The Second Plane: September 11: Terror and Boredom by Martin Amis

At least three times now, my fingers have mis-typed that title as The Second Place, which I'm sure must be deeply meaningful, but I'm damned if I know how or why.

Martin Amis is an opinionated man from an opinionated family -- his father was Kingsley Amis, so Martin comes by his pontification the old-fashioned way -- and this is an opinionated book. In twelve essays, mostly newspaper columns, and two short stories, Amis here gives his opinions on the post-9/11 world and all that portentous phrase implies. On those subjects, he's mildly right-wing -- mildly from where I sit; any view of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars that isn't brow-beating and wailing seems to be considered beyond the pale in the UK -- he thought the Iraq war might have been necessary at the time, but he's decided that was wrong.

And The Second Plane has generally been reviewed from that point of view as well -- the mid-Atlantic literary world is a very liberal one, and Amis has never fit easily there.

On the other hand, The Second Plane has also been reviewed negatively because it doesn't have a strong central focus or argument, and that's completely true -- most of the pieces collected here are op-eds or reviews, work done because a magazine or newspaper wanted famous Martin Amis to say something about Subject X by Tuesday in 2000 words. There's not much sign that Amis has rethought any of these pieces, and they do cover a six-year span.

So the nonfiction in The Second Plane shows a thoughtful writer intermittently poking at the raw subjects of terrorism, war, and hatred, but not bringing any overall framework to bear on the subject. I doubt any readers will agree completely with him, but he's less dogmatic here than he sometimes is on literary subjects, so it's less likely that non-dogmatic readers will be completely incensed.

The two bits of fiction -- "In the Palace of the End" and "The Last Days of Muhammad Atta" -- don't fit as well, though they're both good in their own ways. The former is stronger, a totalitarian fantasia about one of the many doubles for an unnamed dictator. The latter is Amis's imagined version of Atta's last day; it's strongly written but feels like Amis's personal catharsis about the attacks rather than a story.

There's something thrown-together about The Second Plane, as if Amis realized he had enough stuff on this topic to make a book, so he just threw it all together. It would have been better if he'd gone back, re-read all of these pieces, and sat down to write something new and comprehensive on the subject. But he didn't, and The Second Plane is what we have. It's not top-shelf Amis, but it has its strengths.

Other Books Read in February

This was the month I quit Book-A-Day, so I didn't get a whole lot read. (I did get a lot more videogame playing, and, even more so, just plain wasting time done, so it's not a bad trade-off.) I'm thinking about semi-unofficially Book-A-Daying again (without posting about it specifically, since that was a pain), since now I feel like a slacker. Decisions, decisions.

• Gardner Dozois & Jonathan Strahan, editors, The New Space Opera
  Amazingly, as I recall, it has stories by just about everybody you'd hope. And it doesn't publish for a while, so that's all I should say.
  
• Jack Dann & Gardner Dozois, editors, Wizards
  I have to write up my report before I'm sure what I think about it, and, even then, it's not published yet.
  
• Jonathan Strahan, editor, Best Short Novels: 2007
  A brilliant collection of wonderful stories that everyone needs to own. Of course, I may be slightly biased.
  
• Calvin Trillin, About Alice
  I'm still chewing over a long thoughtful essay-ish post about Trillin, which this book made me think about again. I'm not sure when or if I'll ever get that down in coherent form, but that's most of what I'd say about this book. Trillin is a wonderful, down-to-earth writer of the human condition and the everyday world, and this is a touching tribute to his dead wife.
  
• Marion Zimmer Bradley and Deborah J. Ross, The Alton Gift
  Not yet published, yadda yadda yadda.
  
• Martin Amis, House of Meetings
  I was going to write up a separate "Just Read" entry for this, but I'm not sure if I have that much to say (or if the people who read my blog care at all what I think about literary novels, for that matter). The reviews have called this Amis's best novel since London Fields, which I'd quibble with a bit -- Time's Arrow is an amazing tour de force, but that was immediately after London, so it's the same general point. Amis does have an amazing ability to write plausible, personable bastards; his main characters are nearly always people you'd go to great lengths to avoid in the real world, but, at his best (like London Fields and Money and Time's Arrow), they're compelling on the page. Meetings is Amis's Russian novel (though it's short, which is not what one expects from any author's "Russian novel"), following Koba the Dread of a few years back, which was a non-fictional attack on Stalin. It's a strong novel, but not quite up to Amis's best. I think Amis was too caught up in the "truth" of Russia, its history and present-day troubles, to completely fictionalize it all. It's well worth reading, for anyone who reads for depth of character and insight into the human condition.
  

With any luck, next month's list will be longer (though it might have a lot of comics on it to get to that length; that stack is getting too tall again).

Incoming Books: 17 December

I went out to my favorite book store (the Montclair Book Center) to buy a Christmas present, as part of a long day of running around on various errands (the Things were with me for half the day, until their grandparents came to whisk them off to their first Christmas, one with the wife's extended family off in the wilds of New York State).

Sadly, the book I wanted to buy as a present was sold out, so I had to console myself by instead buying a lot of books for me:

• Rumpole and the Penge Bungalow Murders by John Mortimer
  I already read this when one of the SFBC's sister clubs did it last year, but all of my personal copies are Penguin trade paperbacks, so I needed this one to match.
  
• With All Disrespect by Calvin Trillin
  A somewhat nicer second-hand hardcover to replace my ratty second-hand paperback.
  
• The Mammoth Book of Illustrated Erotic Women edited by Maxim Jakubowski
  Even the non-lurid "Mammoth" books have ungainly titles, but this one is particularly oddly phrased.
  
• Gone to New York by Ian Frazier
  Frazier is the author of one of the funniest short essays ever, "Coyote V. Acme." I think the pieces collected here are somewhat more serious, but they're all about New York, which I nearly always find fascinating.
  
• Flashman on the March by George MacDonald Fraser
  
• Private Wars by Greg Rucka
  
• Dilbert: Thriving on Vague Objectives by Scott Adams
  
• a book titled Dahmane, of works by the photographer of the same name
  
• Frazz: Life at Bryson Elementary by Jef Mallett
  Frazz isn't in my local paper, but I've liked it whenever I've seen it, and I like strip cartoons in general. On the other hand, I just realized, typing this, that the author spells his first name with one 'f'. Oh dear.
  
• Black Hole by Charles Burns
  I could have sworn I already had this, but that wasn't the case. Now I do.
  
• Pornoland, photographs by Stefano De Luigi with a text by Martin Amis
  OK, I am something of a Martin Amis fan, which helps to explain why I bought this. However, I did have to be browsing the "erotica" section to find it in the first place, but let's skip over that quickly, shall we?

And, just arrived in the mail today, from the Library of America, is Letters & Speeches by Theodore Roosevelt. I wish there was some way I could get the LoA to send me specific books (such as the Ezra Pound volume, which I've wanted for a couple of years now), but this is definitely a book I want to own, and someday I even hope to read it.

Reading Into the Past: Week of 7/12/00

Nothing in the mail again, no new books purchased. And I haven't been listing digital things when I get them - for example, last month I got Comfort Station by Donald Westlake from the library via Hoopla and slightly earlier I got Lawrence Block's new memoir A Writer Prepares directly from the publisher. (That is the tiniest of jokes: Block self-published.) I've already written reviews for both of those, but never said "hey, this is a new thing I am now reading."

And I'm currently digitally reading Kij Johnson's The River Bank - a sequel to The Wind in the Willows, somewhat authorized I think - which will turn up as a post here someday after I finish it. But I've mentioned my troubles keeping track of digital books before, so I'll keep them excluded until I actually read them.

So, instead, back to the random number generators of the Internet, and let's see what I was reading this week in the fabulous Year of the Future, 2000!

Scott McCloud, Reinventing Comics (7/6)

This was the middle book of McCloud's "Comics" trilogy, after 1993's still-classic Understanding Comics and 2006's more meat-and-potatoes Making Comics. I suspect it's the most dated of the three now: either this or the third had a lot of material on possibilities for micropayments and new forms of comics on the web, which mostly turned out not to happen the way McCloud predicted. I haven't read it since then, and I'm neither a serious student of new kinds of comics or an actual maker of comics, so I could well be wrong. McCloud is always interesting about things he's enthusiastic about, and he's enthusiastic about comics in a way few other people can match.

Martin Amis, Experience (7/8)

I don't remember if he used the Wilde quote ("...the name everyone gives to their mistakes") as an epigraph; that might have been too on the nose, even for Amis. This was a general memoir of his life, up to that point. (It was published that year, when Amis was fifty.) My memory is that it felt deeply honest, full of emotions dredged up and explained clearly, out of a long, messy, tumultuous life - no one on the outside can ever say if a memoir is really honest, but we can say it feels that way. I always like Amis as a writer of prose, and I usually like him as a thinker of thoughts: he's smart and disciplined and usually unsentimental. As I recall, this is one of his better books.

Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen, Wheelers (bound galleys, 7/9)

This was a SF novel by the two British scientists who collaborated with Terry Pratchett on the "Science of Discworld" books, and who each wrote a shelf of popular science books separately. They later wrote a sequel, but I think that was the end of their SF career. This was a first contact novel, set in the solar system, of the imminent-danger-to-Earth subcategory: Jovian creatures nudged a comet so it wouldn't hit them, which unfortunately sent it towards a certain inner-system planet you and me hold dear. I think we did this in the club, so I must have liked it at the time and/or thought it was the kind of thing a lot of other people would like. But I don't have any independent memory of it.

Jerry Oltion, Abandon in Place (bound galleys, 7/10)

This was the expansion of a novella that I think I also read, so I will likely have only confused memories of the two versions twenty years later. It's also one of the burst of Space Nostalgia stories that popped up like fungus around the turn of the century: I disliked them at the time, and possibly dislike them even more in retrospect. This is the one with a phantom Saturn V taking off immediately after Neil Armstrong's death, and that makes me shudder just to think of it.

Robert Park, Voodoo Science (7/12)

This was a book of essays by a noted physicist (chairman of the department at U of Maryland, ran an office of the American Physical Society) about how science actually works, some recent potentially groundbreaking discoveries, and how to tell which new surprising scientific claims are likely to be true, which are likely to be exaggerated, and which are likely to be fraudulent. It was new at the time, and I think it was one of the better entries in that skeptical genre: sadly, we need new books to debunk the new frauds and exaggerated claims almost weekly these days.

Right before that week I finished Jo Walton's novel The King's Peace (the first of her Sulien books, more-or-less historical Arthurian works with, as I recall, only the tiniest bits of fantasy). And immediately after I read J.G. Ballard's Myths of the Near Future, his 1982 short-story collection.

I think of the days after my sons were born (the first in early 1998, the second at the end of 2000) as when I slowed down reading, but the evidence suggests I was still chugging along in mid-00, even with one toddler in hand and a new baby on the way. I guess it all went to hell slightly later.

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).

Incoming Books: May 23

This past Friday, there was a land-rush to get out of the office ahead of the long weekend...but I didn't have a train home for two hours. Well, that's never stopped me before: as usual, I went the opposite way, into NYC, to eventually grab a bus heading homeward.

And if I somehow found myself in the Strand along the way, well -- that's just good planning, isn't it?

The Strand is one of the world's great used bookstores -- well, it's more than that, but I treat it like a used bookstore, and don't bother with the new stuff up front -- and the great rule of a used bookstore is that you can't be looking for anything specific. Oh, certainly: come in with a list, on paper or electronically or just swirling in your head. But make sure it's a long list, and be on the lookout for other things as well. Because the point of a used bookstore, unlike one with new stuff, is that you have no idea what you'll find, and you have to be open to serendipity.

(Parenthetically, I had another realization that I'm getting older and crankier by the moment: the Strand had a major renovation a number of years ago, which made the place more open and airier and cleaner and easier to navigate, with better signage, an improved entrance and cash/wrap, and a great internal staircase. And I keep thinking that I hate it: I want the old crowded place back with massive rows of half-price hardcovers in the basement. I am self-aware enough to realize that at least half of what I want back is the pre-e-book publishing world, and much of the other half is my own youth. But, still: it is new and I don't like it.)

And here's what I found, with the graphic novels/comics first and then the straight prose afterward (since I already have them piled up according to where they'll be shelved):

Welcome to the Dahl House, which seems to be a collection of loosely related strips (though maybe it's one continuous story) by Ken Dahl, who is also the author of the graphic novel Monsters.

I'm Pretty Sure I've Got My Death-Ray in Here Somewhere! a collection of the incredibly obscure but great strip cartoon Eyebeam by Sam Hurt. There were five or so collections of this strip through the '80s (and at least one of its successor Queen of the Universe in the early '90s), and I had collected most of them after discovering the strip about twenty years ago. (They're very hard to find, especially thirty years later -- I think they're the kind of books that turn up used only when someone dies.) I was just missing one collection -- Our Eyebeams Twisted -- when the flood hit, but now I'm back from zero. And, googling to write this, I see Sam Hurt has come back to Eyebeam in the past decade and his style is amazingly still consistent.

I've been reading a lot of Roger Langridge lately -- he'd been on my "you'll probably like him" mental list for a long time, but I really clicked with the Muppet Show books he did for a stretch a few years back -- so I was happy to see Zoot Suite, another collaboration with his brother Andrew from the late '90s. (And I hope this isn't entirely work that's also included in Art d'Ecco, which I just read.)

I read the massive and vital Willie & Joe: The WWII Years collection by Bill Mauldin when I was an Eisner judge a few years back, and I do have a copy of the follow-up, Willie & Joe: Back Home (which is almost as important to comics history and, in its buried way, perhaps even a more impressive achievement). And now I have a copy of the WWII book in the cheaper single-volume paperback edition -- it doesn't seem to be designed quite as wonderfully as the slipcased hardcovers were, but all of the Mauldin cartoons are here, which is the central thing.

Zot!: The Complete Black and White Collection: 1987-1991 collects most of Scott McCloud's first major comics work -- everything but the first ten issues, which were originally in color and can be found in a Kitchen Sink trade paperback reprint if you hunt -- and now I have a copy of it again.

And another book I had to re-buy after the flood is Cyril Pedrosa's Three Shadows, which I reviewed for ComicMix in 2008 when I first saw it. It's not well-known here, though it won a major prize at Angouleme when originally published in French, and I stand by what I said about it then: "This book will break your heart; I warn you now."

And then to prose:

I read and loved Martin Amis's London Fields back in about 1991 -- I might have even bought the iconic Vintage International edition, all yellow and black -- and that set me off buying and reading backwards and forwards in Amis's career, until that lousy book about "a police" stopped me, for at least a while. And then the floods destroyed all of the Vintage International editions, lined up carefully. But I heard that there's a film of London Fields coming -- someone (and I forget who) was on Craig Ferguson's talk show recently talking about it --and so that seemed like a good excuse to get the same edition again and try to find time to re-read the book.

I read Lawrence Block's smutty thriller Getting Off-- transparently published with a small writing as Jill Emerson" credit -- from the library when it was published a few years back, but didn't have my own copy of it until today. Block is one of my favorite writers, though, so I do intermittently think about trying again to collect all of his books.

I do have nearly all of Steven Brust's books -- the flood was damaging, but authors at the beginning of the alphabet in hardcover weren't touched -- with a few exceptions, and Sethra Lavode was one. I also intermittently think I might re-read all of his Dumas pastiches, and now I actually have all of them.

I originally read Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita back in the '80s -- I got it from the SFBC, in whatever the standard translation was in those days -- and have vaguely thought about re-reading it since. That desire picked up when there was a major new translation a few years back, and I had a copy of that new translation sitting on the shelf when the flood hit. So, today, when I saw a Penguin Classics edition -- translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, the standard famous translators of Russian novels for this generation -- I figured that was it. But after a little research, I think the acclaimed translation was by Diana Burgin and Katherine Tiernan O'Connor, and came out a year before the Pevear/Volokhonsky. As I understand it, both of the '90s translations are from the rediscovered uncensored original text of the novel -- unlike the '60s translation I originally read -- so either one is good that way. I doubt I'll have time to read both translations, but who knows?

I've seen several British writers -- Martin Amis, I think, and others I can't recall right now -- praising the short novels of Penelope Fitzgerald, who started her novel career in 1977 at the age of sixty-one. So when I saw an inexpensive edition of her novels Offshore, Human Voices, The Beginning of Springin a nice Everyman's Library edition, I snapped it up. Particularly since I'm doing Book-A-Day this year, short novels look appealing to me.

I've had St. Clair McKelway's Reporting at Wit's End -- a colleection of his journalism from The New Yorker of the '30s through the '60s -- on my "look for it" list for several years, and I finally found a cheap trade paperback copy today.

I've had a vague interest in re-reading J.D. Salinger for years, so I also grabbed The Catcher in the Rye in mass-market. If I manage to get to it, and like it, I might dive into all of the Glass stories after that -- but that would be the next thing.

And last was The Tao of Travel by Paul Theroux -- though, as I remember the shopping trip, I think this was actually the first book I picked up and decided to buy, which is nicely circular -- which seems to be a bunch of quotes and passages about travel and various specific places by the travel writers Theroux himself likes. I've liked Theroux's own travel books, so it wasn't a stretch to think I might like the things he liked.

Reading Into the Past: Week of 1/15

Every Sunday, I roll some dice and pull out one of my old reading notebooks, in an attempt to remember what I was reading this very week in some past year. (And thus prove, I hope, that reading actually has some utility, and isn't just a way to waste time.)

This week, the dice read 12, and so we head back to the year 1994:

• Mary Gentle, Rats and Gargoyles (1/14)

Well, that wasn't very interesting. I mean, Rats and Gargoyles is a great book, and I did take nearly two weeks to read it, but it leaves this post a bit short. So let's look a bit before and after, too:

• Charles S. Sykes, A Nation of Victims (1/4)
  I don't remember this book specifically, but I must have heard about it in National Review (which I subscribed to for, essentially, Clinton's first term). And I can guess what it was about. I think it was somewhat more thoughtful than the those-guys-are-all-traitors books clogging up the bestseller lists today (from both sides; I don't read any of 'em now), but I'm sure it was a "liberals are responsible for all of the ills of the world" book.
  
• Harlan Ellison, Mefisto in Onyx (1/4)
  I'm a big Ellison nut, from way back. So getting to read his stuff professionally -- especially a really strong novella, like this one -- was a thrill. But the publishing situation of this was the usual high drama (I think it was intended for a tribute-to-somebody anthology, but Harlan pulled it for reasons I don't now know, and wrote a very nasty foreword to this edition to criticize anyone who had anything to do with the tribute book), and, as I recall, there was no chance we could buy it for the club. I'm not sure if it's appeared in one of his collections since, though I hope it has -- it's one of his best stories, probably his longest best story, and one of his later best stories, too. Oh, and if anyone has a spare dustjacket for this, e-mail me: Thing 1 went through a period of using a letter opener on my books, and this was one of the ones he chose to attack.
• G.B. Trudeau, Welcome to Club Scud! (1/16)
  A Doonesbury collection, of which I have the entire set. (It took a few years of looking to find Doonesbury: The Musical, and it wasn't really worth it, but I've got it.) I've found that the funniest stuff, to me, was the cartoons from before I knew anything about politics -- which probably just means that he's goring my ox some of the time these days, and I don't like it -- but it's always readable and I love the way he has handled the very large cast over the years.
• George Alec Effinger, Maureen Birnbaum, Barbarian Swordsperson: The Complete Stories (1/17)
  Silly fluff, though quite well-written and satirical silly fluff, which we sold like gangbusters in the club for a number of years. I wish Effinger had done enough for a second volume, but, then, I wish Effinger had been able to do a lot of things, this last decade. I wish he was still around and writing now. This isn't a bad place to start with Effinger, actually, and I hope some of the SFBC hordes moved on from this to What Entropy Means to Me or the Marid Audran novels.
• Martin Amis, Visiting Mrs. Nabokov and Other Excursions (1/17)
  I was still in my utterly worshipful Amis phase at this point (until the dreadful "I am a police" book came out a few years later), so I devoured this whole, trying to impress Amis's literary prejudices onto my brain to supplant my own. I'm not sure if they all (or any of them) took, but he's an engaging, thorny writer, and I've always loved reading the occasional nonfiction of novelists, for no good reason I've been able to figure out.
• Mitch O'Connell, Good Taste Gone Bad (1/17)
  Retro-fab-o-50's-esque art from a guy I think I first saw doing comics covers. I like me my art books, yes I do.

That stretches the period to thirteen days (from my usual eight -- I'm always cheating, actually, since I'm inclusive on both ends of the "week"), but at least gets us more than one book. The good news, from 2006's perspective, is that even as a younger, less encumbered guy, I still got stuck in one book for ten days at a time. So there's hope for me even now, and thus hope for all of us.

Incoming Books: Week of September 1

I was on vacation this past week, so of course I had to find time to get over to the Montclair Book Center (an excellent used/new bookstore near me in the wilds of Jersey) and buy some books. There also was a sale from the Library of America, so I got a few things from them. And then there were some books from a certain online seller named after a massive, all-encompassing onrush of water. These, then, are the new books this week that I paid money for:

First, from a mighty river of South America:
Paterson by William Carlos Williams -- it's one of the great poems in the English language, and I needed to read it again. (And my last copy got lost in the flood.) I'm already one Part in as I type.

Disneyland's Hidden Mickeys by Steven M. Barrett -- my younger son (Thing 2) is rather competitive and something of a completionist (not unlike his father, yes). So this is to give him a task for this year's vacation -- finding stuff while we're in the World of Walt.

To The Ends Of The Earth is a Paul Theroux travel book that I thought collected short pieces -- like Fresh Air Fiend, which I've been reading slowly for several years now. I was wrong; it's selections from several longer books. I don't know why anyone would want to read chunks of Great Railway Bazaar, Old Patagonian Express, Kingdom by the Sea, Riding the Iron Rooster and Sunrise with Seamonsters instead of just picking one of them, but some people are just weird, I suppose. And I now have a disposable Theroux book to press on someone if ever the need arises.

Then from the equally mighty Library of America:
The Devil's Dictionary, Tales, and Memoirs by Ambrose Bierce -- I've been complaining for several years that the LoA needed to do Bierce, so I was very happy to see that they did. This book contains what looks to be all of Bierce's short stories -- which fall into three rough categories: ghost stories, Civil War stories, and tall tales; all of which are dark, gory and cynical -- plus The Devil's Dictionary and the writings Bierce collected as Bits of Autobiography for his 1909-12 Collected Works. I'd have preferred at least two volumes of Bierce -- adding in Write It Right and selections of his journalism and letters -- but this is the core of his work. Bierce is, to my mind, the greatest half-unknown American writer. (But the greatest half-unknown American work is Frank Norris's amazing novel McTeague.)

Kurt Vonnegut's Novels & Stories 1963-1973: the LoA has done two Vonnegut volumes so far (though I do wonder if they'll continue and do his later, lesser books) -- this one and another collecting novels and stories from 1950 through '62. This one has both Cat's Cradle and Slaughterhouse-Five in it, and I intermittently think I should re-read some Vonnegut (particularly since I don't think I've read any of his major novels as an adult).

And, since I was buying stuff from LoA already, I also got A.J. Liebling's The Sweet Science and Other Writings -- I had a copy of Just Enough Libeling pre-Deluge, and I have a feeling there will come a day when I suddenly want to read some Liebling.

Last, books I picked up by hand in a real bookstore, like an old-fashioned person: 

Lionel Asbo by Martin Amis -- it's his new novel, it's been getting good reviews, and there was a time when I fanatically read everything Amis wrote. (I think the horrible Night Train cured me of that, but House of Meetings was strong, so he's half-won me back.)

The Garden State by Gary Krist -- I still have vague thoughts about collecting the '80s Vintage Contemporaries, and this is a collection of stories I've heard about for twenty-plus years without ever actually reading. (I also keep misremembering that it was the source of the movie of the same name, but I don't think it actually was.)

The Receptionist by Janet Groth -- Groth was the receptionist at the New Yorker offices for 21 years -- 1957-78, so not recent years -- and this is her memoir of that time, with the expected focus on vaguely thrilling and/or titillating stories about the boldfaced names of the literary world. 

The Son of Neptune by Rick Riordan -- Thing 2 asked for this, since it's the new book in a series he's been reading. (He's still on a tear through mostly YA fantasy -- just read The Phantom Tollbooth without even my forcing it on him, and working through the "Dark Is Rising" books as well.

Railsea by China Mieville -- this is also officially a YA book, but it's for me. Yes, I still haven't read last year's Embassytown, maybe because it looked more "worthy" -- i.e., like spinach -- but it's on the shelf. And this one might well lap it.

The Pornographers by Akiyuki Nosaka -- I have to admit it:  I picked this one up entirely because of the title (which means it did its job). It's a Japanese novel from the late '60s, which is about a pornographic film company -- and what I have is a Tuttle edition, printed in 2006, only for sale in Japan.

The Afterlife Diet by Daniel Pinkwater -- This is Pinkwater's only novel for adults, and I got to thinking about Pinkwater recently. In particular, I was thinking that I don't have any of his books anymore (they were all lost in the flood), and so I'm going to correct that as quickly as possible.

And one of the biggest losses from last year's flood was about three shelves of P.G. Wodehouse books, in the wonderful Overlook Press editions. I'm rebuilding those as I can, and I got four more this time out: Cocktail Time (an Uncle Fred novel from 1958), Big Money (a standalone 1931 novel), Quick Service (a 1940 novel about ham and marriage, which I read a year before I began this blog), and Heavy Weather (the classic 1933 Blandings novel about Gallahad's memoirs).