Little Toy Robot

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.

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.

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 It was entertaining but a little out of date, and the victim of the kind of sweeping generalizations you’d expect from a popular history of the English language.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]

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]

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.

• Added N. Fagin Books, Sandmeyer’s Bookstore, Columbia College Bookstore, Under the Table Books, and the DePaul-Loop-Campus-Bookstore-that-is-really-a-Barnes-&-Noble
• Removed Rain Dog Books & Cafe
• Added links to reviews at papermustache.com where available. More hopefully coming soon.

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.

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.

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!