Category: Literary Matters

Things have been pretty busy the past month or so, but I have managed to find time to crack open a couple of new books.

The first one was The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick. This is not the first alternate history book I have read, so it felt just a little cliche. Then I remembered that this was one of the first of that sub-genre, and in that context is was BRILLIANT! Basically, America lost WWII and was divvied up between the Germans (east of the Mississippi) and the Japanese (west of the Rocky Mountains), with a no-man;s-land in between. The stories are told from the point of view of several characters, Japanese, German, and American.

Next — and one I am still working on — is the ecological thriller The Swarm by Frank Schatzing. The overall plot is nothing new — the abused Earth begins fighting back against her tormentors — but the specifics of the story are fresh and engaging, and the characters are sympathetic without being preachy.

Finally, the one I just finished, and one which caught me by surprise: The Road by Cormac McCarthy. Normally I am aware of when interesting books are published, but I didn’t hear about this one until after the fact. McCarthy has (finally) published a post-apocalyptic novel. He has written several apocalyptic novels — Blood Meridian being the most obvious — and now he has written the book he was meant to write. The entire novel follows an un-named father and son as they travel west from the mountains to the coast of southern California in an America gone to nuclear winter where nothing is left alive but human beings. Gangs of cannibals roam the remains of the world and a can of peaches is the most magnificent meal to be hoped for.

There is nothing dignified or romantic about the end of the world here — everything is ash and rain and snow, and a simple thing like a shopping cart losing its wheel can be a life-or-death experience.

I read The Road too quickly the first time — punctuated by moments of having to put it down and let my emotions settle — and I will probably pick it up again around the holidays.

Thomas Harris has a new book coming out in three weeks: Hannibal Rising, the story of how Hannibal Lecter became one of the greatest literary monsters of the twentieth century. Saying I am looking forward to this one is an understatement.

That’s all for now. I want to get in a solid hour of reading before I go to bed. I suggest you do the same.

I receive about 35 pieces of spam a day, most of which are successfully filtered by the email client at my host provider, Modwest. Occasionally something gets through, usually Russian advertisements for discount electronics.

Got one today, however, which was a little different. The content of the message was as follows:

In a trice without warning the face of nature
grew sullen Black angry mouths, the clouds
swallowed up the sun The air was dense with
suppressed excitement The wind howled through
the long corridors and sobbed and whispered in
the secret recesses

Hmm. Not your average spam message.

A Google of the first line resulted in many many hits, most of which led toward spammed blogs and message boards, or people complaining about getting over-wrought, semi-literate poetry in their in-boxes. Again, nothing unusual there.

I was still intrigued, so I did a Google book search, which was a little more fruitful. Turns out this line is from page 12 of a book called My First Two Thousand Years, by George Sylvester Viereck and Paul Eldridge. It is a fictional autobiography of the Wandering Jew which was originally published in 1928, and is apparently still in print.

So now — although I am sure it was not the original intent of the spammer — I have another book on my reading list.

And I will leave the question of why this particular passage from that particular book found it way into an un-solicited email for another time.

Last week I picked up the Collected Fictions of Jorge Luis Borges, and have been reading nothing else since. The guy is amazing.

How to classify him? To compare him to authors with whom I am familiar, I would have to say that he exhibits the simplicity and humor of Evan Connell, the poetic strength of Cormac McCarthy, the precision and aloofness of Edgar Allen Poe, and the cosmic overtones of H.P. Lovecraft or the earlier works of Umberto Eco.

This is not to say he is in any way derivative of any of these writers; he very much has his own style and sensibilities, and I am thoroughly enjoying every minute I spend reading his work.

As for genre, I would call him a magical realist of the highest order. He writes of labyrinths and time and mirrors, and twists them all together until it is impossible to tell where one ends and the other begins.

If any of you have read Borges I am interested in hearing (reading) your thoughts on the subject.

I haven’t written much lately about what has been going on in my world, book-wise. I haven’t been reading as much as usual, on account of all of the other stuff going on in my life.

A few weeks ago I picked up Rules of Play, a textbook covering many aspects of game design and game theory. Despite what some of the less-than-impressed reviewers have to say about the book, I am finding it to be an absolute treasure trove of ideas and observations about everything game related. It is very much a “think about this”, rather than a “do it this way” – type book, and as such is useful for a much wider variety of projects than would be a “Learn 3d lighting algorithms for animating hair in Maya for Doom XVIII” – type book, which is what the detractors seem to expect.

A little while before that I picked up Rainbow Stories by William Vollmann. I have read a few of his novels, and of course Rising Up and Rising Down (which Amazon.com is currently listing for $475!!!), but this is the first time I have read his smaller works. And they are brilliant. His characters are prostitutes and junkies and ancient Babylonian heroes and doctors and police and everyone in between. And though the stories can be ugly, the writing is beautiful and very much worth the effort.

Rewinding a little more brings us to The Years of Rice and Salt by Kim Stanley Robinson. This one had been hovering around the edges of my perception since I picked up Red Mars a couple of years ago. It is a speculative history novel which explores the idea, “what if the Black Plague wiped out 90 percent of Europe instead of 30 percent?”. Each chapter explores the world through the eyes of several characters who are continually reincarnated into interconnected lives, from the years of the plague up to roughly the year 2090. I have always enjoyed “what if?” – type books which explore the effects of single events on the cascade of history, and this book is one of the best of them.

Shortly before that I picked up 40 Signs of Rain, also by Kim Stanley Robinson, which follows members of the scientific community as they try to raise awareness in time to stem the disastrous results of global warming. This one is not as accessible as his other works, and sounds a little pedantic at times, but it is superbly researched and does a wonderful job of showing the day-to-day efforts of the scientists who, more than anyone else, understand what we are doing to the planet, and what it will take to counter those acts.

Just today, on the way home from work, I picked up Old Man’s War by John Scalzi. I am a little in to the second chapter, and I have to say this: Buy the book. Buy it now. I am impressed enough after 20 pages that I feel I can safely say that this will be one of the best books I read this year. And after so many years of reading science fiction, it takes a lot to impress me.

So there we are. Fitting in a little reading in the nooks and crannies of my insanely busy life; usually between 11:30 and whenever I finally drift off to sleep on any given weeknight.

Up next: Judas Unchained by Peter F. Hamilton; the sequel to Pandora’s Star, which was a rollicking good read, as are all of Hamilton’s books. It hits the shelves this upcoming Tuesday, and the week after that is spring break, which means an extra eight hours of reading time for me before the long slide into the final weeks of the semester. Eight more weeks before I am free from the insane schedule which I have inflicted upon myself.

Saving up money for the new house has been more difficult lately, what with all of the great books popping up in my Gold Box.

First up was What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy by James Paul Gee. When I first opened the book I was struck with the fear that Mr. Gee might be a wanker, because the chapters had names like “Semiotic Domains”, and “Situated Meaning and Learning”. Turns out I was wrong; Mr. Gee has many useful things to say about the spaces our minds inhabit when we are immersed in the gaming experience.

Next: A Theory of Fun for Game Design by Ralph Koster. I have not read this one yet, but a quick skim tells me that the ideas in this book will be compatible with the ideas in Mr. Gee’s book.

And finally, Chris Crawford on Game Design by Chris Crawford. I love this book. Crawford uses lessons learned over twenty years of designing and building games, to come up with 95 principles to keep in mind when starting the game development process. He is a wonderful writer.

Only a few more weeks until A Feast for Crows hits the shelves. Five years is a long time to wait for a sequel.

Stopped by the bookstore on the way home from work. Intended to grab No Country for Old Men and leave, but there next to it on the new release shelf was The Summer He Didn’t Die by Jim Harrison. Of course, I couldn’t pass that up, especially seeing as how they were both discounted.

I haven’t read Harrison in several years. The last of his novels I picked up was The Road Home about seven years ago. More recently was The Beast God Forgot to Invent, a collection of novellas. I like Harrison’s shorter works more than his novels, so finding the new book was quite a treat.

The new Harry Potter book was quite good. I won’t say better than I expected because I expected it to be good. J.K. Rowling is consistently doing a very good job of both changing the tone of her novels as the protagonists age, and improving the quality and complexity of her writing. It will be interesting to see where she goes after the next (and last) Harry Potter.

A couple of hour ago I finished reading Olympos, which exceeded my expectations by a wide margin. The great thing about reading Dan Simmons in general, and this book in particular, is the great sense of the joy of writing which comes out of his work.

Next on the stack, and probably done by morning, is H.P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life, by Michel Houellebecq.

As everyone in the universe knows, the latest Harry Potter book, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, went on sale this morning at midnight. I waited until 4:30 in the afternoon to pick up my copy from Argos Books, along with a boxed set of The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, Unbeliever by Stephen R. Donaldson, and The Sterile Cukoo, the first book by John Nichols, whose The Milagro Beanfield War I read back in June.

And this should keep me busy for the rest of the weekend, up to Tuesday, when Cormac McCarthy’s newest book, No Country for Old Men, will hit the shelves.

Mmmmmm…books.

In the few fragments that remain of [Roger Fenwick’s] own story, he records that he learned but three things in two years at Oxford. The first, on which he placed the greatest value, was that “Yea” might be turned into “Nay” and vice versa if a sufficient quantity of wordage was applied to the matter. The second was that in any argument, the victor is always right, and the third that though the pen is mightier than the sword, the sword speaks louder and stronger at any given moment.

Leonard Wibberly, The Mouse That Roared

On a whim I stopped by George R. R. Martin’s site, and discovered that At Long Last, after untold decades of feverish expectations, A Feast for Crows is moving into production. For fans of the fantasy genre, this is indeed big news, as the third book in the series (Feast is the fourth) was published in October of 2000.

As for when it will hit the shelves—as near as I can tell, sometime between late July and December of this year. Use the intervening time to read the rest of the series.