miscellanea
So I'm not exactly sure what is up with the bookclub this year, but here's what I've been reading.
Her Smoke Rose Up Forever (James Tiptree Jr): The only Tiptree I'd read before this was The Screwfly Solution, and I still think that's her best. But a lot of these are pretty sharp. I note, incidentally, that knowing her gender wasn't known when a lot of these were being written made me look for gender clues in the text way more than if she'd been known to be female.
Impro (Keith Johnstone): This is seriously deep psychological juju -- it must have been a bombshell when it came out. The stuff in the middle is forgettable but the beginning section on status transaction and the ending one on masks/voodoo/hypnosis are each pretty incredible. (Writers, in particular, might dig the notes on power dynamics in the status transactions chapter.)
The Best Software Writing I (edited by Joel Spolsky): The problem with software writing, as Spolsky points out in his foreward, is there isn't a lot of it, and less that is any good. But it turns out the corollary to this is if you collect the best stuff in a book, then most of your target audience will have read most of it already, especially if you've linked it from your website in the past and so on. The stuff I hadn't read was mostly conference papers, which tend to be either too specialized for a general audience or mostly hot air. But nevertheless there are a bunch of good essays in here, if you like this sort of thing.
Gentlemen of the Road (Michael Chabon): The working title for this was Jews with Swords, which suggests I am exactly the target audience. Chabon feels a little rusty with the genre, to the point of stumbling on the pacing and repeating a plot device twice, but this is basically Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser meet the Khazars, and you can't go wrong with that. It also has an decent apologetic at the end about serious literature vs adventure literature. I assume it's there mostly as a sop to his "normal" audience, but it's still interesting to see his take.
The Alchemist's Apprentice (Dave Duncan): This is another book for which I am exactly the target audience -- a guy is apprenticed to Nostradamus's nephew in fantasy Renaissance Venice, and fights, reads tarot, summons demons, and solves mysteries (with just a touch of Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin thrown in). Really, what more do I have to say.
Crystal Rain (Tobias S. Buckell): This one, on the other hand, I am not quite the target audience for. I like the setting and the technology and I like what he's done with the ethnicities*, and I like the thing where a dude was a badass in the past but has lost his memory now, but I really don't like war novels. Like, all the strategy and tactics and we move our blimp there and they dig this ditch and we run this flanking maneuver and we lost a hundred guys, all good men just leave me cold, and a good half of the book was taken up with that. The rest of it was pretty good, though.
*I feel a little sorry for the Aztecs, but maybe they're just Central American Nazis and I should stop feeling bad that everyone picks on them.
In addition to reading books, I recently got a review copy of Le Réprobateur which is an interesting interactive digital media thing. My review of that is here.
Her Smoke Rose Up Forever (James Tiptree Jr): The only Tiptree I'd read before this was The Screwfly Solution, and I still think that's her best. But a lot of these are pretty sharp. I note, incidentally, that knowing her gender wasn't known when a lot of these were being written made me look for gender clues in the text way more than if she'd been known to be female.
Impro (Keith Johnstone): This is seriously deep psychological juju -- it must have been a bombshell when it came out. The stuff in the middle is forgettable but the beginning section on status transaction and the ending one on masks/voodoo/hypnosis are each pretty incredible. (Writers, in particular, might dig the notes on power dynamics in the status transactions chapter.)
The Best Software Writing I (edited by Joel Spolsky): The problem with software writing, as Spolsky points out in his foreward, is there isn't a lot of it, and less that is any good. But it turns out the corollary to this is if you collect the best stuff in a book, then most of your target audience will have read most of it already, especially if you've linked it from your website in the past and so on. The stuff I hadn't read was mostly conference papers, which tend to be either too specialized for a general audience or mostly hot air. But nevertheless there are a bunch of good essays in here, if you like this sort of thing.
Gentlemen of the Road (Michael Chabon): The working title for this was Jews with Swords, which suggests I am exactly the target audience. Chabon feels a little rusty with the genre, to the point of stumbling on the pacing and repeating a plot device twice, but this is basically Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser meet the Khazars, and you can't go wrong with that. It also has an decent apologetic at the end about serious literature vs adventure literature. I assume it's there mostly as a sop to his "normal" audience, but it's still interesting to see his take.
The Alchemist's Apprentice (Dave Duncan): This is another book for which I am exactly the target audience -- a guy is apprenticed to Nostradamus's nephew in fantasy Renaissance Venice, and fights, reads tarot, summons demons, and solves mysteries (with just a touch of Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin thrown in). Really, what more do I have to say.
Crystal Rain (Tobias S. Buckell): This one, on the other hand, I am not quite the target audience for. I like the setting and the technology and I like what he's done with the ethnicities*, and I like the thing where a dude was a badass in the past but has lost his memory now, but I really don't like war novels. Like, all the strategy and tactics and we move our blimp there and they dig this ditch and we run this flanking maneuver and we lost a hundred guys, all good men just leave me cold, and a good half of the book was taken up with that. The rest of it was pretty good, though.
*I feel a little sorry for the Aztecs, but maybe they're just Central American Nazis and I should stop feeling bad that everyone picks on them.
In addition to reading books, I recently got a review copy of Le Réprobateur which is an interesting interactive digital media thing. My review of that is here.