Interlude: stumbling toward prolifancy

Three back to back yet shallow posts. Amazing.

I am trying an experiment to purchase less books. I have a bit of an issue with buying something because it looks really interesting, then when I am available to devote my full interest to the book, my capricious nature has tended to move on.

I'm trying to avoid this rather expensive habit so I am not purchasing any books for the next two weeks, which means that I will have to make do with the many, many unread books I have until then.

I'm probably going to wrap Apocalypse Movies tonight, and was thinking of moving on to A Pretty Face, a surreal book from Spain about a woman trying to solve her own murder with the help of a mad scientist.

Interlude: Nothing Better than Free Books

I'd like to give a thank you to Alison for snagging me a copy of the next Stieg Larsson book, The Girl Who Played with Fire, months before it comes out in the US.

Bloomberg recently ran an interesting article on the recent popularity of Swedish Crime fiction.

interlude: by complete coincidence,

I was thinking about Flannery O'Connor and it turns out that there is a new biography on her.

I really must read Wise Blood. All of my familiarity with her is through her short fiction, which feels as though it may be a disservice as she only has two.

Interlude: I'm lazy

In re-reading some of my past posts I see just how lazy a "reviewer" I actually am.

Sorry!

I mean to write more and include relevant passages from the books I am currently reading but I am often writing while at work and essentially pulling double duty. The issue with this is that something grand and winding like The Terror boils down to: "it good" as though that were enough to properly convey my feelings on the topics of these books.

I don't really feel to guilty when covering books like The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, because it has a rather expansive wikipedia entry, but then you go on to look at The Terror for example it just boasts a few paragraphs which read like solicitation from a catalog rather than anything meaningful.

Anyway, I have been reading my current book for what feels like forever and I am really looking forward to wrapping it up and moving on.

I have a few options at hand. All Heads Turn as the Hunt Goes By, The Earth Abides and Throat Sprockets have all been looking rather good to me, but then I also have a few Graham Greene short story collections that I would like to cram in. Perhaps the rather short stories will act as a good counter balance to the ballast of my current selection.

interlude: Thanks, NPR

From NPR today.

All writers are grave robbers, but genre fiction writers are the most brazen of all. Of necessity, to write a romance or mystery or horror story means sticking to the narrow confines of a formulaic plot; exhuming stock character types; and, generally, digging up literary turf that's been worked and reworked to the point of exhaustion

As opposed to all of those cutting edge Booker Prize award winners.

Then she goes on to praise the Twilight series.

Both Meyers and Simmons are inventive inheritors of the tale of terror, but Myers is the writer who really proves that "The Undead" is a term that refers not just to vampires, but to the supernatural genre itself.

Come on. Really? REALLY?

Interlude: apparently 1960s Batman is still the height of comperative literature for the mainstream press

From NPR today:

Talk of the Nation, January 30, 2009 · BANG! POW! PHOSPHORYLATION! The Stuff of Life is a new genetic biology primer with a twist — it takes the form of a graphic novel. Author Mark Schultz explains how he turned everything from cytokinesis to parthenogenesis into comic strips.

God, even now? Bang! Pow!?

BANG FUCKING POW?

Must the mainstream press continue to reduce everything about comics to the level of goddamn 1960's Batman? Are we reduced to seeing the same headlining rhetoric that was rolled out for Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns over twenty years ago? And then each time comics became "noteworthy"?

It's not even superhero comics you're doing this for, but a primer. Would you do this for Maus? BANG POW! Nazi Cat vs Jew Mouse!

Fun Home? BANG POW! Lesbian Daughter vs Closeted Father and Ennui!

Acme Novelty Library? BANG POW! Chris Ware vs Your Ability to Read Small Print Without Your Special Reading Glasses.

Hasn't the past DECADE of successful mainstreaming of "art"comics and action packed superhero blockbusters given you a new language with which to address this woefully misunderstood genre?

DIE, MEDIA, DIE! You don't belong in this world!

Interlude: The Pain of Nerdery Continues

Guardian Books is again talking about Genre. This time about Science Fiction that is marketed as Literary Fiction. It's a pretty standard article on the whole frustration with the public's perception of Sci-Fi but it does put forth a theory on why this is.

Perhaps the problem is that our present has caught up with the future presented to us by the pioneers of science fiction. Back in the 40s and 50s, when bright-and-shiny/dark-and-dangerous futures were given to us by the pulps, they were truly beyond anyone's ken. Now we are actually living in a science fiction future, is it fair to label a novel that extrapolates from what is possible today to what will probably be possible tomorrow...

Personally, I blame Star Wars but even that is blatantly ignorant and discounts the effects of 50s Science Fiction film on the cultural perception of the silliness of the whole genre.

I'd love to be able to say something like back then we had serious movies with silly effects but now we have silly movies with serious effects and the fact that we've only managed to shift the silly rather than get rid of it all together as what is keeping the genre from attaining a higher cultural standing, but I don't think I have the knowledge to really back that instinctual feeling up.

I honestly don't know.

Interlude: 1000 Novels You Must Read

The Guardian paper has begun publishing a series of articles entitled 1000 Novels You Must Read with a few grand genres (so far Comedy, Crime, Love) and then a series of smaller articles for more niche sub genres and some devoted to individual authors Michael Dibdin (whom I love), Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (I'm not really a fan of Sherlock Holmes, and much prefer his shorter fiction like The Brazilian Cat), and Great Arabic Love Stories.

So far I haven't had much time to really go through all of the novels, but I thought it may be of interest.

Spent far less time reading this weekend than I had previously planned, so I have still not finished Bug Jack Barron.

Next book will definitely be The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo.

Interlude: Book Buying.

I am almost finished with Bug Jack Barron. I'll probably finish up the remaining 70 pages tonight.

Don't know what's next.

Thanks to Strand Books, I picked up two Ian M Banks books, Consider Phelbas and The Player of Games. Both in the Culture series of Science Fiction books. To my understanding it's not really a series but rather a Universe wherein the Author dips in and out of various worlds and the like. I honestly can't say as I've not read any of them, though I now have 5 of the books.

I also grabbed The Dark Descent, which is my absolute favorite horror anthology of all time and I will try to do a short write up of it. As it's over a thousand pages and I've read it to the point of disintegrating a copy, I don't think I'll be up to reading it for the 52/52 project. The anthologist, David G. Hartwell tries to break down horror into three aspects and then attempts to trace historical roots of these aspects by interposing modern and historical stories. I don't have the book in front of me to quote or define what those aspects are, so I will just link to the Google Books entry wherein you can read the excellent introduction yourself.

I've also picked up The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. This book had quite a bit of hype when it was released in September and it seems to be another author we Americans are only getting after he's died. Haven't read to much on it, but I do know that there's a film version coming from its home country of Sweden.

interlude: Is it not enough to just read genre fiction?

The Guardian book blog features a post entitled "The Lure of the Spy Story" wherein a woman whose natural inclination to read literary fiction is superset by her desire to read and enjoy spy fiction (to the amusement of her brother, apparently).

Is it possible to enjoy genre fiction without digging up classical antecedents to justify the genre and to contextualize your enjoyment within a canonical education?

Interlude

Last night before bed, I began to flip through MURDER INK (as referenced below) and read a few bits of it. I'm an occasional mystery reader, but more of a tourist than a devotee. I come across neat stuff as it comes to me rather than my seeking it out, so reading a book by a fanatic for fanatics is really a bit of an eye opener.

The thing I want to discuss today is the Haycraft Queen Cornerstones. This is a list of works which stretches back over two hundred years dealing with "mysteries." It is not a complete list, but rather touches upon the main works within the genre (thus the name Cornerstones). Unfortunately I could find no formatting of the Cornerstones which matches the annotation found within Murder Ink, nor could I find something so simple as a collection of links from the authors and works to existing Wikipedia articles so that people unfamiliar with the list (people like myself) could find helpful notation on WHY the work is considered important.

However, I wanted to post the link to the list here. As the list ends in 1952, expect a particular bias with regards to the titles mentioned.

Interlude: Strand Books Close Out Bonanza

One of the glorious things about living in NYC is the easy access to Strand Books and their $1 and $.50 close out specials. I've usually been able to find a number of things that I'm interested in reading or had heard about, and the ability to just pick up stuff on a whim is great.

Unfortunately the weather conspired against me by deciding that it did want to snow after all so I didn't get to spend a great deal of time browsing, but I still managed to snag some good deals.

There's no guarantee that these will make it into the 52 books this year because I know for a fact that there are at least two that I'm giving right away.

The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand($.50) I snagged this because my girlfriend's roommate is a bit of a leftist/collectivist and I've been trying to teach her dog capitalism and how the invisible hand of the market can rub her belly and scratch behind her ears as easily as the roommate's real hand dispenses of her poop and that free markets lead to free puppies. Now I can leave the book in the dog's suitcase and we can hopefully lead the dog to being self sufficient. If I ever have kids I'm going to teach them to be Randroids to get them out of the house and into the job market at age four.

Murder Ink by Dilys Winn ($1) This is an oversize and rather thick book from 1977 which is a collection of essays on the mystery genre written by several various prominent authors of the time period. From the introduction it looks like this aims to be about the "fun" of mysteries, so it looks like a reverent and gentle poke at some of the tropes of the mystery genre while also providing factual essays such as the history of the English police force, Scotland Yard, America's own Pinkertons a history of cyphers and on and on. Oh, and the font is Baskerville.

Hong Kong Babylon ($1) The famous 1997 book which was an examination of the HK film markets as kind of a primer for the third wave of HK film making to expand knowledge on what little product had begun to seep through to American consciousness. I have never read this book because I frankly never saw a need for it. By the time it had come out I was already well versed in HK cinema and had seen a great deal of the "classic" films back when we had to pay exorbitant amounts to Tai Seng for often times horrible quality video tape transfers. When this book came out the DVD market had really started to take off so some distributors like Mei Ah and Media Asia were able to get their discs to American shores. Tragically companies like Sony and Miramax would pluck up the rights to the bankable stars and just butcher those films to try to appeal to American audiences (for great horror, watch the Dimension films releases of Jet Li's movies) so if you were a purist you had to invest in a region free player and pay a lot for shipping to get these products directly from HK. Thankfully the Weinsteins have founded Dragon Dynasty which puts out far better product than Miramax ever did. Still no uncut and subtitled Drunken Master 2 though.

The Manhattan Hunt Club by John Saul ($.50) I really like John Saul so it's always a treat to find another one of his books on the cheap.

From the Borderlands edited by Elizabeth E and Thomas F Monteleone ($.50) This is a horror anthology series which I've always enjoyed. Thomas Monteleone can be a bit of an arrogant insufferable bastard when writing non-fiction (see his Mother and Father's Italian Association writing in individual issues of Cemetery Dance for example) but he has a great nose for stories and the Borderlands anthology is one I've always enjoyed. I first discovered the first volume in our barracks library in Military school where I was introduced to Thomas Ligotti, Joe R Lansdale (with the amazing story By Bizarre Hands closing out the volume), Bently Little (with a GREAT workplace horror story called The Pounding Room), Poppy Z Brite, Chet Williamson and John Shirley. This one seems a little bit more mainstream at first, featuring works from Whitley Strieber (best known for Communion a non-fiction book wherein aliens steal Whitley away from his home), and Steven King (though King's short story work is usually pretty amazing), there are a number of authors whom I'm not immediately familiar with in the table of contents. A quick search through Amazon turns up a number of the first volume available on the cheap. I'll probably pick up a copy as it's been 18 years since I read it last.

The Mephisto Waltz by Fred Mustard Stewart ($.50) Known largely for the film which was basically a Rosemary's Baby copy, I had remembered reading that the book was fairly good. I can't find anything online to support this and indeed the books existence seems to have been completely overshadowed by the film. This, of course, only intrigues me further.

The Fellowship of the Ring - JRR Tolkien ($.50) First edition paperback from October of 1965 published by Houghton Mifflin Company. I purchased for a guild member. Personally, I loathe Tolkien's disingenuous pastoral nostalgia.