Here’s the annual list of books I read this year. Fewer than I expected, to be sure, but… that’s life. A lot of these happened to be the hard copy books I brought with me, or mailed to myself, when we came to Vietnam in March… which is to say, I was reading them because I wanted to get ’em all out of the way before the end of our time here, so as to have no sent or brought them in vain. I’d hoped to read them all, but I’m a slower reader than I like, and it’s been …
I posted about the book on Julian the Apostate that I was reading back in November, but never got around to posting how the rest of the book went. I’ll pore over what I read this year (less than I’d hoped) once it’s next year, and just highlight some of the fun from Julian for the moment…
When my friend, fellow Poundian, and coworker Jason Silvis left South Korea–I think in 2005–he gave me a copy of William T. Vollmann’s You Bright and Risen Angels, I imagine probably because the SFnal elements and the sheer challenge of the book would appeal to me. He had given the book a good hard try, but–at least from the pencil markings he’d made–didn’t get very far into it. Having just finished reading the book, I can see why. It’s a flawed book, even for a first novel, and not easy reading by any stretch of the imagination… or, rather, I …
I’ve recently read some really good books, and am working out just what I want to say about them, but in the meantime, I’ve just started on a biography by Adrian Murdoch’s titled The Last Pagan: Julian the Apostate and the Death of the Ancient World. Julian is, basically, as the book suggests, the last great pagan emperor of Rome, which… well, given my occasional musings on how European history might have been different had paganism resisted being steamrolled by Christianity–perhaps, by more effectively co-opting elements of it, in the way Christianity actually did to paganism–the topic excited me. Two …
Miyako no Sora is the school song of the First High School of Tokyo, the one its students sang in farewell to classmates who had to leave to go to war. One after another they went away, as if beckoned by some great invisible hand, and it seems that for a time the song echoed through the school grounds, morning and night. We learned it from an alumnus of this school, when his company happened to be stationed in the same town that we were. It was a fine tune for sending off young men, a tune with a bright, …
I love finding literary easter eggs in unexpected places, as in this description of a drive up to a summer camp to drop off a boy dreading the experience to come: — They drove through a lot of beautiful scenery, for hours and hours and hours. The camp was far to the north. That was one of its special qualities. — Great forests now received the travelers, as they had once received the French; and the car passed though towns with historic churchyards followed by stony farms that bore witness to various sublethal crop diseases which had originated in Dunwich, …
A snippet: All around the world, but particularly in our great Republic, inventors and professors set about applying the universal intrinsic principle. Some worked with formless Unchangeables in their seance lounges, others with religious Notions, and a rare few, such as our Mr. Edison, with bulldog Actualities. The way he looked at it, if your calculations showed you couldn’t do something, then you went ahead and did it without the calculations. Here was one for whom the forces of electricity had been waiting! –from You Bright and Risen Angels, by William T. Vollmann A huge book, left behind by a …
For a while, I was posting reviews of everything I’d read, one by one, but has become somewhat burdensome. Still, I figure a small summary might be justifiable, so, here’s a breakdown on some recent readings:
Well, I haven’t posted about any of the books I’ve read lately, so I may as well start again, and I figure this is as good a place as any to begin. Somtow Sucharitkul (who goes by S.P. Somtow in his fiction writing career) has always struck me as someone who might be a kindred spirit, someone I’d like to sit down with for a beer or coffee or something. He’s a classical musician (conductor and composer), an SF author, and has spent significant chunks of his life living abroad. His blog amuses me, and he has done amazing things …
As I mentioned on Twitter the other day, I recently finished a draft of a weird novella with the working title, “In the Company of Distillers.” I guess the best way to explain the story is that it’s set in London at that part of the 18th century Gin Craze just prior to the government’s second attempt (and the first serious one) at Gin Prohibition… As far as the makeup of the story, it’s probably easiest to explain it more like the way one does a gin-based cocktail, that is, in the form of a recipe: two parts alchemy one …