Category: BOOKS & AUTHORS

Jack Vance’s The Book of Dreams (Demon Princes, Book 5)

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This entry is part 4 of 56 in the series 2022 Reads

Well, this is the saddest of the Demon Princes novels, because its villain, Howard Allen Treesong, was the most sympathetic of the series: a lunatic, to be sure, but he lost his mind through abuse and bullying and a horrible childhood. The eponymous The Book of Dreams feels like some kind of metonym for a lot of SF as a literary form: a kooky, self-aggrandizing remix of obscure adventure stories, folklore, and religious tracts. The “high school reunion revenge” scene is the stuff of a Netflix miniseries season climax, I tell you. Also, the parallels between Gerson and Treesong are… …

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Jack Vance’s The Face (Demon Princes, Book 4)

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This entry is part 3 of 56 in the series 2022 Reads

As you may have noticed, I’m mostly blogging to log my reading for the year, at least right now. Most of these posts come at least a few weeks after finishing a given book, to give me time to think about, process, and settle in my feelings and thoughts before discussing them.  So, I continued on in the new year with the Demon Princes novels by Jack Vance, of which this is the fourth. (I’d read the third back in December, so it wasn’t long ago.)

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Samurai Cat in the Real World by Mark E. Rogers

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This entry is part 2 of 56 in the series 2022 Reads

The third of the Samurai Cat books—and the the last to have full color art—features adventures through gangland Chicago, pulp Nazi Germany (with, yes, Nazi dinosaurs), and b-movie Communist Russia in the time of Stalin. That sounds worse than it is: the Nazis here are strictly for punching (or, you know, stabbing or blowing up: they’re pulp movie Nazis), and the Russian Commies are kind of the same. In other words, this is Samurai Cat’s adventures in three violent, awful moments in history, but the whole thing is a big weird snarking mockery of mobsters and the Nazis and the …

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Lizard in a Zoot Suit by Marco Finnegan

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This entry is part 1 of 56 in the series 2022 Reads

So, last year I tweeted about what I’d read, in part because some friends were doing it, but also because it helped me to resettle my reading habits, which had been somewhat upset since the start of the pandemic. (What can I say, a crazy workload and a kid at home full time for a year kind of… makes other things hard.) But I have this blog here, and I’m not using it so much, so I figure I may as well post my readings here. It’ll give me a little more than 280 characters per post. I’m going to …

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Books of 2021

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thread#showTweet” data-screenname=”gordsellar” data-tweet=”1354383867315015683″>  thread#showTweet” data-screenname=”gordsellar” data-tweet=”1354383867315015683″>Loved the bizarre dark fantasy novella in the middle of this book—the historical narrative is pure gaaah. thread#showTweet” data-screenname=”gordsellar” data-tweet=”1354383867315015683″>I still feel the same. The beginning and end were fine, but that chunk in the middle is astonishingly creepy and strange and wonderful.  Book 2: Mouse Guard 3: The Black Axe by David Petersen Yes, I’m counting graphic novels, and this was a fun one, sort of a gritty flashback prologue telling the backstory of a mysterious character from earlier in the series. Can’t wait till my son digs into these in a few years…  …

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The Adventures of Samurai Cat by Mark E. Rogers

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I first read this book as a teenager: I think my mother found it among the remaindered books at a local bookstore and brought it home for me, as she had so many other books I fondly remember. It’s gonzo parody featuring a samurai cat named Miaowara Tomokato adventuring as he avenges the death of his master—accompanied, at times, by his homicidal little nephew Shiro.  The world of these books—it’s a series—is a patchwork jumble of pop/geek culture franchises and canonic works tossed it into a blender with Norse mythology and Japanese history, except with (a few) anthropomorphic cats. It …

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Blogging Pound’s The Cantos: Canto LXXI

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This entry is part 56 of 60 in the series Blogging Pound's The Cantos

This post is one in a series of readings I’m posting of each poem in Ezra Pound’s The Cantos, one (or a few) at a time. The readings are atypical, for reasons made clear in my first post in this series. I’m not sure whether the fiction project that inspired this series will ever come to fruition, but I’d like to try finish the Cantos just the same. There’s also an (updated) index of all the Cantos (and related sources) I’ve discussed so far. Well, here we are, folks, at the final Adams Canto! It’s taken some time, but the coronavirus outbreak has …

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Recent Books (More Recenter Books Edition)

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So, here’s some stuff I’ve read lately… It’s a lot of what I’ve read so far in 2006, at least since my last book post. Since I typically are working my way slowly through any five books at once, these posts tend to come slowly, and to have a lot in them when they do come, so I’m including just fiction here. I’ll put up a second post, a bit later, with the  nonfiction stuff in it.  Agents of Dreamland by Caitlín R. Kiernan I picked up this book in Los Angeles, and I’m very glad I did.  A creepy …

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Blogging Pound’s The Cantos: Cantos LXIX and LXX

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This entry is part 55 of 60 in the series Blogging Pound's The Cantos

This post is one in a series of readings I’m posting of each poem in Ezra Pound’s The Cantos, one (or a few) at a time. The readings are atypical, for reasons made clear in my first post in this series. I’m not sure whether the fiction project that inspired this series will ever come to fruition, but I’d like to try finish the Cantos just the same. There’s also an (updated) index of all the Cantos (and related sources) I’ve discussed so far. This is my second post on the Cantos after returnint to them following an eight month break. I do …

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Recent Reads: Troubadour Verse Edition

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Though I was inspired to return to Provençal verse by a game—one run by the inimitable Jeremy Tolbert—I’ve been interested in Occitan culture and literature for a long time. Honestly, it was kind of dumb luck, because reading Pound had reawakened in my a craving to return to old Occitanian song and verse, and when I realized I hadn’t read any a decade or so, I decided to get my hands on some. Fortunately for my bank account, a request for a branch loan at school worked out and I got both of the books I asked for: Meg Bogin’s …

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