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Go Get Organized
Jun. 28th, 2005 10:03 pmBeen a busy week or so. Let's start with the most important part: the books.
Behemoth, Part One: β-Max(I'm so tickled that "β" actually works for that!)was all right. Perhaps because it was the first half of a novel, it picked up momentum a little bit slowly. It's also been long enough since I read the first two books that I've forgotten some of the characters, but Watts did a decent job of reminding me. One character's plot just didn't seem to be tying into the main one, and the last couple of chapters suddenly introduced new plot threads that, I'm sure, will come to fruition in Behemoth, Part Two: Seppuku. In other words, I'm frustrated at the two-volume release. Perhaps they'll be reunited in paperback. Stranger things could happen.
After that I went on to a "New Authors" book. That's my reading slot for authors that I, well, haven't read before. Because there are still a lot of them out there. In this case, it was Ian Wallace, and his novel Megalomania. I have two of his books, actually, The Rape of The Sun being the other one. Megalomania, I discovered when I started reading it, is actually in a series of novels about a character named Croyd. But I pressed on fearlessly.
The best thing I can say about the book is that it was less than 200 pages long. It was done from an annoying omniscient point of view which regularly interjected annoying scientific(or supposed-scientific)explanations for things, some of which made me grit my teeth. The plot was self-admittedly a riff on Paradise Lost, but not a very successful one, and in general the book annoyed me. I did a check on Wikipedia, and discovered that this was the fifth Croyd book, the first one having been published in the 60's sometime. Rape of The Sun is not in the same series, either. Bleah.
Now I'm reading Perfect Circle by Sean Stewart, "a novel about Texas, ghosts, and perfect pop songs". Sean Stewart won Aurora Awards with his first two novels, Passion Play and Nobody's Son, and while he stumbled slightly with the(IMHO)dull and pretentious Cloud's End, he's done well since then, with the remarkable sort-of-trilogy Resurrection Man, The Night Watch(set in Edmonton, where he grew up), and Galveston(set in Texas, of course, where he was born and moved back to later, though I have a bit set that he's living somewhere else now). This is about a man who "sees dead people", though IIRC he got the idea before the whole "Sixth Sense" thing, as well as having family issues. Very engaging, even if the main character is a bit of a loser.
I haven't run across many actual references to "perfect pop songs" yet, but I am much gratified to find the main character talking a lot about what music he listens to, mostly 80's alternative. Even a mention of Shriekback(though not an individual song), which I always like because I feel they're underappreciated. I'd love to have all of my characters(in modern-day stories)listening to music a lot, but I haven't pulled it off that much. (Though I did in two of my published stories, "Highway Closure"--which I began based on another Sean Stewart idea, the "pet rust"--and "The New Paranoia Album".) Anyway, I'm enjoying it.
I finally got around to finishing Elaine Morgan's The Descent of Woman, which, after it explains many odd physical features of humanity by postulating the aquatic phase, goes on to speculate on how human love, sex and family life was modified by something so seemingly innocent as the forward tilting of the vagina. In the last few chapters she gets into some actual sexual politics--a bit dated, since the book is from 1972, but not as much as one might think. I haven't really picked a new nonfiction book yet--I've been browsing through The Book of Lists--The '90s Edition, but I'd really like something more in a mass-market paperback. Maybe All The President's Men, or Studs Terkel's Working, which I picked up a few years ago but haven't read yet.
I also have a hankering to a)read the rest of the Lemony Snicket books, b)reread the Harry Potter books, and c)read more Tom Clancy. I may try to get into some of those next month--Perfect Circle is the last of the library books for a while. I'll try to stick some other stuff in there, too, because I don't always want to just read books that I want to read, you know?
Behemoth, Part One: β-Max(I'm so tickled that "β" actually works for that!)was all right. Perhaps because it was the first half of a novel, it picked up momentum a little bit slowly. It's also been long enough since I read the first two books that I've forgotten some of the characters, but Watts did a decent job of reminding me. One character's plot just didn't seem to be tying into the main one, and the last couple of chapters suddenly introduced new plot threads that, I'm sure, will come to fruition in Behemoth, Part Two: Seppuku. In other words, I'm frustrated at the two-volume release. Perhaps they'll be reunited in paperback. Stranger things could happen.
After that I went on to a "New Authors" book. That's my reading slot for authors that I, well, haven't read before. Because there are still a lot of them out there. In this case, it was Ian Wallace, and his novel Megalomania. I have two of his books, actually, The Rape of The Sun being the other one. Megalomania, I discovered when I started reading it, is actually in a series of novels about a character named Croyd. But I pressed on fearlessly.
The best thing I can say about the book is that it was less than 200 pages long. It was done from an annoying omniscient point of view which regularly interjected annoying scientific(or supposed-scientific)explanations for things, some of which made me grit my teeth. The plot was self-admittedly a riff on Paradise Lost, but not a very successful one, and in general the book annoyed me. I did a check on Wikipedia, and discovered that this was the fifth Croyd book, the first one having been published in the 60's sometime. Rape of The Sun is not in the same series, either. Bleah.
Now I'm reading Perfect Circle by Sean Stewart, "a novel about Texas, ghosts, and perfect pop songs". Sean Stewart won Aurora Awards with his first two novels, Passion Play and Nobody's Son, and while he stumbled slightly with the(IMHO)dull and pretentious Cloud's End, he's done well since then, with the remarkable sort-of-trilogy Resurrection Man, The Night Watch(set in Edmonton, where he grew up), and Galveston(set in Texas, of course, where he was born and moved back to later, though I have a bit set that he's living somewhere else now). This is about a man who "sees dead people", though IIRC he got the idea before the whole "Sixth Sense" thing, as well as having family issues. Very engaging, even if the main character is a bit of a loser.
I haven't run across many actual references to "perfect pop songs" yet, but I am much gratified to find the main character talking a lot about what music he listens to, mostly 80's alternative. Even a mention of Shriekback(though not an individual song), which I always like because I feel they're underappreciated. I'd love to have all of my characters(in modern-day stories)listening to music a lot, but I haven't pulled it off that much. (Though I did in two of my published stories, "Highway Closure"--which I began based on another Sean Stewart idea, the "pet rust"--and "The New Paranoia Album".) Anyway, I'm enjoying it.
I finally got around to finishing Elaine Morgan's The Descent of Woman, which, after it explains many odd physical features of humanity by postulating the aquatic phase, goes on to speculate on how human love, sex and family life was modified by something so seemingly innocent as the forward tilting of the vagina. In the last few chapters she gets into some actual sexual politics--a bit dated, since the book is from 1972, but not as much as one might think. I haven't really picked a new nonfiction book yet--I've been browsing through The Book of Lists--The '90s Edition, but I'd really like something more in a mass-market paperback. Maybe All The President's Men, or Studs Terkel's Working, which I picked up a few years ago but haven't read yet.
I also have a hankering to a)read the rest of the Lemony Snicket books, b)reread the Harry Potter books, and c)read more Tom Clancy. I may try to get into some of those next month--Perfect Circle is the last of the library books for a while. I'll try to stick some other stuff in there, too, because I don't always want to just read books that I want to read, you know?
