No Wonder I'm Runing Out Of Space for Bookshelves

[xthread]

Having recently spent the better part of two weeks on vacation, I've had occasion to spend rather a chunk of it reading.

• A Dirty Job, Christopher Moore - technically I read this the week or two before I went on vacation, but oh my god was it good. You should read it. Really.
  
• Thud, Terry Pratchett - I read this one before vacation too, but it was also incredibly yummy.
  
• Player Piano, Kurt Vonnegut - ok, I was rereading this, and it was also before the vacation, but it's still excellent. It also somewhat oddly spoke to me at the time, perhaps in something of a 'It's my own life and I'm going to lead it how I see fit and you can all go bugger off' sort of way.
  

But back to the vacation. Books read:

• Jennifer Government, Max Barry - tyrsalvia described this as being on the order of Romantic Candy, which is quite apt. It's somewhat dystopian cyberpunk fantasy, although somehow the publisher convinced booksellers to rate it as 'Fiction' instead of 'SF.' No accounting for marketing, I suppose. Oddly enough, a few weeks back gizbot and I encountered someone at Coffee Society who'd been assigned reading it in their Business Ethics class. Anyway, I found it deeply entertaining, which inspired mangosteen to direct me to another book by Mr Barry...
  
• Syrup, Maxx Barry - Ok, definitely not high fiction, but riotously funny, at least from my point of view. Also somewhat reminiscent of Bright Lights, Big City. Full of a certain amount of late nineties New Economy Zeitgeist. The fact that Coca-Cola is just now releasing an ostensibly coffee-flavored beverage (and I use both of those terms exceedingly loosely) called "Blak" makes it all the funnier..
  
• Gunpowder Empire, Harry Turtledove - I wish I'd realized when I'd bought this that it was a Juvenile. As it was, I finished it but was fairly disappointed. Mr Turtledove, whose work I love dearly, does not seem to have the knack for writing young adult fiction that nonetheless captivates adult audiences. I winced a lot while reading this. On the positive side, I avoided picking up the sequel to it at Baycon, so that's something.
  
• How To Avoid Making Art, Julia Cameron - mangosteen handed me this, and it's absolutely delightful. I'm thinking of buying a handful of copies to give to people who seem to not quite be able to start living their lives, because they're stuck in some set of phantom constraints that they really need to let go of. It's a wonderful little volume of single-page cartoons that point out that really, if you're not following your bliss, you should realign your life and start living in a better way, because it's not like anyone else is going to start following it for you. I only occasionally started staring at corners of the room guiltily while reading it...
  
• The City, Not Long After, Pat Murphy - a pretty little post-holocaust fairy tale set in San Francisco, as the artists and the very city herself fight off the forces of a military dictator invading from Sacramento to reform the United States. Although Emperor Norton does not make a walk-on appearance, the spirit of Delirium clearly runs throughout the story. A nice afternoon's candy, and it cheered me up by the end of it, which was pleasant.
  
• The Authority of Publius, Albert Furtwangler - A scholoarly examination of The Federalist Papers and why they hold the distinguished place in American political thought that they hold. I still have somewhat mixed feelings about this book; the author spends the first third of the book attempting to demolish the commonly held view that TFP are the revealed Constitutional wisdom of Hamilton and Madison, and I don't think he does that good a job. He spends the second third holding up TFP as a reasoned defense of the Constitution against all comers, which I do accept, and the last third arguing that they were a high point of the free press of the Eighteenth century, which I also accept. But I still think his first third is weak, and it almost seems that he was attempting to diminish them as the work of Hamilton and Madison merely so that he could assert them as a genuinely new and American form of political argument. I'm not really sure that one need diminish them to make the latter argument, and as I said earlier, it just didn't quite work for me.
  
• Anansi Boys, Neil Gaiman - Oh, this was wonderful. Gaiman is back to harvesting other people's mythologies for his stories, and a tale of the son of a trickster god is a very fine thing indeed. Very uplifting, as well, at least for those of us who believe that stamping out complacency is usually a mitzvah. And yes, good enough that it was worth reading in hardcover while traveling.
  

However, during the same time I bought the following:

• Syrup, Maxx Barry - After I read mangosteen's copy, I needed one of my own.
  
• Company, Max Barry - hey, both of his other books have been wonderful, I should start listening to the track record.
  
• The City, Not Long After, Pat Murphy - this was a recent acquisition, although I'd not realized that it had been written in 1989. Taken in that context, published just after the fall of the Berlin Wall and based upon a short story written in the mid-80s, the story takes on quite a different cast. And it gave tylik some small reason for mirth that I hadn't realized when it was written. Oh, as an aside, I strongly recommend Pat Murphy's short A Flock of Lawn Flamingos, which is a wonderful peaen to those of us who don't really see any reason to go along to get along. Trivia bit: The name of the main PoV character in The City is also one of the author's personal handles, which may legitimately label it a Mary Sue, but that's not the end of the world.
  
• The Authority of Publius - I've been on a bit of a Constitutional History kick of late, and this seemed to fit in well with my copies of The Federalist Papers, The Anti-Federalist Papers, and ...
  
• The Thomas Paine Reader - Really, reading The Federalist Papers but not refreshing one's memory of Common Sense is just, well, deficient. Not getting with the program. Mind you, now I have to wade through it all, and I haven't actually read Paine since I was, hmm, nine, but hey. You already knew I had skewed tastes, right?
  
• Londinium, John Morris - John Morris is apparently a serious name in British History, and finding a book on the history of London during the Roman Empire was just too good to pass up. Hopefully I'll make it through this faster than I made it through the last work I read by a British historian, A History of the American People by Paul Johnson. All of my favorite histories of America are by British authors, I find.
  
• Spin, Robert Charles Wilson - Wilson has made it onto my 'default buy' list after reading Bios and Darwinia. I'm looking forward to this one as well.
  
• The Doomsday Brunette, John Zakour and Lawrence Ganem - I haven't read the other books in this series, but science fictional crime thrillers just seems like such a silly category that if it works at all I have to. Here's crossing my fingers...
  

So I'm reading books at about the rate I'm buying them, or maybe a bit behind, if you also count the couple of books of australian erotica I asked argvee to bring back for me on her last trip. Really, some day I'll catch up with my library. Ish. Maybe. If not, I'll undoubtedly die in a tragic bookshelf mishap, or be taken by the Thing What Lurks Between The Walls.

Comments

[jedusor.livejournal.com]

"Anansi Boys" is awesome. I don't know if you remember, but I was carrying around a lime at vito_excalibur's party for a few hours, in the hopes that someone else had read it and would be amused.

[xthread.livejournal.com]

I wish I'd read it then already, though I think it might have degenerated quickly.
Hell, I should have carried one around at this last weekend's party for entertainment value. It wouldn't even have needed to be cloven.

[malabar.livejournal.com]

Ah, the Curse of Literacy. We've been trying to tone down the book buying via library cards, but sometimes you've just gotta have it, don't you?

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Still cheaper than Television...

[malabar.livejournal.com]

Per unit, perhaps; overall, possibly not!

[johnromkey.livejournal.com]

Spin was one of my favorite books last year. Company was great, too.

[fishbliss.livejournal.com]

A film adaptation of Jennifer Government is being made for an expected release in 2008.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0760314/

[xthread.livejournal.com]

It could be quite faithful, the book is the right length.

[xthread.livejournal.com]

The producers suggest that it should be a pretty interesting effort...