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‘Throne Of The Crescent Moon’ By Saladin Ahmed


ThoneThis book got pretty good press when it came out; both as a good read and for the fact that it abandoned the traditional, Western European medieval style of fantasy world for one based on the actual medieval Middle East (or, really, on the fantastical Middle East of the Arabian Nights).

As it turns out, it is one half of a good story. A bedouin-esque girl who can turn into a lion; an ascetic swordsman; an aging ghul hunter; and a husband and wife team of magus and alchemist.

But it’s missing the other half. There are ancient pyramids and evil ‘Dead Gods’ from an ancient time (something between ancient Egypt and Robert E. Howard’s orientalist fantasies of Stygia) and child murderer buried alive in the tomb of an ancient something that was, apparently, not so dead. There are some great stories behind the villains, clearly. Too bad we never ever hear those stories. Just tiny bits. But no flavor. Not background. No glimpse of their perspective or motivations (which the reader is forced to assume are ‘power and world domination’). By the standards of today’s door stopper fantasy novels, this one is not so long and an extra hundred pages would have been well worth it. As it was, the final confrontation was disappointing because I had no feel for the enemy they were fighting.

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Happy Birthday, Tom Baker


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I’m Back From Thailand


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I’m Still In Thailand, So Here’s An Episode Of ‘Flash Gordon’


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My Top Ten Of 2015


In no particular order and merely to get in on the game, here is a list of my top ten reads from 2015 (not the the top ten published in 2015, because I’m still catching up on the nineteenth century [I think I already made that joke earlier]).

Machi Tawara’s Salad Anniversary was just so darn enjoyable to read that it’s got to be on this list.

The Golden Lotus… it took me a while to finish it, but in addition to being an enjoyable read (somehow, the seemingly repetitive venalities of Ximen Qing never got old), I also felt that I learned a lot by immersing myself in the pages of a book about a very, very different milieu than my own. Even little stuff, like figuring out what they were actually drinking when it mentioned ‘wine’ (most likely a malted beverage, similar to sake) and, yes, reading about medieval Chinese sex toys.

Shen Congwen’s Border Town did not stay with me long, but good Lord, was it heartbreaking. I suspect that my mind is trying not to remember it, because it was so darn sad.

Jenny Zhang’s Dear Jenny, We Are All Find was not only a good read, but I felt downright prescient when, while reading it, she became minorly famous for her response to… let’s call it ‘Poetry-gate.’

You know there’s going to be some fantasy on this list, right? Nothing new, but I re-read the gentle, melancholy Riddle- Master of Hed this year, for the first time in decades.

While re-reading Proust, it was in the third book, Guermantes Way, that my efforts bore fruit and I was understanding him in a way that I had not before.

I finished Powell’s magisterial-comic epic, Dance to the Music of Time. Unfortunately, the volumes I read in 2014 were the best, but Books Do Furnish a Room was very good and I finished it in January of 2015, so it counts.

The Red Lily… a sexy, nineteenth century bit of a novel about artists, aristocrats, love affairs and what not… what’s not to like?

Seeing Antogonick performed on the stage in Chicago singlehandedly got me back into Anne Carson, who I had fallen out of love with. I picked up an inexpensive copy and read it after seeing the play and, yeah, it’s still damn good.

Epinician Odes and Dithyrambs of Bacchylides was a freaking wonderful find! Who knew occasional poetry could be so awesome!

 

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City Of Wonders


  I was pretty excited to see that Moore’s City of Wonders – the third book in his Seven Forges series – had come out. I even paid full price for the ebook, which I almost never do.

So I am disappointed to acknowledge that I was… disappointed. It was just lacking in something. Direction perhaps. Or purpose. Or discipline.

But it did add its first female main character. There have been important female characters, several, in fact, but here he added what seems to be a truly major perspective character who is also a woman (and set up to be a bigger influence in the next volume). So score one for a bit o’ feminism.

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‘Elfstones Of Shannara’ By Terry Brooks


 It may be that, horror of horrors, I decided to read a Shannara novel because I read that MTV was making a television series based on the second book: The Elfstones of Shannara.

Many years ago, during a misspent youth, I read this first of the novels, The Sword of Shannara. Even as a callow youth, I could see that it was so shamelessly stolen from the Lord of the Rings that it seemed nearly unbelievable that no legal action had been taken.

The Elfstones is better, if not exactly original (‘Bloodfire’ beneath an ancient mountain in an evil land sounds remarkably like the fires of Mount Doom). I found a reasonable amount of enjoyment from the story. Like LOTR, there is a main quest and then a more military story. Here, the main quest feels surprisingly tension free and unstressful. On the other hand, the battles and the work if preparing for war and defense is pretty thrilling and tense.

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Reading At Work


 I don’t read (except, infrequently, at lunch) at my regular job as minister of propaganda. However, I have a second job working for my better half, usually as a cashier/salesperson. On many such occasions, I read very nearly whatever I want and have recently been reading Remembrance of Things Past at Eastern Market. But lately, I have been at the Downtown DC Holiday Market and it is markedly more busy. It’s not impossible to read, but it is not conducive to the languorous hypnotism of Proust.

What turned out to be nearly perfect was the January 2016 edition of Asimov’s Science Fiction.

The big three of scifi are all owned by the same parent company: Analog Science Fiction and Fact, Asimov’s Science Fiction, and Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. The last is thicker, but also a little more expensive, whereas the middle is so affordable as to be practically a negligible expense and is also named after the greatest science fiction writer of the last century (yes, I know we wasn’t actually a good writer, but he was so influential, especially in using hard science, that we have to give him his due), so the choice is easy. There are other magazines, like Lightspeed and Interzone, but they are but so easily found at my local bookstore.

So this edition was very, very good. Good writing, good ideas, good stories. One weak story near the end and there was a historicalish novella about Einstein that simply didn’t capture me and which I didn’t finish, overall, this boded well for the future of the genre.

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Can’t Wait


Going back to Thailand I cannot wait. Absolutely ready. One hundred percent. Too much going on: buying a house, jam packed holiday season for my better half (she objects when I say that I ‘work’ for her; she prefers something like ‘help’ or ‘volunteer,’ but let’s be realistic, I’m an unpaid employee [so maybe the correct term of art should be that I ‘intern’ with her]), work stuff, work stuff, work stuff, family stuff.

Ready for a vacation. Ready to get away. Especially, knowing that it will probably be a while before I get away again. Logistics, and all.

Perhaps this is what adulthood is like, the constant, ceaseless nervous tension (I stole that turn of phrase about tension; I think from William Gibson; google it, I’m not your babysitter). Or perhaps it’s middle age. Did I skip adulthood and go directly to midlife?

Part of it is struggling, as always, with depression, which feels like a perpetual weight on your internal organs. Something is constantly pressing down on your heart and lungs and so they don’t work properly and you can always feel them about to fail and that knowledge of their being on that precipice takes your mind away from everything else and keeps you psychically crippled, after a fashion.

Let’s hope it’s the break I want it to be. I’ve downloaded several books to my Nook and are keeping them unread for the journey (mostly fantasy novels) and I’ll take some pleasure soon in picking out one or two physical books for the journey. At least one book of poetry, something worth re-reading. In the past, I’ve taken Wordsworth, for example. Perhaps this time I’ll bring Eliot or Shelley or Clare. And something else, something in prose. Could be a novel, but I’m inclined towards something non-fictional. While unpacking, I saw my cope of Elaine Scarry’s On Beauty and maybe I’ll bring that. It’s a little bulky, but perhaps if I put it away and don’t read anymore of it, Quintillian’s writings on the education of an orator. But probably not. Cicero might be better. Plato would be perfect, but I don’t have a compact copy of any of his books.

We shall see. Here’s a picture from Thailand, in the meantime.

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‘The Secret Of Sinharat’ By Leigh Brackett


 Leigh Brackett’s Eric John Stark novels are essentially Conan novels set on and Edgar Rice Burroughs-esque Mars (and also Venus and Mercury). I won’t call this book feminist because, Lord knows, it is not. But it was important to the history of the genre that a woman was contributing to a male dominated genre and was once considered one of the top writers in scifi/fantasy (not anymore, but mostly because tastes have changed).

She’s got the fast pace of a pulp writer and you can catch bits that influenced later works (she worked on the script for The Empire Strikes Back and you can see how she  could have been an influence on Lucas’s space operas). There are lost civilizations, rapacious mining companies (a bit of the western pulp style, that), and ancient mind stealing vampires. And, though the figure on the cover is white, Brackett describes her hero as having skin as black as his hair.