Balls and Walnuts
more than you ever wanted to know
A fundamental misunderstanding of time travel
From Cracked Dot Com: Worst Excuse Ever?
Okay, here’s a question for you: has anyone out there read Jonathan Stroud’s (he of the Bartimaeus Trilogy) new book Heroes of the Valley? Any good?
Am currently reading Michael Swanwick’s The Dog Said Bow Wow. Interesting. Interestingly bad. I love Swanwick’s novels — just got done with Dragons of Babel, which I recommend without reservation — but his short stories never fail to disappoint. Most of them were pubbed in Asimov’s, and it shows. They all have that same cheesiness which turned me off Asimov’s and F&SF years ago.
Only one story thus far has intrigued me (if only briefly) — The Bordello in Faerie, about a young man who discovers he likes being whored to the magical beings of Faerie. Wonderful premise, great follow-through, but then the whole thing fizzled. It felt like Swanwick had had a great idea but not a great story.
Read any good books lately?
D.
(hmm… I’m going to go into Askimet moderation Hell for all the links, but hey! so it goes.)
No on Stroud (I liked Bartimaeus, even if the final book was kinda weak), so no help there…
The books I’ve most recently read and enjoyed have been Emma Bull’s Territory and Howard Blum’s American Lightning. I also recently read Paul Di Fillippo’s Steampunk Trilogy, which I mostly liked but probably wouldn’t recommend unreservedly. I also recently finished Jedediah Berry’s The Manual of Detection, which I found infuriating… When it was good, it was brilliant – but Berry frequently got lazy, and let the book slide on the well-known tropes he was working with.
And I’m pretty sure you won’t be interested in Microsoft .NET: Architecting Applications for the Enterprise.
Hah! For a second, I thought you had taken to reading Harold Bloom 🙂
Steampunk Trilogy sounds interesting, especially Hottentots.
Hottentots is probably the most farcical (is that right? it doesn’t look right, but my iphone isn’t complaining…) of the three stories. It’s totally absurd, but Di Fillippo’s love for the subject is so clear that you (well, I, at any rate) can’t take offense.
Like I said… I liked it, but I don’t know that I’d recommend it without reservations.
Oh, yeah… Monsters vs. Aliens? In 3-D? IMAX format? Totally recommend. No reservations. 🙂