Where's Wallace & Gromit When You Need Them?

I was trying to resist, but I just couldn't.

Seen via Karen Traviss's blog: a BBC headline which reads

A Man Has Been Showing Off His Gigantic Rabbit Named Herman

And my first thought was: Oooh. So the Brits are calling it a "rabbit" now?

Other Books Read in January, Part Two

Continuing the epic journey...

• S Is For Silence by Sue Grafton
  Another solid outing from the always dependable Grafton. Think that's faint praise? It's really hard to write good, meaty mysteries year after year, and she's been doing it for twenty years now. When other mystery series gather dust on my shelf -- I'm three books behind on Sara Paretsky, for example -- Grafton's books leap into my hands and get read. I hope that will continue; I was reading this during my Week of Intestinal Distress and I wonder if that will color my memories of the series. (I was reading Ted Heller's Funnymen -- a nice fake oral history of a not-Martin and not-Lewis comedy team -- when I went into the hospital in '02 with my heart trouble, and I had to get rid of that book because it reminded me of Roosevelt Hospital. I don't think Heller's had a book since then, but I have to admit I also haven't wanted to look.)
• The Legend of Grimjack, Vol. 4 by Ostrander, Truman, and others
  This volume has the big finish to the "Trade War" plotline, which was running as a sub-plot in the previous volume. Unfortunately, the middle of this book is also the point Truman left art chores on Grimjack and Tom Sutton took over. The transition issues, frankly, have rotten artwork. As I recall, Sutton later got into a groove on the series -- his art is nothing like Truman's, but it has a sort of appealing ugliness that works for the character and setting. But the end of this book, sadly, is not his best work.
• The Underground Economist by Tim Harford
  If this one had it's own blog post, the title would be Oh, Look! There's a Nail! And Another One, and Another One. My, There Sure Are A Lot of Nails, Aren't There? Tim Harford is a man with a hammer; his hammer is fairly conventional but slightly right-wing economics. He does some interesting things with the hammer, and the book is worth reading (especially for those of us who liked Freakonomics and wanted to keep thinking about the world through economic lenses), but it has a huge blind spot when it comes to situations in which a screwdriver or a wrench would be useful.
• Murder Among Children by Tucker Coe
  Coe is a pseudonym for Donald E. Westlake, one of the greatest writers in the known universe. This is the second in a late-60s series focusing on an ex-cop (he was off having an affair when his partner got killed, which is the source for much angst), and isn't much like anything Westlake did under his own name. It's very much of its time (the "children" of the title are all in their mid-20s and opening a coffee shop in the West Village), but it's a solid PI novel with an appealingly damaged main character. I wonder if Larry Block was influenced by this series when he started writing the Scudder novels a few years later?
• That Book...of Perfectly Useless Information by Mitchell Symons
  A quite adequate bathroom book. A few years ago, I was reading big poetry anthologies on the loo, until one of them (somebody-or-other's fat historical survey of English poetry, I think) was so full of unreadable treacle that I cast it into outer darkness. Since then, it's been books of odd facts, though I find I now know enough to debunk an awful lot of the things in those books.
• The Big Book of Porn by Seth Grahame-Smith
  From Quirk, who do odd guides to various activities. It's breezy and nice for those who like that sort of thing, but it doesn't go into much depth at all. (I learned the names of some '70s movies, but nothing else.) The most interesting thing, to me, was that a guy with that name turns out to be from Pennsylvania -- I would have sworn he was Home Counties all the way.
• Karavans by Jennifer Roberson
  Read it for the SFBC; bought it for same. Nice fantasy novel and the first in a series. It's the only Roberson I've ever read, and I thought she jumped around between viewpoints a little too much for my taste, but I otherwise enjoyed it.
• The Ultimate Collection by Boris Vallejo and Julie Bell
  Big collection of art. I've been saying for the past few years that I thought Boris's recent stuff was too stiff and posed (and that Julie was doing wonderful stuff; she got really good really fast). This book didn't change my mind on the second point, but not all of Boris's recent paintings do look too posed: some of it is as good as he ever was. I still think he's gotten into a style slightly too photo-realistic for his own good, but it's his art, and he'll do it his way. This book covers both of their careers, and would be a good first choice if someone was interested in their art, or in contemporary commercial fantasy art in general.
• Cinnamon Kiss by Walter Mosley
  The latest Easy Rawlins novel, from another one of those mystery writers who always impress me with his use of language. The racial politics in this series sometimes bug me (of course, I am a white guy born after the events of these novels, and on the other side of the country to boot), but this one -- set in 1967 -- sees the world, and Easy's view of the world, shifting somewhat. Anyway, if you read mysteries at all, you need to read Mosley. He's simply essential.
• Ghost World by Daniel Clowes
  I'd seen the movie a week or two before, and developed an intense desire to re-read the original (and an equally intense desire not to drag my old Eighball issues out from various comics boxes under other junk in the basement). So I bought it. The movie works better as a single story, but the comic has more depth. And I was surprised that my memory was false: the comic, like the movie, was clearly Enid's story; I'd vaguely remembered that the two girls were somewhat co-equal in the comic, and that's not true.
• A Long Way Down by Nick Hornby
  Hornby writes immensely readable novels with great voices. This one is a multiple first-person book (so it plays to his strengths), told by a group of very different people who all arrived separately at the top of the same building in London to kill themselves on New Year's Eve. It's not depressing, and it doesn't come to any easy Hallmark answers, either. It's somewhat sentimental, but not so much as to be a problem (for me, anyway).
• The Unofficial Guide to Disneyland 2006 by Bob Sehlinger
  For a while, The Wife and I were planning to take Thing 1 and Thing 2 on a trip to Disneyland (and probably Legoland first, since that's where Thing 1 is really dying to go) before and during Worldcon this summer. So I bought this book to work things out. Well, the airfares are just too high, so it will be just me in Anaheim this summer. But now I'm thinking I might want to spend a day at Disneyland in the middle of the con. (Anyone going to LA Con IV and want to play hooky one day?)
• Farthing by Jo Walton
  I've blogged about this a bit already, but it's an excellent novel that should interest both mystery and alternate history readers. From Tor in hardcover this August.
• How To Be a Villain by Neil Zawacki
  Ellen gave me this for Christmas, and I hope to put it into action very soon. Look for my death ray looming over the city sometime this spring.

So that was last month. (For those of you scoring at home, I did read a book a day, but that included several books for the SFBC that I read large chunks of but didn't actually, y'know, finish. That probably is cheating, but I write a book down in my notebook when I finish or permanently abandon it.) Now maybe I can get back to the gigantic graphic novel post that's been cooling its heels for a week or so.

Quote of the Week

"It's a sad day for American capitalism when a man can't fly a midget on a kite over Central Park."
-Jim Moran

How To Read a Book a Day

I've been thinking about this post for a week or so now, but the final impetus to put it down into cold electrons was (and I know this is terribly incestuous; I apologize) Jonathan Strahan's blog post about me.

This blog sometimes feels like just a collection of very long lists: books I've just read, books I read sometime in the past, books I just got my hot little hands on and might read someday. And that probably fosters the impression that I'm some kind of super-reader, but it really doesn't feel that way on this end. I work in a business of people who read incessantly and quickly; one of the most common comments around a NYC publishing office is "I'll take that home and read it tonight." Let me emphasize that those people then usually do just that -- drag a big manuscript home, devour it in a night or two, and then start the cycle all over again.

So, compared to people who are reading big books in a night or two, the fact that I can knock off about 150 book pages of fiction a weekday (sometimes less, sometimes more) doesn't seem all that impressive to me. Still, it impressed Jonathan, and it might be impressing some of the rest of you. But I'll explain how I do it, and that will take a lot of the mystique out of it -- and maybe allow you to apply these techniques to your own life! [big fake infomercial grin]

First of all, to read a book a day you need to have lots of books around. Big piles, of all different kinds of books, so there's always something you want to read. It also helps if many of those books are not all that long; one big fat book can take a week or more, and that's a trainwreck to the book-a-day schedule. (I've had periods where I scoured my shelves for anything under 200 pages, to read those first. And shorter books nearly always get read before longer books, when I get new stuff in.)

The kind of books you read is also important: if you only read novels, it's going to be hard to get through one a day, unless you read much faster than I do, or have most of the day free to just read. But if you also read comics collections, art books, and other books (bathroom books of odd facts; small gift-y point-of-purchase books; young adult novels: there are many kinds of books that could work) with fewer words in them than the typical novel, you'll find that you get through them quickly.

That leads to the next point: read more than one book a time. That medium-sized novel will take two or three days to read, but you can read (in my case) Samurai Executioner, Vol.8 in the evening (mostly while waiting for the computer to do things) of the first day, and still keep the book-a-day pace.

(One of my related sneaky tricks is to read almost to the end of something like a cartoon collection, or a book of short pieces, and then put that book on a special emergency I-need-to-finish-a-book-today pile. I currently have three books in this holding pattern, ready to pull out and finish off on a day I didn't finish anything else.)

Another related trick is to read during odd moments. Computer is booting up? Have something sitting next to the computer that you can read for two minutes and put back down -- fiction usually isn't good, but newspaper comics reprints are perfect and there's plenty of non-fiction that can also work. Some people read waiting in line -- I try not to wait in line very much, but I've read there, too.

But, tricks aside, to read a book a day you still need dedicated reading time. For me, it's commuting (via bus, 45-55 minutes each way) and lunchtime (I've been reading for about an hour at lunch nearly every weekday for the last fifteen years). That's where I get the bulk of my main reading time in; that's where I read the novels, short story collections, and other relatively serious books. As I said above, my target is 150 pages a day, roughly evenly spread across those three reading times. (One problem of reading this way is that a book needs to fit into my bag to be read during the week -- oversized books and most 6x9 hardcovers over 400 pages or so just don't fit, and so I can't read them during the week.)

I keep trying to read in the evenings; I used to do it before kids (and even more so before computers -- it's probably the triple whammy of kids, computer and Internet that put the kibosh on that). And, in fact, I'm generally settling onto my dining room/kitchen couch for half an hour or so of magazine reading (generally non-fiction: New Yorker, Locus, and the two years worth of New York Review of Science Fiction I keep trying to catch up on) before bed.

And what makes the whole thing go, of course, is guilt. You have to look at those towering stacks of books and desperately want to get through all of them, right now. You have to run into an author online or at a con, and realize that you still haven't read her "new" book that came out in 2003. You have to want to read more than you want to do other things. (I don't really watch TV, though with Netflix I've been watching a movie or two a week lately -- though, even there, I generally combine movie-watching with exercising and laundry-folding to feel more efficient and keep myself from wandering off to do computer things.)

If you follow those rules, you, too, can read a book a day. They may not all be the books you thought you most wanted to read (sometimes those big books just look too daunting when you're trying to get through one a day), but they'll all be books, and your friends and neighbors will stand in awe of you.

Today's WFA Reading: 2/2

Today brought just a double-sized issue (October/November) of F&SF, completing the year. Tomorrow's mail will be very sad, without any Van Gelder goodness to cheer it up.

Other Books Read in January, Part One

I didn't blog about most of these at the time, so this will be essentially everything I read this month. This may end up being chopped in half for length reasons (if there's a "Part One" in the header, I've already done that). I've also decided not to list books that I didn't finish, partially to keep the list somewhat shorter, partially out of guilt, and partially because I'm worried the authors of said books might read this blog, find out I didn't finish their books, and ask me pointed questions...

• Built To Last by George Sullivan
  A Young Adult non-fiction book about bridges, dams, and other massive engineering accomplishments. It was interesting, but I mostly read it to drop it off in Things 1's room afterwards. I don't think he's looked at it yet.
• The Blood Knight by Greg Keyes
  Third in "The Kingdoms of Thorn and Bone" epic fantasy series. I love this series: Keyes is doing a George Martin-esque series (somewhat less grue, though) with wit and verve and his own style. The last series of his I read (The Age of Unreason) bogged down in book three, but this is just as good as its predecessors, and actually has a solid, important-things-happening ending -- almost unheard of for book three-but-not-final in a big series like this. More people should be reading these books! [Mutters, shakes his fist at the sky and shambles off.]
• Star Wars: Incredible Cross-Sections by David West Reynolds
  Another YA book that moved up to Thing 1's room after I read it. I believe this is also the book that killed DK. [Doffs cap.]
• Bonjour Laziness by Corinne Maier
  I did blog about this briefly; it's a runaway smash hit French bestseller about not working too hard. One of those books that's no longer than it needs to be, and a nice book to knock off in a couple of hours.
• Talk to the Hand by Lynne Truss
  She's staking out a position as her generation's general-purpose curmudgeon in the UK, but this is somewhat less interesting than Eats, Shoots, and Leaves. Here she's complaining about how everything everyone else does is annoying. Short version: she hates everything and everyone, and will, within a few years, be one of those nutters pushing around shopping trolleys and ranting loudly about orbital mind-control lazers. (True complaint: she can't stand people who smoke outdoors. I don't smoke myself, and am not a huge fan of the stench of cigarettes, but this is ridiculous.)
• Pornoland by Stefano De Luigi with a text by Martin Amis
  Artsy photos taken on porn sets in Europe and the USA over a period of years, featuring some naked people but no really dirty stuff. I bought it for the Amis connection, and his "text" is an essay (it reads like a magazine article, actually) about porn, featuring interviews with several directors and performers in Southern California. One of the things I like best about Amis is his non-fiction, especially when he does relatively serious reportage, so this was a neat thing.
• Wimbledon Green: The Greatest Comic Book Collector in the World by Seth
  This is a "sketchbook graphic novel," which means it was supposed to be not as finished as Seth's usual style. Maybe it's been a while since I read a Seth book, but it didn't look at all "sketchy" to me. (And I almost didn't buy this, because it was shrinkwrapped, and "sketchbook" made me think of sub-Image full-page doodles of girls with unfeasibly large mammalian appendages.) The story is yet another joke version of the comic book world (somewhat like Dan Clowes's Pussey! or the "Rusty Brown" stories by Chris Ware), but done with a lot more genuine affection. And Seth is, as always, marvelous with dialogue. For readers who know anything at all about the comics world -- even those who have avoided Seth previously as one of those pretentious arty types -- this is a wonderful little book.
• Star Trek: Captain's Glory by William Shatner with Judith and Garfield Reeves-Stevens
  It finished the current trilogy. I read it with no pain. I actually found Shatner's middle trilogy (this is the third one) quite a lot of fun in an everything-and-the-kitchen-sink way, but this trilogy was much snoozier for me.
• Magic for Beginners by Kelly Link
  I don't like it as much as everyone else does, and I don't like it as much as Stranger Things Happen. I've been thinking about it, on and off, since I read it, which certainly is the mark of an book worth reading. A couple of the stories, including the title one, really worked, but too many of them seemed like exquisitely-written non-stories (what I mean is: they were collections of prose organized into beautiful sentences and paragraphs that started in interesting places but didn't go from that place to anywhere else). I'll keep thinking about it. It's certainly worth reading, though, especially for writers -- Link is the current master at using exactly the right word at all times.
• School Days by Robert B. Parker
  First I read Parker uncritically, as yet another decent PI writer. Then, for a while, I kept reading his Spencer books (they were too short and zippy not to read), but denigrated them, telling people that they were pointless, effortless, and all had the same, very bland, plot. But something happened to me (I don't think it was to Parker) three or four books back: I finally got it. Sometime in the past, at least a decade ago, Parker whittled his prose down to the absolute minimum number of words necessary to tell his stories; there's not an ounce of fat anywhere in these books. I'm not sure how he manages to have such sparkling dialogue within that minimalism, but he does it. It's really amazing to see him take the PI genre and flay it to the bone, and then watch it get up and walk around.
• Vinamarama by Grant Morrison and Philip Bond
  An OK graphic novel, but nothing special. Morrison was on a limited series roll before this, with Seaguy and We3, but this is just fluffy fun.
• Samurai Executioner, Vol. 7: The Bamboo Splitter by Kazuo Koike and Goseki Kojima
  Not much to say at this point in the series (after seven previous volumes of this and 28 of Lone Wolf and Cub). Gorgeous art, gripping stories, set in a world 21st century Americans can barely comprehend. Very good stuff.
• The Legend of Grimjack, Vol. 3 by John Ostrander and Tim Truman
  I was a little uneasy going back to this series (one of my favorites in my early comics-reading days in the late '80s), since the new series, Killer Instinct, was a little, well, a little sentimental. I'd remembered the old ones as very unsentimental, and I was worried that was just nostalgia talking. Nope. John Gaunt was a right bastard most of the time (though he was a bit of a softy in the stories in the first volume), and this collection gets into some of the better single-issue stories of the Ostrander-Truman run. It makes me want to find what comics Ostrander is writing these days; he's very good at slightly twisted adventure stories, and I've liked all of his stuff that I've read. (He's probably writing a superhero I can't stand right now, though.)
• His Majesty's Dragon by Naomi Novik
  
• Throne of Jade by Naomi Novik
  
• Black Powder War by Naomi Novik
  I have already talked about these here, but I still love them. Naomi, if you're out there, write #4 quickly!

That's enough for one day (especially since I'm already a day late!) The second half of last month will follow (tomorrow, I hope).

My Purpose in Life

I spend my life opening packages with books, galleys and manuscripts in them. Occasionally, for a break, I pack up boxes with books, manuscripts and galleys. Without me, the whole mailing-literary-works economy would come crashing to a halt.

(This post occasioned by opening five packages at home last night and three here at work first thing in the morning. Oh, and having a FedEx box that I really and truly am going to get out the door this morning.)

Incoming Books: 1 February

Some of these came home two days ago (since stuff makes it home as I have space in my bag), but here's what just got added to the pile of books I shouldn't even look at until after I read a hundred books or so for WFA:

• War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy, translated by Anthony Briggs
  I'll want to read War and Peace someday, assuming I don't get hit by a bus first. This is a nice edition, and it seems to be a good translation, so it goes on the already-packed bookcase of Classics I Hope To Read When I Have A Lot More Free Time.
  
• The Complete Plays by Anton Chekhov
  And the same for this one.
  
• Platinum Pohl: The Collected Best Stories by Frederik Pohl
  Ellen got to this one first (which is only fair, I guess, after I snagged Sheckley's The Masque of Manana before she had a chance to see it), so it has to wait until I have non-work, non-WFA reading time for it.
  
• Arthur and George by Julian Barnes
  I still haven't read his last story collection, The Lemon Table, but this has been getting such great reviews (in the trade and from people at my company who read it six months ago) that I wanted to read it quickly. Well, maybe not.
  
• Skin City by Jack Sheehan
  
• Life's Little Annoyances by Ian Urbina
  This one (and the ones after it) I might be able to sneak in between big serious WFA books, if I try hard enough.
  
• Rereadings edited by Anne Fadiman
  
• The Idler Book of Crap Jobs edited by Dan Kieran
  
• The Joys of Engrish by Steven Caires
  And this I could read in a stray five minutes waiting for my computer to boot up, so I'll save it for a day I'm trying to keep my book-a-day reading streak alive.

Today's WFA Reading: 2/1

I knew it would happen sooner or later; the big packages have started coming. It's thrilling and frightening at the same time: one part look at all of this cool stuff! and one part I've got to read all of this very quickly! I still haven't gotten anything I've already read, but nearly all of the books today are things I already wanted to read, which is nice.

Anyway, here's what arrived, in one big box and four not all that much smaller soft mailing envelopes:

• The September and December issues of F&SF, of course
  
• from Carroll & Graf, The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 16 and Horror: Another 100 Best Books
  
• from Raw Dog Screaming Press (who were previously unknown to me), Forrest Aguirre's Fugue XXIX and Scott Thomas's Westermead
  
• from Chronicle Books, It's Superman! by Tom DeHaven
  
• and from Tor (accompanied by an note mentioning that these are seven of the twenty-two books that they will be submitting), Four and Twenty Blackbirds by Cherie Priest, Jonathan Carroll's Glass Soup (now I can get rid of my bound manuscript! yay!), Someone Comes To Town, Someone Leaves Town by Cory Doctorow, Susan Palwick's The Necessary Beggar, Paul Park's A Princess of Roumania (which I was just talking about in the office this afternoon), Child of a Rainless Year by Jane Lindskold, and Gene Wolfe's Starwater Strains: New Science Fiction Stories. I'm not sure why that last one is in there, but I'm a big Wolfe fan, so I might just have to read it on general principles.

A Question for You Other Bloggers/LJers Out There

Do you ever stop adding people to your list? (LJ friends, bookmarks, whatever -- I'm using Bloglines myself.)

Because, just now, I added three more blogs to my list, for an all-time high of 80. I just keep stumbling across people who I vaguely know, or know of, and suddenly think, "Oh, that guy is blogging, too?" (This is especially noticeable in the murky depths of LJ, where no one has a #%@! real name, so you have to either already know who they are, or figure it out from context.)

At what point do you say "I can't even read the ones I have now" and curl up into a fetal ball? For me, it's still fun and exciting to see everyone out there, but surely that must end at some point, right? (Says the man with 190 unread posts sitting in another window.)

Today's WFA Reading: 1/31

I think I'm organized, but I'm a piker compared to Gordon Van Gelder, because today brings me two more issues of F&SF: July and August 2005. Another nice little note with it to point out which stories are fantasy and which SF, too; organized and polite.

On the reading side, I'm now halfway through Alex Irvine's The Narrows, and thus falling farther and farther behind every day. (I live in hope that, one of these days, I'll get a big box filled with all of the fantasy books I already read from 2005, and suddenly I'll be ahead of the game. I know I did read a lot of fantasy last year, so it has to happen sooner or later, right?)

Celebrate Gorilla Suit Day -- Or Else!

The whole twisted tale is here. Don't say that no one warned you.

More Temeraire Fun!

You can't buy Naomi Novik's Temeraire books in the US yet (the first one, however, is just out in the UK this month), but you can play the video game version!

The game isn't quite as much fun as the books, but it does allow you to shoot fire, which the book, sadly, does not.

(In other Temeraire news, Ballantine accepted my offer, so the SFBC will do a 3-in-1 as a Selection in early June. I don't have a title yet, so any ideas would be welcome.)

Today's WFA Reading: 1/30

Two more issues of F&SF: May and June. It will be sad when I hit the end of the year in a couple of days, since I'm getting used to these little packages from Gordon waiting in my mailbox. (Not that I've started to read them yet, but merely piling up more stuff to read is a joy in itself.)

Today I finished Farthing by Jo Walton, which is neither fantasy nor published in 2005 (it's coming this August), but which is excellent, in that chilly, alternate-historical, all-other-possible-worlds-are-worse-than-this-one kind of way. It's an English country-house murder mystery set in a 1949 where Hess's flight to Scotland in 1941 led, fairly quickly, to a negotiated "Peace With Honor" between England and the Third Reich. On the one hand, it's an alternate history that has nothing to do with battles, which is a wonderful relief. But it is yet another book about how horrible the world would be if we didn't lick Hitler, and the world is amply supplied with those. Luckily, that's not the main point of Farthing, which is much more about its characters than about vast movements of history. It's quite an impressive book, but I worry that mystery readers will be put out of joint by the ending.

Arthur C. Clarke Shortlist

The shortlist for this year's Arthur C. Clarke Award has been announced:

• Never Let Me Go -- Kazuo Ishiguro (Faber)
  
• Learning The World -- Ken MacLeod (Orbit)
  
• Pushing Ice -- Alastair Reynolds (Gollancz)
  
• Air -- Geoff Ryman (Gollancz)
  
• Accelerando -- Charles Stross (Orbit)
  
• Banner Of Souls -- Liz Williams (Tor)

Speaking personally (and as a big fan of some of Ishiguro's previous books, such as The Remains of the Day and The Unconsoled), one of these things is not like the others; one of these things just doesn't belong. At the moment, I'm rooting for MacLeod, but that may change after I read Pushing Ice.