The Nerdy, Wordy, Reading Life
I really enjoyed Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes (this was only the third Bradbury for me). It took me a while to get into it. The “weird” level was pretty high and it moved slowly. Eventually ( by about the last third of the book) it began to pay off. Bradbury’s vision is uncomfortable but [...]
OK. The laptop and I have an uneasy truce going on. It still crashes frequently and is unpredictable but will occasionally stay operational for whole hours at a time. Back to our regularly scheduled book reviews… I recently finished William Gibson’s Neuromancer. And I really don’t know what to think of it. I did enjoy [...]
I took a trip from Boise to Idaho Falls to visit my sister Quinn last weekend. It is about a four hour drive (a bit less if you keep your cruise set at 80, ahem!). I had been planning this trip ever since Thanksgiving, which was the last time I’d seen my sister. I very [...]
My most bookish (and Wolfe-ish) friend loaned me Gene Wolfe’s first novel: Operation Ares. It was quite disappointing for a Wolfe. Of course, Wolfe himself has made efforts to keep the volume out of print, as it endured a brutal editing process (103,000 words to 60,000!) without Wolfe’s input, and he is not proud of it. [...]
A friend from grad school loaned me her copy of Brady Udall’s The Lonely Polygamist. It was an intriguing, if imperfect, work. I enjoyed the lighter approach to a subject I have otherwise only encountered in serious research or first-person accounts. Polygamy in the U.S. is a complex and often painful subject. This story of [...]
I’ve been reading this “Definitive Retrospective of His Finest Short Fiction” for some time now. Wolfe is always a little slow-going because his writing is so richly complex that one cannot dash through a novel in a day. I snagged this volume with the Barnes and Noble Groupon that came out a few months ago. [...]
Maybe it’s because I just finished Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men but Alan Heathcock’s Volt reminds me of McCarthy’s grimly violent work, though Heathcock’s prose is richer – less stark. This collection of short stories also echoes Flannery O’Connor as characters struggle against the macabre ill-luck of a small town, each seeking a [...]
I finished this charming volume by Rider Haggard late last night. His prose is both approachable and evocative of his Norse myth sources. He chooses some archaic terms and constructions that echo the Icelandic. The story is essentially tragic although the atmosphere is one of heroic endurance in the face of the “Norns” or Fates. [...]
I just finished this title by Cormac McCarthy. It was violent (of course) and dark but very interesting. In a way, it reminds me of Luis Alberto Urrea’s The Desert Highway for it’s bleak picture of the border. No Country For Old Men focuses on the drug trade in the 80s while Urrea’s work looks [...]
I have just finished this book which is an unusual venture for me. I don’t often read sci-fi or fantasy unless it is authored or recommended by Lewis or Tolkien. But my good friend Brent proffered it and his recommendations are nearly as reliable so I read it. And…I’m not sure what to think. The [...]