Old chimps' home

This is a book I must get....

The blog's been quiet this week due to some combination of the following: (1) actual novel-writing (versus internet procrastination); (2) very slow literary news in August, always irksome to me - much less than usual that's interesting to link to!; and (3) a hurricane-related travel swerve.

Whiled away an unexpected (and considerably delayed) flight with the gift that wretched Miami airport gave to me - a new novel by Dick Francis and his son Felix of which I had heard nary a peep! It is fairly awful, but it was delightfully soothing to me - there is a truly comical sex scene about two thirds of the way through, and the protagonist makes a number of morally suspect choices - in the end, though, there is nothing like a Dick Francis novel for calming one down...

Other light reading around the edges of work: Laurie King's Touchstone (good, but not nearly as much to my taste as Jo Walton's Farthing books or the novels of Peter Dickinson); a very charming and well-written young-adult novel about life and running, Martin Wilson's What They Always Tell Us (recommendation courtesy of Gautam); Charlie Stross's Accelerando (at its best, really and truly hilarious and thought-provoking, but somewhat uneven when taken as a whole).