to work out at length what the reader already knows what will happen.) I'm afraid I have no memory of this book.

Andre Norton and Sasha Miller, Dragon Blade (typescript, read beginning and end, 2/19)

Oh, look - I did it again! Yes, the dirty secret of reprint publishing (and possibly certain kinds of reviewing, as well) is that you often don't have to read all of a book to understand or deal with it. A lot of books are what they are, and the middle is just the complications and events that keep the covers far enough apart to charge the appropriate amount of money. (And give the reader more stuff to read and spend some time with - that's the less mercenary way of putting it.)

This was fourth and I want to say last in an epic fantasy series, and I have to admit that Norton (often with collaborators) was doing a lot of epic fantasy in my SFBC years, and I was generally lukewarm at best about it. Norton SF was muscular and smart, with lost civilizations and tough heroes stuck in dangerous situations that sometimes even obliquely commented on real-world social issues. Norton Fantasy was clotted, written in backwards-syntax, straining for mythic effect and running to endless volumes. A lot of people seemed to like that, though - there were a bunch of those books and they all sold well. So maybe my personal tastes don't mean a hell of a lot.

Kazoi Koike and Goseki Kojima, Samurai Executioner, Vol. 3: The Hell Stick (2/20)

This is another series by the 'Lone Wolf & Cub" team, which I think is set in the same continuity - don't the two series cross over, or refer to each other, at a few points? Anyway, more samurai action, more straightforwardly, without the larger take-care-of-your-infant-son-while-pursuing-vengeance frisson. I have no idea what happened in this one, but I bet the hero killed a whole hell of a lot of people in interesting and exciting ways.

Gardner Dozois, The Year's Best Science Fiction, Twenty-Second Annual Collection (2/21, photocopies)

I'm going to have to look up a ToC to say anything coherent. Well, wait, before I do that: in those days, Dozois was the "standard" Year's Best, the really big one with an equally impressive essay about everything going on in the SF field during the past year. Dozois always had a viewpoint and often axes to grind, but he was about as honest as any editor ever is and tried to be clear about even the stuff in the field he didn't enjoy or like as much. So his books were great signposts of What Is Going On every year, albeit given his usual bent towards slightly more literary work.

OK, here's a TOC, from ISFDB. I see stories there I remember from Kage Baker, Walter Jon Williams, and Eleanor Arnason, which isn't a bad hit rate for something almost twenty years old.

Reading Into the Past: Week of 2/5/94

This is Monday. (I know, I know.) On Mondays, if I got any new books, I write about them here. If not, I write about the old books I read "this week" in some past year.

This time out, the past year is...1994! And the list is both short and weird, which suits me.

James Morrow, Towing Jehovah (1/30)

When I was an editor at the SF Book Club, my boss Ellen Asher and I used to regularly discuss putting together a "blasphemy flyer," collecting all of the books we offered that could offend the Mrs. Grundys of the era. Sure, there were some other books, like God: The Autobiography (which sold well for us for years but I otherwise never saw or heard anywhere else in the world), but it would largely be a Jim Morrow collection, which might be why we never did it.

(Another reason being that it would be designed to offend people, which is not generally a good idea to do in a business context.)

Morrow had already won the World Fantasy for Only Begotten Daughter, which is probably a better, definitely a more popular, and absolutely a friendlier novel than the chilly, doom-laden, deliberately anti-theistic Towing Jehovah. So he was clearly doubling down at this point in his career, focusing on one of his major themes really tightly - did I mention this was the beginning of a trilogy, in which God's gigantic dead body is found floating in the Atlantic, and things get weirder from there? It is.

So: this is a good book, a major book, a powerful book. I don't know if I can recommend it to all readers, though. For some of you, you might just burst into flames upon trying to read it, and I wouldn't want that on my conscience.

Jim Thompson, Cropper's Cabin (1/31)

Vintage Crime/Black Lizard was reprinting all of Thompson's novels in somewhat unified trade dress (they had a batch for each season, and, as art directors will, the design tended to drift over the course of a few years), and I was buying and reading all of them. This was one: I'll have to look it up to see which one it was.

OK. This is a 1952 novel, about the son of a sharecropper in Oklahoma (where Thompson was born and lived) who was in love with the daughter of a man he hates. I think Thompson used that same vague plot - not the sharecropper part; the "obsessed with the wrong girl" part - more than once, but I have a vague memory of this book, and it's too-headstrong-for-his-own-good hero. (All Thompson heroes are tragic, one way or another, either for themselves or others.) Core-period Thompson is always good.

Macintosh User's Guide for Macintosh Performa Computers (2/3)

This was the manual that came with my first "real" computer (I had a TRS-80 Color as a teen, hence the qualifier), which I bought sometime that winter from an office-supply store on Route 46 in Totowa. (The one that was previously a movie theater, and is now some kind of women's-clothing emporium; I think it was an OfficeMax back in the day. This will mean nothing to those of you who aren't local.)

And, yes, I did read it cover-to-cover; we were serious about our computers in my day!

Jon A. Jackson, The Blind Pig (1/4)

This was some variety of mystery novel; I know I read a couple by Jackson and I may have read everything he published. Let me go check - maybe I'll find out he's had a booming career since then, and this series now has thirty books, including a bunch of award winners. (I write that down, since it's always my hope: I want things to have gone well while I wasn't paying attention.)

OK, this is Detective Sergeant Mullheisen - I seem to remember he had some nickname (aha! It's "Fang") - and this was the second of ten novels. They were quite hardboiled, especially for a series with a cop protagonist, and set in a mob-riddled Detroit, with a lot of great recurring characters and wonderfully sleazy atmosphere. The Diehard was the first one; this was the second. They might feel out-of-date these days, but I enjoyed all the ones I read. 

Reading Into the Past: Week of 1/29/05

Every Monday, I talk about a list of books here. If I've gotten anything new, that's the list. If I haven't...that's when "Reading into the Past" comes into play.

This series of posts looks at what I was reading "this week" in a randomly-chosen past year, from the period when I did keep a reading notebook (so I know what I read) but didn't have this blog yet (so there isn't already a post about that book). It is a weird and quixotic thing, but it is mine own.

This time out: the end of January of 2005.

Andre Norton, The Beast Master (photocopies, in Beast Master's Planet omnibus, 1/23)

This I read for work, obviously - I was Senior Editor of the SFBC at the time, and this omnibus was being published by Tor later that year. Beast Master was the first novel about Hosteen Storm, some guy in the future who could talk to animals (I think he had a Native American background to explain that - well, in those days it was probably an "Indian background," but you know what I mean). The other novel in this omnibus is Lord of Thunder; I don't seem to have read that, but the SFBC did offer the omnibus. And Lynn McConchie then wrote a series of sequels, supposedly "in collaboration" with Norton, but I always doubted how much the senior author did in the junior-senior pairings like that.

I never imprinted on Norton as strongly as some people of my generation did. I read some of her books when I was younger and enjoyed them, but never really went out of my way to read more - and Norton always had lots more; she was prolific and generally dependable. My memory is that this series is on her sillier side: psionics stories have not aged terribly well to begin with, and psionics stories about a noble savage and his animal friends have it even worse.

Robert E. Howard, Bran Mak Morn: The Last King ("read parts and skimmed parts," bound galleys, 1/23)

Here we see the era when I was "handling" a lot of books for work, and being clear about how much of them I actually read. (Elsewhere in this notebook I see "got through most of it" and "poked through parts," but the most common thing is "read beginning & end." You can get most of the point of genre fiction, especially a series novel, by reading the first 50 and last 50 pages, if you have to.)

This one was part of a somewhat scholarly project reprinting a lot of Howard work by Del Rey in the early years of the century - I think there were four Conan books first, with all of the stuff by other people stripped out of the mid-70s twelve-volume series and a serious attempt made to get back to preferred texts and proper chronological order. Bran was part of the second wave, along with Solomon Kane and Kull; I don't think we did all of them in the club, but I'm pretty sure we did this one.

I'm not a huge Howard fan; I've mostly stuck with Conan, which is his best stuff, as far as I could tell. My memory is that most of this collection - the cover calls it a novel, but it's not, at all - is OK pulp adventure, with a couple of stories substantially better than that.

Steve Almond, Candyfreak (1/24)

Popular nonfiction is always the same kind of thing: shortish books, in a breezy style, about something interesting to at least a big swath of people. It helps, the past three decades or so, if the writer can pretend that thing changed the entire world - that's not required, but it's been a major strand in the nonfiction world. This one was a bestseller, so you may have heard about it - I bet it's still selling decently even now, since the world Almond depicts is basically the same: there are a few big food/candy conglomerates, though they do tend to trade divisions to each other, like baseball cards, every so often, and they have kept buying up or forcing out the smaller players.

I remember liking this, and I think I went on to read at least one more Almond book, which is a good sign. But I'm also a guy whose family took an annual trip to the Hersheypark amusement conglomerate (mostly for the roller coasters & similar stuff, but always with a stop to the gigantic visitor's center and gift shop) for a couple of decades, so you may have to recalibrate your expectations.

John Kovalic, The Dork Side of the Goon (1/25)

I know this was a collection of Kovalic's popular webcomic Dork Tower, but I'll have to look it up to tell which one. According to that big internet bookstore, it's #7, and seems to be from the era where it looked like the series might actually move forward with some of its plotlines. (It's been irregularly-published for what feels like the last decade - never quite going away, but reduced to monthly random gags at times and often dropping what seemed to be central plots.) I like Kovalic's humor, even though the only tabletop gaming I did was back in highschool, and - though I think he's made a good living doing card art and creating games - I do wish he had time and financial incentive to tell more stories in comics form, since I like stories better than random art.

J.G. Ballard, Millennium People (1/26)

Before I look it up: I think this was Ballard's new novel at the time, and almost the last one he published. (My memory is that we got one more, and that he's been dead not quite a decade at this point.) Ballard's novels always came in clusters: the last group was about shiny new buildings and developments and other built environments in Europe, the not-quite-as-shiny people who moved into them and caused trouble with their neuroses and messy lives, but not nearly as much apocalypse as the similar urban novels of the '70s or the phantasmagorical books of the '80s. This one was right in the middle of that cluster: was it the one about the holiday camp in Spain? Now let me check my facts.

Actually, Cocaine Nights is the one set in Spain; Super-Cannes is the one set in a planned community near Cannes; and Kingdom Come the one about the mall outside London, his last novel. Millennium was second-to-last, with the original UK hardcover in '03 and the US edition (I think) somewhat delayed, and was the most general, about terrorists in the London suburbs - Ballard was always writing about suburbs, even when he didn't seem to be - and the man with the name starting with M who investigated and inevitably joined them. And he died in 2009; more than a dozen years ago now. Tempus fugit.

Thinking about Ballard always makes me want to read more Ballard, but which Ballard? The chilly  core stories? The '70s urban novels? The '60s cozy apocalypses? The experimental stories? The pseudo-autobiographies? Or the late flourish this one was part of? So many choices....

Simon Furman, et. al., Wallace & Gromit: The Whippet Vanishes (1/27)

I'm pretty sure this was a collection of the comic strips - originally from newspapers or comics? - from the UK starring Nick Park's claymated duo. But let me check.

No, this seems to be an original GN about W&G - I think the ongoing comics came slightly later, or maybe didn't make it to this side of the Atlantic until substantially later. As far as I can tell, this is indeed a story about W&G investigating a whippet (the dog breed, not the teenage drug of my youth) disappearing.

Nick Hornby, How to Be Good (1/28)

Hornby is a writer who makes deeply readable books that are thoughtful in a mass-market way, if that makes sense. (In some ways, he's very parallel to Tom Perrotta, his US equivalent.) I like his books a lot while reading them, but, even though he doesn't have a whole lot of books, I still struggle to remember which one was which. And that's my backhanded way of saying I don't remember anything about this one unaided. So time for some aid:

OK, so this is the one about a woman who - to be hugely reductive - was "the good one" in her marriage, until suddenly her husband changes and becomes massively more charitable, kind, giving, open - all of those things. And she...doesn't hate it, because that would be petty and wrong. But she's suddenly at sea in a lot of things in her life.

I think Hornby is a really incisive writer about the kind of lives lots of people actually live - a lot like Perrotta. He'll be read, at least by scholars, in a hundred years as they construct theories about "the mind of early 21st century humanity," if that's a positive for anyone.

Daniel Pinkwater, Atilla the Pun (1/29)

I've read a lot of Pinkwater; many of his middle-grade (and the rarer YA and one adult) novels are among my favorites in the world. This I think is a more minor work, but I don't remember it well, so let me research:

This is the sequel to Magic Moscow, which I'm not sure if I read as an adult. This time, a punmaster from the historical depths of the Eastern steppes is transported, magically, to the modern day, and causes upheavals and consternation among the people of what I think was the early '80s originally. Generally not considered to be one of Pinkwater's best, but just fine if you want more - which is pretty much exactly how I came to it.

Reading Into the Past: Week of 1/17/02

As usual: on Monday, if I have new books, I write about them here. If I don't, I pick a random year in my reading notebook and try to remember the books I read this time that year. (How much do any of us remember about things we did ten or twenty years ago? It is an odd exercise, I admit.)

This time, our number is 2002:

Julianne Balmain, Office Kama Sutra (1/10)

Before I look it up, I'm going to assume that I read it because of that title, and also that I found out about it through work. I have a sneaky suspicion that QPB offered it: it's got their kind of title.

And...it is exactly what you'd expect from the title: a tongue-in-cheek guide, written in faux-Orientalia, about pursuing nooky in the office. I suspect 2002 is awfully late for a book like that; it would not fly now, even written by a woman (and illustrated by another: Thorina Rose). It looks amusing, but, these days, it would be a race between being condemned for cultural appropriation and being condemned for making light of workplace sexual harassment.

Michael I. Meyerson, Political Numeracy (bound galleys, 1/11)

I was still a Good Republican in 2002, though I was wavering. So this may well be a "why lefty economics never adds up" book, though I hope not. Let me check.

Nope: looks like this was more of a follower in the school of Freakonomics: applying scientific rigor, at least in theory, to some thorny policy questions to find Provable Right Answers. A lot of people thought that was possible, in that technocratic time, but that thread in American discourse seems to have mostly disappeared: right-wingers aren't interested in objective facts or science to begin with, and left-wingers are coming from a different direction.

It looks like Meyerson was either using political issues to explain mathematical concepts, or using mathematical concepts to show how political issues could be solved in a roughly utilitarian way, and I don't think anyone took the hint.

Kazuo Koike and Goseki Kojima, Lone Wolf & Cub, Vol. 16: Gateway Into Winter (1/13)

This was just past the half-way point of the samurai epic, which was collected in twenty-eight volumes. Even if I read dug out the descriptive copy for this book, I don't think I could say anything coherent about this specific piece of the larger story. I did think the whole series was excellent, and I'd read it again if I hadn't lost all of those books in my 2011 flood. (Buying twenty-eight books for a re-read is more than I feel up to at the moment. Maybe someday.)

Doron Swade, The Difference Engine (1/15)

I had to look it up, because my mind kept going to the Gibson/Sterling book of ten years earlier. This is a non-fiction work about Charles Babbage and his machines, and, knowing that, I can vaguely remember reading a book about that at some point. (This one, presumably: unless I've read multiple books on Babbage without keeping track, which is unlikely but not impossible.)

Swade was assistant director of the Science Museum in London, and led the team that built the first working Difference Engine in 1991. (So I'm pretty sure this is the book I'm remembering.) As I vaguely remember now, it's Babbage's story, not Swade's -- there might be an intro or something about his team's work, but the book itself is a conventional this-one-interesting-thing-in-history kind of book.

Calvin Trillin, Tepper Isn't Going Out (1/16)

This book I actually do remember! Trillin has only written a few novels - Barnett Fummer Is an Unbloomed Flower, a very hippie-inspired book from the late '60s, Floater, a very newspaper-inspired novel from 1980, and this one, a very New York-inspired book that was new at the time.

Trillin is a great writer, funny in a wry way no matter what he's writing, and I remember this as one of his best books. It is deeply frivolous - as I recall, he referred to it as a the only novel ever written about parking. Tepper is a guy who likes to read the newspaper in his car, and inevitably, people ask him if he's leaving that spot. He isn't. I believe he becomes local-famous for this, and the plot escalates from there: silly, parochial, and specific, all things Trillin is good at.

Richard Stark, The Score (1/17)

This is the fifth of the Parker novels; I may have been trying to read through them at the time. A decade later, in 2013, I read and reviewed the entire series in the puckishly titled blog series "Starktober." (No points for guessing what month it took place in.) So let me just link to my more detailed post on The Score.

Immediately before that, I finished Jorge Luis Borges's Selected Poems (no memory at all). And right afterward I had some reading for work: a two-book Star Trek: Stargazer series by Michael Jan Friedman (I don't remember what Stargazer was; my guess is a book-only series with some new characters) and then R.A. Salvatore's novel Transcendence (I'm sure it was part of some series; but I'd have to look it up.).

Reading Into the Past: 1/10/98

On a Monday morning here, you get one of two kinds of posts. If I got new books - no matter how I got them - I'll list them. If I don't get new books, I pick "that week" in a random past year of my reading notebook, list the books I was reading then, and try to remember anything about them.

That's "Reading Into the Past." Think of it as the opposite of review of new books: an examination of what, if anything, remains in memory of books read long before.

This time, the RNG gave me 1998, so here's what I was reading at this time that year:

James Blish, Earthman Come Home (in Cities in Flight, 1/3)

I read the first two books of Cities in Flight on the first of the year. And the fourth one the next day, so I think I'll put any thoughts about the series together below.

James Blish, The Triumph of Time (in Cities in Flight, 1/4)

This was the first and only time I read Cities in Flight: I do not remember being particularly impressed. (I don't remember being impressed by anything of Blish's; in my memory, he's a dour and dull writer, plodding in the small and depressing in the big. Oh, the two magical-apocalypse books are OK because their pyrotechnics are bigger, but, in my memory, they're all the same kind of neo-Calvinist thing.) As I remember, the four novels are all quite separate - by many years in both writing and internal chronology, I think - and only a few characters even appear in multiple books. Plus the whole point of the series is another one of those Atom Age parables that nothing ever gets better and everyone is horrible and cruelty is the iron law of the universe. I do not regret letting them slip out of my mind: let me put it that way.

Anne Fadiman, Ex Libris (1/5)

I remember liking this, and, before I look it up, let me say that I think it was a small collection of essays about books that she particularly liked. (Maybe originally appearing somewhere like The Atlantic? Something classy and literary, I think.) Probably also some element of "what I read while young, to mold me into the classy literary intellectual I am today," he said with more cynicism than is probably warranted.

After looking it up: Fadiman is the daughter of Clifton Fadiman (if you remember that name, congratulations! you are at least as old & stepped in random publishing history as I am), and this is her memoir of growing up in a world steeped in (drawl it out for maximum impact) high literature and how she occasionally slummed in things that are not quite as highbrow. I still have pleasant memories of it, but I think it could come across as awfully precious to readers who don't at least like some of the Great Classics, since she is a big-time Great Classics type.

Ian McEwan, Amsterdam (1/6)

I'm several books behind on McEwan now, and started having trouble keeping track of which was which long before that - so many short novels, all well-written, all realistic, all about middle-class British people, will tend to blur in the mind. So I have to admit I have no memory at all of which one this was.

According to sources, this is his Booker-winner, which makes me sad I can't remember it independently. It's the one where two old lovers of the same woman meet at her funeral - I think he jumps into flashbacks from there, with some kind of revelation at the end. McEwan is always an excellent writer and creates great characters, but he has the prolific novelist's problem: there's so much that's all pretty good or better that they all get forgotten in the general mass.

Damien Broderick, compiler, Not the Only Planet (1/7)

I'm going to guess this was a book of quotes and try to look it up. It is not ringing any bells.

Oh! The cover is familiar: it's actually a book of short stories about SFnal travel, published by the Lonely Planet people in one of their occasional frenzies of line-extension. I'm not sure why Broderick was credited as "compiler" rather than "editor" - sure, reprint collections are assembled and their "editors" typically don't touch a word of the text, but that is the standard credit. Maybe Broderick was persnickety about it; it's the kind of thing I could see me being persnickety about. (Speaking as someone who compiled a number of single-author collections in my own day, and who doesn't entirely remember what credit I gave myself.)

ISFDB has a TOC, which is pretty impressive: "Let's Go to Golgotha!" and "Trips," "Tourists" and "Seven American Nights," among others. Probably a fun book to read, even now, if you can find it.

Connie Willis, editor, Nebula Awards 33 (bound galleys. 1/10)

Let me try to remember how it worked in that era: this would have been a book published in 1998 reprinting stories that won the Nebula in 1997 by ending their eligibility period in 1996 and mostly being published in 1995. I used to complain that the Nebula books should be billed as "The best stories of two years ago!" and people would just glare at me. I believe the rules have changed since, and Nebulas are no longer trailing indicators as they used to be - no idea if anthologies of the winners are still a thing, though.

Again, I'll grab a TOC from the indispensable ISFBD and also link to the official list of winners on the Nebula site. I do remember some of those stories - Swanwick's The Dead" in particular on the positive side, though I do not think I was a big fan of "Abandon in Place." No particular memory of this specific assemblage that Connie put together, though it does have a ghastly cover that I'm sure we can't blame on her. (It was the late '90s! Everything was "cyber"!)

Reading Into the Past: Week of 12/20/99

Some weeks, I get new books, and write about them here for a Monday morning. When I don't have anything new to mention, I write about old books instead, digging into my reading notebooks to see what I was reading "this week" sometime during the stretch when I was keeping track of books read but not cataloging those books in this blog. (That's roughly 1991 to 2007.)

This week, it's Option Two, and the year I'm heading back to is 1999:

Gregory Benford, Eater (bound galleys, 12/12)

I read this for work (I was Senior Editor at the SF Book Club at the time), and I'm pretty sure I bought it for work. I feel like I've only read Benford's more straightforward books - not the wide-scale, galaxy-spanning crazy-hair stuff, just the more near-future, serious-science books. (And I wonder how that happened, since my personal inclination is very much the other way.) This one is about a wandering black hole that comes into the solar system and turns out to be intelligent, or inhabited, or something like that -- I forget the exact details twenty years later. I think there was a lot of "political leaders argue about what to do," which is the failure mode for a lot of Hard SF: that's what would happen in most Hard SF situations, but it's deadly boring to read about.

Frankly, I have more memory of the packaging of this book than the story. Avon was experimenting with what I thought of as "non-SF" look for a lot of their books: usually small-format hardcovers, design-y covers without SFnal art. It wasn't trying to look like literary fiction, which is the usual thing - it was, I think, trying to make an entirely different visual identity for a certain kind of SF. I don't think it worked, in the end, but it was really interesting to watch them try.

James Lee Burke, Heartswood (12/14)

I thought this was a Dave Robicheaux book, since I read all of them up to about this point, but I'm wrong: this is from another, loosely related series about Billy Bob Holland, a defense attorney in Texas (not a on-and-off police detective in Louisiana like Robicheaux). I remember absolutely nothing about Billy Bob, not even that I read any books about him. I do have vague memories of Dave: he was an alcoholic, and some of the books about him walked the line between delirium tremens and magic realism in a really exciting way. (I want to say In the Electric Mist With Confederate Dead is the high point there, but my memory is not reliable.)

Billy Bob's books, as far as I can see, are more conventional than Dave's; that may be why I read fewer of them, as I slowed radically down on reading mysteries. The Dave books came closer to the borders of the kinds of genres I was still reading a lot of, so they stayed in the mix longer.

Linda Barnes, Flashpoint (12/16)

The title makes me think of the DC Comics crossover (which I never read), and that doesn't help bring this book to mind. This was a mystery novel, in a series about Boston PI (and cab driver, I think) Carlotta Carlyle, and I don't remember the details of this story. It was fairly new at the time; I probably got it through work.

Fred R. Shapiro, Stumpers! (12/17)

Stumpers-L was an internet group, made up of mostly reference librarians, that answered weird and hard-to-research questions for each other. Basically, some patron would ask how much German potato salad would be needed to fill Death Valley to sea level, or what was the name of Genghis Khan's third-favorite horse's sire, or something equally random, and it would get posted to that list, and someone would be able to give an answer.

The group became a book, as all things on the Internet - especially the early Internet - turned into books. This is that book; it was published in 1998 and covered queries from the previous six years.

It's sad and amusing to look back at what the Internet was and could have been before social media and commerce colonized it for all of the worst impulses of  mankind: this was the kind of thing we thought there would be a lot more of. Sadly, more people want to have their prejudices validated and to buy junk than to learn the truth about anything.

The Stumpers-L site now gives a "could not be found" error. Of course.  

James Frenkel, ed., Technohorror (12/18)

I'm pretty sure this was a reprint anthology of SFnal horror stories (or horrifying SF stories, depending on how you want to spin it). I read a lot of random anthologies in those days, because, although we said then that anthologies didn't sell, they sold better then than they do now. (Though less well than they had a decade before, and so on back to the early days of SF.)

According to ISFDB, it has 16 stories, including "Pretty Maggie Moneyeyes," "The Veldt," "That Hell-Bound Train," and "Descending." Looking at the TOC there, it's pretty much exactly the horror SF anthology you'd create in about 1999 if you had the budget and a bend towards the classic. It's more of a '60s-'70s-'80s anthology than something really current at publication date, but it looks really solid for that era even now.

Cathy Fenner and Arnie Fenner, eds., Spectrum 6 (12/19)

I definitely can't remember which pieces of art were in this one. I eagerly grabbed each of these annuals for nearly twenty years - for a few years after I left the SFBC, since I had a vain hope for a while that I could get back into the SF field. (You can never get back. Once out, there's no way back in.) I'm sure this was an awesome book: all of them were. This was a series of the best fantastic art across a wide variety of areas: advertising art, books, movies, and so on. They might still be awesome books; I'm not sure if they're still coming out. 

Reading Into the Past: Week of 11/29/91

No new books arrived this week, so I'm diving into my archives to list things I read in the past. The RNG sent me way back to the beginning of my reading notebook this time, so here's what I was reading this very week thirty years ago:

Dave Sim, Jaka's Story (11/24)

I've attempted to re-read Cerebus - of which this is the fifth volume - a few times since 1991, but this looks to be the last time I actually got through to the end of the what had been published to that point. (I was planning another re-read before my 2011 flood, which destroyed those books along with several thousand others.) A couple of years ago, I read the first two volumes, Cerebus and High Society, and I do have vague plans to get to at least Church & State and this book again...slightly hampered by the fact that I don't have copies of those. More speculatively, I do want to read the whole thing, even the tendentious stuff I didn't manage to get through before, eventually.

But there are a lot of things I hope to do "eventually."

Jaka's Story is probably the last really good part of Cerebus, and arguably the best story of the series. Unlike High Society, I don't think it stands on its own: you need to read up to this point for it to work. (And it's just over the two-thousand page mark, so I can see that might be a deal-breaker for some people.) When I read this again, I want to see how much it's really about consequences and aftermaths; when I read it before, I was a lot younger, and I don't know if thought that way yet.

Dave Sim, Melmoth (11/24)

And then this was the probably brand-new collection of Cerebus, retelling the story of Oscar Wilde's death through a fictional Widean character in Sim's fantasy world. (Yes, Sim was always hugely self-indulgent; every last thing he learned or cared about came out in Cerebus in nearly real-time. Before he went sour, it was exhilarating and fun. Afterward, it was just sad.)

This is one of the quirky middle-region bits of Cerebus: not clearly one of the heights (Jaka's Story, High Society, arguably all or parts of Church & State) but not one of the depths (Reads most obviously from the stuff I actually got through, though I hear parts of the end can get as bad or worse). It probably would stand on its own, oddly enough, since it has very little to do with the actual story of the larger series and is mostly Sim-does-death-of-Wilde. So it's possibly of interest to big Wilde fans.

Cynthia Manson & Charles Ardai, editors, FutureCrime (bound galleys, 11/25)

This was an anthology of stories, probably packaged by someone, that I read and that the SFBC  and offered soon afterward. (I'm not sure if I bought it; I started acquiring the fall of '91 when my boss Ellen was on a long vacation and Word Came Down to increase the number of new books in the magazine we thought we'd just finalized. As I recall, I handled a lot of small things for the first few years, and this probably counted as that.)

From ISFDB, I see that this was an all-reprint anthology, which was my guess. And the ToC is pretty good: "Barbie Murders," a strong recent Effinger story, plus a lot of other good stuff. This is massively out of print, but probably worth picking up for SF short-story lovers who happen to find it.

Mark Helprin, Winter's Tale (11/26)

I periodically think about re-reading this book, since it was that good. (I also periodically think about reading other Helprin books, but I think I've only hit maybe one in the decades since.) It's a historical fantasy novel published as mainstream, by a writer possibly better known as a right-wing crank, though his fiction is generally (I think) still very respected.

I may be burying the lede there: in memory, this is one of the massive, overwhelming fantasy novels of the world, up there with Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, Little, Big and similar brain-changers.

Bob Thomas, Disney's Art of Animation: From Mickey Mouse to Beauty and the Beast (11/27)

I'm sure I got this from work, and read it mostly because it was full of nice pictures, and was up-to-date at that point. Disney has put out similar books many times since then: my guess would be a new one for every "major" movie in the past thirty years. I have no specific memory of it at all, though the cover is vaguely familiar.

Chris Achilleos, Sirens (11/27)

Achilleos was - and may still be; I'm out of touch with that end of illustration these days - a famous and regularly working illustrator, based in England, whose work had a lot of attractive women wearing not all that many clothes and brandishing various implements of destruction. Unlike say Boris Vallejo, Achilleos was not mostly a book-cover artist, and did a lot more historical work (well, at least vaguely historical, since Boudicca or whoever would inevitably have her tits out while fighting the Romans).

This was the big book that helped make him famous in the mid-80s: it collected his mature work in a classy package.

I read his later book Amazonia a few years back, if you want my more-contemporary thoughts on Achilleos. (TL; DR: he's really good at what he does, but his stuff leaves me cold for reasons I don't really understand.)