Better living through toy robotics.
There are few words that go together better than “bar” and “books.” Thursday night, 6/1, is the Chicago Reader BookSwap at Hideout. Unfortunately I won’t be able to make it, but I hope it’s a success and it happens again. Especially since I have a bunch of old books laying around that I’d rather swap than sell. [via GB]
(That’s the “royal we.”)
The only Web comic I’ve been able to read consistently for a long period of time is Cat and Girl.
Once, in Tower Records in Atlanta, I saw a guy walking around with a Cat and Girl t-shirt, but I didn’t say anything to him.
Anyway, the eponymous Girl is a very busy bee indeed, but my favorite side project is very small array, a sort of sketchbook blog.
I know where I’ll be next weekend. The Printers Row Book Fair has a stellar lineup that includes Augusten Burroughs, E.L. Doctorow, Stuart Dybek, Dave Eggers, Erica Jong, Studs Terkel, Scott Turow, and John Updike. Of personal interest: Rich “Tough Jews” Cohen, Jonathan “Luckiest Man” Eig, and Aleksandar “Nowhere Man” Hemon.
Printers Row is on Dearborn, just south of Congress. Sandmeyer’s Bookstore is right there, at 714 South Dearborn, and while the area’s not exactly a bookstore Mecca, why not walk on over to Powell’s using directions from this handy map?
Here are some humorous ads promoting books [via AdJab]. The tagline: “Read it Before Hollywood Does”. I’m not sure if they’re real, but they’re still funny.
On a related note, I am now reading Richard K. Morgan’s Woken Furies. I am enjoying it so far, and I noticed from the author’s bio that he seems to be making a decent living from optioning his books to movie studios. I wonder what percentage of options get filmed and released.
It must be a very small number, but also a difficult number to quantify. For example, Michael Chabon’s Mysteries of Pittsburgh, a 1988 novel, is just beginning to get the film treatment 18 years later. And 2000’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay could be next, though we’ll see how long that takes..
A few updates to The Amazing Chicago Bookstore Locator. Thanks to the proprietors of papermustache and Pete Lit for the comments.
It all looks different when you see it on a map. So I made a map of Chicago, with all its bookstores plotted.
This complements the Chicago library map (done by somebody else) here.
Feeling low in terms of my nerd mojo, I put together this little page of books to be read. It looks pretty plain, and it is, but what’s neat is that it’s actually a database query inside PHP. It pulls up books marked as unread from a database, and when I’m done with them, they’ll magically disappear from the page. There are a few more fields in my database that I could end up doing something with, but this is just the start.
A helpful note, in case anyone stumbles on this through a Google search: you’ll need a plugin to enable PHP in Wordpress posts and pages. I’m using RunPHP.
Via Gapers Block, today I found Yo Chicago, “[a] fresh look at Chicago housing and neighborhoods.” Some of the writing on there is hilarious. Take a look at these headlines:
“Yuppie-on-yuppie violence mars Cabrini-Green housing redevelopment”
“Fisticuffs avoided at Plan Commission hearing on new Cabrini-Green high-rise”
Cabrini-Green, of course, is best known as being one of the things I pass when I drive to Borders.
Elsewhere, Fred Wilson (a venture capitalist who has great thoughts about the Internet and even greater taste in music) teases with a track from the new Arctic Monkeys EP.
At long last–the previous issue came out in 2004–there is a new Nutmeg Point District Mail. This is the newsletter of the Avram Davidson Society. Editor Henry Wessels wisely drops “all pretense of maintaining a bimonthly frequency,” and I’m looking forward to the next installment in–perhaps–Autumn 2006.
Google Notebook looks like some sort of cross between Furl and, well, Yahoo Notepad. Not as robust as either, but a much more simple execution. And of course, Ajax.
However!
Although it is possible to share notebooks publicly, I am wondering if it is missing the boat with the social aspect of this. Whence the tagging? Am I too spoiled by Flickr and del.icio.us (both Yahoo companies, by the way), that I don’t see the point of sharing anything unless I can view a tag cloud? Perhaps.
Another note (ha). This is purely speculation, but the Firefox extension that is available, in order to capture text and links online to add and edit in your notebook, seems to be having a disagreement with my browser (1.5.0.3). It’s nothing Microsoftian, but I’ve been turned off enough to uninstall the extension and wait for an update cycle or two. I am reminded that, this being Google, Google Notebook is still in beta (if even that–the page simply bears the Google Labs logo).
Poor John Le Carré! The highly regarded writer of literary espionage thrillers–one of those always cited by critics looking to make the point that genre fiction doesn’t need to be poorly written–has found himself yet again a victim of my attention deficit. I have given Tinker Tailer Soldier Spy a second shot, and, probably through no fault of the book itself, haven’t been able to crack triple digits.
What next? Jack Vance, perhaps. Also eyeing Lewis Carroll and Robert Louis Stevenson. And–of course!–Richard Dawkins. Stay tuned. I know it’s thrilling.
In other news, I am going to open this blog up to other topics. What, you ask? Extreme knitting? Beethoven? Coverage of the mythical Knight Rider movie? Nothing so interesting. Just little posts here and there about the Internet. I do so love the Internet!
There are a number of books that look particularly interesting right now.
Jeff points out U.S.! by Chris Bachelder. I’ll admit that I didn’t make it past the first few pages of Bear vs. Shark, though by all accounts I should have loved the book. I can chalk it up to one of those “wrong book at the wrong time” accidents and give Bachelder another chance.
Chris Roberson (the evil genius behind Monkeybrain Books) maintains one of those consistently interesting blogs (unlike mine) here. He’s an enthusiast of pop culture and science fiction, which I hear is some sort of fringe genre that involves robots. Kids these days! Anyway, Chris is also a fiction writer. I read his story “O One” in the Live Without a Net anthology, and I thought it was very good. I haven’t read any of his novels, but I am going to give Paragaea a shot. Check out the description. It’s irresistable.
I don’t know if you caught it, but all three books I mentioned in my previous posts are parts of series. I am wary of series. They usually require to be read in a certain order, and it takes up a lot of psychic energy to follow them–psychic energy that can be used for other things like building a space elevator and writing a massive thesis on cultural evolution, which of course are my main hobbies. But I liked all three books so much that I have mentally committed to continuing to read each series. To wit:
His Majesty’s Dragon is followed by Throne of Jade, already out in paperback. It is a wonderful thing that all three books in the Temeraire trilogy are being released not only in affordable mass market paperback but also within one month of each other. Compare to the Tor release schedule… actually, don’t, because it will put me in a bad mood.
Tropic of Night is followed by Valley of Bones. These mystery/suspense books are less like sequels than episodes. Just an observation. Tropic of Night was so engrossing that it will take a pretty big blow to the skull to turn me off of other books featuring Jimmy Paz and the demon-haunted city of … Miami. Go ahead and laugh. I grew up in South Florida, and just the thought of my subdivision scares the shit out of me.
OK, almost done (with the facetiousness and with the post).
The Water Room is the second Bryant & May mystery by Christopher Fowler. The next in the series is Seventy-Seven Clocks. The books have a convoluted publishing history, and I’m too lazy to prove how I know what is next. But you will have to trust me. The titular characters in the series, by the way, are a pair of mismatched but endearingly devoted friends who head up London’s fictional Peculiar Crimes Unit. This is the unloved police division that handles all the bizarre cases the regular police don’t have the time or inclination for. To say that it’s bizarre or wacky doesn’t do Fowler’s style any justice: he’s a fluent, literary writer who spends time drawing his characters, but make no mistake: he is a master of plotting, and the books are suspenseful thrillers with twists and turns and supernatural hints. Just the way I like ‘em.
Join me again at a later date–hopefully it won’t take another two months–for another installment of Books I Will Probably Read, a thrilling series of blog posts that will change your world!
Wow, I don’t touch my blog for weeks, and still I get dozens of comments! Thank you, poker sites, online pharmacies, and purveyors of penis enlargement pills!
Here are some short reviews of books recently read, for my adoring fans.
His Majestey’s Dragon, by Naomi Novik: Huzzah!
The Tropic of Night, by Michael Gruber: Excellent, sultry, fascinating thriller.
The Water Room, by Christopher Fowler: Not as much fun as Full Dark House, but it’s a mystery with some interesting elements (and in case nobody gets the pun on “elements,” I’ll mention right here that it’s a pun on the word elements meant for people who have read the book–oh dear, this review got a little longer than I had anticipated).
I have recently acquired a copy of Lucius Shepard’s vampire novel, The Golden. This book is a reprint from the fine folks at Golden Gryphon, who have somehow managed to attach the most gaudy, awful cover to a piece of fiction that I have seen in ages.
The art is of a style I call “psychedelic vomit.”
I was embarrassed to purchase it and had to sandwich it between two other books as I made my way through the store–ah, the delusions of the book-obsessed organism who exists only to multiply the books in its possession!