I’M READING AS FAST AS I CAN (AUGUST 2011 EDITION)

Book reports blah blah blah.

JUST FINISHED

Child Of Fortune by Norman Spinrad

I bought a copy of this book in the late 80s but never got around to reading it. It’s probably as well as I don’t think I was mentally prepared for Spinrad’s complicated, lyrical prose at the time, if only because even now I found it somewhat of a slog, with Spinrad spinning hippy-dippy psychedelic imagery peppered with Spanish, French and German phrases to the point of pretentiousness. But I’m used to Spinrad’s style by now, and as usual I’ve found it’s worth the effort to slash through it to get to the meat of the story – which is, basically, an interplanetary allegory of the 60s Flower Children movement and the hippie intellectual quest for self-discovery via travels, psychotropic drugs and free love. Whatever you think of the reality of the Flower Children, Spinrad does a great job of capturing the spirit of the ideology that drove it without ignoring the realities of where it ultimately led for a lot of people.

AUTHOR’S NOTE: Eagle-eyed readers may have noticed that last month’s book report said I was just starting this book. Well, I did say it was somewhat of a slog. And in case yr wondering where I found the time to finish the books listed in the Recent Titles section, the answer is simple: they were read in parallel, for I tend to read two or three books at a time.

JUST STARTED

The Grave Robber Chronicles 1: Cavern Of The Blood Zombies by Xu Lei

Here’s something you don’t come across every day: an English translation of a best-selling series from mainland China, written by a guy who runs a trading company and wrote it in his spare time, about modern-day grave robber Uncle Three raiding tombs and fighting vampires and zombies with his nephew. That alone was incentive enough to give this a try. We’ll see how it goes.

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