Catch-up

Waiting at the airport for my flight back to New York. Figure it's a good time to get the light reading log up to date: when I don't have tabs to close, I tend not to get around to blogging what I've been reading either.

Two books I loved: Sara Gran's Claire DeWitt and the Bohemian Highway, which is almost unbearably bleak and sad and true to life; and Gabriel Roth's altogether delightful The Unknowns, which I am tempted to blurb as Ready Player One for grownups! I can't imagine what novel-reader wouldn't love this one - it's super.

Also all quite good: A. S. A Harrison, The Silent Wife; Max Barry, Lexicon; Karin Slaughter, Unseen; Todd Robinson, The Hard Bounce; Aric Davis, Nickel Plated; Lavie Tidhar, The Projected Girl; and Ian Tregillis, What Doctor Gottlieb Saw.

Only book I read this week that I really didn't like was J. M. Ledgard's Submergence - in retrospect, the presence of the word "lyrical" in so many of the descriptions should have warned me that it is a book with a portentous sense of its own importance and little sense of humor - really I am just not the target audience, I should have put it down right away but I was slightly mesmerized by my dislike for it!

Don't seem to have anything on my Kindle that I'm quite in the mood for - will go and trawl now for some reasonable crime fiction, I never can get quite enough of that to have a sufficient pipeline. If I really can't find anything, I might reread World War Z - seeing the movie gave me an irresistible desire to reread the book (the movie is very poor - Despicable Me 2 was much superior!). I enjoyed this piece about Max Brooks, as I too seem to spend a good deal of time contemplating the zombie apocalypse....

Catch-up

Strange and distressing week following news in Boston. My trip to Maine for the reading was very lovely, other than Boston thoughts hanging over us all - and some combination of distress and general excess-travel-related discombobulation led to me accidentally leaving my Kindle on the plane on Tuesday in Portland! Have filed missing property report, it's not at the Delta lost-and-found either in Portland or LGA, so I will wait and see whether it turns up - can read on phone (or of course actual "books") in the meantime. Am going to write a separate post tomorrow with Portland linkage, as my host did an absolutely lovely job taking me to all the most delicious and beautiful places, and they deserve a full account.

Logging of light reading will be slightly erratic: I read a lot of novels over last week due to time in airports etc. but cannot swear this list is inclusive without the record in the "Finished" folder on lost Kindle.

I think this is most of it:

I had a good run of books that are exactly what I like. I read Sarah Pinborough's A Matter of Blood and loved it so much (it was perfectly what I wanted to read) that I was only thwarted to discover that the second and third volumes have only been published in England and are not yet available for US Kindle. However ILL (which reminds me I must reread Jo Walton's novel Among Others, the novel written by one of the few other people in the world who loves ILL as much as I do) has served me well, I have volumes 2 and 3 in my possession (UK hardcover) and will shortly finish 2 and turn to 3.

Two absolutely perfect novels by Deborah Coates, crime fiction with excellent sense of place and mild element of supernatural - read them! I liked them enough that I pillaged the Amazon page for her bits of short fiction as well - the novels are just super.

Gene Kerrigan's The Rage: excellent Irish noir (this crime fiction of the Irish financial crisis is a depressing but extremely interesting subgenre - Alan Glynn and Tana French most obviously coming to mind, but make recommendations in the comments if you have any more suggestions).

Harlen Coben's Six Years is not good value for the money, wait and get it from the library - Crais's books have gotten better, I think, as Coben's have gotten weaker. Too often here I just had the feeling He is making this up, this is nonsense!

A Mira Grant zombie tie-in I missed at the time, and thoroughly enjoyed: San Diego 2013: The Last Stand of the California Brownshirts. Seanan McGuire/Mira Grant = true genius of popular fiction!

Melissa Scott's Five-Twelfths of Heaven, which I loved - but I am halfway through the sequel now (very glad these novels are all available electronically) and it does not seem to me nearly as sharp and engaging. However I certainly will read the whole trilogy.

Strangest and most complex of the bunch: a really uncanny and haunting novel by Richard Bowes, Minions of the Moon. I definitely hadn't read this before, though I think I must have an ARC of it sitting around somewhere in my apartment - and I also had a strange conviction that my friend M. had recommended to me, but could not then decide whether this was a real memory or an imaginary one based on the similarity (minus supernatural elements) of this book to Lawrence Block's Scudder novels and also to M.'s own story. The book it is most like, I think, Scudder notwithstanding, is Graham Joyce's The Tooth Fairy. Highly worthwhile.

Miscellaneous additional linkage:

Beautiful but also distressing: the library at Guantanamo. (Via.)

A happy note to end on: a nice story about a Muswell Hill tortoise.

Pre-drop

The Kirkus review is here. Official publication at twelve midnight, at which point you can get it here (for Kindle or for "real"). It probably won't be stocked in most bookstores, but your local store should be willing to order a copy for you if you prefer to get books that way, and here's a Powell's link for another option.

I am in Cayman till Thursday, and still haven't seen finished copies of the book (I think a box is waiting for me in New York), so it all seems slightly unreal. Will hope to see some of you at Book Culture a week from tomorrow. I've been writing bits and bobs for various guest blog posts and so forth, and I was looking back through old Light Reading posts (= external hard drive of the brain) for when I first read Julius Chambers' journalistic expose of abuses at the Bloomingdale Asylum.

That took me down the rabbit hole: I read back through all of the posts with the tag THE BACCHAE ON MORNINGSIDE HEIGHTS.

I started serious reading and research for the book in July 2010, which was a difficult month for other reasons; I started drafting it in December 2010; I had a full draft a couple months later (and also little cat Mickey, a happy addition to the Morningside Heights household), but I had to wait until the summer before I had enough time to pull it all together.

The provisionally final version I had in August 2011 (I accepted an offer from a publisher near the end of the calendar year) underwent significant subsequent revision right down to submission of the final version in July 2012, including a frenetic eleventh-hour rewrite of the final section from third-person to first-person voice. The story is basically one of regular bronchial ailments and brutal insomnia punctuated by the production of quota and a series of revisions that are always optimistically conceived and undertaken but that turn out not to have solved fundamental problems with the manuscript.

Writing a novel is not easy, I am happy with how this one came out but I think it will be wise if I don't write one again for quite a while!

(On the other hand, though, the intellectual excitement of the research and the thinking and the discovery of how things will really fit together properly is unbeatable, there's nothing else like it. I think that despite my resolution not to, I am pretty much stuck on writing another novel one of these days - but it will be good if it's a couple years before the next really compelling idea strikes, zombie apocalypse premise notwithstanding....)

Survival

I want to read this journal issue; even though I swore this spring I'd never write another novel again, that conviction has waned and I can't help but think there might be a zombie apocalypse travelogue (horror! survivalism!) in my writing future. Part of the appeal is that I wouldn't have to make up the characters or places, just the nature of the zombie apocalypse and the obstacles and dangers our party of adventurers would face. I have the full cast of characters and locations already, in my life....

I did manage to write the lecture (on the first of St. Aubyn's Patrick Melrose novels, truly a work of genius) and also the letters of recommendation. Had an extremely strenuous and rather glorious run in the late morning, in short sleeves - temperature was in the mid-50s, perfect running weather. Class went well, but by the time I got home from work I was ready to collapse.

Finished reading the most recent Phil Rickman Merrily Watkins novel, The Secrets of Pain. Will go to bed shortly.

I have the luxury, for the first time in many days, of not setting an alarm, and I hope to take maximum advantage of the fact that my first actual engagement tomorrow is boxing class at 2pm! A long night of sleep is in order.

Catch-up

Fiendishly busy. The next month is fairly daunting: the Thanksgiving overland odyssey (I'll be offline for the duration), the last three weeks of classes, several dissertation chapter meetings and a dissertation defense, a few eighteenth-century seminars and colloquia, opera tickets for Don Giovanni and Les Troyens, sundry departmental meetings, etc. etc.

I have a mystery rash on my lower legs that has caused me to google words like scabies, impetigo, ringworm, ensuring a computer screen full of ads for STD testing! (Doctor's appointment next Monday evening, internet self-diagnosis having been found wanting.)

Worst of all I am called for jury duty on Dec. 12! I must get it out of the way, I can't postpone it as I will be traveling quite a bit in the opening months of the new year, but I can't say I'm looking forward to it, not least because of constraints it places on various other end-of-semester scheduling obligations.

Seems like I have been too busy even to keep a proper log of light reading. Catch-up titles: Manel Loureiro's Apocalypse Z: The Beginning of the End (still can't get enough of these zombie novels, and spent the week after Sandy contemplating the possibility that I might even write one myself one of these days); Laini Taylor's Days of Blood and Starlight, an enchanting book that only prompts the complaint I WANT THE NEXT INSTALLMENT NOW!; Ben Aaronovitch, Moon Over Soho, which I thought was excellent (the first installment had some rookie continuity errors and points of confusion, though already very strong, but this really picks up momentum and delivers on the promise); and another appealing entry in the postapocalyptic zombie stakes, a good recommendation from my colleague Anahid, Kresley Cole's Poison Princess.

I always slightly grumble when these books are built on a romance chassis - I would rather hear less about the fellow's rippling pectoral muscles and more about the exact contents of the survivalist's larder! Still, very much worthwhile, and I dimly recall that Kresley Cole is the writer my friend "Lilia Ford" was recommending as so much superior to the rest of the paranormal romance cohort....

Happy Thanksgiving!

Light reading catch-up

I hadn't really intended to, but in effect I am clearly taking the weekend off (tomorrow I have ambitious exercise plans and am also meeting my dad for lunch and the matinee of Nico's ballet)....

Finally had time to read some novels, soothingly!

Edward St. Aubyn's At Last is pretty amazing; I like the aphoristic mode here better than the mode of more profound commentary, but these Patrick Melrose books really are a must-read (and as I said, I think the opening chapter of this one may be the single best novel opening I've read in recent memory).

I considerably enjoyed Anya Lipska's Where the Devil Can't Go, a crime novel about Polish immigrants in London (a good recommendation from Maxine!); Sharon Shinn's Troubled Waters is what my grandmother, speaking disparagingly of certain kinds of sliced bread, would have called 'pap,' but highly readable pap; S. G. Browne's Breathers: A Zombie's Lament is absolutely wonderful (thanks to Jared for the recommendation); Robert Harris's The Fear Index is goofily heavy-handed in its Frankenstein parallels but certainly a page-turner.

Bonus link (FT site registration required, but it's more interesting than what Harris tells us about finance!): school for quants.

Triffids!

Defoe's zombie apocalypse.

How to Keep Rabbits for Profit and Pleasure

A nice piece on the London Library.  (My grandfather had a lifetime membership, obtained in the early 1950s; he must have gotten more than fifty years of use out of it, but my frugal grandmother still sometimes expressed a wish that it could be transferable to me after his death...)

A medical study of the Haitian zombie.  (Via Hari Kunzru.)

The curse of the trochee?

A ticket to Buffalo

I fear I am about to explode from stress at the amount of work I need to get done in the next four days in and around other commitments!

Finished Colson Whitehead's Zone One.  The writing is incredibly sharp, and I loved the first third or so, but I found my enthusiasm slightly cooling due to relative lack of plot.  I definitely still recommend it, but not as passionately as I might have on the basis of early passages like this one:

There were your standard-issue skels, and then there were the stragglers.  Most skels, they moved.  They came to eat you--not all of you, but a nice chomp here or there, enough to pass on the plague.  Cut off their feet, chop off their legs, and they'd gnash the air as they heaved themselves forward by their splintered fingernails, looking for some ankle action.  The marines had eliminated most of this variety before the sweepers arrived.

The stragglers, on the other hand, did not move, and that's what made them a suitable objective for civilian units.  They were a succession of imponderable tableaux, the malfunctioning stragglers and the places they chose to haunt throughout the Zone and beyond.  An army of mannequins, limbs adjusted by an inscrutable hand.  The former shrink, plague-blind, sat in her requisite lounge chair, feet up on the ottoman, blank attentive face waiting for the patient who was late, ever late, and unpacking the reasons for this would consume a large portion of a session that would never occur.  The patient failed to arrive, was quite tardy, was dead, was running through a swamp with a hatchet, pursued by monsters.  The pock-faced assistant manager of the shoe store crouched before the foot-measuring instrument, frozen, sans customers, the left shoes of his bountiful stock on display along the walls of the shop on miniature plastic ledges.  The vitamin-store clerk stalled out among the aisles, depleted among the plenty, the tiny bottles containing gel-capped ancient remedies and placebos.  The owner of the plant store dipped her fingers into the soil of a pot earmarked for a city plant, one hearty in the way the shop's customers were hearty, for wasn't every citizen on the grand island a sort of sturdy indoor variety that didn't need much sunlight. . . .

Anyway, it is very lovely writing, in a hybrid satirical-elegiac vein.

Also, and this really was the perfect light reading, the first installment of Denise Mina's new series, Still Midnight, which really is pretty much exactly what I most enjoy in this vein.  Unfortunately I purchased that and its sequel in haste without realizing that I had already read The End of the Wasp Season - I had it in the form of a 'real' book, and even the Amazon website is not capable of telling me that I bought a paper version of the book at a Chapters in Ottawa in June!  (If memory serves...)

Post-vortex update

It is not quite true homecoming (no New York, no cat!), but it is a tranquil point of rest, something for which I am extremely grateful!

Ottawa was tough, but it was important to be there.

I read some great books in airports and airplanes en route there from Philadelphia last week (in particular I loved Doris Egan's Ivory books - a Jo Walton recommendation - extraordinarily good lucid storytelling and an immensely appealing voice t o boot, making me hope that she had published tons of other books I could now read too, only it seems that really she is [probably sensibly] writing for television mostly these days - her blog is full of interesting things that would be useful for novelists as well as writers of television episodes, though). A mediocre Tanya Huff novel, purchased in the Detroit airport, helped pass the time. Katherine Howell's Frantic is a pretty high-quality rendition of a genre I like very much (in this case, it's paramedics and cops in Sydney, with more of a thriller than police-procedural vibe), and I'm now near the end of the next one in the series: definitely recommended. Daniel H. Wilson's Robopocalypse (Brent warned me!) is markedly inferior to Max Brooks's amazing World War Z: definitely read Brooks instead if you haven't already but are pondering the purchase of Wilson. (Wilson has some notable gifts as a storyteller but he is not truly curious about the more logistical elements of what would happen if robots took over the world, how resistance fighters actually organize their resources, etc., which makes him ill-suited to excel in this particular genre.)

After that we got sucked into the VORTEX, so there was pretty much no time whatsoever for reading or websurfing, thus the silence here. Did manage to read one really amazingly great novel, Megan Abbott's Bury Me Deep. What a book! There is an obvious comparison to James Ellroy, not just because of the nature of the subject matter (and the charge of the writerly investment in that sort of material) but also because it is so unusual to find propulsive storytelling in combination with such an amazingly distinctive writerly voice. For this book Abbott has come up with the most extraordinary idiom, lush and baroque and stylized yet also with the sort of concision and selectivity that one thinks more often of spare prose only possessing: anyway, I really loved it, and am eager to read more of hers, including the brand new one called The End of Everything, which I have pre-ordered for Kindle...

And so it was a great relief to be back in an airport yesterday and with all the time in the world to read books again! I could not resist purchasing a huge armful of real old-fashioned paper books at Chapters in Nepean, many of them on deep discount, and the travel time was honestly at that point just a great respite from what had gone before! Two very good crime novels, really exactly to my tastes: Mark Billingham's Bloodline and Denise Mina's The End of the Wasp Season. Two writers I can't get enough of...

Finally, a couple of links:

The real-world setting for the adventures of Thomas the Tank Engine.

My favorite bit of Roland Barthes on Cy Twombly

Sunday update

I've been making myself crazy the last couple days with self-castigation about my missed race: it was painful but straightforward to decide to pull out at the beginning of the week, as I was still feeling so ill that I couldn't even imagine getting myself and luggage on a plane to Idaho on Thursday let alone actually exerting myself on the racecourse today, but as the antibiotics worked their magic and I started to feel more myself again, it was inevitable that I would second-guess myself.

In short, I know that I made the proper decision, but half of me still very much wishes that I were living in an endurance sport vacuum where I could just do things as irresponsibly and self-absorbedly as I wish and have the ill consequences affect nobody but myself!

ARGHHHHHHH!

I am holed up at my mother's house in Philadelphia, keeping my little cat company and getting some work done on my novel. Have been wrestling with certain plot-related obstacles: I am really overlaying the draft with an entirely new more thriller-type plot - Barbara Vine/Joyce Carol Oates thriller, not Lee Child thriller - but having a hard time getting the right balance of melodrama and emotional plausibility; I am working with a fixed quantity, a death at the end of the book, but I need to have it not just come out of nowhere. We will see what can be done.

The days loom rather long here, especially without exercise (I am going to venture out for a short run later and see how it feels - lungs finally almost entirely better), so I have read an implausibly large number of books...

(I did spend a very pleasant afternoon yesterday with my adorable little niece and her parents, and will have oysters tomorrow evening with my dad, so I am not altogether hermited up, much as I feel like skulking and lying low!)

A couple books that I was finishing the night before I left New York, out of desire not to bring excess physical books with me on complicated travels: Michael Gelb's Body Learning: An Introduction to the Alexander Technique (an odd book, worthwhile but strange; I think that this other one which I did actually pack in my luggage is probably in a more modern vein!); Barry Hughart's Bridge of Birds, a nice present from Brent.

A couple more actual physical books I brought with me and will now ditch: Charles de Lint, Promises to Keep (minor but pleasant - I think Colleen might have sent me this years ago, though really it is hard to say, books crop up from who knows where...); Margaret Mahy, The Magician of Hoad (I loved this one - but now see I could have had it for Kindle after all! Plucked it from the shelf at the Bank Street Bookstore a few weeks ago on a day when I felt short of anything good to read).

In the couple days before I left New York, I put the call out for light reading recommendations (will welcome more here, too, in the comments, if you didn't see my Facebook one). I need to stock up with a lot of books for the next couple weeks/months! I got a ton of stuff but am unfortunately already burning through it at a slightly worrying rate...

Kate Christensen, The Astral: A Novel. This one was a bit of a disappointment to me. I really loved her last novel Trouble, but somehow I just couldn't suspend my disbelief in the protagonist of this one: I initially thought that Christensen was ventriloquizing this unattractive late-middleaged male character to some more postmodern end that would soon be revealed, and that it would be a novel of multiple voices, and I was mildly dismayed as I realized I was going to have to keep company with him for the entire book. The writing is very good, but there is something deeply unbelievable about the premise and character (or perhaps it is just that I disliked him more than the novel seemed to want me to), so that I don't know I'd recommend it more generally unless it is, as they say, the sort of book you particularly like...

Cherie Priest's Bloodshot was extremely enjoyable: it is a less abbitious book than many of the others she's written, but that makes it fit more perfectly into the light reading mold! I will look forward to subsequent installments of this series.

A couple very good recommendations from Brent, who heard my call and kept the links coming: Suzy McKee Charnas's Dorothea Dreams, which is to a ridiculously exact degree exactly the kind of book I most love (it is a very good book in its own right, but the fit with my personal tastes is slightly uncanny!); and, also very good but less exactly my kind of book (definitely recommended, though - it's great!), Max Brooks's World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War. Hmmm, I had better start brushing up my survivalist in preparation for the pending zombie apocalypse...

Next up: a fat little omnibus I got for $6.99 used at Amazon after reading Jo Walton's description of the trilogy as having "a high 'I want to read it' quotient," which is really another way of what I mean when I beg for light reading - it might have serial killers, it might have swashbuckling swordsmen, but it has to have a high want-to-read quotient! Interesting: when I purchased that shortly after reading Walton's post, there were tons of cheap copies, but clearly there was a run on it, now all the copies available via Amazon are significantly more expensive!

Brains!

At Publishers Weekly, Gwenda Bond has a fascinating piece on trends in paranormal romance and urban fantasy.

Jane bites back

"Anything is better with zombies."