Little Toy Robot

The most highly anticipated genre novels of 2004, both with “mainstream” appeal, are upon us.

M. John Harrison’s Light comes out today (finally!) in the U.S. Jeff VanderMeer, generally one of the most astute reviewers out there and the one whose taste I trust the most, says this of the book:

M. John Harrison’s Light is not just among the best SF novels of the year — it’s without question the best read of the year. Harrison has jettisoned all banality, dead spots, padding, and come up with a novel that moves without sacrificing depth.

And Matthew Cheney has this to say:

North American readers have been impoverished, not having been able to read one of the best science fiction novels ever written: Light by M. John Harrison . . . . Yes, I’m shilling for this book, I’m exhorting you to buy it, I’m threatening you with eternal damnation if you don’t.

And there has been much of the same all over the place. Will it live up to the hype? I already have my copy and am reading it this week.

Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell comes out on September 8th in the U.S. and 30th in the U.K. It has been hyped extensively, most notably by prolific blurber by Neil Gaiman (whose ubiquitous endorsement also graces the cover of Light):

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell is unquestionably the finest English novel of the fantastic written in the last seventy years.

More discerning readers, for whom this is damning praise, will not fail to notice that the book is also on the Booker longlist. At 800 pages, it promises to be Stephensonesque in scope (and of course weight), but by virtue of its description it sounds fascinating:

The drawing room social comedies of early 19th-century Britain are infused with the powerful forces of English folklore and fantasy in this extraordinary novel of two magicians who attempt to restore English magic in the age of Napoleon. In Clarke’s world, gentlemen scholars pore over the magical history of England, which is dominated by the Raven King, a human who mastered magic from the lands of faerie. The study is purely theoretical until Mr. Norrell, a reclusive, mistrustful bookworm, reveals that he is capable of producing magic and becomes the toast of London society, while an impetuous young aristocrat named Jonathan Strange tumbles into the practice, too, and finds himself quickly mastering it.

(A note: I am temporarily lifting my self-imposed embargo of anything that is described by or that employs the word “faerie” to read this book.)

(Another note: Susanna Clarke is kicking off her American reading and signing tour next Thursday here in Atlanta — in fact, four short blocks from where I work.)

Sunday night at Ted’s Montana Grill with a friend. Little Toy Robot is enjoying a salmon salad for dinner. Very pleasant. Olympic closing ceremonies are on the television above the bar.

Friend: “Oh, are the Olympics over tonight?”

Little Toy Robot: “Yeah.”

Friend: “Didn’t they start on a Friday night?”

LTR: “Yeah. But I’m pretty sure everything ends tonight.”

Friend: “But you haven’t been following the Olympics. How do you know?”

LTR (searching data banks): “Because of the logo on Google today. They’re waving goodbye.”

I think it’s cheesy to publicly offer Gmail invites on blogs. Everyone’s doing it. I’m sick of reading about it.

That said, I now have six invites, and I don’t know a single person without a Gmail address anymore. Since it worked for me last time, I just thought I’d offer them to anybody who asks. Just email me.

Also, here’s a good song: “Saint Simon” by The Shins. If you like it, you might like The New Pornographers.

It’s a shame I find R.E.M.’s new stuff boring. Up until 1994’s Monster, they were probably my favorite band. I don’t think they sold out. I don’t blame them for anything. I just think they’re boring. (Don’t even get me started on U2.)

So I was very disappointed when I heard their new single, “Leaving New York.” I wanted to like it very much, not in the least because I have left New York myself, and I thought it would be neat to have a “leaving New York” anthem that I could listen to when I wanted to pretend there was some drama in my life. Which there’s not. So maybe it’s a good thing that I don’t like the song, even though, for now, whenever I want to play a song that reminds me of leaving New York, I am forced to listen to the Ataris’ “So Long, Astoria,” since I used to live in Astoria, Queens, even though the song is about Astoria, Oregon. Oh well.

A strange sense of exhilaration has come over Little Toy Robot’s Daytime HQ, also known as “work.” After a very busy August, projects have been completed, and it finally feels like summer… at least until September. In the spirit of being able to breathe easily and enjoy oneself, here are some feel-good links.

One of the best blogs out there, bar none, is Giornale Nuovo. Thursday’s entry “Drolleries” proves why. Every word that this guy writes, every image he posts, is fascinating.

There’s a new Yahoo group called GothamLit “specifically created to carry events and information of interest to readers and writers of speculative fiction and horror in the New York City area.” What a great idea.

Men and Cartoons by Jonathan Lethem is coming out in November. I can’t wait to … umm… wait, $20 for under 200 pages?… I can’t wait to check this out from the library!

What is Jabberwocky? Nothing highlights a good mood like pronouncing those immortal words:

‘Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe

I am not particularly mathematically minded, but like most baseball fans, I am like Rain Man when it comes to baseball stats. There are two newish books that are on my reading list on the subject: A Mathematician at the Ballpark: Odds and Probablilities for Baseball Fans by Ken Ross and The Numbers Game: Baseball’s Lifelong Fascination with Statistics by Alan Schwarz.

A note: If somebody would just write a book that links the Yankees, Wilco, and robots, it would save me a lot of time by allowing me to consolidate my reading.

Here’s something kick-ass, by way of both Bond Girl and SoT: The Pixies’ “Ain’t That Pretty At All.” We do likes the Pixies.

Attention, delinquent bloggers: BLOG! I need something to read at work during the upcoming slow week.

Inspired by Jeff, and needing something to link to on the right that explains just who the hell I am, here’s a silly exercise in narcissism: the LTR FAQ.

Who are you?
I’m Anonymous!

Why “Little Toy Robot”?
No real reason. I love the camp and cheese of robots. I sometimes read books with robots in them, but it’s not a big deal for me.

Where do you live?
Atlanta, GA.

So you’re a Southron?
I was born in New York and grew up mainly in South Florida. I also lived in England, Spain, and California when I was a kid, and went back to New York for college and to ride the wave of dot-com mania.

Why did you move around so much?
My father is in the Russian mafia.

Why did you move to Atlanta?
I have friends and family around here. Plus, I couldn’t take one more northern winter. You can’t tell from looking at me, but I do like the sun and heat. Even the humidity. Extra bonus: violent thunderstorms.

Didn’t you…?
Yes, this is my third blog. I’m fickle. Sue me.

What’s your deal?
What an awkward question! I like baseball, urban fantasy novels, cartoons, adventure comics, occult detectives, Russian history, alt-country music, hoaxes, and Yiddish folktales. My interests go through phases (or cycles). I am drawn towards the obscure and try to immunize myself from trends.

Baseball? Which team does someone as rootless as you root for?
Good question. When I was a kid, my idol was Don Mattingly. So I am a Yankees fan from one of the rare periods in which they were no good. I fell in love with the Oakland A’s in the late ’80s when I lived in California for a year and was thrilled when Florida got the Marlins during my senior year of High School. The only team I truly despise is the one in Boston. And the Mets, but that’s a given.

So, you like books?
I am an anti-snob who hates most so-called literary fiction (you know, the kind with no plot, flowery prose, and some sort of epiphany at the end) and loves Buffy (seasons 3-5 only). Then again, I am a snob who hates The Lord of the Rings and Star Trek and loves John Dos Passos’ early novels and William Faulkner.

Who are your favorite writers?
This is hard to do, but here’s a bunch: Avram Davidson, Jeff VanderMeer, China Mieville, Michael Moorcock, Mervyn Peake, Michael Chabon, Jonathan Lethem, M. John Harrison, James/Jan Morris, Cynthia Ozick, Jorge Luis Borges, Italo Calvino, Bruno Schulz, Vladimir Nabokov, Witold Gombrowicz.

What’s your favorite music?
To name a few: Uncle Tupelo (and its offspring), Big Star, Pavement, Silver Jews, Jimmy Buffet, XTC, The Flaming Lips, Yo La Tengo, Whiskeytown, The Decemberists, Quasi, Velvet Underground (and both Lou Reed’s and John Cale’s solo work).

Movies?
What about them?

What are your favorite movies?
Oh. Dark City, Rushmore, Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, Spirited Away, Once Upon a Time in America, Evil Dead 2, and of course Spaceballs.

I missed Jo Walton’s Tooth and Claw when it was first published last November.

I think there are a few reasons for this. I generally don’t pay much attention to new hardcovers unless there is a lot of hype or it is an author I know. The cover looks like it belongs to a YA book. The blurbs only referenced the author and earlier books, not the book in question, which is sometimes a bad sign.

So I ended up missing an excellent, very tight story that is a novel of manners wrapped in a conceit about biological determinism. Walton says it best in her introduction:

It has to be admitted that a number of the core axioms of the Victorian novel are just wrong. People aren’t like that. Women, especially aren’t like that. This novel is a result of wondering what a world would be like if they were, if the axioms of the sentimental Victorian novel were inescapable laws of biology.

And on her amusing Web page:

I was reading two books at once, one fantasy novel and Trollope’s The Small House at Allington. I complained that the fantasy novel didn’t really understand dragons, and [my husband] misheard and thought that I meant that Trollope didn’t. Naturally, this led me to the revelation that Trollope did understand dragons extremely well, and that in fact the rather peculiar nature of the women in Trollope can be explained by the facts of dragon biology.

The book was singled out by Kelly Link and Gavin Grant as one of the top 20 of 2003, and one of Kelly’s favorites, in The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror. They call it “odd.” I agree. It is also nominated for a World Fantasy Award. And I heartily recommend it to anyone who is interested in a unique perspective on the novel of manners, a well written book in which very little actually happens but there is much going on.

I have a Gmail address to give away. Let me know if you’re interested. I’ve added an email address to the right of the blog. You can also comment on this post.

Update the first: Taken!

Update the second: I just got six more.

Well, not me. These guys. Let the age of the Robosapiens begin!

I have two books on hold at the library that I am very excited about. (Yes, I am like that.)

The Land That Never Was : Sir Gregor MacGregor and the Most Audacious Fraud in History, by David Sinclair. I saw this one in Borders and the title caught my eye. It is “the outrageous and tragic story of Poyais, a South American nation that, as the subtitle indicates, never actually existed. Sir Gregor MacGregor, a pusillanimous and pompous soldier who fought in the South American wars of liberation, concocted the Territory of Poyais in the early 1820s as a means of getting rich off of land sales and financial speculation.” The author has tons of great stuff at his site.

Monturiol’s Dream : The Extraordinary Story of the Submarine Inventor Who Wanted to Save the World, by Matthew Stewart. “A marvelous rediscovery: the compelling story of the strange and noble life—and dream—of nineteenth-century utopian social revolutionary and self-taught engineer Narcís Monturiol, who invented the world’s first fully operational steam-powered submarine, not as a weapon of war but as a means of saving human life and spreading democracy.” First seen on Blankbaby.

This is what I’d make into a 10-song mix if I were making a mix right now. These are not really in any order, and for god’s sake don’t read too much into them.

• “The Ballad of El Goodo,” by Big Star
• “Muzzle of Bees,” by Wilco
• “Hummingbird,” by Wilco
• “Jagged,” by Old 97
• “Broadway,” by Old 97
• “Heart on the Ground,” by Jay Farrar
• “For the Good Times,” by Court and Spark
• “Gravity’s Bringing Us Down,” by Beulah
• “Blue Diamonds,” by the Long Winters
• “Firefly,” by Mark Eitzel

And I have to say: the whole Garden State soundtrack looks outstanding. It includes an intense cover of Postal Service’s “Such Great Heights” by Iron & Wine that strips the song bare.

Yahoo has a search blog. Sadly, it seem to only be a bit of corporate cheerleading.

The Museum of Hoaxes now has an RSS feed for their forum, in addition to the one for the main site.

I’ve been meaning to mention for a while that Media Nugget is back. Always a great place to go for quick recommendations and reviews. The August 16th entry made me go out and buy You Are Here, a book about imaginary maps edited by Katharine Harmon.

I’ve enjoyed the reactions to Charles Simic’s extremely short-sighted essay on the South: Clay, Maud, Gwenda, Jeff. I was going to jump in and write something about it, but I realize that these people have made the point better than I could, and they all have far better Southern credentials than this New York- and Florida-raised boy who feels perfectly at home in Atlanta.

Great post on gamebooks at Criminal English. Yeah, I used to be into those things, too.

Via Bookslut, Kurt Vonnegut’s “I Love You, Madame Librarian.” (”Our president is a Christian? So was Adolf Hitler.”)

The “Montreal” Expos, Major League Baseball’s neglected child, are currently tramping around the hemisphere looking for a home. Commissioner Bud “Conflict of Interest” Selig was confident that the team would know their status by the middle of July, but Selig does not engender confidence among baseball fans. Indeed, the league missed the July deadline, and the latest news is that “a decision on the future home of the Montreal Expos is put off once again.”

Which is not really news at all.

The Expos have already played some “home” games in Puerto Rico, which is cool, but it can’t be doing anything good for the players’ morale. They must be sick of living out of suitcases.

In addition to San Juan, places under consideration to adopt the Expos are the D.C./northern Virginia area; Portland, Oregon; Las Vegas; and Monterrey, Mexico. (That’s old Mexico, not New.)

It’s a great story of a nomadic baseball team that has seen better days, with a tenuous parallel to Philip Roth’s 1973 farce The Great American Novel. In Roth’s book, the Ruppert Mundys of the forgotten Patriot League are forced out of their home stadium in fictional Port Ruppert, New Jersey, as the team’s greedy owners convert it to a staging ground for troops during World War II. The team spirals down the drain in a sort of baseball purgatory, setting records for horrible play and getting entangled in all sorts of hapless adventures and schemes before the league finally folds and recedes into oblivion.

The narrator is (deliberately) bombastic, and the book won’t make it on anybody’s list of favorite Philip Roth novels, but there’s still a lot to endear the story to the reader. In particular, it is a great mixture of whimsy, wit, and sarcasm, and it is one of the more engrossing tales of baseball alternate history, along the lines of W.P. Kinsella’s The Iowa Baseball Confederacy.

Greg Kot’s Wilco: Learning How to Die is a readable biography of the band. I have to give Kot a lot of credit: He wrote the book with the full participation of a bunch of people who dislike each other, and he never degenerates into hagiography, even if he is a bit enthusiastic at times.

I was very glad that the first third of the book was dedicated to Uncle Tupelo. There’s no simple way to listen to Wilco’s music. As a fan for years, I’ve felt that everything has an automatic context to it: The music comes out of and is a direct reaction to what became alt-country music, and each album is a commentary on the one before. I have been engrossed in this narrative ever since I heard the rumbling introduction to “Gun,” the first song on Uncle Tupelo’s second album. The song still gives me goosebumps. When Uncle Tupelo split into Son Volt and Wilco, and when each scion produced solo and side projects, I have eagerly snapped them up. I think there are two types of fan: The first, the fan-boy, is a die-hard purist who can’t accept either criticism or change. The second is the fan who is inspired by the artist and critical of their every move, who exposes him- or herself to their art with every development and gives it a fair chance out of loyalty, while retaining the ability to dislike or question the artist’s motives.

In that context, as the second type of fan, I got a lot from the coherent story in Kot’s book, even as I am struggling with Wilco’s latest (A Ghost is Born) just as I struggled with Jay Farrar’s last solo studio album (Terroir Blues). It is worth the effort, and I feel sorry for anyone who doesn’t realize that both Tweedy and Farrar are engaged in a revolution and have transcended into the literal avant-garde; they are not producing rock or alt-country music anymore. And since Summerteeth, Tweedy has been the one leading the charge. Kot’s book is another weapon in the arsenal for the worthwhile task of appreciating where they have come from and are going.

During a non-fiction marathon last week, I read both of Paul Collins’ first two books, Banvard’s Folly and Sixpence House. They’re highly recommended, especially the first.

I read the title essay of Banvard’s Folly in McSweeney’s years ago, and it remained in my mind a well-rounded biography of the once famous but now obscure artist John Banvard. God only knows why it took so long for me to read the rest of the “Thirteen Tales of Renowned Obscurity, Famous Anonymity, and Rotten Luck.” Each section is a complete, articulate miniature biography of a character who achieved distinction and fame (or infamy) during their day, but who has been squeezed out of the collective memory for a variety of reasons, or for no reason at all.

Favorites include the essays on George Psalmanazar, a fake who invented an entire culture, and John Symmes, whose crackpot theories on the “hollow earth” served as a prototype for a type of fantastical adventure literature that became Science Fiction through a direct line from Edgar Allen Poe to Jules Verne.

Sixpence House is part travelog, part catalog of digressions. It documents the move of Collins and his young family to Hay-on-Wye, a tiny, idyllic town in Wales that is home to an extraordinary number of bookstores. Collins’ idealism, generalizations, naivete, and cringeworthy pride about being a published writer are tampered by his humor and eruditeness.

The book meanders, and the narrative is broken up with many digressions that seemed forced and scattershot, even though they are largely interesting. Still, Collins’ enthusiasm is infectious, he writes well, and when he leaks some insight into what is going on with the publishing of Banvard’s Folly, you can’t help but feel like you are one of his friends and eager to forgive him his small faults for the pleasure of his company.

Collins now edits an imprint of McSweeney’s called The Collins Library, which specializes in reprinting obscure old books. It’s a great idea, and I happily own all three books he’s published so far. Although the first book, which is the only one I’ve read, properly belongs in the humor section of the bookstore, I hear good things from trusted sources about the other two, especially David Garnett’s Lady Into Fox.

Collins has also recently published Not Even Wrong, an account of the diagnosis and treatment of his son’s autism, which I will definitely read as well. And so should you–but start with Banvard’s Folly. You won’t regret it.