Balls and Walnuts
more than you ever wanted to know
No! Not Eminem! ANYTHING but Eminem!
As an early Father’s Day present, I asked my wife and son to come with me to Eureka for the afternoon. I wrote until 1PM, so it’s not like I was slacking. Primary point of this trip: Borders Bookstore. I’ve griped about this before, but we have to drive 90 minutes to get to an actual bookstore.
I tried to find books by some of the folks I’ve linked to. Sad to say I couldn’t find anything by Gwenda Bond or Scott Westerfield, but they did have John Scalzi’s Old Man’s War (but I already own that!) Nor did they have Keith Pirie’s Digging Up Donald, but I’m beginning to despair of finding that in a US store. Which reminds me, I need to give Keith’s book a good plug here sometime soon.
Here’s what we got:
make love!*
*the bruce campbell way
by Bruce Campbell
gun, with occasional music
by jonathan lethem (what’s with all the lower case letters, anyway?)
Tales of Neveryon
by Samuel R. Delany
Nightfall
Isaac Asimov & Robert Silverberg
plus a Catherine Asaro fantasy (The Charmed Sphere) and a Piers Anthony fantasy (Being a Green Mother), both for Jake. Surprisingly, Nightfall was his pick, too. I say ‘surprisingly’ cuz he usually doesn’t read SF (unless Piers Anthony wrote it).
I’m still trying to recover from the shock of learning that our government has used pop tart Christina Aguilera’s music as a form of torture at Gitmo.
You gotta rub me the right way honey
I’m a genie in a bottle baby
Come, come, come on and let me out
Message to the Feds: if you ever want to break me, put me in a padded room with a continuous loop of Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody. Hell, just show me the CD and I’ll talk.
D.
90 minutes to a book store? Yikes, you have my condolences! Ironically, my husband is always trying to get me to leave my little island and live somehwere big so we can have more choice.
I live in the second-largest city in Manitoba (which ain’t saying much; there are ~50,000 people in my town, and just over one million in the whole province), and we have one semi-chain bookstore in town. And apparently their parent company won’t let them order their own stock; they have to take what they get. There are a bunch of second-hand bookstores, and an indie bookstore that’s mostly full of whatever they haven’t been able to sell for the last decade or so. The nearest chain bookstores are in Winnipeg, two hours east.
It’s hard to find good SF in Brandon — the local “semi-chain” store has an entire shelf dedicated to, for instance, Terry Brooks, with books that reach back into the 80s, but heaven forfend that you try to find the newest (or anything, really) by Swanwick.
pant pant Ok, that’s enough ranting. At least there are the online booksellers. And we have a halfway-decent library. And I do still manage to stumble upon the occasional gem here in town.
But still.
Yeah, I found Spinrad’s Iron Dream in our used bookstore. Whenever I go there, I always have particular authors in mind (this time, I was looking for more Swanwick), and I never find anything. At least this time I found SOMEthing.
I don’t think Jack Faust is for me, by the way. I can’t manage to slog through the first chapter. Reads like he did his research and he wants you to know it. Every bit of it. Sorry . . .
I don’t think Jack Faust is for me, by the way. I can’t manage to slog through the first chapter. Reads like he did his research and he wants you to know it. Every bit of it. Sorry . . .
I can certainly see your point. The first time I read it, I felt underwhelmed. The second time, I was much more impressed.
I find that most of his short stories are amazing, though. Especially the collection Gravity’s Angels (think I mentioned that one before…)