#fridayreads 1.jun.2012

Picked up The Jewel Hinged Jaw, Samuel Delany. Because Delany came up in a con­ver­sa­tion recent­ly and then I came across this lit­tle screed on io9:overmind http://io9.com/5910814/what-samuel-r-delany-can-tell-publishing-about-its-latest-trend
Typically shal­low but hits a pain point of mine about how many authors have suc­cumbed to the pro­duc­tion line via ghost writ­ers and co-authors and how the prod­uct has suffered.

In the midst of Gods with­out Men, Hari Kunzru. Mixed reviews on Amazon but rec­om­mend­ed by a cou­ple of peo­ple I trust. I’m glad I start­ed it. Yes, the nar­ra­tive struc­ture is a bit odd and there does­n’t seem to be a cap­i­tal ‘P’ plot, but not every­thing in the world has to fol­low the three act arc.

Sandman Slim, Richard Kadrey. Read because I found the sin­gle phrase “like God’s tiny tyran­nosaurus rex” in an excerpt amus­ing. I’m not a hor­ror fan but it was fun­ny enough to send me look­ing for anoth­er Kadrey. (and it went well with migraine.)

HebrewPunk, Lavie Tidhar. One of my favorite writ­ers of the moment dis­ap­point­ed me. Admittedly one of his ear­ly efforts. Not worth the time even if you like Yiddish myth and leg­end. Sigh.

 

Wind Through the Keyhole, Stephen King.  A fairy tale. I like fairy tales. This made up for the last 2 Dark Tower books.

A bunch of dog train­ing books. Because the world moves on and the pup­py rais­ing books that I leant some­one so long ago and nev­er got back are out­dat­ed any­way. The basics nev­er change. The tricks of the trade are refined. The research updates enough to make the sequence of assigned tasks a lit­tle dif­fer­ent. I have yet to find my replace­ment for the nice­ly bal­anced approach of “Mother Knows Best.”

PS When you bork the Kindle app on an iPad because you are switch­ing iTunes from one com­put­er to anoth­er you lose all of the sam­ples that you have down­loaded and thus lose all of the books queued for pos­si­ble inclu­sion in your read­ing list. Is that hell­ish­ly annoy­ing? Or a fresh start?