Little Toy Robot

Here are some things that are keeping me busy lately:

• The Green Hour, by The Autumn Defense
• Begin to Hope, by (the divine) Regina Spektor
• Jens Lekman
• Tufte
• Pivot Tables
• Google Earth
• Joe Mauer

The next Collins Library book is announced: The Lunatic at Large, by J. Storer Clouston.

‘The best-bred lunatics in England’ live in Clankwood, and Francis Beveridge is its newest resident. Rather than attending the asylum’s Saturday dances, though, Beveridge goes on the lam in London. And thus, when a traveling German noble finds himself at the luxurious Hotel Mayonnaise without a guide to England’s customs, who better to escort him than the amnesiac Englishman who materializes by his side - a splendid tutor in bringing rail stations to a standstill, the best way to fake a rabies attack, and how to crash London’s most exclusive clubs - quite literally.

A much-loved Victorian comic masterpiece, this is the original anarchic novel that ushered in the age of Wodehouse and Waugh.

The Collins Library is curated by Paul Collins, author of the excellent Banvard’s Folly. It is an imprint of McSweeneys Books specializing in obscure and weird titles.

Looper is a “[q]uasi-daily architectural photoblog generally focused in and around the Loop.” The photos are often stunning, but this recent set stands out.

This shot follows the Chicago River east into Lake Michigan and it shows the city in a completely different way than I’ve ever seen it. It looks like some European city emptying out into the Mediterranean or the Baltic Sea.

Well, I knocked another book off my to-be-read list today: River of Gods, by Ian McDonald. This is highly recommended. It’s sci-fi of the first order, a book that balances action, ideas, and character development through 600 wonderful pages. The plot focuses on a few months about forty years from now as the world is learning to adapt to increases in technology (or the new technology is learning to adapt to us…) while reliving the same nightmare of balkanization and international politics that has been going on since the beginning of recorded history.

Next up are some non-fiction books, I’m afraid, that aren’t even on my list since they are work-related.

I’m sure this is a big shock, but I went to the Printers Row Book Fair over the weekend. I didn’t actually find anything to buy, but I stopped at the library and picked up Ian McDonald’s well regarded River of Gods (it’s on my constantly changing To-Be-Read page). The weather was great and there was a good crowd at the book fair, and that’s a great stretch of Dearborn to walk down in any circumstance, with a few places to eat and drink and the unlikely clock tower of the Dearborn Street Station punctuating the street’s end.

Via LHB, the New York Times lists books on fantasy baseball (”a game that unites thousands of American men in a time-wasting exercise of epic proportion”–though I know for a fact that women play fantasy baseball too!). I actually read both of these books (The Mind of Bill James by Scott Gray and Fantasyland by Sam Walker) in March. Walker’s book is a lot of fun and a great read, and Gray’s book is a slobbering hagiography.

Incidentally, I’d like to point this out:

Two months into the season, I am in first place (however tenuously) in all three of my Yahoo leagues.

The Mother Tongue (nonfiction), by Bill Bryson
The Golden, by Lucius Shepard
The Living End, by Stanley Elkin
Woken Furies, by Richard K. Morgan
The Empire of Ice Cream (collection), by Jeffrey Ford

The Bryson book was kind of random, I’ll admit. It was entertaining but a little out of date, and the victim of the kind of sweeping generalizations you’d expect from a popular history of the English language.

The Golden is a vampire story with a great setting (a Gormenghastian castle) and a great plot (it’s a mystery), but Shepard’s writing is too overwrought to enjoy, and the climax drags on for far too long.

Stanley Elkin’s The Living End starts out as a humorous, satirical piece, but in its later section it becomes heavy and bizarre. It’s a meditation about life and death and the afterlife, and it’s a mess.

Woken Furies was not Morgan’s best, but it shows that Morgan has a great worldbuilding talent. I would love to read another story in this universe, but I am done with Takeshi Kovacs as a character. He’s a monster, and any depth he has as a person feels like an artificial attempt to, well, give him some depth as a person. The books would be far more effective and interesting if they were from the perspective of a less invincible, less obvious character.

Last but definitely not least, Jeff Ford’s short story collection contains some absolute gems. “Botch Town” is a sort of an anti-Dandelion Wine that at first felt very prosaic and out of place. But very quickly I found myself drawn into the inner life of the main character and the fascinating world he inhabits, and after 70 pages my only disappointment was that it was too short. The title story of the collection is another standout, and another favorite is the extremely weird and brutal story “The Beautiful Gelreesh.”

I am disappointed and a little bit insulted that I didn’t make the Lit 50 list of Chicago’s “women and men who keep us hooked on books.” Who is this “Oprah Winfrey” and why is she on the list? Is she that lady who makes everybody cry? I don’t make people cry. [via #49]