Simple Tricks and Nonsense

No doubt my teenage self would be surprised and disappointed to learn this, but the truth is I don't read a lot of science fiction anymore, and even when I did, my interests tended toward the less-respectible, less-than-serious stuff: movie tie-ins, old pulp heroes like Doc Savage and John Carter, and space opera. So-called "hard" SF or the tomes with literary and/or philosophical aspirations rarely caught my interest. Which means I'm usually at something of a disadvantage when I'm confronted by those lists of the Great Works that occasionally circulate, because I just haven't read many of the Great Works. Even so, I always feel the compulsion to throw in my two cents anyway because, you know... they're lists. And lists, by their very existence, demand that you comment on them, because they're inevitably just some other person's ideas of what constitutes greatness, and we all know that mileage varies. Especially when you're contrary by nature, as I tend to be.

Anyhow, here's one such list of 100 SF books that everyone supposedly needs to read, discovered and meme-ized by the always-reliable Jaquandor. Following his lead, I shall bold the titles I've read, italicize those I own but haven't gotten around to reading, and color red the ones I do not own but hope to read one of these days. I've also added a twist by striking out the handful of titles that I know I never want to read. And of course, there will be commentary. So... onward!

Continue reading "100 SF Books Everyone Should Read" »

Posted by at 8:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

A number of my regular blog-reads have been playing this week with a little doodad that analyzes a sample of your writing and determines which famous writer your style most resembles. Or something. (I cynically suspect it just grabs well-known names at random from a list. But maybe not. What do I know?)

Anyhow, I can't resist trying these things out for myself, so I plugged in my angry "Synchcronicity II" blog entry from a couple weeks ago and this is what I got:

I write like
Stephen King

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

And you know what? That's fine by me. In fact, it's awesome. I've never felt like I had a "favorite author" the way many people espouse, no one whom I've felt compelled to study and memorize and read every single work by that person, but if I'm forced to pick someone, King is usually my answer. He's vulgar, yes, and frequently self-indulgent, and when he's off his game, he really stinks up the place. But when he's good -- and he is good more often than his detractors would have you believe -- he's brutally effective in taking readers where he wants them to go. I admire his plain-spoken prose style, his grasp of real-life detail, his ability to make the most outlandish threats seem immediate and real (at least as long as you're under his spell), and of course his deep understanding of and empathy for lower-middle-class and working-class Americans, a demographic that's rarely handled with a fair hand, in my opinion.

No other author makes me want to write fiction of my own the way I do after I read something of King's (although my recent discovery Charlaine Harris comes close).

Posted by at 7:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I think this speaks for itself (click on the image if you can't read the fine print and need to enlarge it):

My man Rick has actually had a pretty colorful -- and sometimes difficult -- life: He became a teen idol at the improbably advanced age of 32 (when "Jessie's Girl" hit number one) after years of struggling to find an American audience, and he's struggled ever since to find respect as a genuine musician instead of a one-bubblegum-hit wonder; he lived for several years with Linda Blair of Exorcist fame -- she was all of 15 when they moved in together, and he was a decade older (I imagine that raised a few eyebrows, even in the anything-goes 1970s); he collapsed into a deep depression in the late '80s, when it seemed his moment had come and gone in such a brief span of time, and he actually contemplated suicide; and now at the age of 60, he's rebuilt both his musical and acting career, and consistently puts on one of the best live shows I've ever seen, even if it's only his hardcore fans who ever actually see it.

Assuming that he can write prose at all (or has found himself a good ghost writer), I expect all this ought to make for a hell of a read...

At least, that's my hope. I still remember all too well my excitement at the news that Jimmy Buffett was writing a memoir, and the crushing disappointment when I finally got around to reading it. All those wild experiences and people that surely inspired his songs about swashbucklers and vagabonds, the rumors that he'd made ends meet for a while by smuggling weed from Cuba to Key West, the beer-drinking-and-hell-raising early days of his career... that's what I expected from A Pirate Looks at Fifty. Instead, I got a fairly boring travelogue written by a middle-aged capitalist who thinks he's more clever with a turn of phrase than he often is. Rick, old buddy, don't let me down the way Jimmy did...

Posted by at 11:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I spotted the following meme on the subject of comic books over at SamuraiFrog's last night and thought it'd be fun to do it today, in honor of Free Comic Book Day. If you're unaware of it, Free Comic Book Day is held annually on the first Saturday in May, and it's exactly what the name suggests: Participating comic shops nationwide give away free comics to anyone who sets foot through the door. The idea is to try and draw new readers -- and customers -- into the somewhat insular world of this hobby that, quite honestly and sadly, is in decline.

Unfortunately, I ran out of time before I had to leave the house for the day, and the moment of maximum relevance has now passed. That's pretty typical for me anymore, I'm afraid. Always a day late and a dollar short. I'm going to do the meme anyhow, though. Hope nobody minds.

For the record, I am really just a dilettante in the world of comics. I've been lurking around the fringes of this particular scene off and on for years, and I enjoy reading the form, but I've never gotten into full-bore into the hobby. Much of my knowledge of the important characters and stories comes not from the primary source material, the comics themselves, but from the movies and cartoons based upon them, and from occasional research when something comes up in conversation.

Just so y'all know where I'm coming from...

Continue reading "Comic Book Meme" »

Posted by at 11:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

When I was in San Francisco last year, I did what every tourist with the slightest literary pretension does in that town: I stopped by the famed City Lights Bookstore and bought a copy of Jack Kerouac's On the Road. It's one of those classics I've always heard the cool kids talking about and meant to read myself, but somehow never quite got around to it. Not until last winter, anyhow.

My plan to blog my reactions to the book that defined an influential subculture never quite materialized, naturally, and given how mushy my memory seems to have become lately, I no longer recall many specifics about it. I do remember liking it in general, although Kerouac's style gave me some problems. The narrative occasionally slips into stream-of-consciousness -- never a technique I've liked very much -- and the beatnik slang peppered throughout is sometimes, well, laughable. (I recognize, of course, that this is an unfortunate result of time, and that when On the Road was originally published in 1957, the language must've been fresh and exciting. Sadly, though, it's been so parodied over the past 50 years that it's nearly impossible to encounter it today without thinking of silly stereotypes like Maynard G. Krebs -- the "G" is for "Walter" -- or a hundred cartoons featuring skinny men in black turtlenecks, sunglasses, and berets who snap their fingers a lot.) On the positive side, however, the book has a genuine verisimilitude, and the reader gets the sense of being privileged to experience an unknown subculture through the eyes of an insider, without any filters or censorship. And Kerouac really captures the restless, hungry-to-see-and-do-it-all energy that consumes many (if not all) young people.

Anyway, I bring this up now because I was sifting through a stack of junk on my desk this afternoon, came across my copy of On the Road (which has been sitting there since, oh, February or thereabouts), and saw that it still had all the sticky-tabs I'd placed on passages I found particularly striking. I thought I'd post some of them here, for my own amusement if no one else's...

Continue reading "Passages of Interest from On the Road" »

Posted by at 4:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Reading the Sunday funnies yesterday brought me to an important moment of self-realization.

No, really.

You see, yesterday's edition of "Get Fuzzy" turned on a disparaging reference to the TV sitcom Two and a Half Men, a series that seems to be deeply loathed by a not-insignificant number of people. I like it, myself; it's not remotely deep, but I find it is consistently laugh-out-loud funny, at least to my sensibilities, and I'm frankly baffled by the level of ire I often see directed at this amiable -- if admittedly crass -- little show.

So I was thinking all of these things about Two and a Half Men and suddenly it struck me.

OMG... I like crap.

The things the sophisticates, connoisseurs, intellectuals, and hipsters generally decry as lowbrow, superficial, or -- how I have come to loathe this word! -- cheesy are often the things I most enjoy. And in turn the things that make them gush with enthusiasm and sweet, sticky joy tend to leave me, well, unimpressed. Consider the evidence:

Continue reading "I Like Crap" »

Posted by at 11:38 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)

I still want to address the passing of Farrah Fawcett and Michael Jackson, but given the big subject matter earlier this week, I am hesitant to turn this into the "all obituaries, all the time" blog. Besides, I'm not really in the mood right now to talk about losing more of the familiar trappings of my youth. So instead, I'm going to offer up another item I've been meaning to post for a while, an image I spotted at Michael May's Adventureblog some time ago. It's probably a bit advanced for laypeople and casual geeks, but it certainly made me smile:

If you don't get it, start here, then proceed here. And if you still don't think this is funny after doing your research, well, then, I can't help you.

Posted by at 1:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

It's been a busy, busy week here in the Proofreader's Cave, and I haven't had the time to even think about blogging, let alone actually do any (very frustrating, especially with today's pair of celebrity deaths -- one expected, the other shockingly not -- practically screaming for my attention). But I would like to briefly note the passing on Tuesday of one of Salt Lake's leading citizens, Sam Weller, whose eponymous Sam Weller's Zion Bookstore has long been the literary epicenter of the city. Sam didn't actually found the store, but he did change its name when he took it over from his father in 1946. In a painfully ironic twist, he was forced to retire 12 years ago -- leaving the store in the capable hands of his own son, Tony -- after losing his eyesight. That's always struck me as an impossibly sad fate for a bookseller, and just a little too uncomfortably close to that old Twilight Zone episode that starred Burgess Meredith. You remember, the one called "Time Enough at Last," the one where the bookworm survives a nuclear war and looks forward to finally catching up on his reading now that there's no one around to bug him, but then he drops his spectacles and they shatter, leaving him blind as a bat. Ugh...

Anyhow, you can read more about Sam's life and his store here. He was 88 years old. I have more to say about my own experiences with Sam Weller's Zion Books, but it'll have to wait. Like Burgess Meredith pre-apocalypto, I simply haven't the time right now...

Posted by at 5:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

I've read in a couple different places this morning that the venerable magazine Starlog -- which is for sci-fi fans something like Rolling Stone is to music lovers -- has ceased publication. The official announcement calls it a "temporary" cessation while the publishers re-evaluate and revamp, and they apparently intend to continue producing digital content for their website, but I think we know what this move really means. For all intents and purposes, after 33 years and 374 issues, Starlog is finished. It may live on in a diminished form as some kind of blog or genre-centric website, but there are thousands, if not millions, of those already, and Starlog.com is going to have a hard time differentiating itself from, say, io9. The most public and respectable face of science-fiction film and television fandom -- our only honest-to-god, widely distributed, often-seen-on-regular-newsstands magazine -- is dead.

Continue reading "Starlog: 1976-2009" »

Posted by at 9:52 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This is kind of incongruous, coming as it does on the heels of yesterday's remark that I really don't like living here in the future, but I was somewhat excited this morning to have my first in-the-wild encounter with one of those Kindle electronic-book gadgets everybody's been talking about. It was in the hands of a well-dressed older woman sitting a few rows ahead of me on the train.

And why, you may be asking, would a self-confessed semi-Luddite late-adopter like myself be thrilled to glimpse a device that signifies yet another step away from my precious Way Things Used to Be? Well, partly it was just the novelty of actually seeing an object that I've heard so much about but which has been, up until now, only an abstraction. That whole experience of "oh, there's one of those things!" That's always fun. But what really pushed my buttons was a fleeting sense that I'd somehow stumbled into a Star Trek episode. Seriously. Even though I've seen plenty of photos of the Kindle (obviously, since I identified it easily enough; I even recognized it as a Kindle 2 instead of the earlier model), I'll be damned if my first thought wasn't, "Hey, that woman is looking at one of those thingies Picard was always using on Next Gen!" I've been saying for years that the world seems to be inevitably becoming more like Star Trek; here we have another piece of evidence in support of that theory.

So, to review, I don't like living in the future because I'm a nostalgic bastard who prefers the past, but I was excited to see a futuristic device because it resembled a prop seen on a 20-year-old television show that was set... in the future.

Yeah, I'm confused, too. Welcome inside my head.

Continue reading "I Have Seen the Future" »

Posted by at 10:20 AM | Permalink | Comments (6)

Continuing on with my literary ramblings, for those who may be interested...

Continue reading "2008 Media Wrap-Up: Books, Part Two" »

Posted by at 1:16 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

I felt like I had a pretty good reading year in '08, even though I actually completed two fewer books than in 2007 (only 22 versus 24 last year). I blame the discrepancy on the length of a couple of them, more than anything; I never have a moment when I'm not in the middle of something. Anyhow, the book lists are below the fold.

We'll start with what my fifth-grade teacher used to call the "true" stuff:

Continue reading "2008 Media Wrap-Up: Books" »

Posted by at 11:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

I spotted this short meme over at Byzantium's Shores a few days ago...

Continue reading "New Book Meme" »

Posted by at 9:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I reject the notion that anything popular can't be good. I don't want to be obscure; I want to be read.

--Michael Crichton, 1994

I'm sure everyone's heard by now that the best-selling novelist Michael Crichton died earlier this week, yet another victim of cancer, struck down at the relatively youthful age of 66. I have to admit that my feelings about him and his passing are a bit more muddled than is usually the case when I write these tributes.

I used to be a big admirer of his back in high school and college. His prose was serviceable at best, never soaring, but he was a master at plot, which was my primary interest in fiction in those days, and I found the science on which he based his plots fascinating and thought-provoking. I was an aspiring novelist myself, and on something of a personal crusade against the sort of high-minded literature that was read in academic settings but no where else. Actually, I should clarify that: I had no problem with Literature-with-a-capital-L itself -- I even liked some of it -- but I hated the snobbery that came along with it, the implication that there was something inherently wrong with fiction that simply entertained. (I still hate that attitude, come to think of it.) The popular stuff was what I preferred to read on my own time, and what I wanted to write myself, and I was always on the lookout for something that would validate my feelings on the issue. Crichton became a hero to me after I read that quote up there at the top of this entry in a newspaper interview; I scribbled it down in my notebook and used it for inspiration -- and ammunition during arguments -- for a very long time.

But then, perhaps inevitably, I cooled on Crichton, partly because my tastes were changing and I was finally coming to understand some of the criticisms of his writing, and partly because I think the quality of his work declined following Jurassic Park. The final straw came a couple years ago, when I was moved to publicly denounce him after learning of his shameful and childish attack on a journalist who'd had the temerity to question his ideas. You can read the details yourself, but the short version is that my old hero revealed himself to be a royal jerk. He wasn't the first of my heroes who turned out to have feet of clay, but he was the most extreme in terms of how genuinely distasteful he revealed himself to be.

So now, upon his untimely death, the question for me is, which Michael Crichton should I be remembering? The one whose work I enjoyed and found inspirational as a young man or the one whose pettiness and total lack of class utterly disgusted me as a grown man? Which was the "true" Crichton?

Perhaps the best way to memorialize him is as a genuine human being who, like all human beings, was more complicated than strangers knew or believed, who had it in them to both please us and let us down. He wasn't a marble statue, and he didn't ask a naive college freshman into idolizing him.

And I should also keep in mind that despite my disillusion with the man, The Great Train Robbery, which he directed, is still a damn entertaining movie...

Posted by at 12:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Never mind the cognitive dissonance of watching a video trailer for a book, this is something I think I need to pick up:

Jetpack Dreams Trailer from Mac Montandon on Vimeo.

I, too, mourn for the future we never had. Sometimes it really sucks to be an aging geek stuck in the real world...

(Via Boing Boing, of course!)

Posted by at 9:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

My friend Jen has led me to a couple of Internet quizzes today, about what my taste in art says about me and what sort of intelligence I have, according to Howard Gardner... read on to discover arcane trivia about yours truly!

Continue reading "Friday Timewasters" »

Posted by at 12:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Something that's been bothering me lately is the difficulty I have remembering books these days. If you throw out the title of something I know I've read, I can usually summon an impression of whether I liked or disliked it, and maybe some quality that contributed to said impression (e.g., it was pretentious, it was fun, etc.), but the specifics of plot, character, style, the writer's voice... these details have more often than not evaporated from my brain without a trace.

It didn't used to be this way. I used to have excellent recall, and I don't know if the change is a consequence of getting older, or of having so many more concerns competing for my attention now that I'm a grown-up, or even because of some mundane thing like not getting enough sleep or something. Whatever the cause, I don't like it. I mean, I really don't like it. Recently, I tried keeping a book journal to try and help my retention. I failed utterly, giving in to procrastination and ultimately abandoning the thing after only three or so completed books. My efforts at reviewing books here on the blog haven't been any better.

And so I've been struggling to accept the reality that, even though I'm more or less constantly reading, not much of that effort is sticking. It's hard not to feel like some kind of failure, or to worry that I'm getting old and losing something that used to be effortless, or to wonder if I was just fooling myself for all those years that I thought I was such a literary person.

Apparently, I'm not the only one:

In fact, an afterglow is about all that is left to me of many - maybe most - of the books I have read, and, as age advances, less and less of what I read is retained in any solider form. The one thing I liked about Nicholson Baker's U And I was his frank admission that, of the Updike he had read, he remembered very little indeed - and wasn't going to look again to refresh his memory (well, that's how I remember it anyway, and I'm certainly not going to check Baker again).

Does it matter how much we remember of books? Does it matter even if no memory at all is available to our conscious mind? I know I must have read large numbers of books that I don't even remember reading - occasionally I find myself reading one, and realise I'm actually rereading... What I like to think is that the better ones (of the books I do at least remember reading) have left some beneficial trace at a level somewhere just below the conscious, retrievable memory - an afterglow, an aura, a faint fragrance... Or maybe I'm deluding myself?

Do books leave a residue somewhere in the unconscious mind? I hope they do. It's nice to imagine so, anyway...

(Via Sullivan.)

Posted by at 1:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

I've missed out on a lot of intriguing memes lately because I haven't had the time to comment on lengthy lists of stuff, so when I spotted a fairly short one over at SF Signal, I figured I'd better grab it. It's about sci-fi movies based on books...

[Update: Looks like I was having a moment of extreme dumbness when when I posted this last night -- instead of doing as the third rule asks and italicizing only the movie titles for which which I started the book but didn't finish it, I italicized all of the titles. Because they're titles and you're supposed to italicize those. Doh! Anyway, they're fixed now, if it matters to anyone...]

Continue reading "Movies from Books Meme" »

Posted by at 11:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Oh, I think I'm going to like this... via Michael May's Adventureblog I've just heard about a new series of pulp-adventure novels to be published by Hard Case Crime, the wonderful small-press company that's been trying to single-handedly revive a bygone aesthetic with a mix of Golden Age reprints and new material by current authors, all wrapped in lurid vintage-style art work. (FYI, Hard Case may be best known for publishing Stephen King's experimental mystery/journalism novel The Colorado Kid, which I quite liked although I know many other folks did not).

Bookgasm has the goods on this new series:

Debuting next May, the novels will be issued once a month in true serial fashion, ghostwritten by several Hard Case authors under the nom de plume of [Gabriel] Hunt himself, the globetrotting adventurer, with painted covers by Glen Orbik.

The publisher promises classic adventure fiction aimed squarely at “anyone who grew up reading H. Rider Haggard and Edgar Rice Burroughs or watching Harrison Ford wield his bullwhip at the movies.” Sounds right up my alley, and in fact I'm jealous I didn't think of doing this myself. The timing probably couldn't be better; I suspect there's a whole lot of people out there for whom Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull was just good enough to whet their appetite for more period adventure, but they haven't quite known where to find it. In fact, when I saw the promo art above, I thought at first glance that it was for a new Indy tie-in (it was the Sallah clone in the fez that did it, I think, since Gabriel Hunt himself looks more like Rick O'Connell in the Mummy movies).

Anyhow, if you think this might be something you'd like, too, head over to "Hunt's" official web site and sign up for the email newsletter. I'll post more details about the series as I encounter them...

Posted by at 1:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I realized the previous entry was getting to be ridiculously long, so I moved the book list over here. Read on...

Continue reading "Top 100 of the Last 25, Part 2" »

Posted by at 1:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Great, more lists. This time we're looking at Entertainment Weekly's Top 100 Movies and Top 100 Books of the last 25 years. I'm not going to quibble with the actual rankings of these titles, since such things are almost entirely subjective in my opinion. My super-bestest faves aren't likely to be yours, after all. But what I will do is follow in Jaquandor's footsteps and bold the titles I've seen or read, with occasional commentary when I have something to say.

Continue reading "Top 100 of the Last 25 " »

Posted by at 11:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

I'm such a sucker for these meme/booklist things. Sigh.

Courtesy of Jaquandor:

...it's a list of books most often marked "Unread" on LibraryThing, indicating books people have copies of either so they can say they own them, or in the best intentions of reading 'em someday if only James Patterson would quit churning out must-read thrillers or whatnot. (Like I'm any different!) Anyway, the instructions are to bold the ones you've read, underline the ones you read for school, and italicize the ones you've started but not finished. I'll add another two rules: strike the ones you know you'll never, ever read and don't even own a copy of, and mark with a star (*) the ones you own and really, genuinely intend to read one of these days. OK? OK!

(Note: I made a few minor editorial changes to Jaq's set-up; hope nobody minds!)

To this set of instructions, I'd also add a mark to indicate the books you do not own but would like to read one of these days. Let's make that one a plus sign ( +).

Alright then, shall we?

Continue reading "Another Book List/Meme Thingie" »

Posted by at 2:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

You may recall me mentioning a while back that Pixar is adapting Edgar Rice Burroughs' fabulous pulp novels about John Carter of Mars into a mixed live-action/CGI film trilogy. Well, I've just learned they're not the first animators to take a crack at ERB's manly Virginia gentleman who becomes the warlord of an alien world. Another attempt was made to translate Carter to film way back in the 1930s by Bob Clampett, an alumnus of Warner Brothers' famous Termite Terrace and the director of many well-known Looney Tunes shorts (including one of my favorites, Falling Hare, in which Bugs Bunny battles a gremlin).

According to this guy, the attempt never amounted to much, because Clampett and ERB had a different creative vision than the movie studios -- unthinkable, I know! -- but Clampett got as far as making some test footage, which I now present as a Fascinating Historical Curiosity:

I don't know about you, but I think that stuff looks really cool, very much in the vein of the extremely nifty Superman shorts produced by Max Fleischer in the '40s. The running thoat -- the eight-legged animal -- is especially impressive. Sigh. Yet another item for the "If Only" file...

(Hat tip to Chris Roberson for posting the video first.)

Posted by at 3:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Back in high school, my AP English teacher was fond of telling us that all fiction could be divided into "Literature with a capital L" -- i.e., the good, important work, the books you read for AP English class -- and everything else, which was, by implication, crap.

Needless to say, his list of "Literature with a capital L" did not include any science fiction titles. (Well, to be fair, it did include 1984 and Brave New World, which are technically SF, but they weren't SF by my exacting standards of the time... no spaceships, you see.) This was 1987, way before geeks conquered the world, and SF was a ghetto genre that was widely dismissed as kid stuff, or else as disposable, escapist fare that couldn't possibly provoke any worthwhile thoughts in its readers, and could possibly even be harmful to thinking. Even when you were reading the best the genre had to offer, there was something slightly shameful about being seen with it, as if you were just exiting a strip club and didn't want to run into anyone you knew.

Nevertheless, I was a fan, dammit, and I was utterly incensed by the idea that the books and movies I loved above all others were considered second-class. I was a smart kid with good grades, college-bound for sure; reading SF certainly hadn't caused any damage to my brain cells. Obviously, I needed to send a message, to strike a blow against the elistist literati who thought that dreary English moors made for better settings against which to explore the human heart than the surface of alien planets. It was, in the immortal words of Chris Knight, a moral imperative!

My message was to be a lengthy research paper on the genre, specifically on the giants of science fiction's Golden Age: Robert A. Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, and Arthur C. Clarke. Through sheer logic and examples I no longer recall, I set out to prove that the work of these three men was just as significant and influential, just as important, and most of all just as literary, as anything produced by Faulkner or Fitzgerald or whoever else we'd been reading in class.

What can I say? I was young.

Looking at those three authors now, through eyes that have seen a hell of a lot more of life than the ones that eagerly watched my old teacher for any signs of capitulation in the face of my audacious act of rebellion, I suspect I would probably come to different conclusions than I did back then. I haven't actually read these authors in years. But from what I recall of their work, Heinlein -- always my favorite of the three, by the way -- would probably strike me as a writer of excellent adventure stories that weren't lacking in significant ideas but perhaps also were not as profound as my 17-year-old self believed. As for Asimov... well, I doubt I could get through an Asimov novel these days; even when I was 17, I thought his characters were little more than cardboard props, and I suspect his most famous works probably haven't aged very well. No, out of my "holy trinity," only Arthur C. Clarke, the legendary science fiction author who died yesterday at the age of 90, produced anything that I would dare to call "Literature."

Continue reading "In Memoriam: Arthur C. Clarke" »

Posted by at 11:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (8)

Here's kind of an interesting little page, whereupon you can listen to "brief recordings of authors and illustrators saying their names." I must confess that I don't recognize most of the names on the list, and also it seems that some of the names are pretty self-explanatory -- really, who can't figure out how to pronounce "Ann M. Martin"? -- but I like the idea here. It would be especially useful in science fiction circles, where many authors seem to flaunt esoteric and/or eccentric noms de plume.

(Manys the time I've encountered some doughy geek-boy in a Doctor Who t-shirt -- the sort who claim to despise the original Star Trek but secretly covet Captain Kirk's skill with the ladies, green-skinned and otherwise -- who defiantly insists that Author X says his or her name this way, and anyone who would dare to pronounce it differently is obviously a complete ignoramus. It's a sci-fi thing, I guess, that unique combination of obstinate arrogance and screaming insecurity.)

In any event, the web site did help me clear up one nagging question for me: Neil Gaiman, author of the amazing Sandman comics among other things, says his last name "GAY-mun," not "GUY-mun." Good to know...

Posted by at 3:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This kind of random, but here's a meme I ran across somewhere in my blog-wanderings today that looked kind of fun. First up, the obligatory description of The Rules:

1. Pick up the nearest book ( of at least 123 pages).
2. Open the book to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the next three sentences.
5. Tag five people.

Let's proceed, shall we?

Continue reading "123 Meme" »

Posted by at 4:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

A meme about reading, ganked from Jaquandor:

Continue reading "Reading Meme" »

Posted by at 11:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

Diving right in:

Continue reading "2007 Media Wrap-Up: Books" »

Posted by at 12:58 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I finished the Harry Potter series back around the end of August -- I meant to write a nice long entry about the experience and my reactions to the whole Potter phenom, but, as you may have noticed, I haven't been able to write many nice long entries lately; the short version is that I liked these books, far more than I ever anticipated -- and I've got to admit, it never occurred to me that Dumbledore was gay. His sexuality never entered into my conception of him at all, actually, just as I never really wondered what kind of trouble Gandalf got himself up to after smoking a big old bowlful of, ahem, "hobbit leaf," or whether crazy old Ben Kenobi occasionally liked to visit the famous "Bantha Ranch" House of Hospitality in Anchorhead's red-light district. The respective texts simply don't provide -- nor do the stories require -- this level of characterization for these guys, who we all know are little more than archetypal mentor figures, no matter that we love them so much. But hey, if Rowling says Dumbledore is gay, then so be it. She would know better than us, and it doesn't trouble me in the least if he is. It's just not anything I imagined, and I personally don't see any hard evidence for it within the story. (I will grant that Dumbledore is probably the best fleshed-out of the three mentors, in terms of having a detailed backstory that the reader is allowed to experience as part of the book's main plot, but there's still nothing there that suggested any kind of a sex life, gay or straight, in my opinion.)

That doesn't mean, of course, that other people won't see whatever they want to see now that the idea has been planted. I imagine this will only add fuel to the fire for those busybody whackjobs who are already down on the Potter books because they've got our kids thinking about that evil, nasty witchcraft. Um, yeah... and all the other beloved classic stories that people have been exposing their kids to for generations, from the Brothers Grimm to The Wizard of Oz to, yes, Star Wars, have absolutely nothing to do with magic or the supernatural...

Posted by at 9:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (11)

Some of my favorite books growing up were the so-called Martian Tales of Edgar Rice Burroughs, the pulpy adventures of a Civil War veteran from Virginia named John Carter who is magically transported to the dying planet Mars (Barsoom, to the locals), where he encounters all manner of creatures, monsters, beasts, villains, lunatics, arcane technology, ancient civilizations, and, of course, beautiful, scantily clad women as seen in the wonderful artwork above. (That painting by Michael Whelan was used for the cover of the first book in the series, A Princess of Mars, during the 1970s and '80s, and is the imagery I automatically associate with these stories. Click to embiggen.)

For an adolescent boy who had moved beyond childish things but hasn't yet hit the full flush of puberty -- say around 11 or 12 -- those books were like catnip for the imagination, amazing, swashbuckling stories in which swordplay mingled with anti-gravity technology, and adventure and feats of derring-do were always in the offing. Oh, and did I mention the scantily clad women?

There has been talk of a movie version of Princess of Mars for years, but nothing has ever come of it, probably because special effects technology just wasn't up to the task of depicting what Burroughs described without coming off as impossibly cheesy. At least not at a halfway-reasonable cost. And an animated Barsoom movie, while always possible, probably would've been prohibitively expensive, too, certainly if it was going to be as eye-popping as it deserves to be.

That's no longer a problem, however, and it looks like a John Carter movie may finally be happening. Even better, it's being developed by Pixar, a film company with what I would consider to be a flawless record.

Continue reading "Pixar Is Going to Barsoom!" »

Posted by at 8:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Here's a bummer note on which to start the weekend: SF Signal is repeating the news that author Madeleine L'Engle, best known for the classic children's story A Wrinkle in Time and its various sequels, died last night at her home in Connecticut. She was 89, so she had a good, long life at least. And of course her books will no doubt remain in print for a long, long time to come, a form of immortality that everyone who puts words to paper dreams of achieving.

I blogged some time ago about revisiting Wrinkle when I had to write an essay on a favorite childhood book for a job interview; you can read that essay, as well, if you've a mind to.

You never realize how much some of those long-forgotten things from childhood really mean to you until something forcibly reminds you. A couple years ago, it was a job interview that got me thinking about Wrinkle and its sequel, A Swiftly Tilting Planet, which I also loved (I never got around to reading the other twothree books in the Time QuartetQuintet, as I understand it's called). Today, it's the passing of the lady who created them.

Update: There's a detailed obit up now at The New York Times, and Scalzi has pretty much summed it up with this observation:

...what a great writer she was. Her books remain; in fact, they are on my daughter's bookshelf right now, waiting for her. I envy her that she gets to read them for the first time.

I don't have any children, but I understand that sentiment very well...

Update Two: Hm, it seems there are actually five books in the "time" series: A Wrinkle in Time, A Wind in the Door, A Swiftly Tilting Planet, Many Waters, and An Acceptable Time. Man, am I out of touch with my children's and young adult literature!

Posted by at 5:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Via Boing Boing this morning, I found an interesting New Yorker essay by Adam Gopnik on the late science-fiction novelist Philip K. Dick. Dick has long held a certain amount of fame for writing the novel on which the movie Blade Runner was based, but in recent years he's also become increasingly respected by the Keepers of the Literary Standard, as evidenced by the anthology reprints of his much of his oeuvre in the '90s and the recently published Library of America omnibus edition of his most significant novels. As Gopnik says, "Of all American writers, none have got the genre-hack-to-hidden-genius treatment quite so fully as Philip K. Dick, the California-raised and based science-fiction writer who, beginning in the nineteen-fifties, wrote thirty-six speed-fuelled novels, went crazy in the early seventies, and died in 1982, only fifty-three."

Now, I must be honest, all I really know of Dick's work is some of the movies that have been based on it. I have read Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, the novel that inspired Blade Runner, but I was very young at the time, and it confused the hell out of me. I remember being baffled that it didn't follow the movie more closely, and Dick's tendency to invent words caused me no end of frustration. I've always intended to give the book another try, but haven't gotten around to it yet.

In any event, Gopnik's essay -- which covers Dick's fascinating and tumultuous life, and also offers some insightful criticism of his work -- is a good read, and I recommend it to anyone who has even a passing interest in the subject. However, the point I really want to address with this entry actually turns on a single paragraph:

Continue reading "The Future: Pretty Much More of the Same" »

Posted by at 11:29 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

OK, you know you've been reading too much Harry Potter when you're proofing a technology-related document at work, you start reading a sentence that begins, "Defense against viruses," and your mind sees it as "Defense Against the Dark Arts."

And I'm still only on Book 5. Somebody help me...

Posted by at 10:54 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

I think I must be the last person in the Northern Hemisphere to jump on the Harry Potter bandwagon. (Or should I say the Hogwart's Express? Nah, that would be way too clever and precious, and may even induce vomiting in some of my more sensitive readers...) I simply haven't had much interest in reading children's books, nor have I been able to quite fathom all the grown-ups I've seen on the train who seem utterly engrossed by them.

However, I'm a sucker for a good pop-cultural groundswell, and with the final book and fifth movie in the series debuting in the last few days, and the constant buzz of excitement coming from practically everybody I meet, well, I've finally given in. I started reading the series for the first time a few weeks back (I just began Book 5 today), and yes, I did attend one of the midnight release events on Friday. I'll be writing more about my experiences with Harry soon.

In the meantime, I was really amused to see that not even Sith Lords are immune from hype. No matter what one may think of J.K. Rowling's writing style or the stories themselves -- Harold Bloom, I'm thinking of you, you sour-pussed old killjoy snob -- you cannot deny that this weekend was a remarkable, watershed event. Millions of copies of the same book were distributed all around the world in a single weekend, a good percentage of them in a single night, and a significant number of those books were read cover-to-cover before Monday morning. That's almost unbelievable. Has there ever been any other mass entertainment that has come so close to being a ubiquitous experience, i.e., something that everyone was doing? Maybe the mini-series Roots back in the '70s, or the initial surge of Star Wars's popularity (although both of those played out across longer timeframes than this single, three-day orgy of reading...), but I'm not sure even those things were so big. It's truly mind-boggling, and I doubt it will ever be repeated.

(Credit where it's due: the photo came from here -- I also like the one of Vader in the shower -- and there's an explanation of that photo set here.)

Posted by at 3:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Scalzi is feeling testy today, as you can see in this book meme he's cooked up:

1. Open the book you're currently reading to page 133.

2. Read the fourth line on the page.

3. Put the book back where it had been resting.

4. Tell no one of what it was you just did.

5. Think of five friends to tag with this meme.

6. Do not actually tag them. They are busy and have lives.

7. Go about your life as if nothing has happened.

8. Carry the secret of this meme to your grave.

So did I perform this particular meme? No one will ever know...

Posted by at 3:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

So, all my blather a month ago about the early days of the Star Wars phenomenon put me in the mood to revisit a novel I've not read in probably, oh, 25 years or so: Splinter of the Mind's Eye by Alan Dean Foster.

Continue reading "Book Review: Splinter of the Mind's Eye" »

Posted by at 5:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Two of my favorite stories in my younger days were Jules Verne's Journey to the Center of the Earth and Edgar Rice Burroughs' At the Earth's Core. (Notice I said stories, because, as it happened, I first knew these tales through their movie incarnations, and only came to the original novels later on, with a detour through the Classic Comics versions in between.) Both works stem from the premise that our planet is hollow, or at least contains vast subterranean open spaces, and that there is life, usually some weird mishmash of prehistoric beasts and highly advanced civilizations, in this interior realm.

It's actually a pretty common idea within a certain subset of fantasy-adventure pulp fiction. But just recently I've learned that there are apparently people out there who think it's more than just a good idea for a story. Some people really think the Hollow Earth theory is possible... and one guy aims to prove it:

Continue reading "Beware of Pterodactyls" »

Posted by at 11:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

As fate would have it, today, in addition to the 30th anniversary of Star Wars, is also Towel Day, the international tribute to the late Douglas Adams. The 25th of May is a very hoopy day indeed.

Posted by at 11:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (8)

Just in case anyone is keeping track, I finished Slaughterhouse-Five the other night. It was the first time I've ever read it, and the more I think about it, the more I think I liked it. I'm not prepared to say much about it yet -- I'm afraid my brain's literary-analysis lobe has atrophied quite a bit since I finished college and embarked on a steady diet of non-fiction and lowbrow genre crap -- but I plan to write more after I ponder it for awhile. In the meantime, however, I recommend this classic American novel for those who, like me, missed reading it in school.

I've now moved on to a collection of Vonnegut's short fiction called Welcome to the Monkey House. As with Slaughterhouse, I'm enjoying it. Some of it, anyway; I find short-story collections are, by their very nature, pretty hit-and-miss, with some stories doing more for me than others. There are enough hits happening, however, that I think I'm becoming a definite admirer of Kurt Vonnegut. But there is one thing about him that I'm not getting. All the cover blurbs on these '70s-vintage paperbacks of mine rave about how funny he is, and I'm afraid I just don't see it. Humor is, of course, highly subjective and, I believe, often dependent on historical context -- in other words, I'm suggesting that maybe this stuff was knee-slapping in the era of Vietnam and Watergate but no longer carries the same punch. Or maybe it's just me. Either way, I'm not laughing much at Vonnegut's writing. I find his words truthful, elegant, frequently powerful, often clever, but not funny. He does have a way with an image, though. Consider this line from his story "Who Am I This Time?":

...his eyes (were) still on her. Those eyes burned up clothes faster than she could put them on.

Oh, yeah, I like that. It's got a little noir flavor there, which makes sense in the story's context, it perfectly converys the man's expression, and it's a line that stays with you after you read it. Very nice.

But I still didn't laugh.

Posted by at 10:24 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

As long as I'm in a complaining mood today anyway, I may as well mention that one of the reasons I'm not a big fan of so-called "literary fiction" is the way authors of this stuff so often play with the standard rules and techniques of fiction writing. Presumably they're trying for some kind of effect, and also presumably fans of LitFic appreciate and enjoy this; me, I just think it comes across as pretentious and gimmicky.

Case in point: I'm currently reading a novel called This is the Place by Peter Rock, which, in general, I am enjoying. (Rock has created some wonderful evocations of Wendover, Nevada, and the Bonneville Salt Flats, two places I just visited last month.) However, the guy is apparently unaware of the existence of the quotation mark. None of the book's dialogue uses it. Instead, you're just supposed to pick up from context that someone is speaking, as in this passage:

How you doing, Jamie? The bartender knew what she wanted before she said a word. He brought two cocktails and she drank the first one fast.

I'm doing, she said. Hard at work here.

It's not a huge thing, but it's driving me crazy. It's sometimes confusing, but the biggest issue is that I just don't see any reason, artistic or otherwise, for doing it, and it's coming off as more of a distraction, an affectation, than anything that adds value to the work...

Posted by at 12:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)

Andrew Leonard has a nice personal remembrance of Kurt Vonnegut over at Salon. I think you'll have to sit through a commercial to read the whole thing, but here's the part I liked:

Continue reading "Playing Chess with Vonnegut" »

Posted by at 4:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Renowned author Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., died yesterday at the age of 84, and I find myself rather puzzled by the depth of my reaction to the news. I feel truly, deeply bummed about this, which would make sense if Vonnegut had been one of my heroes. But the truth is, the only work of his I've ever read is a single short story back in high school, the same short story that everyone else reads in high school, "Harrison Bergeron." I've always meant to read some Vonnegut, or at least his best-known novel Slaughterhouse-Five, but I just haven't gotten around to it.

Continue reading "Kurt Vonnegut" »

Posted by at 11:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

One of the regrets I've carried forward from my college years was my failure to form personal relationships with any of my instructors. While friends of mine can talk of networking opportunities or outright friendships with their professors, I doubt my former teachers would even recognize my face these days. And things aren't much better on my side of the equation, as a conversation with a co-worker and fellow U. of U. alum earlier today forcefully demonstrated: we were talking about the horrors of writing workshops, and she asked me who my teacher had been during a particular workshop experience. To my surprise and sincere discomfort, I couldn't remember the man's name. I could summon up his face reasonably well, but the name was a complete blank. And the more I thought about it, the more I realized that I have the same problem with most of my professors.

The shame of this realization sent me scrambling across the Internet, compulsively searching for any mention I could find of the four or five names I can still recall. And lo and behold, I stumbled across this upcoming release from the University of Utah Press: Wallace Stegner’s Salt Lake City by Robert C. Steensma.

Continue reading "Steensma on Stegner" »

Posted by at 3:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Another meme from Jaquandor, this time about books:

Continue reading "The Most Significant SF and Fantasy Books Ever" »

Posted by at 12:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Perhaps memes aren't quite as dead as I said they were the other day. Case in point: I've been "tagged" by my friend and occasional commenter, Jen Broschinsky. The meme she passes along to me is a toughie; I've read a heckuva lot of books in my life, but I have a hard time when people ask me to start ranking, rating, or quantifying them. Still, what can you do when you've been tagged by a fellow blogger? I give it the old college try below the fold:

Continue reading "Puffbird's Book Meme" »

Posted by at 6:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

I normally reject the idea of literary manifestos as pretentious ego self-stroking (on the part of whomever writes the manifesto) that treads on my anti-authoritarian "do whatever the hell I like" nature, but here is one I can get behind wholeheartedly, John C. Wright's NEW SPACE PRINCESS MOVEMENT:

The literary movement will follow two basic principles: first, science fiction stories should have space-princesses in them who are absurdly good looking. Second, the space princesses must be half-clad (if you are a pessimist. The optimist sees the space princess as half-naked). Third, dinosaurs are also way cool, as are ninjas. Dinosaur ninjas are best of all.

...The second thing to remember: bare midriffs. This is what science fiction is actually all about. Let no one tell you differently.

Oh, yeah. That's the stuff, baby. Thanks to Scalzi for cluing me onto this.

In a somewhat-related note, I've just learned from SF Signal that you can get science fiction and fantasy stories from this site -- for FREE! Just in case you really don't feel like working today...

Posted by at 11:33 AM | Permalink

Ever wonder what the "E" in "Wile E. Coyote" stands for? Yeah, me, neither, but Mark Evanier has an interesting answer nonetheless.

Continue reading "Ethelbert?" »

Posted by at 5:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

No particular comment here, just sharing a nifty passage from the novel I'm currently enjoying. I especially like the image at the end. The characters are shy young Quakers who are beginning to discover that they have a thing for each other; the setting is New York in the year 1778, during the American Revolution:

Rob was enthused about the scientist William Herschel.With his improved telescopes, Rob said, Herschel had discovered nebulae and galaxies strewn across the heavens as a farmer could scatter flaxseed. ...The night had grown cold, and they blew on their fingers and stamped their feet as they stared up at the spangle of stars. The arm of Rob's coat brushed Kate's cape and she saw tiny sparks dance in the wool.

--From Shadow Patriots: A Novel of the Revolution by Lucia St. Clair Robson

Posted by at 2:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

If you've been hanging around this place for any length of time, you've probably got a pretty good handle on my tastes in entertainment. I like pulp adventures, science fiction movies, superhero comics, horror novels, and British comedy. In the simplest possible terms, I'm a geek. But aside from the social stigma of daring to like such things, what is the connection between them? Why is the core appeal of all these various genres?

A blogger named John Seavey has a pretty good idea:

Continue reading "Stranger Than Life" »

Posted by at 5:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

It's time for a silly Internet quiz! Today, the question is, "Which science fiction author am I?" And the answer is:

I am: Arthur C. Clarke Well known for nonfiction science writing and for early promotion of the effort toward space travel, his fiction was often grand and visionary.

I enjoyed a lot of Clarke's work in my younger days, so I'm satisfied with this. The really amusing thing is, I haven't actually attempted to write any science fiction in a good 15 or 20 years. I like to read the stuff, but was never much good at creating it...

Posted by at 12:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Writing a few days ago about old buildings reminded me of something I read recently. It's yet another passage from the book 1939: The Lost World of the Fair:

Now I've always been fascinated with the world my parents grew up in, I mean the actual look & feel of it, because the change between that time and this seems so uncannily large, as if five centuries had passed and not five decades... I have always wanted so badly to feel what that time was like -- because of a strange belief I suppose I was born with -- that if, somehow, I could feel an era before I was born, the scales would fall from my eyes & and I would then be able to feel my own life, grasp what it is really like, the way you can grasp time after the fact, when it is all over...

--author David Gelernter, speaking through a fictional character's diary in 1939

That quote doesn't entirely capture my own reasons for being fascinated by the artifacts of the past -- a big part of the appeal for me is simple aesthetics; I just plain like all that old stuff -- but it does begin to get at the yearning I seem to feel when I'm around those artifacts. I really would like to experience what the world was like for my parents and grandparents, to know not just how things looked, but how they smelled and sounded, how mundane daily tasks were accomplished. I've always enjoyed historical stories, and stories about time travel and immortal characters, and I think that yearning to have first-hand experience of another time might be partly why.

Shifting gears a bit, I'd like to offer a few thoughts on the book I quoted above. I meant to do a proper review when I finished it a few weeks ago, but as with so many of the entries I plan to do for for this silly blog, the time slipped away from me and I never got around to it.

Continue reading "A Final Word from 1939, and Some Thoughts" »

Posted by at 11:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Science fiction author Steven Brust has come up with an analogy to categorize different types of reading matter according to their "nutritional" value:

Continue reading "Food for Thought" »

Posted by at 1:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I've mentioned before that I'm fascinated by the life of Howard Hughes, the billionaire aviator, movie producer, Lothario, and eventual recluse and nutcase. There are many chapters in Howard's life story that are worth considering, but one of the most interesting to me personally is the epilogue that comes after his death, the tale of Melvin Dummar and the so-called "Mormon Will."

Continue reading "Melvin and Howard" »

Posted by at 6:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Here's another meme from SF Signal, focusing this time on genre literature. As I pondered my answers, I realized that I'm not nearly as much of an SF junkie as I used to be, or at least as I used to imagine myself to be, because it was downright hard to answer some of these items. However, much of this meme can relate to book habits in general, so it's still worth considering, if you're interested in this sort of thing.

Continue reading "Genre Book Meme" »

Posted by at 10:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)

And we're back. Here's the other half of my annual media retrospective, focusing this time on my literary pursuits.

Continue reading "2006 Media Wrap-Up: The Dead-Tree Edition" »

Posted by at 6:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

There was a time -- roughly 15 years ago, if you're keeping track -- when I would've called Michael Crichton one of my heroes. He was even somebody I aspired to be like, a popular storyteller who sold novels by the truckload, occasionally dabbled in Hollywood, ate dinner with Sean Connery, and routinely confounded the literary snobs who resented his success. I loved the movies Westworld, The Great Train Robbery, and Runaway, which he wrote and directed; I was fascinated by his personal journeys as recounted in the autobiography Travels; and I thought (and still do) that the original Jurassic Park novel was a terrific thriller. In my unsophisticated youth, I even prophesied that Crichton would someday earn the respect of those aforementioned snobs through dint of his popularity, that his books, loved by millions, would endure long after the "literary fiction" beloved of the ivory-tower-types had passed from memory.

Then I grew up.

Continue reading "I'm Done with Michael Crichton" »

Posted by at 6:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Man, it seems like forever since I've run across a good meme -- I suspect that they were probably just another Internet fad that's now largely run its course. Still, that doesn't mean we won't run across one from time to time, right? Courtesy of Lou Anders, here's one based on the the Science Fiction Book Club's list of the 50 most significant science fiction/fantasy novels published between 1953 and 2002.

Like other book-related memes I've done before, the idea here is to indicate which ones you've read and what you thought of them, to demonstrate your erudition and good taste, no doubt. Or your lack thereof. Or to at least give you something to do on the boring work-day before a long holiday weekend. Here we go:

Continue reading "SF&F Book Meme" »

Posted by at 11:09 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Haven't done an Internet quiz in a while, so here we go:

Hmm... a "fad reader?" I'm not quite sure how I feel about that. It's not an inaccurate description, I suppose, but there is something sort of... shameful... about it. At least I'm not a non-reader (he says, rather defensively).

[Ed. note: the table is screwy, incidentally -- those black lines are supposed to be red, but I don't know what's wrong. I copied and pasted the code exactly...]

Posted by at 12:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Here's a public service announcement for any local bibliophiles who may be reading my humble blog: The Great Salt Lake Book Festival is now underway at the beautiful Salt Lake Main Library. The Festival's director, Rebecca Batt, is an acquaintance of mine, and it looks like she's done a fine job this year. The schedule for the next three days is packed with interesting speakers from the Western literary scene, including the novelist Ivan Doig, nature photographer and writer Stephen Trimble, graphic novelist Dave Sim and artist Gerhard (the creators of the monumental work Cerebus), and Steve Hendricks, a journalist who has just published what sounds like a very intriguing book on the way the FBI derailed the mid-70s movement for American Indian rights. Also on hand are Salt Lake's favorite Jeopardy champ Ken Jennings and Betsy Burton, the outspoken advocate of independent booksellers and co-owner of The King's English bookshop.

For those, like me, who probably won't be able to attend in person, a number of the author lectures will be broadcast on KCPW, a radio station that's headquartered at Library Square on 88.3 FM, 1010 AM, and, of course, over the Web. Should be some good stuff going on... check it out!

Posted by at 10:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Here's Scalzi talking about the choices one makes in the writing life:

...a Bennington grad won the Booker Prize this year, for a novel that is praised for "illuminating the pain of exile, the ambiguities of post-colonialism and the blinding desire for a 'better life,' when one person's wealth means another's poverty." Meanwhile, my [new] book starts with a chapter primarily about farting an alien to death. Would I have written a book with farting, had I gone to Bennington? And would it have won the Booker Prize? These are the personal alternate personal histories of my life. Be that as it may, two roads diverged in the woods, and I, well, I took the one in which intestinal emanations were used for humorous effect. And that has made all the difference.

And the Monday-morning laughter continues...

Posted by at 10:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Just got back from lunch and a brisk afternoon walk around the mean streets of SLC. Saw something that gave me a chuckle as I passed the stinky bookstore and thought I'd share.

In the shop's window, among the antique steel cans of Miller Beer, the Godzilla toy, and an ancient, crumbling Book of Mormon held together with a red ribbon, was a pair of recently published but used hardcovers standing side-by-side. A hand-lettered sign tucked between them made the following offer:

"Ann Coulter's Treason $7. Living History by Hillary Clinton free with Coulter book."

Is this someone's gesture at political balance? Or just an observation about what sells in Utah and what doesn't?

Posted by at 1:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In case anyone out there is keeping track, I just passed 1,000 book titles on my LibraryThing catalog, and I still have several boxes to go. I don't know whether to be proud at the expanse of my collection, ashamed at the amount of money I've spent over the years, or depressed that I've read so few of them...

Posted by at 11:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

I just spent my lunch hour browsing an intriguing little dive of a book shop called Utah Book and Magazine, better known among the bibliophiles at my place of employment as "the stinky bookstore around the corner." The place is one of the last remaining examples in these parts of the sort of half-assed, stuffed-to-the-rafters, semi-amateur used-book emporiums that I loved to frequent in my younger days -- most of my other college-era haunts have gone out of business or, in the case of Sam Weller's, have gentrified and cleaned themselves up in order to compete with the big national chain stores. But not Utah Book and Magazine, whose owner isn't overly fussy about condition and will buy damn near anything. The shelves in this place are 12 feet high, creaking under the weight of everything from vintage pulps to well-thumbed nudie mags to last week's best sellers, now running at reaminder-table prices. And you can get more than reading material at the stinky bookstore, too: you can buy an ice-cold beverage from a '60-vintage Pepsi machine or a Big Hunk candy bar from a countertop display. Shove the candy bars to one side and you might find an antique straight razor, a Charlie McCarthy doll, or a dummy hand grenade for sale inside the counter's display case. The only drawback to the place is, as you may have gathered, the peculiar funk that fills the air. It's less like the scent of old paper (which I quite like) than the, ahem, strong aroma of some of the neighborhood bums.

In any event, I can't set foot in that hole without buying something, and today I picked up a novel with such an unlikely (and charmingly ungainly) title that I wanted to share:

Adventures: Being a Stirring Chronicle of Intrigue, Romance, Danger, Hairbreadth Escapes, and Thrilling Triumphs over Fierce Beasts and Fiercer Men in the Mysterious and Exotic Dark Continent, as Recounted by the Daring, Resourceful, Handsome, and Modest Christian Gentleman Who Experienced Them

Ah, how I would've swooned at such a title when I was a boy...

Incidentally, I've been adding to my LibraryThing catalog whenever I've managed to find the time. I still have several banker's boxes to go, but with the addition of today's purchase from the stinky bookstore, I'm up to 919 titles...

Posted by at 2:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

There's an interesting interview over at SF Signal with Alan Beatts, the owner of San Francisco's Borderlands Books. Borderlands specializes in science fiction, fantasy, and horror, but Alan's got some provocative thoughts about the book industry in general, especially on the future of brick-and-mortar bookstores both independent and otherwise:

Continue reading "The Future of the Shop Around the Corner" »

Posted by at 11:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

For any who may be interested, I'm continuing to add titles to my LibraryThing catalog, a few at a time as I have the opportunity and whenever the damn thing is working. The site frequently seems to be overwhelmed by server requests; I'm guessing the owners were unprepared for a flood of new memberships resulting from a mention on Boing Boing. I've got 200 books up there now. At the rate I'm going, I should have the entire Bennion Library up for your perusal by this same time next summer...

In the meantime, I've found something rather interesting (and somewhat related), a vast collection of statistics about books and the book industry. Here are some items that grabbed my attention:

Continue reading "Book Stuff" »

Posted by at 12:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (6)

Jim Baen, who founded the very successful publishing company that bears his name, passed away yesterday, some two weeks after suffering a massive stroke. Unlike many of the celebrities I eulogize here, I have no personal feelings toward or about Mr. Baen. I know his name, and I've undoubtedly read something he published, but that's about it. Still, I was moved by the tribute written for him by his friend, the science-fiction author David Drake:

Continue reading "Tribute to Jim Baen" »

Posted by at 2:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Yesterday, I followed a link from Boing Boing to LibraryThing, this groovy online service that lets you catalog your book collection and share it with others. It uses tags like Flickr or MySpace, so other people can easily search your personal library and you can search theirs. Thus, the system doubles as a social network based around similar tastes in reading.

I thought the idea of a non-local catalog sounded like a good one -- I've got a database of my movie collection on my home PC, but if the house burns down, I lose the record along with the collection -- so I set up an account. So did one of my three loyal readers and frequent commenters, the inimitable Cranky Robert. Judging from the sporadic outages and slowdowns the site has been experiencing, so have a lot of other people. It's one of those full-blown Internet fads, I tell you! Everybody's doing it... so why aren't you? Seriously, if you own a lot of books, you ought to go check it out.

(Incidentally, if you go to my catalog, you will notice that I haven't yet entered very many titles. That's because, as my profile page notes, I have a huge library that's scattered all over the house, and, as with everything else I do, it requires time, of which I have precious little these days. Now that I think about it, maybe this wasn't such a good idea. The last thing I need right now is another fracking project...)

Posted by at 9:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Sad news this afternoon for fans of fantasy art: Tim Hildebrandt, who, along with his brother Greg, was one of the most prominent book illustrators of the 1970s and '80s, died yesterday at the not-very-advanced age of 67.

Continue reading "Tim Hildebrandt" »

Posted by at 6:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

Yesterday I mentioned one of my recent book purchases, Chris Roberson's novel Paragaea. I've started reading it already, despite all the years-old purchases that are waiting in line for my attention, and I've got to tell you, it's a real corker.

Continue reading "Paragaea: So Far, So Good" »

Posted by at 11:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

So, I may not have done much of my promised blogging about books last week, but I was at least thinking about the subject. Cranky Robert and I exchanged a flurry of e-mails which resulted in mutually recommended reading for both of us, as well as my discovery of the Titanic Book Site, a wonderful resource for anyone interested in the world's most famous sunken ocean liner. And I also walked up the street from my office one day to Sam Weller's and bought a couple of books. That may not sound terribly noteworthy, but it sort of is, at least to me. You see, I don't buy many books these days. And that's quite a change from The Way Things Used to Be.

Continue reading "The Evil of the Trade Paperback" »

Posted by at 11:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (7)

Hmm. This is interesting. It seems there's a bit of a kerfuffle brewing among the on-line writing community (i.e., folks involved in or aspiring to professional writing and the publishing industry, and who also have blogs) because a shady literary agent named Barbara Bauer -- who is number three on SFWA's list of the 20 worst agencies -- threw a tantrum and got a Website called Absolute Write shut down. Teresa Nielsen Hayden has the details.

Continue reading "Doing My Part" »

Posted by at 5:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)

I haven't read Douglas Adams' brilliant and genuinely funny sci-fi parody novel The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy in years, but I still remember large passages of it -- no doubt because my memories have been fortified by hearing them dramatized in various media formats over the years. Still, I can't say that I remember chunks of any other books I read in high school, and that is probably reason enough for me to pass along the news about this somewhat silly gesture of tribute to Adams, who left us unexpectedly five years ago. I think Doug would've appreciated the absurdity of people carrying around towels in his honor...

(Incidentally, if you haven't read the Hitchhiker's book, listened to the radio show, or seen the TV series or last year's rather disappointing movie, you may be wondering about the significance of the towel. Go below the fold for the explanation...)

Continue reading "Tomorrow Is Towel Day" »

Posted by at 3:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

To kick off Book Week here at Simple Tricks and Nonsense, here is an item I've been meaning to blog about for some time but haven't gotten around to yet. (My apologies if you've already seen it somewhere.) It's a list of the top 1000 titles owned by libraries as determined by an organization called the Online Computer Library Center (OCLC), a network of some 53,000 libraries around the world. According to the intro copy, the list -- which is updated annually -- comprises "the intellectual works that have been judged to be worth owning by the 'purchase vote' of libraries around the globe."

As you can probably imagine, the list includes all the usual canonical titles that you think of when you hear the word "classics," but there are some surprises. One of them appears right in the top 20, which I've reproduced below the fold. (Hint: I'm talking about number 15...)

Continue reading "What's at Your Library?" »

Posted by at 11:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (8)

I'm thinking I'd like to talk this week about a subject that tends to be somewhat neglected in public discourse these days: books. As I understand it, there was a time in America -- probably that fabled mid-century period following World War II and preceding Watergate, when architecture was googie and kids still respected their elders -- when books were the major driving force of our popular culture, not movies or television or the as-yet-uninvented Internet. The controversies that office workers debated around the water cooler, the fictional characters that everyone knew and loved like their own flesh-and-blood friends, originated on the printed page, not the silver screen. I think it's pretty obvious that those days are far past us now. It isn't that books are irrelevant or that people don't read anymore -- I personally believe those claims are overhyped and just a tad hysterical, and if you don't believe me, walk down to your local Barnes and Noble store sometime and ask yourself how this place could stay in business if people were no longer reading -- but the cultural emphasis has definitely shifted away from the oldest of our media. Where once the movie version of a best-seller was considered the spin-off product, now it's more like the pay-off that everyone is really interested in. The book often seem to serve as a warm-up for the featured act. Further, the movie is most likely the version that will be remembered in the future -- do you know anyone who's actually read The Godfather? I didn't think so. The book has become the ancillary product now.

Continue reading "Talkin' Books" »

Posted by at 3:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

As the title suggests, I'm having a giddy fanboy moment. You may wish to avert your eyes.

Still looking? Okay, fine, it's your funeral...

Continue reading "My Giddy Fanboy Moment, Courtesy of the Internet" »

Posted by at 2:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)

Here's something kind of cool: This morning, a fellow blogger named David left a comment in my entry on those curious scopitone thingies, informing me that today is Joi Lansing's birthday. (She would've been 78 years old, if she hadn't died 34 years ago.) He also linked to my humble site in his own entry on the subject. I don't think I've ever been linked to before; it's rather flattering. Thanks, David!

On a related note, I learned from David's blog that someone has written a novel that revolves around Joi, or at least the idea of Joi:

...Comfort and Joi records one weekend in the life of a man suffering a "low-grade obsession" with real-life bosomy blonde bombshell, Joi Lansing. He shuts himself away in a borrowed house on the coast of California to try to write a book about the minor glamour girl who appeared in such "classics" as Hillbillys in a Haunted House and Queen of Outer Space. But the deeper he goes into her career, the more questions he asks about himself. Offbeat movie history from the fringes of Hollywood triggers haunting personal memories as he follows this "beautiful beacon in a Sargasso of bad filmmaking" and finds an unexpected path to his own past.

I have, of course, added this volume to my wishlist.

Posted by at 4:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

It'll be four weeks this coming Friday since my basement flooded, and, believe it or not, I'm still working on cleaning up and putting my house back together. The ridiculous length of time it's taking me to finish this job is a sum of many factors: the sheer magnitude of the job, which I'll talk more about in another entry; my easy distractibility and tendency toward procrastination, which is a fancy way of saying I haven't been working on it steadily; a recent bout of the flu that left me not wanting to tote boxes up and down stairs; and the fact that I've actually been trying to save many of the things that got wet rather than just tossing them, especially a number of books that I've been reluctant to part with.

Continue reading "Final Casualty Report" »

Posted by at 6:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

You may recall back in August when I announced that my friend Ruthie Ellenson's first book had just been published. Well, there's been further news regarding Ruthie and her book. I'll let the message I just received from her husband, the irrepressible Cranky Robert (as he's known in these parts), speak for itself:

Hi everyone,

I'm very happy to announce that Ruthie's book *The Modern Jewish Girl's Guide to Guilt* has won the *National Jewish Book Award* for women's studies!!!!

I'm sure everyone joins me in wishing Ruthie a very *big congratulations* on a truly great achievement!!

All the best,
Robert

So now not only do I know a published author, I also know an award-winning author. Props to me! Oh, and, of course, to Ruthie...

Seriously, this is a very cool development. I'm sure the rest of my tiny little following here at Simple Tricks will join me in giving Ruthie our most sincere congratulations.

Posted by at 12:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Hey again, kids. Sorry it's been so long since I've posted. Hope you haven't missed my sterling prose too much. I've been working on a nice long recap of Anne's and my Yellowstone snowmobiling adventure, and I was planning to post it tonight, but...

There's always a "but" when computers are involved, isn't there? In this case, the "but" refers to the way I somehow lost three-quarters of the entry when I tried to e-mail the part I wrote at work this afternoon to myself so I could finish it tonight here at home. I'm hoping I can recover it tomorrow when I get into the office. If I can't, I'm going to be a very unhappy blogger, because I thought what I'd done was quite good. For a change. I haven't been terribly proud of my recent writing here at Simple Tricks; this entry, however, seemed to be going very well.

In any event, I'm long overdue to give you guys something -- I'm surprised my three loyal readers aren't banging their tin cups against the bars by this time -- but about all I have to give you tonight is another of those e-mail survey thingies that occasionally makes a circle of the 'net. You know, those long lists of random questions that try to elicit trivial responses. It's kind of lame, I know, but it's quick content, and you may learn something interesting about moi. Hopefully, I'll find my travel piece waiting for me tomorrow and I'll be able to finish it and get it up to you before tomorrow night. In the meantime, enjoy the trivia...

Continue reading "Consolation Prize" »

Posted by at 11:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

By the time my three loyal readers see this entry, The Girlfriend and I should be well on our way to West Yellowstone, Montana, where a quick weekend adventure awaits. It's a long story, but basically, she had some business dealings with a place up there that offered to give her and a guest (that would be me) complimentary lodgings and a snowmobile tour of the park. Neither of us are exactly what you'd call outdoorsy types, but the lure of a virtually free weekend away from the wintertime smog of Salt Lake was too tempting to resist. We said yes about a month ago, we bought ourselves some long underwear a couple weeks ago, and by tomorrow we'll be looking for moose in America's first National Park.

However, I didn't want to leave all you folks in InternetLand with nothing to look at on the dull final Friday of January, so in the spirit of last week's post -- that is, in an effort to clean out one of my bookmark folders -- here are a few links you may find interesting. I know I did...

Continue reading "Some Friday Reading" »

Posted by at 12:57 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Seeing the recent movie Good Night, and Good Luck sparked my curiosity about the legendary newsman Ed Murrow, so I've been reading a book by former NPR host Bob Edwards called Edward R. Murrow and the Birth of Broadcast Journalism. It's a short little volume, less an in-depth biography than a concise overview of Murrow's life and philosophies. Sparse as it is, though, the book provides plenty to think about. Consider, for instance, the following passage:

Continue reading "Unthinkable" »

Posted by at 11:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

It was back to the grind for me this morning. Fortunately, it hasn't been too grindy as of yet; everyone around my office seems to be taking their own sweet time to start up the assembly line again, which is fine by me. It's a funny thing -- even though it's been years since I last worked at the movie theater, whenever I have an extended period of time off my body clock always seems to revert to the hours I used to keep as a projectionist. This means that during the week between Christmas and New Year's, I started staying up until 2 AM and sleeping until 10. Which means that I only managed about four-and-a-half hours of sleep last night, and I'm probably not going to be much good as a proofreader today.

Slow workday or not, I am rather bummed that my holiday vacation is already over. I had a lot of things I wanted to accomplish during that time, and I only managed to do about five percent of them. C'est la vie, I suppose, but it's frustrating to look back on some eleven days of free time -- the most precious commodity our overscheduled society currently enjoys -- and not have much to show for it. At least I managed to finish Stephen King's gargantuan magnum opus, The Dark Tower series, which, as I now recall, was one of my goals for the year.

That's not a terribly good segueway into my annual recap of the previous year's media consumption, but it's the best I'm probably going to manage today. As I said, I'm running on only about four-and-a-half hours of sleep...

Continue reading "2005 Media Wrap-up" »

Posted by at 12:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)

I loved the Peanuts comic strip when I was a kid. I had -- still have, somewhere in the depths of the Bennion Archives -- a dozen or so paperback compilations that I carried around in my back pocket all through my elementary-school years. I practically had those books memorized, I flipped through them so frequently. I identified with Charlie Brown's insecurity and I thought the World War I flying ace was the coolest. But as I moved into middle school, I came to realize that I didn't think the strip was very funny. It was gentle and wise, as its fans so often claim. It was also stodgy and old-fashioned, sometimes preachy, occasionally heartwarming or cute, but it was never funny. I can't recall ever laughing out loud at a Peanuts strip the way I did over Bloom County or Calvin and Hobbes or even the early, pre-sell-out Garfield, and I honestly can't remember the last time I actually read a Peanuts strip.

Still, I do have a soft spot for the characters of Charles Schulz -- they were very important to me when I was very young and memories of them linger in my heart, like kindergarten friends you haven't seen in decades -- so I couldn't resist taking the latest personality quiz that's circulating through the blogosphere, the Which Peanuts Character Are You? test. Here is my result:

You are Franklin!


Which Peanuts Character are You?
brought to you by Quizilla

I guess this is an accurate enough description of me. Funny thing, though: I don't remember this character. Not even a little. I find that odd and more than a little disturbing, considering how obsessive I used to be about this strip. Who is this guy? And what does it say about me that my Schulzian personality match is so forgettable?

Posted by at 11:59 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

It's the American Library Association's Banned Books Week, during which we remember the immortal words of Dr. Henry Jones, Sr., as portrayed by the immortal Sean Connery:

"...gooshe-shtepping morons should try reading booksh inshtead of barning them!"

"Barning" is, of course, Scottish for "burning."

I don't know about you, but I find the very notion of banning books deeply offensive. I resent well-meaning busybodies taking it upon themselves to tell me what's good for me or my children, if I had any. I resent authority figures that would presume to tell me or my hypothetical children what we should think. I resent the implication so often made by the self-appointed forces of morality and/or political correctness that reading something -- or viewing something or listening to something -- that they dislike somehow makes me a sinner. Mostly I resent the fact that the books that most often come under fire from Those Who Would Protect Us From Ourselves are so frequently the ones that have the most value, to me personally as well as to society in general. Of course, there are also plenty of cases in which the targeted text is utterly innocuous and the whole thing leaves me scratching my head and wondering what anyone could find wrong with that. Case in point: Where's Waldo?, which appears on the ALA's list of the top 100 most frequently challenged books of 1990-2001. Where's Waldo? And they say Trekkies need to get a life.

If you, like me, shudder at the thought of somebody like Ned Flanders -- or Pat Robertson, if you're looking for a real boogeyman -- dictating what you can and cannot put into your brain, take a look at the ALA list. I'll reproduce it below the fold, so just click on through. If you're like me, you'll recognize a lot of these titles from your childhood and young adulthood. Think about those books and ponder what they may have meant to you, even if they meant nothing more than a good read or something you were exposed to in one of your English classes. Let yourself get pissed off at the foolishness of trying to keep a book like S.E. Hinton's The Outsiders out of the hands of the kids who most need to read something like that, to have it speak to them and assure them that someone out there understands what they're feeling and thinking, that they're not freaks. Then select one of these horrible, evil, sinful titles that you haven't read and pick it up from the library or bookstore in the next five days. Read it proudly, in public. Maybe one of those goose-stepping morons will dare to say something to you about it, and you'll get the chance to do your Connery impression...

Continue reading "Stick It To The Thought Police -- Read a Banned Book" »

Posted by at 5:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

In case you were wondering, you can indeed find my friend Ruthie's book, The Modern Jewish Girl's Guide to Guilt, here in the Salt Lake area. Anne and I went shopping last night at a local Barnes and Noble store and located it with no trouble at all. There were, in fact, two copies available. And we weren't even at the big store downtown. We were out in stiflingly dull, virtually monoethnic, suburban Sandy. The book was located in the Judaism section, which is next to the Bibles and around the corner from the LDS stuff.

So who would have thought there was a Judaism section at the Sandy B&N? I was stunned...

Posted by at 2:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (9)

My friend Ruth Ellenson has just emailed me with some very exciting news: her first book hits the stands today! (How ironic, in light of the previous entry's gloomy assessment of modern American reading habits, but this isn't the time for pessimism...)

Yes, it's true, I happen to know a published author. (Imagine me gripping my lapels and looking smug as I say that.) Actually, she was the editor of this volume rather than the author, since it's a collection of essays, but hey, it's still her name on the cover, right? Close enough to famous for my money. Here's the message she sent me:

Continue reading "Ruthie Gets Published!" »

Posted by at 5:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (8)

Writer Peter David tells a heartbreaking story today about a little boy who loves Spider-Man. He wears Spidey-branded shoes, plays the Spidey video game, owns the Spider-Man movies on DVD and regularly watches the animated series on the Cartoon Network. But he's never read a Spider-Man comic. Even worse, he has no interest in reading one. Zero. Zip. The very source of the character and stories that he's made the center of his young life holds as much appeal for seven-year-old Steven as sitting through a grad-school lecture on macroeconomics. (Not that a lecture on macroeconomics holds much appeal for anybody except the tiniest handful, but you get my point.)

It is stories like this that are propelling me down the road to premature Grumpy Old Man-hood.

Continue reading "Kids Today..." »

Posted by at 12:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Say what you will about the French -- and I know people who will say plenty -- they are the clever folks who brought us the wonders of the self-cleaning street toilet. And now they've come up with another "duh, why haven't we had this before?" invention: the Maxi-Livres book-vending machine. Five such machines, stocking 25 titles that range from The Odyssey to a French-English dictionary, have been installed in various locations around Paris. According to the linked article, the books cost only $2.45, an incredible bargain these days, especially when you factor in exchange rates. And the thing that makes these machines really cool?

...Maxi-Livre's distributors were designed to bypass the characteristic vending-machine-drop, which can be punishing for books.

"We knew that French bibliophiles would be horrified to see their books falling into a trough like candy or soda," [Maxi-Livre president Xavier] Chambon said. "So we installed a mechanical arm that grabs the book and delivers it safely."

While my first choice will always be a quirky, independently-owned bookshop -- preferably one with a live-in cat or other animal mascot -- I really like this idea. If nothing else, it would solve that nasty problem of what to read on the train-ride home if you finish your book during your lunch break...

Posted by at 4:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Picture yourself curled up in your favorite chair on a cool autumn afternoon, sipping a cup of your favorite hot beverage, lost in the pages of a good novel... and all of a sudden a character steps into the scene who shares your name and maybe even looks like you. Sound like fun?

Well, then, check this out: a dozen or so notable authors including Michael Chabon, Amy Tan, Peter Straub, Lemony Snickett, John Grisham, Stephen King, and Neil Gaiman (from whose blog I got this little tidbit of news) are auctioning off the opportunity for your name to appear in one of their upcoming books. It's all for charity, with the proceeds going to the First Amendment Project, an advocacy group that defends the freedom of expression. Complete details about this charity auction are available here.

Personally, I'm thinking I'd like to be immortalized by Stephen King. If you know his work, it probably won't surprise you to hear that he's offering the most elaborate prize for your auction money; whereas the other authors promise simply to use your name somewhere, King intends to have his way with your fictional doppelganger:

"...Buyer should be aware that CELL is a violent piece of work, which comes complete with zombies set in motion by bad cell phone signals that destroy the human brain. Like cheap whiskey, it's very nasty and extremely satisfying. Character can be male or female, but a buyer who wants to die must in this case be female. In any case, I'll require physical description of auction winner, including any nickname (can be made up, I don't give a rip)."

A buyer who wants to die at the hands of cell-phone-induced zombies... I love it.

The auctions are being held in three separate blocks, with King's prize up for grabs during the September 8-18 block. You know, my birthday happens to fall within that span of time. If someone really wanted to impress me...

Posted by at 11:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Pop quiz: who's the coolest actor working in the film industry today? I'm thinking of someone who has appeared in both blockbusters and art-house movies, a journeyman actor who both headlines and does small character roles, a man who commands a legion of die-hard fans, and who is the very definition of "suave."

Am I referring to Sean Connery? Nah, I said someone who's still working today, and all the signs indicate that Sir Sean has retired. Harrison Ford? Hasn't worked in several years, apparently content to spend his days playing Rescue Ranger in his helicopter. Tom Cruise? Please... the word "suave" hardly applies to someone who publicly abuses a sofa in the name of mid-life-crisis/publicity-stunt love. No, the person I have in mind is someone you could actually imagine yourself hanging out with, a regular guy who just happens to have landed a job a whole lot of people think they want (but would probably hate if they got it), and who has managed, somehow, against all odds, to forge a decades-long career in an industry that is finished with most people within a couple of years.

I'm talking about the one and only... Bruce Campbell.

Continue reading "I Made Love to a Screaming Brain!" »

Posted by at 10:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

After reading the previous entry, a friend of mine e-mailed to let me know of someone else whose passing is worth noting: Shelby Foote, the soft-spoken Southern novelist and historian who became a minor-league celebrity after appearing in the landmark PBS series The Civil War. Foote died Monday at the age of 88.

Continue reading "Shelby Foote" »

Posted by at 12:55 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

There's a new meme floating around LiveJournal country, about books. I just did a book meme not too long ago, but the questions on this one are a little different, and it's short enough that neither writer nor reader will lose much time over it. If this is your sort of thing, read on and enjoy. If not, I'll catch you later...

Continue reading "Another Book Meme" »

Posted by at 11:59 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

I'm not one to go rock-climbing or bungee-jumping, but I have nevertheless longed, from time to time, for a taste of adventure in my largely unexciting suburban life. I therefore found the following comments on the subject most interesting:

Modern society, of course, has perfected the art of having nothing happen at all. There is nothing particularly wrong with this except that for vast numbers of Americans, as life has become staggeringly easy, it has also become vaguely unfulfilling. Life in modern society is designed to eliminate as many unforseen events as possible, and as inviting as that seems, it leaves us hopelessly underutilized. And that is where the idea of "adventure" comes in. The word comes from the Latin adventura, meaning "what must happen." An adventure is a situation where the outcome is not entirely within your control. It's up to fate, in other words. It should be pointed out that people whose lives are inherently dangerous, like coal miners or steelworkers, rarely seek "adventure." Like most things, danger ceases to be interesting as soon as you have no choice in the matter. For the rest of us, threats to our safety and comfort have been so completely wiped out that we have to go out of our way to create them.

--Sebastian Junger, "Colter's Way" in the collection Fire

Posted by at 11:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Oh, no, it's another meme! No worries, though -- this one is pretty short, only five questions about books...

Continue reading "Book Talk" »

Posted by at 2:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Uh-oh, it's another LiveJournal meme. Surf on if you're not interested in gaining further insight into my questionable tastes and interests...

Still here? Oh, good, then let's talk about banned books. What follows is a list of the 110 all-time banned books. Exactly what the term "all-time" means is open to interpretation, since the LiveJournaller I appropriated this from wasn't sure who compiled the list or what criteria were used in choosing items for it. Nevertheless, these are books that at some point have gotten somebody's ruffles in a bunch. The idea of this meme (presumably) is to demonstrate to all the world how enlightened, literate, countercultural, or just plain contrary you may be by showing how many of these you've read.

Continue reading "How Many Banned Books Have You Read?" »

Posted by at 11:26 AM | Permalink | Comments (9)

When I was pondering the other day what purposes this blog serves for me, I forgot one very important function: it gives me a place to publicly voice my frustration at the knuckleheaded, market-driven, focus-grouped, pre-packaged mediocrity that festers in the heart of our culture, draining the passion from anything new, leeching the originality out of anything cool, and digesting everything into a soft, flavorless gruel of miserable disappointment.

What, you may be asking, has Bennion's knickers tied into such a painful little knot this afternoon? Why, it's nothing more than a glimpse I caught yesterday of a poster for an upcoming movie, a little summertime trifle called Sahara.

Continue reading "Coming Soon to a Theater Near You..." »

Posted by at 6:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

I was doing some follow-up research on a couple of recent post topics and I thought I'd share some interesting findings with all you bored cubicle dwellers out there.

Continue reading "Ancient Treasures, a Theory on "Deep Throat," and a Black Bird" »

Posted by at 11:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I should've known better than to publicly announce the topic of my next post on Friday. Events have a disconcerting habit of continuing to occur, regardless of my writing plans. Case in point: the death last week of Arthur Miller must sadly take precedence over my oft-promised musings on the remake of Battlestar Galactica.

Continue reading "Death of a Playwright" »

Posted by at 11:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

I hate to say it, but I didn't really accomplish much in 2004. The best description for my career these days is "sporadic," I didn't begin the novel I've been planning (and procrastinating) forever, and I didn't do any travelling. I did collaborate with a friend on a screenplay, so that's something, and another friend who lives in Los Angeles paid me a rare visit, but overall it's not been a memorable year for me. Still, there are a few statistics I can discuss, superficial though they may be.

Continue reading "Year's End" »

Posted by at 8:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In retrospect, yesterday's entry on the possibility of more Star Wars films got a little long and never came to as sharp a point as I hoped it would (much like the Star Wars prequels, actually), so my apologies if anyone was bored by my ramblings.

Perhaps it's because I feel like I didn't make much of a point that I'm still thinking about the subject this afternoon. Specifically, I'm wondering why it always seems so inevitable, so necessary, that any successful or much-loved story will give rise to sequels, prequels, and spin-offs. Why are we -- by which I mean our society, producers and consumers alike -- not content to just let things be? Why do we have to keep worrying at our favorite tales like an eight-year-old with a loose tooth? In short, why do we always want more of a story instead of simply being satisfied with a well-told ending?

Continue reading "Knowing When to Call It a Day" »

Posted by at 3:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

There's another one of those big personality surveys making the rounds on the 'net this morning, 100 questions about your cultural preferences called the "Teachout Cultural Concurrence Index." This survey originated on a blog belonging to a Manhattan music and drama critic named Terry Teachout. Given Teachout’s credentials, it's not too surprising that some of the items on this survey are a bit, well, hoity-toity, and not really the sort of thing that would appeal to a non-New York intellectual. (That's a roundabout way of saying that I, like fellow blogger Kevin Drum, didn't know enough about many of the choices to have any preference. I hang my head in shame at my apparent Philistinism.) However, Teachout does state that his blog is about "all the arts, high, medium, and low," and, true to that declaration, his survey has plenty of the lower-brow stuff that I can relate to. Besides, I like taking these things. And therefore I offer the following window into my tastes, or lack thereof:

Continue reading "Wherein I fail the "Teachout Cultural Concurrence Index"" »

Posted by at 2:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Life has gotten pretty busy for me lately and it promises to remain so, at least for the rest of this week. This has left me in the frustrating position of having many things I'd like to write about here at Simple Tricks, but not enough time to actually do the writing. Rest assured, my loyal readers, that there is some actual content in the offing... it just may take a while to get here. In the meantime, I thought I'd throw you a bone by offering up the following examination of my personal reading habits.

Continue reading "LiveJournal Book List" »

Posted by at 11:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

For several days now I've been wrestling with the question of whether I should mention the book I recently finished here on Simple Tricks. It's a political book, you see, and my mother always told me that you should never discuss religion or politics in public. That's good advice, particularly when you live in a place where conformity is valued more than diversity and your personal views tend to run against the grain. I learned early that it's usually better to keep your mouth shut than to say what's on your mind and risk alienating your friends. In sum, I've been hesitant to mention my latest reading because I haven't wanted to pick a fight, especially with those friends who I'm certain probably don't share my opinions on current events.

However, I truly believe that the times are grave enough to justify the risk of a confrontation, and with this election year already heating up and so much felgercarb about the candidates already flying, I've decided to go ahead and write about this subject and hope that no one reading this blog will take offense. Instead, I hope my readers (all three of you) will carefully consider the issues that may be raised by what I'm about to say. Hear me out, and if you disagree with me when I'm finished, then we'll shake hands, thank whichever version of God we worship that we live in America, and remain friends.

Continue reading "Book review: The Book on Bush" »

Posted by at 11:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (7)

I've been thinking that perhaps someone out there might want to read the essay I mentioned in the previous post. It's no big deal, really, but I think it's pretty good considering that I banged it out in about an hour yesterday afternoon. It's a basic high school English type of thing, but that's partly why I enjoyed writing it so much. It was exercise for a part of my brain that's been slumped in a corner, staring at the wall and drooling for a long time now, and after a few preliminary stretches, I found that the workout felt very good.

Anyhow, for your reading pleasure and in the name of the on-going obsession with nostalgia that is Simple Tricks and Nonsense, here is:

Conformity vs. Individuality and Personal Responsibility in L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time

Continue reading "Addendum: My Wrinkle in Time Essay" »

Posted by at 11:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This morning I applied for a Marketing and Communications (MarCom) position with a private school, which I won’t name in order to protect the innocent -- namely me. That’s neither here nor there as far as you folks in InternetLand are concerned, but here’s the interesting thing: instead of the usual request for samples of my previous work, I was asked to compose a short essay about a favorite childhood story and the values expressed by it. This assignment presented an interesting challenge. To be frank, I really don’t have a favorite childhood story, at least not one that immediately came to mind. So what the hell was I going to write about?

Continue reading "Rediscovering Childhood" »

Posted by at 1:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

From the "And Now for Something Completely Different" Department, Simple Tricks and Nonsense is pleased to present its very first guest speaker: Mr. Ron Safsten, editor-at-large (ret.).

Continue reading "Scan-a-Book The First" »

Posted by at 1:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)