What I Want to Know From You
Jeff VanderMeer • October 3rd, 2007 @ 3:37 pm • Uncategorized
Okay, so, tomorrow I’m doing a radical re-cleaning of the house due to the upheaval of the book sale. And I’ll be fleshing out some Predator stuff. So…no blogging until Friday morning.
In the meantime, I want to know at least one of three things from all of you yahoos, miscreants, cranks, and ne’er-do-wells:
(1) What’s the best book you’ve read in the last six months?
(2) What’s the stupidest thing you’ve done in the last year? (I’m hoping these will be funny)
(3) What’s the worst book you’ve read in the last two years, and why? (Be as kind as you can be given the context, and you can’t mention my books. I am already a tormented starving artist–you wanna put me over the edge?)
Jeff
October 3, 2007 at 3:53 pm
1:Killing Hitler: The Plots, The Assassins, and the Dictator Who Cheated Death by Roger Moorhouse superb history.
2:Payed extra for express shipping for Harry Potter and the deathly hallows [the audio version]
3:The African Safari Papers by Robert Sedlack instead of actually doing characterization will just make everybody have some sort of mental disorder, that makes them compelling and literary right?
October 3, 2007 at 4:14 pm
1) We Have Always Lived in the Castle – Shirley Jackson. This didn’t have to be a *new* book, did it? It was a new edition with an introduction from Jonathan Lethem.
2) Thinking it would take only a few days to rip every CD we own into our iTunes folder—ended up taking weeks.
3) The Ruins – Scott Smith. Am I taking crazy pills here? What is in this book that everyone enjoys so much? Reading it made me feel literally furious at the author. Gah, I’m getting angry just thinking about it now….
October 3, 2007 at 4:33 pm
1. See below (the blog listing below, not what I wrote below for #2 and #3). Thanks Jeff for reminding what I should write for #1. I’m talking about The Arrival.
2. (1) Forgetting a pen that I would need for teaching class, (2) thus being put into the position of borrowing a pen from a student, (3) but forgetting to return it to the student at the end of class, (4) so putting it into a drawer in the lecturn for next time to return to said student, then (5) finding it gone when the next class rolled around, and so (6) running around bothering the AV people to see if they have a policy against leaving stuff in the lecturn drawer (they don’t; someone just took it, probably inadvertantly). At the end of the term the student will write in her teacher evaluation that I stole her pen. This will be posted on-line. My life is ruined.
3. Snow by Orhan Pamuk. Not a bad book if judged solely on its own sake, but…I expect to be better entertained by a Nobel-prize winner. This dragged, and could have been shortened by a third IMO.
October 3, 2007 at 4:39 pm
1. Other than SHRIEK? Hmmm…I really liked ONE RED PAPERCLIP by Kyle MacDonald. I almost never read nonfiction, but this story of how MacDonald went from a red paperclip to a house through a series of trades was just inspiring.
2. Not stupid, but funny. I’ve been up late a lot recently so that I can do work and family and magazine stuff, so I’m often tired. On Tues and Thurs I watch the baby by myself in the evening. One night, I was trying to keep her semi-occupied, but I fell asleep on her floor. I woke up to find her smearing vaseline on my face.
3. BITTEN by Kelley Armstrong. I’ve been making a point recently of reading some books outside of my normal tastes; so authors like Laurell K. Hamilton, Jim Butcher, Carrie Vaughn, Kelley Armstrong, etc. I just could not get into Armstrong’s characters. I didn’t understand their motivations. I ended up not even getting 100 pages into the book.
October 3, 2007 at 4:39 pm
1) “Ender’s Game” – Orson Scott Card. So well written that I didn’t notice how well written it was.
2) Wasted two and a half hours listening to a time share salesman, knowing full well that we weren’t going to buy, just to get a cheap vacation.
3) “Wrinkle In Time” – Madelaine L’Engle. I probably would have loved this as a kid, but… well… I thought the preachiness buried the good parts.
October 3, 2007 at 5:51 pm
1)Lucius Shepard – Softspoken.
2) oh, man, where do I begin…well, maybe the least embarassing and most suitable for public mention is me sending off my 100th short submission, and congratulating said market on being the recipient of my 100th sub; and then asking them to consider it for pubbing:) buuuuut, I’m reasonably certain this market’s editors will get a chuckle out of it. I hope.
3) Vicki Pettersson – Scent of Shadows. It was so ludicrous I actually enjoyed it! I particularly enjoyed the description of a typical comic book store featuring typical comic geeks that was completely not like any comic store I, or any person I know RL or online, has ever seen (those of us who do read comics and do frequent these stores).
October 3, 2007 at 6:02 pm
1.) River of Gods by Ian McDonald. Simply an amazing book.
2.) Got a tattoo of a squid on my leg…I keed, I keed. I kept trying to print the second page of a document in word. This sounds innocuous enough, but the second page of this document didn’t actually exist. I did everything to try and fix this mystery problem with the printer, including uninstalling and re-installing it. I was so convinced something was broken because the page wouldn’t print. It was really embarrassing when I realized there was no second page to print.
3.) I was going to say something else, but then I remembered that I read The DaVinci Code.
October 3, 2007 at 6:14 pm
1. Earth Logic by Laurie J. Marks. She is the master of making you care about the world by making you care about the characters.
2. I took a job I had done before and so already knew I would hate, telling myself it will only be for a few months. Gah. No time to interview when one has a full time job!
3. The Thief by Megan Whalen Turner. It was just…boring. And trite. And there wasn’t a single female in it until the VERY end. I’ve heard a lot of people insisting that the 2nd and 3rd in the trilogy are better, but why on earth would I read a sequel to a book I didn’t like?
October 3, 2007 at 7:02 pm
1) Brittle Innings by Michael Bishop, for its beautiful writing and heartbreaking story.
2) NA (I’m not good at funny)
3) The Nameless by Ramsey Campbell, primarily because I’d heard it mentioned as one of his best novels and was disappointed by it underwritten characters cluttered plot.
October 3, 2007 at 7:07 pm
1. A Princess of Roumania by Paul Park –I can’t wait to read the sequels!
2. One day one of my eye contacts fell out of my eye–well I thought it had, even though I couldn’t find it, I just knew I couldn’t see. I opened up a new contact less package and put a new one in. Only to realize the old one was still on my eye- folded up. For at least an hour I couldn’t figure out why I couldn’t see, even with the new contact in! I promise I really did not feel the first, folded up contact in my eye at the time. :(
3. Morgwar by Terry Brooks. A total boring waste of paper. I also really hated how Ryder Ord Star just HAD to be raped and beaten repeatedly in order to find salvation. Or so Brooks’s writing implied.
October 3, 2007 at 7:36 pm
1) THE IMAGO SEQUENCE AND OTHER STORIES – Laird Barron, an incredible collection that really creeped me out.
2) Realizing in the split-second before the wall of water from the Six Flags log ride hit me that I had my cell phone in my pocket. About an $80 mistake.
3) TWILIGHT (YA) – Stephenie Meyer – I seem to be the only person on the planet that didn’t like this one, but I never felt like anything was at stake for the main character until the last few pages.
October 3, 2007 at 7:44 pm
1) Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk, tied with Lucifer’s Hammer by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle
2) Hmmm . . . (and I only “hmmm” because I’ve done so many stupid things this year). I’m going to have to get back to you on that one. Too many deserving incidents for this little post . . .
3) Wizard and Glass by Steven King. I never finished this book, and have since been itching to re-read it. I was disappointed by the slow pace, after plowing through the Gunslinger, the Drawing of the Three (one of my favorite books), and the Wastelands in little more than a month, only to find myself in the middle of a slogging . . . could it be? . . . ROMANCE novel. Huh? Huh? Huh? Anyway. In hindsight, I’ve realized that the book wasn’t bad, per se, just very different than what I had been reading for a few years. I’m actually excited to re-read the first three books, have my fated rematch with Wizard and Glass (I imagine it like the rematch between Rocky and Apollo, but instead of a belt, the winner gets an autographed copy of a Danielle Steel novel), and finish the rest of the series.
October 3, 2007 at 8:08 pm
(1) Dune by Frank Herbert. Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card comes a close second. I’m finally reading them (still wondering why I didn’t get to them for 8 years), and discovering why they are so popular and such big names in SF.
(2) Mmm. Hmm. I’ve made plenty of these (sometimes taking a while to work out why people were laughing at me) but I tend to forget my gaffes and foot-in-mouth hangups very quickly… for good reason… *heh*
(3) Polar City Blues by Katharine Kerr. Predictable, dull, pedestrian, not even faintly engaging, and I had to dig for excuses to keep reading it. (Which isn’t a good position for a book to be in.) Finally expired at the penultimate chapter because I ran out of reasons. A specimen of how not to write a novel.
October 3, 2007 at 9:34 pm
1) Best book was Cosmos by Witold Gombrowicz. Simply amazing. After a bit it starts to get a little tedious, but then there is a dead cat and things just get better and better from there.
2) I am getting a tattoo of a snail shell on my wrist in a week, so perhaps that. If not, buying an Xbox 360 when I should have been working hard on my dissertation . . . . I am sure I am forgetting something much worse, but I am also certain that there is a very good reason that I have forgotten it.
3) Orphans of the Sky by Heinlein. I would not say that this was a painful read, but it was also far from good.
October 3, 2007 at 10:02 pm
1) Lint by Steve Aylett (been wanting to get around to this one for some time)
2) Left my Bessa R in a Black Cab in London
3) A Game of Thrones: Someone forced me to read it and I found it bloated and boring..
October 3, 2007 at 10:26 pm
1) Jason Goodwin’s Lords of the Horizon, a superb history of the Ottomans.
2) I let a professor’s rudeness get the better of me and snarked about it to her students. End result being they ratted me out to her, the students didn’t pay attention to what I was saying, and the professor complained to my boss, and so I had to send an e-mail of apology. At least I’ve got job security….
3) Children of Lensmen. I’ve tried, oh, how I’ve tried. I just can’t make myself read it, or any of the Lensmen books. They don’t make my brain hurt, they just make shut it off.
October 3, 2007 at 10:33 pm
Oh, I’m glad someone said Lint. Love that book. Wow, Jess–that Goodwin sounds great! (I’ve tried the Lensmen, too. No dice.)
Keep ‘em coming–after the dust settles, I’ll post at least all of the book recs as one list.
Jeff
October 3, 2007 at 11:07 pm
1. Eugene Onegin, translated by Nabokov. Loved the narrator’s digressions. But if you’re looking for something more current, then Soldier of Sidon. After the Wizard, which left me a bit cold (though I thought the Knight was brilliant), it was great to get back into Wolfe.
2. When I mistakenly directed a child and his mother to what I thought was Rick Riordan’s “The Sea of Monsters”, but turned out to be erotica with a very suggestive cover. I should have known too, because we never put children’s books in the New Fiction section. Not cool.
3. Olympos by Dan Simmons. My expectations were just too high on this one. I loved Ilium, but most of Olympos just felt bogged down. It wasn’t bad, just not what I’ve come to expect from this author. Fortunately the Terror came along and renewed my faith.
October 3, 2007 at 11:48 pm
1) I might have read it a bit more than six months ago, but The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolano was superb. It seems at first to be merely episodic and unstructured, but it’s got so much narrative verve it just relentlessly drives you through to the end. I just finished The Brief & Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, which also kicks some serious ass. Given time to reflect, it might get my vote.
2) Saying yes when my co-workers asked me to stay for just one more drink.
3) A Taxonomy of Barnacles–supposedly a quirky family story a la “Royal Tenenbaums,” it had a great cover and I couldn’t have been more predisposed to like it. The writing was so sloppy, though, that I had to give up on it a third of the way in. When one of the characters was described as lying prone on the floor kicking her heels against the backs of her knees, I was fed up.
October 4, 2007 at 1:25 am
1:: Is it sad that I had to go rummage through my blog archives to jog my memory about what I’ve read this year? Seems to have been a lackluster year of reading. Only one of the titles I dug up has stayed with me as being ‘wow, awesome’, and I suspect you’ve already read Peter Watt’s Blindsight.
2:: I do stupid things every day. Some of them are spectacularly stupid, like planning only one day of rest on a seven week trip, and others are stupidly stupid, like attending a matsuri on a hot day, dehydrating, and fainting right before the horseback archery was to start. I crushed many a tiny japanese person. It was like the fall of Godzilla. Only I don’t shoot lightning out of my mouth.
3:: Another daft thing I do is read a lot of bad books. Good bad books. This year seems to have been a junk-food-book year. The only book I’ve read that I thought was bad and didn’t actually enjoy was Neal Asher’s The Voyage of Sable Keech. It felt like a sequel because Asher refused to let go of his characters, and didn’t seem to have much point other than ‘this happened, this happened, and this happened’. It had giant mollusc in it though, so major kudos there.
October 4, 2007 at 3:00 am
1. The Yiddish Policeman’s Union.
2. Take on an open-ended freelance project while trying to hold down a day job, a long-distance relationship, a novel and a novella.
3. Blindsight. As Twain said of Fenimore Cooper, the reader “dislikes the good people in it, is indifferent to the others, and wishes they would all get drowned together.” I found the book ill-conceived, ill-paced, ill-plotted, arrogant and smug, despite the fact that I actually agreed with all but a few of the things Watts seemed to mean to say. That said, a book which can keep me this angry this many months later must have something going for it, and I think everyone else should read it too.
October 4, 2007 at 3:00 am
(Argh. Sorry about the closing italic tag there, or rather the lack of one.)
October 4, 2007 at 3:51 am
1) I had to think about this one but I’m going to have to say Life and Fate by Vassily Grossman, mainly because I haven’t finished City of Saints and Madmen as of yet.
2) see #3.
3) Once again a tough call, but I’m going to have to say The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor by John Barth or Against the Day by Thomas Pynchon(really disappointed in this one, 1000 pages of meandering I just gave up after about 2/3. There was only so long I could keep hoping that it would get good, or at least interesting)
October 4, 2007 at 4:12 am
1) It’s a toss-up between the Tiptree/Alice Sheldon biography, VIRICONIUM, CITY OF SAINTS AND MADMEN, and Elizabeth Bear’s NEW AMSTERDAM. (I’ve never been good at choosing favourites.)
2) At a work party I told a woman not to go into the ladies’ loo because “That’s the ladies’.” She looked like a man from the back. I was, in my defence, quite drunk on free Pimm’s. Fortunately the woman works elsewhere in the office from me and I think I’ve only glimpsed her once since. Even when I’m sober she looks a bit mannish.
3) I’ve been quite lucky in the last two years. But there was DEVICES AND DESIRES by KJ Parker, in which the author seemed to think that saying ~exactly~ the same point over and over and over again in page-long paragraphs was just what readers wanted! It felt like wading through quicksand, with my patience getting quickly sucked away. I gave up after 100 or so pages.
October 4, 2007 at 4:22 am
1. The Professeur Bell series by Joann Sfar, graphic novels of how the inspiration for Sherlock Holmes becomes enmeshed with a two headed alchemist, devils and angels in Jerusalem and a giant ape.
2. We’ve got a book of London ghostwalks. The longest of these is the Jack the Ripper walk which we did about three weeks ago, traipsing all over the East End in unseasonal sunshine. The walk itself was excellent but I forgot to put sunblock on my legs. The result? The worst sunburn since I was 10 – I looked like an oystercatcher for a week.
3. Atonement by Ian McEwan. The plot is daft and the internal monologues and descriptions are suffocating. I can’t take anymore. Yeah, I’m a philistine.
October 4, 2007 at 5:03 am
Good idea Jeff, I have a lot of good recommendations now!
1. It’s been more than six months, but The Terror still sticks with me. I think that’s one of my favorite books, ever. The book I’ve gotten the most from recently is Vernor Vinge’s Rainbows End. Pretty unsettling from this oldster’s perspective. But I never did figure out the missing apostrophe.
2. I seldom do anything stupid or funny because I’m so introspective. Also, quite a short memory.
3. Neither do I read bad books; life’s too short. Whenever I realize I’m into a stupid book I close it and take it to Half Price Books immediately. Sometimes I think about penciling in a warning for future potential purchasers, but that would surely also clue the good folks at Half Price – and reduce or eliminate my credit for it.
October 4, 2007 at 5:08 am
2. But I have to admit that chasing the dog around the house with my RC helicopter wasn’t well considered; beat the shit out of the furniture *and* the expensive helicopter! I’ll to have to reserve that activity for lesser flying machines.
October 4, 2007 at 6:30 am
1. The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolano. Hippie poets in the 70′s, what’s cooler than that? Favorite image — Ulysis Lima reading poetry in the shower.
2. Accepting a supervisory position at my day job. Now, all I do is put out fires and negotiate treaties between warring factions. And I have to learn to speak corporate-ese!
3. Air by Geoff Ryman. Actually, I loved the book. But nearly every page had a typo. I felt I was reading an obstacle course.
October 4, 2007 at 6:33 am
Dave, ha ha – I’ve wanted to do that same thing for a while (dog/helicopter).
October 4, 2007 at 6:41 am
1. Best book: A toss up between The new Gibson “Spook Country” and John Crowley’s Aegypt sequence.
2. Stupid Thing: I blithley ordered a digital camera from a dealer online that I afterwards realised seemed extremely wonky. I could have kicked myself and spent several anxious days waiting to see if the camera would actually arrive, which fortunately it did in a surprisingly short time.
3. Worst book: Has to be “Temple” by Matthew Reilly. Absolutely execrable stuff. Reading it could almost be classified up there with one of the stupidest things I’ve done.
October 4, 2007 at 7:19 am
1. GAST by Edward Lee. Couldn’t really get into Lee’s writing before, but this one actually had a great plot and nicely thought out characters (with the requisite extremely nasty stuff).
2. (a) Stupidly filled a 200 disc binder with most of the DVDs, videogames, and CDs I owned. (b) Very stupidly took said binder out of state to a friends house and left in passenger seat of my car overnight. Smashed window… you can guess the rest. Still trying to get over that one.. :(
3. Grave Sight by Charlaine Harris… just blah.
October 4, 2007 at 7:23 am
1. The Imago Sequence and Other Stories by Laird Barron. Creepy, corgeous and utterly fantastic book. Mr. Barron is a prose stylist par excellence and his opening lines are the best ever. (“Then he bites off my shooting hand.”)
2. Going on a five day drinking binge when I turned fifty. Apparently growing old is harder than I imagined…
3. Deepness in the sky by Vernor Vinge. Well, not exactly a bad book, but it just bored the hell out of me.
October 4, 2007 at 7:40 am
Awesome stuff! Wonderful reading this morning.
Although I like Watts, I wasn’t fond of Blindsight, like Moles.
Whoever recommended Life and Fate–one of my favorites of all time!
It’s unfair to tell you not to mention my books for #3 but not ban them from #1, but given the week I’ve had, I’ll take the ego boo for now, although I won’t be putting them on the final list.
Jeff
October 4, 2007 at 8:29 am
1. Move Under Ground by Nick Mamatas: The prose in this novel is spectacular; an attempt to capture that mad and maddening off the cuff stream of inebriated consciousness that made Kerouac so popular that actually just ends up demonstrating how superior a stylist Mamatas is. More importantly, its Jack Kerouac, Neal Cassady and Bill Burroughs FIGHTING FUCKING CTHULHU! How in the hell can you go wrong?
2. Believe it or not, its actually classified. I may or may not have done something to a computer system at U.S. Customs and Border Protection (my bosses, by the by – I’m not nearly clever enough to be a hacker) on the Canadian Border that if it had not been caught as quickly as it had probably would have resulted in several public and private agencies losing hundreds of millions of dollars. The moral of the story: Cross platform systems between competing government departments that share the same physical location = bad.
3. Mainspring by Jay Lake: Not a bad novel really, it just felt… rushed? cramped? cliched? After getting almost halfway through the novel till we begin to see the real mysteries of this clockwork world (and being treated to some excellent descriptive sequences about life aboard an air ship) the novel suddenly pushes almost all action off scene, reduces most of its characters into cookie cutter plot fillers, and rushes the novel to an essentially meaningless confrontation at the bottom of the world that reveals absolutely nothing. I think I am more upset by how much of Lake’s short work I have so deeply enjoyed only to find myself reading a longer work with so much promise in some of its essential conceits that than left me feeling cheated by cheap and easy fantasy routines.
October 4, 2007 at 9:01 am
1) Magic for Beginners by Kelly Link. Yeah, I’m probably the last person in the world to read it.
2) Deciding to run for office, again. Why? Why? Why? Oh, yeah, the power (small village) and the money (a whopping $200 a month, before taxes).
3) Life is too short to read bad books. I used to read books (and short stories) that I didn’t like, thinking that I could learn from them. Then I realized I was learning from the stories I didn’t like and that this was a stupid thing for me to do. If the book or story doesn’t grab me within a certain amount of time (I’ll give a novel a little longer than a short story) I move on. I guess the worst I’ve read in recently is The Dark, Ellen Datlow ed. (which I normally like what she has edited). I’m 2/3 of the way through and I have to admit I’ve skipped more stories than I’ve read. I almost put it down and gave it one more chance; of the last 3 stories, I’ve only skipped 1.
October 4, 2007 at 11:29 am
1) Out on Blue Six by Ian McDonald. Yeah, it’s filled with outdated SF ideas (arcologies and Gilliamesque distopias), but it was such an unbridled joy to read that I didn’t care. It was the latest in a long line of books that reminds me why I write SF: because it is awesome.
2) Signing up for Ironman New Zealand. What started out as a lark between me and a friend (“Hey, you know what would be cool? If we went to the other side of the world and beat the hell out of ourselves for a day! That would be great!”) has completely consumed my life. I’m up every day at 5 to ride, run or swim, I’m hungry all the goddamned time, I dragass myself home after lifting weights, inhale whatever foodstuffs aren’t tied down, then fall asleep, only to repeat the next day. On the plus side, my legs look fantastic.
3) I’m with Steve Buchheit: life’s too short for shitty reading. I have to limit myself to the essays of Caitlin Flanagan or Michael Hirschorn in The Atlantic. Reading either of them is the literary equivalent of picking at a scab: I know it’s a bad idea, but I can’t help myself. They both just piss me off, Hirschorn because he has the balls to comment on culture when he’s responsible for extending the careers of D-list celebs on VH1, and Flanagan because she writes great prose in the service of moronic theses. They’re also reminders that if their crap can get published, then there’s hope for me yet.
October 4, 2007 at 1:16 pm
1) An Imperfect God: George Washington, His Slaves, and the Creation of America by Henry Wiencek.
2) I’ve mainly spent the past year continuing to make up for stupid things I did four years ago, but I guess overdrawing my checking account would rank up there.
3) We Were the Mulvaneys by Joyce Carol Oates. Quite possibly the most predictable book I have ever read. And I’ve read Eragon, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, and a few Forgotten Realms books and Ace Doubles in the past two years, so that’s saying something.
October 4, 2007 at 3:30 pm
1.) Hrm .. it’s been a slow six months reading-wise. One that comes to mind is The Hummingbird’s Daughter by Luis Alberto Urrea, which started out gorgeous and paled only a bit as it progressed, not meandering anywhere near so much as some other novels of its length and scope. Fun overall!
2.) That’d be a list, but we pregnant women are fabled to be absent-minded and, well, do stupid shit routinely. Such has been my excuse anyway. Let’s see .. I almost ran over a NY State Trooper at 60 MPH a couple of months ago. There were two of them in the middle of the road stopping cars (or so I learned) to check inspection stickers .. but .. there was no-one ahead of me at the time so I couldn’t see that they were stopping everyone. The trooper put his hand out in what I guess was meant to be a “Halt, motorist” gesture, but the angle of his hand was such that it looked like he was waving me on, gesturing further down the road. So I kept on going! Anyway, I have an excuse. Although, some days, I wonder whether the getting pregnant part itself appears on the list of stupid things done. Oops.
3.) Gonna go with the Girl with the squid tat on this one. Just thinking about The da Vinci Code makes me feel dirty. Nothing I love more than being browbeaten on topics the author knows nowhere near enough about to get away with, yet feels compelled to buttonhole the reader mid-paragraph for further haranguing. Just glad I didn’t buy it. Ugh.
October 4, 2007 at 6:12 pm
.
Matt, the activity is recommended. Just use a styrofoam helicopter, not your expensive one. I chased the dog up the stairs one day with the cheapie, scared the living shit out of my wife – which was totally worth the doghouse time! :D
October 4, 2007 at 10:47 pm
1) Probably The Scar. Though Ian McDonald’s Terminal Cafe (Necroville in the UK) is way up there – McDonald is IMHO and extremely underrated writer.
2) Taking a course which required me to do an oral presentation… And getting the date for it wrong. Ouch.
3) Return to Mars by Ben Bova. If ever a novel needed more space opera and less soap opera, this was it.
October 5, 2007 at 11:53 am
1) The Bloody Poet, by Desider Kostolanyi
2) When visiting Greece, not stopping to see the ancient remains of Tiryns—-I just saw it from the window of a slow moving bus—–then a taxi—–then a bus again….
3) Who has time for bad books.
October 5, 2007 at 4:42 pm
1. Queen of the South by Arturo Perez Reverte and Richard Morgan’s Thirteen (Black Man in the UK).
2. I skipped the updates for my computer’s AV, caught a bad virus and lost about 150 pages of a translation.
3. The End of the Story – The Collected Fantasies of Clark Ashton Smith, volume 1. Hated it.
October 5, 2007 at 6:43 pm
1. I started re-reading ‘Little, Big” by John Crowley, and I haven’t finished The Solitudes yet (and so, won’t vote on it), so that would have to be the *best* book I’ve technically read in the last 6 months. The best I’ve read, beginning to end however, was ‘Titan’ by John Varley. Very fun, well-written, and touched me good in quite a few places.
2. Stupidest thing has probably been my horrible diet/lack of exercise, and all the grueling exercise it’s taken to correct the situation-I’m right with you, Adam.
3. I stay away from bad books too, by virtue of a lot of research and reading ‘classics’ and authors I expect a higher level of writing from-Jeff, you’re at the top of my list. There’s enough good voices out there, new and old, that I never lack *something* to read.
Easily, and by far the worst in 2 years has been ‘Sahara’ by Clive Cussler. How’d he ever sell a book? The man should be doing valuable janitor work at a nursing home, in trade for being allowed to entertain the lonely, the venerable, the near-catatonic. That way the floors would also be clean. Atleast the Da Vinci Code engaged my brain-Yes the gas was leaded, yes the gear was wrong, but atleast it wasn’t the inbred child of Rambo, Miami Vice, and Captain Planet; helmed by a hero whom I could envision as no one other than the Beastmaster of 80′s movie fame, forced but not fitted by sorcery into a future of electronics and suits-and topped off like a cherry-bomb in a toilet bowl, with an ill mixture of gastrointestinal health advice, the gentle racism of 1st world imperialism, and the vomitous debris of exploded tech manuals. Even the movie based on the book seemed embarrassed, created by gifted schoolchildren far more capable than their teacher, but in their uncertainty, equal parts tittilated and ashamed by this cafeteria pizza material they’re forced to digest and transmute. (How’s that for bad writing?)
The worst recently has been the Barnes & Noble Classics edition of the Arabian Nights-which isn’t very bad at all. The writing’s archaic and choppy, naturally, and it’s not the Burton edition so much of the juice has been sucked from it. Still, it’s something I *want* to read, and what remains is a tragic, glorious, despoiled half-ruin.
October 6, 2007 at 1:49 am
1. If you had said seven months, I would have said Ngugi wa Thiong’o's Wizard of the Crow (which I bought after reading your piece about it in January, by the way). But since it’s for the past six months, I’ll go with Zoran Zivkovic’s Steps Through the Mist by a nose over Stepan Chapman’s The Troika and Salvador Plascencia’s People of Paper.
2. Let’s just say it’s so stupid that a) I almost lost my teaching position, and b) I’m praying there won’t be a lawsuit. But that’s stupid as in being frustrated. For stupid-funny…well, would slipping up in a middle school classroom this past spring and cursing count?
3. Worst book of the past two years….hrmm…although it had some redeeming features to make it worth reading for many, I’ll have to add my voice to the chorus of those who said Blindsight. That ending was a bit out there for me and I had lost most interest about 2/3 in.
October 6, 2007 at 2:19 pm
1. Got to be either Brasyl by McDonald or Pattern Recognition by Gibson.
2. Forgetting the birthdays of multiple family members. I do love my family, actually.
3. I would say Da Vinci Code but I didn’t finish it. I did finish Mainspring by Lake and thought he took such a cool premise and made it as boring as possible.
Gotta say I don’t understand the hate for Blindsight. I agree the ending could have been better, but there were some wacky and fun ideas in that book.
October 6, 2007 at 5:28 pm
1) three-way tie between Kevin Brockmeier’s A Brief History of the Dead, Conrad Williams’ The Unblemished and Stephen King’s Lisey’s Story (I loved each book for different reasons).
2) Exercising w/my husband can sometimes be dangerous to me. Last week I asked him to do this ab-routine where one person lies flat on their back, the other stands above their head. The person on the floor holds on to their partner’s ankles and lifts their legs all the way up. The partner then pushes the legs back down. Up and down until you can’t do it anymore. An excellent exercise for your lower abs. All went well when I was on the floor. Then it was Jeff’s turn. He held on tightly to my ankles and proceeded to lift his legs up so fast and with such force that the impact knocked me off balance. Problem was – he was holding on to my ANKLES….so I had no place to go, couldn’t step back, etc. I landed backwards flat on my butt!
3) worse book – would have to be The Ruins – stoopid people doing stoopid things and then they all die…
October 6, 2007 at 9:03 pm
1.) “The Strange Last Voyage of Donald Crowhurst”. What a fascinating look into the sad, bizarre mind of one of the oddest people ever to appear briefly in the public eye and then vanish without trace off the face of the earth. Though non-fiction, it read like a brilliant suspense novel, and I could not put the thing down. I loved it.
2.) Fainted for the first time in my life on my kitchen floor on July 8th upon discovering that a writer I worshipped had friended me on a blog site because he’d seen something I wrote about his works on another blog of mine, and wanted to send me his latest book. Nothing of the sort had ever happened to me before in my life, and I was stupefied and elated, somehow believing that he thought I was interesting, worth knowing, someone he wanted to discuss literature & life in general with on the blog site. I talked about his stories constantly with family & friends, even told complete strangers in book shops all about it when encouraging them to carry his books. After my posts & comments on the blog site went uncommented on and my e-mails went unanswered, and I had made, in retrospect, a public ass of myself continuing to write funny posts pertaining to his stories on all my blogs, I realized while walking through the men’s dept. in Target one night that the only reason he’d contacted me & sent me the book was because he wanted me to review it on one of my blogs. He didn’t want to know me, never thought I was cool, or neat; he liked the way I wrote about his stories, and he just wanted a positive review. I have never felt stupider. His book, which was good, is packed away in the top of the garage, and no one says his name around me anymore.
3.) “The Ruins” SUCKED. Vines. On. A. Hill. Kill. People. That’s it. Thaaaaaat’s all there was to it. My cat could come up with a stronger plot and more fully fleshed out characters. Sheesh.
October 7, 2007 at 7:55 am
Hey, Candy–I almost feel like re-posting that 2) comment as a general blog post. That sucks.
Jeff
October 7, 2007 at 2:15 pm
Thanks! Yep, it did suck; perfect way to describe the whole experience…
October 8, 2007 at 8:09 am
Snow Plowing…
I know!…