Wednesday, October 14, 2009
I read Declare and The Jennifer Morgue a few months ago, due to responses to my post about The Atrocity Archives. First, I was expecting Declare to inhabit the same intersection of genres as the others — hackers plus Cthulhu plus spies. I was mistaken. It is a supernatural spy novel, but there are no [...]
Also filed in
|
|
Saturday, February 7, 2009
What is going on in Scotland? There are too many creative SF writers there. I demand that they be forced to churn out fantasy books until they have lost their edge. I recently read The Atrocity Archives, by Charles Stross. Following my general theme of SF ignorance, I hadn’t heard of him until I read [...]
Also filed in
|
|
Wednesday, December 17, 2008
Our friend Jennifer recommended this the other week. Initially I put this book into the same category as The Yiddish Policemen’s Union — which is to say, tough competition. And, while enjoyable, The Eyre Affair is not really up to the same standard; the writing is decent but not popping, the ideas are fun but, [...]
Also filed in
|
|
Awesome book! Chabon’s use of language alone is worth the read.
Also filed in
|
|
Monday, September 8, 2008
Years ago I read Vacuum Flowers and loved it — it was, and remains, one of my favorite cyberpunk novels. I remember believing at the time that Swanwick was a mysterious author; I heard a rumor about a sequel to Flowers but nothing else. The other day I ran across The Dog Said Bow Wow [...]
Also filed in
|
|
Friday, September 5, 2008
We checked out Three Bags Full from the library on a whim — Elyn grabbed it off the shelf to show to me, and I immediately thought of somehow using it to poke fun at a friend of ours who likes cat mysteries. A mystery solved by a flock of sheep sounds like the next [...]
Also filed in
|
|
A while ago I read The Little Sister, by Raymond Chandler, and also Dark Tort, by Dianne Mott Davidson. I had sworn not to read any more of Davidson’s books, but, like Marlowe, boredom and angst got the better of me. It was just sitting there, on Elyn’s side of the bed, promising relief. “Look [...]
Also filed in
|
|
Thursday, February 14, 2008
Never say pomo didn’t build anything — there’s a small genre of books that take fresh looks at old stories, usually adopting the outsider point of view. Soon I Will Be Invincible is the latest such book, the story of a supervillain (Doctor Impossible) and his attempts to take over the world. I stayed up [...]
Also filed in
|
|
Wednesday, March 28, 2007
Phil pointed out to me that the author of “The No Asshole Rule” has a blog. It looks pretty good, give it a read.
Wednesday, March 21, 2007
I heard of this book a few weeks ago and I bought it at the airport and read it on the plane. It is an extended defense of the idea that assholes are detrimental to working conditions in many ways and should be either retrained or gotten rid of. This is the sort of book [...]