March's Manic Marauding of Maverick Meanderings

[Connavar]

Riding The Rap by Elmore Leonard

I read recently the first book Pronto in this Harry Arno/Raylan Givens series and this book improved on the faults,weakness of that book. It had better mix of fun,quirky story and hardboiled,darker story. The first book was too much quirky and too little hardboiled for my taste with a hero like Raylan. This book have also better characters specially when it comes to the criminal,low live characters. They had more depth, interesting personalities.

Raylan is only one of 4-5 POV characters and doesn't appear in every page but he carried the book really well. Cant wait for his solo book!

 

[D_Davis]

So far, Nine Hundred Grandmothers is fantastic. The reasons that Lafferty is so highly praised by other writers are becoming abundantly clear. Like Sturgeon, Lafferty is simply working on a different level than most of his contemporaries. Also like Sturgeon, I can understand him being a writer's writer, and it also makes some sense that his stuff has been OOP for so long - I can't imagine there being a big market for this stuff.

Of the five stories I've read, I've loved three ("Nine Hundred Grandmothers," "The Six Fingers of Time," and "Frog on the Mountain") liked one ("Land of the Great Horses") and disliked one ("Ginny Wrapped in the Sun"). Of the ones I've loved, "The Six Fingers of Time" is my favorite. It's a very well-written story about time manipulation (think bullet-time), with some secret-society conspiratorial stuff mixed in.

 

[No One]

Finished Toby Frost's Space Captain Smith the other week. All in all this was enjoyable stuff with many good laughs along the way. My (always unreasonable) expectations of something a little broader were brought to earth with the knowledge that this was a first novel for the author with a sequel in the works.

I'm now reading a Frood's copy of If Chins Could Kill: Confessions of a B Movie Actor - the autobiography of the man - nay, the legend - that is the inimitable Bruce Campbell. I'm now resolved to buy this at some point, not because I'm surprised it's good, but because I want to contribute to the success story (such as it is) that is Mr. Campbell's hard-fought career.

Will have to keep an eye out for the sequel too.

Hail to the King.

 

[HoopyFrood]

I have the sequel, nutter! You can borrow that next time.

Although it's not a sequel, more of a fictional outing mixed with real experiences in the biz. It's enjoyable, but as I was telling you p) it's somewhat uneven, as it goes from quiet, sentimental Bruce to over the top in the blink of an eye.

I definitely preferred his autobiography, just for being so darned hilarious and damn' interesting.

 

[No One]

I have the sequel, nutter! You can borrow that next time.

Although it's not a sequel, more of a fictional outing mixed with real experiences in the biz. It's enjoyable, but as I was telling you p) it's somewhat uneven, as it goes from quiet, sentimental Bruce to over the top in the blink of an eye.

I definitely preferred his autobiography, just for being so darned hilarious and damn' interesting.

Oops. Er. Yeah. I knew that.

That's what I meant - keep an eye out for the sequel. That's on your shelf. Which you told me about.

 

[J-Sun]

Read Carol Emshwiller's Carmen Dog, a mostly feminist fable of female humans turning into various animals and female animals turning into humans. The protagonist is a dog (was a dog) named Pooch whose dream is to sing Carmen. Coupla provisos: this isn't remotely my kind of thing. And, as short as it is (148 pages of this weird kind of extremely short trade paper or extremely wide mass market), it's a bit long, reading more like an expanded novella. Also, one thing I like about Emshwiller - for instance in the stories in The Start of the End of It All - is that, even when the stories are "feminist", I don't feel particularly excluded as one of those "evil men". However, for much of this novel, I did have a kind of "outside looking in" vibe until Emshwiller slyly hinted, way into the novel, that she knew the whole time that I might have been looking over her shoulder as she wrote.

That out of the way, this can definitely be read and appreciated as a masterful use of present tense and a masterful use of tone. And the thing I probably like best about it are the hundreds of asides and incidental details and extensions of ideas and descriptions for just a brilliant phrase beyond what most other writers would. I can't really give an example because any one would seem minor by itself but it's just that that makes them so cool in the course of the book. (It's not this that slows the book down but more a lack of a sense of a propulsive plot - it is plotted, but it feels a little loose, or has too many plot segments or something.)

Anyway - I'm usually disappointed when Emshwiller is described as a "feminist" author because I think that's reductive and sells her short, but it's hard to see this as much else. Yet, in a larger sense, in even this she's a "humanist" and even (as a quote from Stapledon's Sirius has it) a "caninist" author as well as feminist. Emswhiller might well disappoint some feminists in not making all males villains and even finding decency in the ones that are, and in wanting to "not win". And she delivers one of the things I like about her best - in describing Pooch singing Carmen, Emshwiller could be talking about herself: "She brings to every mind a new thought of what love and life might be." It may be Emshwiller's ability to communicate "alien" perspectives and new thoughts across the gulf to my generally wiring-diagram-and-spaceships perspective that most intrigues me.

 

[j d worthington]

Just wanted to say that I'm glad to see Carol Emshwiller getting a mention... someone whose work should really be much better known.

Lafferty certainly had a period when his work was popular... but then, a LOT of very individualistic writers were emerging from the sff field and getting a name for themselves, many of which have since fallen by the wayside (sadly, as several of them were fine writers). It was an exciting time in a lot of ways, and I think there's a fair amount of what came out which, given exposure in the future, just might be remembered much more than it is now... and Lafferty, I would say, would be high on that list. A writer one can revisit time and again with increasing pleasure.

 

[Vertigo]

Finished Gregory Benford's Galactic Centre series with Sailing Bright Eternity (though I believe there is a later novella set in the same world). Sadly, after a strong start (the first four books were good to very good hard SF) the series ended, for me, in confusion. They are certainly ambitious in their scope but ultimately I felt they failed in that ambition. In the last two books Benford (a Professor of Physics) got carried away with his personal area of interest; the physics of the centre of our galaxy. The passages describing this area (and there are many) dive into some of the most staggeringly confusing purple prose I have ever come across. Not helpful, for me at least, when trying to explain something that is already monstrously complicated.

I would have given up on this last book half way through but I wanted to see a resolution of the whole story and frankly in the end it failed to even achieve that.

Disappointing.

 

[J-Sun]

Just wanted to say that I'm glad to see Carol Emshwiller getting a mention... someone whose work should really be much better known.

Glad to see that, in turn - I agree.

Finished Gregory Benford's Galactic Centre series...Disappointing.

Benford drives me batty. I've read 10 (possibly 11 or 12) books of his[1] and currently own none. I've said before that he is a real scientist who would seem to be writing exactly the sorts of things I want to read and they all sound good but I'm just never ultimately happy with them. And I'm not even sure why. Though, for me, I wasn't all that thrilled with the earlier books in the series - I don't recall a great cleft where everything came apart but just that I didn't care for the series overall. But I love reading the stray non-fiction pieces of his on science and science fiction that I come across.

Other than Galactic Center's first books, do you recommend any others? I've really given up in the sense that I won't just pick up any more of my own volition, but if someone really advocated one, I might give him one more try.

---
[1] Beyond the Fall of Night, the six GC books, Timescape, Cosm, Matter's End, and possibly either Artifact or Heart of the Comet or both.

 

[Overread]

Looks like this IS a reading month for me!
Finished:
A Princess of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs -- generally liked it and its a shorter, faster paced book than the epic ones that I tend to end up reading more. That said I can't say I favour the weaker worldbuilding, or at least Burroughs style. He worldbuilds without you realising as such, but the problem is he drops big facts all of a sudden without much expansion (eg martians layings eggs was totally glossed over at the end!) The style can also be a bit short feeling, poor Woola seems to get left behind a lot without much mention as to where he was.

Crucible of Gold by Naomi Novik - getting back to the roots of things a bit more after the slight pace change in the last book. Great to see more characters from past books reappearing and also seeing some big changes in the world again. Certainly completes another cycle of the tale and opens itself up to the next chapter (I've also a feeling that we might get a trip to Russia sometime soon!)


Moved onto:
The Gods of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs

 

[Vertigo]

Other than Galactic Center's first books, do you recommend any others? I've really given up in the sense that I won't just pick up any more of my own volition, but if someone really advocated one, I might give him one more try.

Can't help there I'm afraid the Galactic Centre books are the only ones of his that I've read.

 

[J-Sun]

Can't help there I'm afraid the Galactic Centre books are the only ones of his that I've read.

Okay - it's probably for the best.

 

[Randy M.]

To Charles Fort, With Love by Caitlin Kiernan. Story collection. Kiernan incorporates influences like Lovecraft and Shirley Jackson and goes in a distinctly different direction from those influences. This collection is terrific, in particular "Onion," "Le Peau Verte,' and "A Redress for Andromeda." Terrific and sometimes wrenching story-telling.

Next up: Kiernan's newest novel, The Drowning Girl.


Randy M.

 

[J-Sun]

Mike Resnick's Inferno. This is a simplified, telescoped, and somewhat distorted science-fictionalization of some of the history of Uganda. It seems to me that it's simultaneously too close and too far away from the "true history" to quite serve as a great "para-history". As near as I can tell, Emperor Bobby is King Freddy, William Barioke is Milton Obote, Gama Labu is Idi Amin, even Sibo Dushu is Tito Okello and I think (though he's much the most fictionalized and distorted) James Krakanna may be a long-ago Yoweri Museveni, though it's possible Krakanna is intended to be more completely fictional. The Entebbe raid is depicted and the Faligori-Talisman war is the Uganda-Tanzania war and so on ("moles" are Asian-Ugandans, etc.). Yet the planet is opened and we get to Krakanna in the span of a normal human lifetime, so there's no explorer-missionary-extended colonial period and so on. So, like I say, it's close enough that things are very recognizable yet far enough that it then seems "wrong" in places.

But that's just the history. The more pertinent issue is, how is it as fiction? Even there, since we're dealing with such agony and horrors, some could argue that a more subjective, slow, existential "literary" type novel might be good. The effect is mostly more journalistic, like how you read something terrible in the papers and you definitely say, "Oh, that's terrible" but it's doesn't provoke the sort of reaction you might have if it happened to people you know before your eyes. But that doesn't bother me - just saying some might want a different approach. What I especially liked about it was that the 304 pages (albeit large font and lots of partially blank pages at the many parts and chapters) flew by in the reading yet it had that wonderful temporal telescoping effect of some of my favorite books - it's flown by on the one hand, yet you look back on how it started and it seems like you've gone on a tremendous journey and covered so much ground. The characters that you know at the end seem strange and young when you reflect on how you met them in the first pages. And something I can't reveal regarding one of them was masterfully revealed and had surprising effect - beyond a journalistic one. And, perhaps most importantly, it makes one (me anyway) want to explore African history a little more and it makes a strong case (perhaps too strong in that it's literally argued rather than implicit) for the idea that idealistic interference is a root of some evil.

Anyway - very much worth reading.

 

[dask]

Finished BEETHOVEN, THE UNIVERSAL COMPOSER by Edmond Morris. Superb, brilliant or at least almost so. The image of Beethoven strolling through the fields grunting and shaking his fist is no longer cute or funny. The guy had a hard life, his growing deafness only a part of the problem. I fell in love with him before I knew anything about music and I hope he's the last thing I hear before I die.

 

[Fried Egg]

Finished reading Kim Stanley Robinson's "Red Mars" and Robert Aickman's "Dark Entries" before the end of this month and now have started on Italo Calvino's "If on a winter's night a traveller" (courtesy of Nesa).

 

[Vertigo]

Finished BEETHOVEN, THE UNIVERSAL COMPOSER by Edmond Morris. Superb, brilliant or at least almost so. The image of Beethoven strolling through the fields grunting and shaking his fist is no longer cute or funny. The guy had a hard life, his growing deafness only a part of the problem. I fell in love with him before I knew anything about music and I hope he's the last thing I hear before I die.

Images of Soylent Green there, where they used his Pastoral as the chosen music for the Edward G Robinson's character's euthanasia. But I know what you mean, one of my favourite composers too and yes, a tragic life.

 

[Jeffbert]

EGR is one of my favorite actors; he could be a gangster, a G-Man, a newspaper editor, an insurance claims guy, & even a milquetoast, & be believable in all those roles. In his last scene ever, he was really dying, & Heston's tears were genuine. I believe they met in THE TEN COMMANDMENTS, and became life-long friends. He would have been great as Dr. Zaius. Too bad he never got past making the pilot.

On topic: I just read HEART OF DARKNESS, & was rather surprised to see that Kurtz played such a minor-- no, brief role.

 

[GOLLUM]

Admin: Locking thread....

Cheers.