The books

So yesterday I braved the storm of the century to check out the annual Variety monster book.

I'd like to think I didn't go too crazy...


A few classics. No, I don't think my reading habits have been influenced by Starship Sofa, why do you ask?


The Terror for two dollars! Big volume of Sturgeon. The volume on the end is a real find. Stories by a great many giants including H.P. Lovecraft, C.M. Kornbluth, Clark Ashton Smith, Sturgeon, Kuttner, Bradbury, Heinlein, Blish, Vance, Philip Jose Farmer, Shirley Jackson, Robert Bloch, Avram Davidson, Thomas M. Disch, Fritz Leiber, Roger Zelazny, R.A. Lafferty, Harlan Ellison and more.



My Moorcock collection already takes up a couple of shelves. I'm working on number three now...


There were a crazy number of old magazines. And here I could have gone completely mad, but I was strong and just snagged a handful of F&SF from the sixties. Some very good stories though.


And check out who's on the back - Hugo Gernsback, a couple of editors from the Book of the month club and ... Louis Armstrong?



Pretty good haul. Now I just need to find the time to read them. I'm still reading stuff I got from last year.

in which several random things are combined to make a blog post

Liz and I spent the weekend at Hahei, the first time I've really been to the Coromandel. Yes, I know it's only a couple of hours from home. Shut up. Got some more work done on the story that is eating my life and had an epiphany. This isn't just a standalone story. It's all related, albiet tangentially, to a series I'm writing. Things are proceeding better now. Started reading the latest Peter F Hamilton, which seems to have about three chapters in 600 pages. I'm normally not a fan of singularity SF, but this is Peter F Hamilton - I'm in safe hands.


Black Gate remembers Gary Gygax. If it wasn't for this man, I would never have started reading (or writing) fantasy.

Billy Bragg has a podcast. And bloody good it is too.

Are you all subscribed to Starship Sofa yet? If not, now's a great time to start. Tony's taking the week of, so in place of a show he's podcasting one of the short stories up for this year's BSFA awards every day this week.

update: This arrived in my inbox this morning:

StarShipSofa will bring you, in conjunction with the British Science Fiction Association all five of the short stories that have been shortlisted for the BSFA Award for Best Short Story 2007 in audio narrated format for FREE. Starting Monday 10th March (tomorrow) StarShipSofa will upload one of the narrated stories each day. First off, to give you a heads up will be Chaz Brenchley narrating his own story Terminal.

Now this means they will all be up online for free for you to listen to, well in advance of voting time at Eastercon.

And yes.... I will not except....."Er I was too busy to read 'em excuses!"

So... if you haven't already... pop over to StarShipSofa and subscribe for free or you can subscribe via iTunes and get some of the very best in SF short stories, narrated and uploaded for free.

Get Ready,

Blast Off!

Tony

Obligatory video. How about this?

and Sid James

I know it's only February. But I may be reading my book of the year: the bar has just been set extremely high.

Alice in Sunderland. Just. Stunning.

Not my fault

This is happening tomorrow, less than five minutes from my house.

So if I come home with a bag full of Sidney Sheldon and Leon Uris, I can't be held responsible.

Doppler effect not provided

And still the drive by blogging continues. But I thought it worth noting that, as of yesterday, the entire discorobot.com domain is now hosted by Google Apps. All the oher discorobots are still using mail.app on ther iMacs, but I've gone commando - from now on I'll be accessing my email via gmail only. No more Thunderbird for me.

Right back to writing and reading. Especially the reading. I'm just about to start the new Richard Morgan. Oh yeah.

Read a good book, why don't cha?

So I took the girls and wandered into Whitcoulls on Saturday for the Potter. Wasn't hard to find - Emily said it looked like there was only one book in the shop. But I can report that Whitcoulls Botany was not packed by thousands of children with national health glasses and lightning scars on their foreheads. OK, I did see two kids like that, but the place was pretty empty.

Liz is now reading the Potter, so I'm dipping into The Locus Awards. Theory being since they're short stories, it's easy to stop when the book is free.

I also got to sit down and read the new Weird Tales. Standout story for me was Faraji by Will Ludwigsen. Time travel, Terrorism, Tense complications- what's not to like?

Gone to pot

I don't suppose anybody is surprised by contents of the final Harry Potter book being leaked on the Internet. And it's nice theatre, watching the publishers threaten the various pirates, early shippers and New York Times reviewers. Ultimately though, it doesn't matter. The book goes on sale here at 11:01 am tomorrow and anyone who simply can't wait will just flip to the back of the book while they're still waiting to pay. Fine.

But here's the thing - we'll turn up somewhere tomorrow and buy a copy. And Liz will get to read it first. Simple logic - I'm still reading the excellent The Man From the Diogenes Club and she's not too fussed with the book she's reading (this is obviously a ploy to get the Potter first, because she's reading a Moorcock). Anyway, result is I won't get to read the final Harry Potter for at least a couple of weeks. So far it's been easy to avoid the spoilers, but after tomorrow, every media outlet on the planet's going to be spilling the beans. And it's not like finding out the ending will completely ruin my reading, but still. How in the name of Rowling am I going to be able to avoid the news?

Joy

Didn't get any writing done this weekend and the whole family is sick, including me*. Nevertheless, there were many reasons to be cheerful.

-I totally rule the plumbing! Pulled all the plumbing out of the sink, cleared all the blockages and put everything back together: no leaks and everything works better than it ever did! 111one!!

-Emily and Liz went to the Ballet and absolutely loved it. Meanwhile Abigail took my hand, pulled me downstairs to the iMac and demanded I load the Toy Story web site. She's two and she knows how to get to the Pixar website.

-Flight of the Conchords got BoingBoing'd

-I got to see the last ever Royle Family, the existence of which I was unaware of until recently. Stellar.

-I finally finished reading the book that would not die. It starts well but it's pretty insubstantial. There's probably an excellent short story in here trying to get out.

-I have extremely high hopes for what I'm reading now. And I'm only on page 6! Oh yeah, I've been needing to read something like this for a long time.

-I Am Kloot

*Here's my latest theory why guys like zombie moves. Because they're all about guys with colds! Think about it - you're at home, in the mall, at work, wherever, and somebody infects you, probably a family member or workmate. Then you're all like shuffling around going 'urrrrr' until someone takes pity on you and shoots you in the head. Ask Liz if that's a pretty good description of me this weekend.

Thing

Funny thing is, I'd been thinking just last night that I must put a "currently reading" item on the blog, like the one over at the slush god's site. Then this morning I read Tobias Buckell's recent post on the subject.

So I did.

That's it over there.

Great book, btw.

Books now and later

Now:
I'm currently reading the new Tim Willocks The Religion. It's very different to his previous stuff, but still brilliant. I can see this becoming a very big book indeed.

There's an article at mediabistro about the US Religion party. Interestingly, it's going to be co-published by Tor and Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Tim Willocks is back. And he is awesome.

Later:
Can't wait to read Michael Chabon's The Yiddish Policemen's Union. Salon cover it here, and there's coverage at the WSG (again, via Galleycat) about the giant eight-month rewrite effort. Wow. I break out into a sweat when I think about rewrites on a 5000-word short story.

I'm always forcing books on to people who undoubtedly would rather not read them but are too polite to say no. And the books I've recommended more than any others over the years have been Willocks' Green River Rising and Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. So if I've ever tried to pass one of those books on to you, prepare for a fresh onslaught.

Where I'm Calling From

Where I'm calling from, Raymond Carver

This guy could write.

And I shouldn't really be saying that. Early exposure to Katharine Mansfield and the shorter Joyce left me with a phobia of the dreaded Literary Short Story. You know the drill: a few pages setting the scene, showing our protagonist performing some domestic task, reminiscing about that time she...

and by that point, I'd be throwing the book against the wall. I have no problem with well-drawn characters or a nicely set scene. And I understand that it can't be car chases and explosions all the time. But sooner or later somebody has to, you know, do something. The Literary Short Story and me, we don't get on.

So when I tell you that I loved this book, you have to understand it's pretty special. Because by rights, I there should be a book-sized dent in my wall. It's all Literary Short Stories, full of people who do nothing, or very little, hardly any of which have a plot. A great many of them just randomly stop, seemingly with no attempt at resolution, climax, anything. And I couldn't put it down.

Ask me what it was, exactly, that sucked me in and I couldn't tell you, except maybe the voice. Carver was completely in control of what he was putting on the page. There's not a wasted word in any of these stories. Not a lot of big words either. Everything is simply, beautifully, told.

One thing: you may not want to read this thing from beginning to end. These stories are indivdually so good, you may not be able to handle more than one at a sitting. Think of them as Russian Fudge: one piece, two, grand. Eat a whole plateful and you'll be lying on the couch groaning all afternoon.

So go on. Pick up this book and conquer your phobia of the Literary Short Story.