Banvard's Folly by Paul Collins

I've written about Paul Collins's books -- non-fiction, usually on quirky or oddball subjects -- several times before here, including Sixpence House, The Trouble With Tom, Not Even Wrong, The Book of William, and The Murder of the Century. He writes the kind of books that I like to think I might have done, if things had worked out differently -- and we always are fascinated by the people who seem to be alternate versions of ourselves.

Banvard's Folly was Collins's very first published book, back in 2001. Its thirteen chapters each tell the story of one man's quest to change the world -- all of which ended in ignominious failure, usually while that man (or, in one case, a woman) was still alive to be thoroughly destroyed by it. It's an amusing book to read, particularly for those of us who have no hopes of ever changing the world -- we might never reach these heights, but at least we'll never lose everything and become the world's laughing-stock. (Or maybe we will: we're not dead yet, and the future holds unknown dangers.)

So we learn of John Banvard, who invented and mastered the moving diorama as a stage experience just in time to see its fame plummet while he was still trying to make a living. There are literary nuts and forgers, like William Henry Ireland, who faked Shakespeare plays, and Delia Bacon, who insisted her namesake really wrote the (actual, non-Ireland) works of Shakespeare. There's the once-noted French scientist Rene Blondlot, who discovered the sadly non-existent N-rays, and John Cleves Symmes, who was sure he could discover the secret world inside the Earth if only he could get enough funding for an expedition. Most of the chapters are about cranks of one sort or another: Francois Sudre, inventor of the musical language Solresol; the fake Formosan George Psalmanazar; Alfred Ely Beach, who built a secret pneumatic subway beneath New York City; the lousy actor and fashion plate Robert Coates; and Augustus J. Pleasonton, who insisted that blue-tinted light was the premier source of health and happiness.

They weren't all deluded -- though a lot of them were -- but they were all monomaniacs, in common with a lot of politicians and artists and writers. Sadly, all of their monomanias turned out to be either factually untrue or too-quickly out of fashion -- and they all lived in the ages before mass media, when lives might have second and third acts, but they rarely got another run at the big brass ring.

So all of these men (and the one woman) were failures, in the end, even if many of them were hugely successful for at least a while. But, in the end, we're all dead, and at least these thirteen followed their own idiosyncratic dreams, and achieved enough to get a chapter in a book a hundred or three years after they were dead. That, as the man says, isn't nothing.

I wouldn't recommend Banvard's Folly to a young man -- you need to have a good footing in failure yourself to really understand and appreciate it. But, if you've failed and been ground down enough by life, it's a great book, one part Schadenfreude and one part whistling-past-the-graveyard.

Necessary Evil by Ian Tregillis

I don't know how well Tregillis's previous novels have sold -- I could look them up easily, but I'm ignoring that for a rhetorical purpose -- but the cover of Necessary Evil has the flop-sweat look of a cover desperately trying to drag in an audience that has failed to be engaged so far: vague quote from a big name, pretty blond young hero with guns blazing, what seems to be several massive simultaneous explosions, and no hint that it's the third book of a trilogy.

That's a damn shame if true, because Tregillis's "Milkweed Tryptych" -- comprising Bitter Seeds, The Coldest War and now Necessary Evil -- is a towering achievement, brilliantly integrating large-scale secret-history fantasy with the classic spy novel and telling a story that is both deeply human and full of characters who are vastly more than human. On the evidence of these books, Tregillis is a major talent, and not just because his local-writers-group friend George R.R. Martin says so. Tregillis is a major talent because he's written a compelling, mesmerizing, thrilling sequence of novels, because he's believably organized the plots of those books around a woman who both can see all the possible futures and is ruthless enough to always pick the best future for herself alone, and because he has the widescreen imagination and painstaking skill to make a WW II fought between British demon-summoners and Nazi electrically-sparked supermen seem more real than the true history.

(See my reviews of the first two books, linked above, for the details -- you definitely don't want to start with this book, but I give the whole series my highest recommendation. If you've ever enjoyed Tim Powers's Declare or Charles Stross's nasty tales from "The Laundry Files," you will love these books.)

Even sketching the setting for Necessary Evil would be a massive spoiler for the second book, so I'll try to be vague: the precognitive Gretel has seen one way -- one convoluted, folded-onto-itself timeline -- that humanity can escape the attention of the extradimensional Eidolons and survive. As this book opens, her plan to create that timeline -- and, as ever, to warp everyone around her into doing what she wants as well -- is under way, and Raybould Marsh, once one of England's best spies, is the only one besides her to know the plan. Necessary Evil hurtles forward from there, continuing the brilliant story of the first two books and culminating in a magnificent ending.

Look, this is a major series by a great new writer. Period. Necessary Evil should be on award ballots for 2013 -- as many of them as it can be shoehorned onto. (Maybe not the Golden Spur, but just about everything else.) Just go read Bitter Seeds and try to stop there. I dare you.

One Good Turn by Kate Atkinson

One Good Turn is the second in a very unlikely mystery series: unlikely both in its very existence and in its popularity. Kate Atkinson is a literary writer by temperament -- she won the Whitbread Award for her novel Behind the Scenes at the Museum, for example -- whose fourth novel, Case Histories, had a private detective as a major character and concerned some criminal activities. (See my belated and fuzzy review for more.)

Case Histories wasn't much like a genre mystery, but mystery-lovers around the world picked up on it -- I got my first copy of it from my then-colleague, the editor of the Mystery Guild -- perhaps because it was a damn good novel with some mystery elements in it, or perhaps just because the crime fiction field is vast and expansive, with room even for great books that don't fit into marketing categories. In any case, Atkinson wrote three further novels with Jackson Brodie in them -- it's not fair to say they're "Jackson Brodie" novels, given her multi-plot-line style and social novelist's eye -- which are treated as a mystery series, despite how poorly they fit into the usual definition of that category.

One Good Turn is set a year or so after Case Histories; Brodie's life has been changed by the end of Histories, and he's left the private-detective business to be, mostly, a man of leisure in a small house in France. But, for the course of this book, he's in Edinburgh for the Festival, trailing his actress girlfriend Julia and not enjoying anything at all. He's not central to this book -- not even as much as he was central to Histories -- but he is one way into it, and turns out to be perhaps the most unbiased of all of the viewpoint characters.

The plot sprawls out over several days, set off in the very first section by a road-rage incident that ends with quiet, mousy crime writer Martin Canning saving a life almost against his own will, which drags him into the plots of both the attacker and attackee -- each of whom is in Edinburgh for very specific but initially murky reasons. Several bodies pile up quickly -- seemingly without any connection to each other -- and the local police investigate in the form of DI Louise Monroe, who has her own complicated connections to other parts of the case.

Like Case Histories, One Good Turn loops around through a small group of people who end up being more connected than we would expect -- but, unlike Histories, it all happens in a much smaller time and space. If I were wearing a serious lit-crit hat, I'd probably rumble on about how Atkinson came from family sagas, with their vast scope of time and space, to the saga-ish Histories and then realized that crime fiction could give her the chance to compress a similar amount of action and event into less than a week. Whatever the reason, Atkinson tells a compact, tight story here, with threads that appear to be separate at first inexorably pulling closer and closer as we realize who all of these people are to each other -- all the way up to the very last line of the novel.

One Good Turn is a damn good book, and doesn't require knowledge of Case Histories -- Jackson Brodie is in no way a series detective, just a guy around whom interesting things happened a few times. And it shows what a serious writer with an eye for humor and character and the often bloody vicissitudes of life can do when she finds herself in the crime fiction arena, and what a crime plot can do to enliven and up the stakes for a novel of character and connection.

A Possible Explanation For Why I'm Like This

All of my favorite comedy acts end up doing something like this sooner or later:

And, better yet, those are usually my favorites. (Also see Kids in the Hall and "We work in silence. We shovel fuel.")

This particular piece of rural lunacy is from Mystery Science Theater 3000, a '90s puppet-show that made fun of bad movies.

Reviewing the Mail: Week of 7/13

There's only one book this week, so I'll avoid my usual time-wasting at the top of this weekly post, and just give the essentials: this book came to me from a very nice publicist at the publishing house that brought it out, in the hopes that I'll review and/or publicize it. I haven't yet read it, but here's what looks interesting at first glance:

The book is Heaven's Fall by David S. Goyer and Michael Cassutt, and it's the sequel to Heaven's Shadow and Heaven's War, neither of which I saw. Fall is an Ace hardcover, coming on August 6th, and it looks to be set a generation after the earlier books, so it might well stand on its own. The backstory takes its cue from Greg Bear's Eon (and/or The Forge of God): a gigantic Enigmatic Space Thingy (dubbed Keanu, which might be an indication of the kind of humor to expect here) appeared in the sky twenty years ago, and transported a whole bunch of humans into its large (and already inhabited) interior, as part of a war between good and evil alien races. (It's not entirely clear to me if the races are good and evil, or if it's just that one of them wants the Earth for its own purposes, and the other doesn't.) Anyway, by the time of Fall, the Space Thingy has gotten back in contact with Earth to find that the evil aliens have conquered it -- all but for the few redoubts of plucky rebels, of course. I won't pretend that this is a story none of you have ever seen before, but Goyer and Cassutt are both smart professional writers (mostly for various screens), and I'm sure they provide lots of moments for popcorn-chewing.

The Last Train to Zona Verde by Paul Theroux

Getting old means, more than anything else, that things are ending. Everyone knows this: that there's a last time for everything, and each last time marks another step toward death. Even something as small as realizing that forty is too old to go on a Tilt-A-Whirl any more is one small step, one indication that a once-assumed capacity and ability is now gone forever.

Paul Theroux has been a professional traveler for forty years, since his first unhappy journey across Eurasia was encapsulated in The Great Railway Bazaar. Some of the countries he's visited are now closed to outsiders, or too dangerous to visit -- each of those is an ending. But with The Last Train to Zona Verde, Theroux comes up against a larger ending, realizing that there are countries and types of travel and situations that he's just not up to anymore at the age of seventy.

Last Train declares itself Theroux's "Ultimate African Safari," and it's his farewell journey in Africa if not his last travel book entirely. Theroux was always happiest -- well, as happy as he ever allows himself to be seen as, which is not very much -- at the edges of things, out in wilderness of one sort or another, on a bad train or jolting bus or faraway from modern cities. Last Train doesn't give up on those things, but it could signify that getting to those places -- getting through the horribly overcrowded and corrupt Third World cities that are the gatekeepers of wilderness -- is just too much for him now, physically and emotionally. Those cities have gotten larger and more hellish in Theroux's lifetime, and Last Train culminates in Luanda, the capital of Angola, a city broken in more ways than even Theroux can deal with.

Before that, though, the journey begins in high spirits and hope, as Theroux plans a trip up the East African coast from Cape Town to match the similar journey down the west coast a decade before in Dark Star Safari. As usual, his plans are fluid and contingent -- he knows where he'd like to go, but doesn't plan exactly how he'll get there, or all of the stops along the way. So he planned to travel by land through South Africa and Namibia and Angola, and had vaguer ideas of how to deal with the war-torn countries north of them, and no clearly defined end-point -- this would be a safari that lasted as long as it could, and went as far as it could go. And Theroux finds joy along the way, in Cape Town and out in the bush on his way north.

Zona Verde, like all of Theroux's travel books (and nearly everyone else's travel books, too), is made up of episodes -- what he sees and does in a particular place before he moves on to the next stop. And each of those episodes is exquisite here, with a poignancy and clarity driven by Theroux's knowledge that this would probably be his last trip through Africa, a land he's loved since he was a young man. Theroux is still unparalleled when it comes to deploring dirt and corruption and thoughtlessness, but he's equally good in celebrating the simple joys of human existence -- as he writes, early on in Zona Verde, "the best of them [humanity] are bare-assed."

If we're lucky, Zona Verde will turn out to be Theroux's last African trip, but not his last travel book -- he's not young, but he's still writing as well as he ever did, and it would be a shame to have his eye turned away from the outside world, never again to stare intently at the things only he can celebrate or disdain this well.


Footnote: I've previously covered the Theroux travel books Ghost Train to the Evening Star and The Pillars of Hercules here.

Through the Window by Julian Barnes

Julian Barnes always feels like a writer insufficiently lauded -- even after winning the Man Booker Prize for his last novel, The Sense of an Ending, a couple of years back, he's never had the attention of his flashier contemporaries like Martin Amis, Ian McEwan, and Salman Rushdie. And yet Barnes has been more formally interesting than any of those contemporaries, from brilliant and formally complex novels of his early career like Flaubert's Parrot and A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters to less flashy but equally incisive later novels like Love, etc. through his books of stories like The Lemon Table -- he's kept writing books of short stories long after most writers abandon them for novels -- and a thread of serious non-fiction, from his Letters from London for The New Yorker to the precise mediation on death Nothing to Be Frightened Of. Perhaps it is that very facility, the breadth of his work, that has kept him from those literary-bestseller heights -- the next Julian Barnes book is guaranteed to be very different from the last one.

Through the Window keeps up that streak; it follows a collection of stories, Pulse, with a very different collection: these seventeen essays (and one closely related short story) are all about writers and writing, mostly from the prior decade and mostly from the Guardian. There are three pieces from the late '90s, but it's all relatively recent Barnes; Through the Window collects the thoughts of the mature Barnes on what we presume are the writers most important to him, or the ones he had the most to say about. (That's likely more of a presumption than we should make; Barnes was writing, in all of these cases, for a specific editorial purpose and time, rather than planning the book from scratch -- it's possible that several writers he considers even more vital just didn't come up.)

Barnes is mostly writing about his predecessors here, Orwell and Ford Madox Ford, Kipling and Johnson, Wharton and Arthur Clough, though he does write about some influences whose careers overlapped his, Penelope Fitzgerald and Lorie Moore and John Updike. And what Barnes has to say about each of those writers is measured and thoughtful and based on long experience -- the impetus for many of these pieces may have been an immediate news hook (a new edition, new scholarship, an anniversary), but Barnes's critical opinion exists already -- he's examining it in print on those occasions, but there's nothing quick or haphazard here.

So Through the Window is a quiet and bookish book; the result of long hours sat reading and thinking and arguing in one's own head about books and writers. And Barnes's head is a pleasant and well-ordered one to spend a few hours in, particularly if your favorite writers overlap somewhat with his, or if you suspect he'll lead you to new discoveries.

Quote of the Week

"I've got a pair of socks I like better than you."
 - Hollowblue, "First Avenue"

Here, have a video of the whole song:

Kitty's House of Horrors by Carrie Vaughn

Kitty's House of Horrors was the seventh book in the Kitty Norville contemporary fantasy series, and the last to come from Vaughn's original publisher (Grand Central), whom she left over what seemed to be their insistence that she concentrate on this series and not spread her time among other projects. [1] Subsequent books have come out from Tor, which is proverbially the place where SFF authors go once they get angry with their current publisher. (There's no similar story in the field about what happens when Tor authors get unhappy; perhaps they simply change editors, of which Tor has a plethora.)

So it's three years old now, and there have been five more novels in the series since then, counting Kitty in the Underworld, scheduled to release this month. And so any detailed criticism I could offer up here would be deeply pointless, since this is not just middle, but old middle.

(I've also reviewed several earlier novels in the series -- Kitty and the Silver Bullet, Kitty and the Dead Man's Hand, and Kitty Raises Hell -- and did a quick take on one later book, Kitty Goes to War, here as well. So I've been pretty Kitty-fied over the years.)

So: this is the one where Kitty Norville, her world's first publicly declared werewolf (and late-night radio host), agrees to do a reality show with a bunch of other supernatural folks, and one requisite doubter, off in a remote lodge deep in snowy mountains. And, of course, things turn out Not To Be As They Seem -- as if the title, and the existence of the genre of contemporary fantasy itself, haven't already tipped you off to that.

It's fun and zippy -- zippier than many of the other books, since it's slightly Christie-esque in its set-up (bunch of odd characters in a remote location, and then nasty things start to happen to them) -- and well worth reading, as is the whole series. But I would recommend starting at the beginning; the books basically stand on their own, but sub-plots and character development go on in the background, so it just makes sense to hit them in order. 


[1] I've only read one of those non-Kitty books, After the Golden Age, which was pleasant but not up to the level of this series. But she's written a couple of other novels since the move to Tor as well, and I'm not about to claim my opinion is more important than Vaughn's.

The Anti-Woody Allen

This is today's 9 Chickweed Lane, a well-drawn but molasses-slow and idiosyncratic at best comic strip; if its creator allowed commenting on the comic itself, I probably wouldn't bother to post this here:

(click to embiggen)

So, this young man -- I gather he's supposed to be in his twenties -- has an erotic fantasy harem entirely made up of women old enough to be his great-grandmother? The youngest of them is Kelly, who's also been dead the longest (since 1982).

Also, please note that all of these women are dead, and have been dead since at least 2000 -- sure, we'll assume that he knows them all through old movies, but does he live entirely in old movies? (In this strip, that is sadly a possibility.)

Please, creators, remember the old rule: just because you like something, or identify with it, doesn't mean your characters should.

The Beautiful Land by Alan Averill

Look, there's just one thing I really have to say about this book, so I'll say it up front. Remember Charles Yu's How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe? Big literary splash, praise from a whole bunch of respectable people, aura of smartness emanating from it? Came out a couple of years ago? Had no plot at all and was just a single metaphor as all-enveloping and useful as kudzu?

Well, How to Live sucked. [1] But The Beautiful Land is almost exactly the book that all of those respectable people pretended that How to Live was. So if you thought you wanted to read How to Live -- a smart time-travel book, SF with some literary heft and a good story, too -- but then got suckered into staring into Charles Yu's navel for over two hundred pages, then I want you to know that The Beautiful Land is the book you really want to read.

It's not quite a time-travel novel, true -- it's about alternate universes rather than the past. But it uses a SFnal device to make metaphors concrete -- while at the same time (and unlike Yu's book) keeping track of the fact that its SFnal devices are actual devices that work and have controls and exist in a real world with more than a tiny handful of self-obsessed people (unlike Yu). It's about one young man, and how he ran away into a SFnal device rather than deal with his real life.

But The Beautiful Land is also about the girl that young man ran away from, and that opens up The Beautiful Land from being the claustrophobic hall of mirrors that How to Live was -- The Beautiful Land is about real people who were damaged by horrible experiences in the real world, not just a boy who's afraid his daddy doesn't love him enough. And the stakes in Beautiful Land are higher as well: there's an entity from the worst dreams of Greg Egan or Charles Stross that wants to clean up all the world that have those noisy, messy, complicated living things on them.

Takashiro O'Leary was the Bear Grylls of Japan -- more or less -- but he's washed up, broke, and suicidal in a lousy NYC hotel as Beautiful Land opens, for all that he isn't even twenty-five yet. He's that old SFnal type, the man who needs a frontier to explore, a boundary to breach, a new land to do his best not to die in. And the Axon Corporation -- the usual shadowy consortium of interests, organized around one semi-mad genius -- has a device that finds new lands, and they need a fearless explorer to check out those new lands and report back on which ones are ripe for exploitation.

Samira Moheb was never Tak's girlfriend, though that probably would have happened eventually -- if he hadn't run off to explore jungles and do his TV show in Japan, and she hadn't enlisted as a translator and spent three tours of duty in Iraq, watching people get killed around her in sudden horrible ways. Now, four years after Tak supposedly committed suicide, she's a mess, a barely functional stew of post-traumatic stress and obsessive-compulsive behaviors.

The last thing she expects is for Tak to show back up in her life, toting a briefcase that can take them both to alternate dimensions and a crazy story about that half-mad genius, Charles Yates, and how Tak's really spent the last four years exploring alternate worlds for Yates and Axon. Even if she could believe that -- that Axon plans to shift our real world, the central one, into a pattern where they already own everything and run the world -- Tak's story about Yates is even less coherent: that he's double-crossing Axon, as part of a plan to live forever in a perfect world, the Beautiful Land.

And what will make that land so perfect is that it can contain nothing that is not Charles Yates.

Beautiful Land charges forward from there, with Tak and Samira -- two people broken in their own ways, who have to try to survive and save whatever worlds they can save or create -- and with Judith Halford, Yates's nearly-as-brilliant assistant, who is coming to realize the true horror of Yates's plans, and that there's only as much room for her in the Beautiful Land as there is for anyone else other than Yates.

It's a damn good SF novel: it moves quickly, it has real emotion, and it's filled with interesting, specific, modern people. You could do much worse than to read it.


[1] See my review for the bloody details. But it did.

Impulse by Steven Gould

Please do not judge this book by its cover, which is dour and subdued and drab. (Only one cover in a thousand ever quite looks like anyone involved really wanted it to look, anyway -- most of the time, it just hints at what it could have been.) Impulse is the third novel in a loose series about teleporters in the modern world -- following Gould's excellent first novel Jumper, nearly twenty years old now, and Reflex, but not the side-novel Jumper: Griffin's Story, which was related to the movie made from Jumper rather than the very separate world of the novels -- and Gould is just as colloquially readable a writer and engagingly compelling a plotter as he has ever been.

(The way I'd describe Gould to someone my age or older: remember how it was easier to just keep reading a Heinlein juvenile novel than to stop and do anything else? Gould has that same matter-of-fact, unflashy ability to roll out a story where putting it down is harder than reading just one more page.)

As Jumper was the story of Davey Rice, abused teen of an alcoholic father (and inadvertent discoverer of a very Bester-esque form of teleportation), and Reflex was the story of Davey's love Millie and how she saved him from the shadowy organization that wanted to break him to serve them, Impulse is the story of their daughter Milicent "Cent" Rice, born in hiding and kept secret from the world her entire life.

But Cent is fifteen when Impulse begins and even the best-behaved, most parents-loving teenager is going to want some space from her parents -- and some friends outside of them. So, once Cent learns how to "jump" herself -- as in Bester's Stars My Destination, at least some subset of humanity can learn to teleport, given the right life-or-death situation -- her parents eventually give in to her pleas and move from their secret isolated Arctic lodge to a typical house in a typical American suburb to give Cent the chance to live a typical life as a highschooler.

It doesn't work out that simply, of course -- that suburb has its own problems, and Cent isn't the type not to stick her nose in and try to make things better -- but Impulse never descends into melodrama. Gould instead manages the tricky feat of telling a story that includes dramatic events but isn't defined by them, and, which is possibly even trickier, creates real tension in a story about a family of teleporters without resorting to the usual genre trappings.

So: look past that drab cover, and this is a swell book -- suitable for older teens, as well as most skiffy-friendly readers above those years -- that has a certain flavor of Classic SF while still being modern and telling a great story mostly from the point of view of an up-to-date, contemporary young woman. I can't say that Gould did Cent's voice "right" -- I'm not a girl, and haven't been a teenager for two decades -- but he gave her a great voice, and a great story to tell in that voice, so I'm pretty confident that even readers with a much more immediate knowledge of the inside of teenage girls' heads would really enjoy it.

"Who Could That Be at This Hour?" by Lemony Snicket

"Lemony Snicket" -- both the pseudonym Daniel Handler has used when writing for pre-adults and the narrator of the thirteen-book "Series of Unfortunate Events" series -- has been mostly missing since that series ended in 2006, with only a few minor picture books and similar ephemera in the six years following. But Snicket came back in late 2012 with "Who Could That Be at This Hour?", the first in a series of four telling the story of the young Snicket and his first mission for a mysterious organization, at the age of not-quite-thirteen, in the broken-down town of Stain'd-by-the-Sea.

The four books collectively will be called "All the Wrong Questions," and they take their tone and style from Raymond Chandler and classic hardboiled fiction as "Unfortunate Events" took its cues from penny dreadfuls and The Perils of Pauline. The narrative voice, though, is very similar -- Handler, once again speaking as Snicket, here looking back on Snicket's life and failures from a viewpoint much farther in the future.

I can't detail the intricacies of the plot to you now; I read it too long ago. But I can remember the tone and the style and the amazingly assured voice -- and, in case I'm making it sound too dour and dull, also the humor and sheer reading pleasure of At This Hour. Handler has been a compellingly readable writer since The Basic Eight, his first novel, and no matter what else he does, he never loses track of the power of his writing to grab a reader and compel her to just keep reading. At This Hour is smart and melancholy and funny and wry and masterful, and I'm thrilled to know that there will be four more books to follow it.

(It's also well illustrated by Seth, cartoonist of It's a Good Life, If You Don't Weaken, and his cartoony and cleanly illustrative style is perfect for Snicket.)

Several Books of Genre Interest Reviewed Haphazardly, But Mostly Positively, Several Months Late: A Preview

It's no secret that my book-reviewing here has been in an extended slump for the last six months or so. (Though the amusing thing to me is, as I poke through my archives, is that the one consistent theme of this blog is that I'm always behind in writing about the books I've read and that I'm never happy with what I write about books I like. So this is an extreme case, but it's also the standard.)

Since I'm on vacation this week, I'm going to try to clean up the backlog, which will solve one problem. The other one -- motivation -- is trickier; as my job has gotten more difficult and complicated and taken more of my attention and mental energy, I don't want to spend a lot of time thinking deeply about things I've read. (And then I read less, and drift farther away from the SFF world, and feel worse about that, and start moaning that I'll die still selling crap to accountants.)

There's no reason any of you should care about any of that.

For that matter, there's no reason why I should bother to keep typing things like that; I know what the problems are, and my complaints don't help. But whining is one of the great human pastimes, and I'm not immune to its charms.

Anyway: I've written a couple of reviews already (they originally were all going to go into this post, until I thought better of it), and I hope to do more. Right now, I'm planning to space them out once a day. We'll see what actually happens, as it happens.

Reviewing the Mail: Week of 7/6

For those of you who are in the self-declared greatest country on earth, I hope you had a pleasant patriotic holiday (and that, like me, that holiday extended into a four-day weekend). For the rest of you...well, most of you get many more vacation days than we Americans do, so I hope getting the month of August off will quell your sadness for not having a dedicated "watch explosives in the sky" holiday earlier in the summer.

That holiday is probably the reason why I only got a couple of books this week, though I never can tell -- the ways of publicists are secret and mysterious, and one can only petition the Gods of Publicity, not compel them to action. (Unless one can conjure one of the Phrases of Power, such as "Network Morning Show" or "National NPR" or the fabled "Oprah" of memory.)

Anyway, these are those two books. I haven't read either of them yet, but one of them -- heck, both of them, potentially -- could be your new favorite book of 2013. Here's what looks most interesting and/or amusing to me right this second about them:

Rachel Caine's "Revivalist" contemporary fantasy series -- about Bryn Davis, a zombie addicted to a drug that keeps her body fresh -- continues into a third book with Terminated. The previous book, Two Weeks' Notice, was a Times bestseller, and Caine's prior series, "Weather Warden," also had a lot of fans. (I read pieces of a bunch of those book when I was angling for a particular publishing job which didn't work out -- so I can't speak to how Caine shapes a whole book, but all of the bits I read were entertaining.) Terminated is a Roc mass-market paperback (and the equivalent collections of electrons in your favorite formats), coming on August 6th.

And then there's Carpathian by David L. Golemon, a St. Martin's Press hardcover hitting stores on July 30th and the latest "Event Group Thriller." (That almost sounds like a series of real-world invitation-only rave parties, but, no, it's a series of novels about the super-secret government agency that stops supernatural apocalypse at least once a novel since Event. This one is mostly about the secret army of warriors (or perhaps animals, or maybe both -- the flap copy goes both ways) that defeated the Pharaoh and the inhabitants of Jericho for the soon-to-be Israelites and then disappeared without an archaeological trace, but also (as the title hints) has something to do with Transylvania. I would not bet against Transylvania's most famous fictional inhabitant showing up at some point, either.