-
The Madman's Library / Seeker
The Madman's Library was a great Xmaholisolstizaah gift from Dr. Pookie. Subtitled The Stragest Books, Manuscripts and Other Literary Curiosities from History, the book is lavishly illustrated in color with all these oddities. Too many good things to even summarize. If you're into old books, moldy books, books bound in human skin, fake books, giant ( Read more... ) -
Klara and the Sun, The War with the Newts, Some of Your Blood
Klara and the Sun, by Kazuo Ishiguro, is written from the perspective of an artificial friend (AF), an android companion for children. We learn a lot about Klara as she waits to be chosen by a customer along with the other AFs. In particular, her devotion and adoration of the sun. Perhaps because she is solar powered, she comes to essentially ( Read more... ) -
Secret Santa, by Andrew Shaffer
Secret Santa tells the story of a cursed publishing house, and an unusual gift received by a new employee there. In a genre that lends itself to self-parody, this at least wears its exsanguinated heart on its sleeve. Merry Christmas everybody! -
Playboy Book of SF / Of Sound Mind / The Rim of Morning
The Playboy Book of SF collects a lot of big names Bradbury, Le Guin, Niven, Vonnegut, PKD, Ellison...
The collection comes from 1998, and some of the stories date back to the 50s. But not every author is a household name, and while most of these were *somebody* at the time, many of them were not yet undying giants of SF. Like most jumbled ( Read more... ) -
The Afflictions & Automatic Eve
The Afflictions, by Vikram Paralkar (a doctor in real life) is sort of a compendium of fantastical illnesses, in very very short story form. At its best, the book's entries are something that could have fallen from the pen of Jorge Luis Borges as an encyclopedia of things that never were. But few of them reach that level of substance. Most have ( Read more... ) -
The Russia House, by John Le Carré
Kind of interesting for being written in the time of Gorbachev and glasnost and perestroika. Not long before the Soviet Union collapsed. But as a story, I found it kind of a let-down. The first two-thirds is kind of a jumble of bits and pieces, and while the last third holds together better, it's on some pretty inevitable rails that take us to the ( Read more... ) -
The Glass Hammer / A Lot of People Are Saying: The New Conspiracism and the Assault on Democracy
The Glass Hammer, by KW Jeter, bears the stamp of Jeter's mentor Philip K Dick, both thematically and in a character that seems very much like a stand-in for PKD. There are some thoughtful idea about reality and media scattered throughout the science-fictiony tropes and Dickian paranoia of post-whoops America, psychic computers (or are they?), new ( Read more... ) -
Waking Nightmares / Some Assembly Required
Waking Nightmares is an anthology of Ramsey Campbell short stories. No particular theme to them, although many of them do have an element of dream logic that make them nightmarish. All good stuff. Interesting mix of protagonists. Beside the many good people to whom bad things happen are quite a few bad people to whom bad things happen.
--
Some ( Read more... ) -
News Stories Colliding in My Head
Xander Schauffele, citizen of Earth, wins Olympic golf gold
The meaning of this turn of Olympic golf ended up being that the gold medal went to that man for all nations, the polyglot delight from San Diego who stood for one national anthem, “The Star-Spangled Banner,” but could have stood for several. This 27-year-old with the Californian ease and ( Read more... ) -
The Big Goodbye / Red Pill
The Big Goodbye: Chinatown and the Last Years of Hollywood, by Sam Wasson
I guess I thought this was going to be more generally about 1970s film-making in Hollywood, but the book is very tightly focused on the production of Chinatown from inkling of a story through the whole process, focusing on writer Robert Towne, producer Robert Evans, Polanski ( Read more... )