Back to the 'To be Read' pile…

I'm about 100 or so pages from the end of Scott Lynch's Red Seas Under Red Skies and loving every minute of it. I know what I'll be reading next: the latest instalment in the Dresden Files by Jim Butcher: Proven Guilty. I'm also half way through a rather excellent short fiction collection - Unbecoming by Mike O'Driscoll - which I'm definitely going to make time to finish.

After that, I'm diving back in to the to-be-read pile:

Fragile Things by Neil Gaiman
The Execution Channel by Ken MacLeod
Evil for Evil by K.J. Parker
The Terror by Dan Simmons
Bone Song by John Meaney
Death's Head by David Gunn
Icarus by Roger Levy
The Somnambulist by Jonathan Barnes
Emperor by Stephen Baxter
Deadstock by Jeffrey Thomas
The Summoner by Gail Martin
The Book of Lost Things by John Connolly

And those are just the dozen I can remember off the top of my head, or from glancing around the office. That's without going anywhere near the eight shelves of assorted paperbacks in the corner, or the four (very large) boxes of unread books that have been in storage for the past couple of years, during the extension, or the whole bookcase worth of unread hardbacks that I re-shelved at the weekend, having finally gotten the dining room back into some sort of order.

Bloody hell, I'm going to have go give up my weekend computer gaming habit for a couple of years if I'm even going to make a dent! And probably a few other things as well. Television, definitely. Eating, maybe. Sleep, possibly (I can do without one night in three, right?)

I'm not the only one who suffers from this ongoing angst over the sheer volume of books I'll never have time to read (whole libraries I'll never be able to experience, dammit!), right? Or is it just a case of my life being too badly organised for words, while everyone else has everything all neatly squared away, with more time for reading than they know what to do with?

Anyway, are there any particularly strong recommendations from the above list, either for or against? Worked well last time, Ed recommended The Solaris Book of New Science Fiction and it was indeed a cracking read. Feel free to let me know what you reckon.

April 3, 2007 | Filed Under Books | 8 Comments

New Arrivals / Recommended Reading - late Jan '07

No fewer than four must-read new titles came in at the back end of last month, which threatened to throw my to-be-read list into fresh disarray. As it happens though, I've already finished one of 'em(The Intruders - highly recommended!) and started another. Hmmm. So, perhaps not so much 'disarray' as 'temporary abeyance'...

The Intruders by Michael Marshall

Michael Marshall (Smith) fans are going to love this one. It's a classic MM(S) tale: the protagonist, Jack Whalen, is basically an ordinary guy with a background in taking care of himself - in this case he's an ex L.A. cop - who finds himself flung into having to deal with an extraordinary situation, and with little idea of how big a situation he's landed in, or how deep the trouble goes.

In this case events are triggered by the disappearance of his wife, Amy, with whom he's very much in love, and the re-appearance of an old high school acquaintance, Gary Fisher; the golden jock who went off the rails following a suicide by a secret admirer and has since wound up practising law, and who is now dealing with a rather odd-feeling last will and testament.

But of course, nothing is ever quite as it seems in an MM(S) novel, and The Intruders is no exception. I'll say no more, to avoid spoilerage - although speaking of which, if you're planning on reading The Intruders, then do not read the blurb on the back of the book as it contains a moderate spoiler that could damage the narrative tension of a particular segment - but suffice to say it's full of all the MM(S) hallmarks: rich prose, great characterisation and an absolutely wonderful observational eye. No other writer I've encountered to-date is quite as good at summing up the intricacies of human relationships in so few words. And dammit, he writes a damn good shoot-out as well...

Black Man by Richard Morgan

And, having finished a contemporary conspiracy-plot thriller, I've launched myself straight into a high-tech, futuristic techno-thriller by another of my very favourite authors: Richard Morgan. Black Man is, as far as I can ascertain so far, set in the same milieu as Morgan's earlier Takeshi Kovacs novels, although I think it might be set in a much earlier time-frame; I'd have to check back with the earlier books to find out for sure.

I'm only a few chapters in so far, but already the book has the classic Morgan hallmarks; special agents running more or less amok, hard-pressed police detectives having to deal with far out-of-the-ordinary cases (in this case a downed spacecraft that crashes in the Pacific Ocean en-route from Mars) and a dark, gritty atmosphere that you can taste in the back of your mouth.

I'm looking forward to losing myself in this one over the next couple of weeks and I'll let you know how I get on, of course...

Ysabel by Guy Gavriel Kay

For years now, I haven't met a Guy Gavriel Kay novel that I haven't instantly liked; well, not since his debut trilogy outing, The Fionavar Trilogy, which frankly I wasn't too keen on at all (the author and I have exchanged emails on the subject at some point, and apparently I'm not alone in the hate/love thing... although he did explain that there's a fair bit more to the series than I first read into it... but I was only 17 or so at the time, so we can blame the callowness of youth...)

Anyhow, Ysabel is a rare outing for Kay, in that it's set in a contemporary environment, albeit one in which the mythical past seems to be magically impinging. In his last few novels he's established an alternative version of our own world's Iron Age and Medieval histories and has written about various time periods within this new timeline. I'm intrigued to find out whether this new novel represents a blurring of the boundaries between our own world and this alternate universe, or whether the 'contemporary' setting of Ysabel actually turns out to be the modern-day equivalent in that world all along... if you follow me.

I'll be reading this one before too long, I expect, so again, I'll report back as and when.

The Terror by Dan Simmons

Now, this one looked highly intriguing when it turned up, but I have to confess to being somewhat worried by the daunting 784 page-count. Plus, whilst I enjoyed the artistry of Ilium - Simmons' re-mix of The Iliad - I probably didn't get as much out of it as I should have, given the rave reviews it received elsewhere. So, my initial reaction to The Terror was coloured by the worry that I might suffer the same fate here - and at a considerable investment in precious time as well.

Then I had a coffee with the esteemed John Berlyne, proprietor of The Works of Tim Powers and UK reviews editor for SFRevu, and he said that it was an absolutely wonderful book. In fact, he went as far as to say that it's one of the best three books he's ever read... and this from the guy who's one of the world's leading authorities on Tim Powers (you can read his review on SFRevu).

So now I'm really going to have to read it. Although I might wait until the end of October and take it away on my hols to read by the pool. A chilling tale of terror set in the Arctic ice fields might be just the antidote to all that Maltese sunshine I'm planning on soaking up...

February 15, 2007 | Filed Under Books | 3 Comments

2007 - The Year of the Short Story?

I'm anticipating a significant up-turn in the amount of reading time I have available as of the start of 2007. The year-long decorating project is almost done (short version: we had a major house extension built between July '05 to Feb '06 and have been painting over bare plaster ever since...) and that should give me my Sunday afternoons back, for reading, blogging, computer gaming, etc. (cue my lovely wife, Jo, muttering something along the lines of "nice try, mister..." as she dusts off the list marked 'additional chores: urgent'...)

So anyway, I'm hoping to read a lot more short fiction next year.

I know from long experience, both as a bookseller and, latterly, a review 'zine editor, that short fiction as a general form does have its detractors. Mostly they're folks who say that they prefer to invest longer amounts of time in the fiction they read; that they like to get involved in a fulll-length novel and really connect with the characters, plots and situations; or, rather typically, that they "don't like the way short stories always seem to stop just as they're getting interesting".

Well, I agree with the first few sentiments expressed, but I agree more with the countless commentators (I'm really not going to try to claim credit for this as any sort of original thought on my part) who point out that these folks have rather missed the point of good short fiction with that last objection.

A good short story delivers a short, sharp, hit - in what could be either or both of the narcotic and pugilistic senses - of, well, something. Catharsis, revelation, speculation, imagery, intrigue, bafflement... something. And if that means that they do stop "just as they're getting interesting", well, perhaps that was the whole point of the story; perhaps the writer fully intended to leave the reader hanging, suspended in a moment of contemplation, intrigued and desiring further resolution. That's often how and why some short stories stay with you long after you've read them, a pin-prick of bright memory amidst the bulk of dull, grey matter, and so forth.

Fair enough, if that's not your cup of tea - if, say, you'd generally rather listen to a two-hour concept album than a compilation mix-CD - then that's fine, of course. But personally, I love that hit of... whatever... and as I am rather hopelessly addicted to variety in both literature and music, and short fiction surely seems the best way to satisfy the former craving.

And I reckon there are enough good writers out there - and enough publishers with the good sense to make sure that their work sees the light of day - to keep me well-stocked with premium material pretty much all year round, if I wanted to. I know I've got any number of anthologies and collections on the shelves that I've yet to dive into.

I'm reading the latest two issues of PS Publishing's always excellent (and multiple award-winning) Postscripts magazine at the moment [declaration of possible bias: I'm a PS staffer, having run the PS website for a number of years, but hey, ask anyone how good Postscripts is and you'll hear the same thing, and anyway, why the hell haven't you subscribed yet..?] and then I've got five issues of D.F. Lewis's Nemonymous lined up as well. And I'm thinking of trying to pick up pretty much one of everything published by Andrew Hook's Elastic Press - although I can already make a start on Mike O'Driscoll's The Unbecoming, which I snapped up in the Fantasycon dealers' room - and then Chris Teague's Pendragon Press will most likely be raided as well.

Not that I'll be giving up on novels entirely of course. There's just far too much must-read meterial already on the shelf, and a whole stack of potentially great stuff lined up for next year. But I would like to broaden my horizons - horribly cramped as they've become due to the lack of commuter reading-time since May and the aforementioned self-inflicted slave labour - and what better way to satiate my fiction-flavoured cravings than with a whole series of short, sharp hits?

Feel free to recommend particulalry strong collections and / or anthologies in the comments there, folks (and yes, I have already read Joe Hill's Twentieth Century Ghosts, and yes, it was bloody marvellous...)