I’M READING AS FAST AS I CAN: OCTOBER 2008 EDITION

[defrog]

Because you can’t have too many book reports on the Interwidewebs.

JUST FINISHED

Lamb: The Gospel According To Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal by Christopher Moore
You know about the birth of Jesus, and you know what he did after age 30, but what happened in between? To hear Moore tell it, a lot of sex, demons, yeti and kung fu training. The story is genius: Jesus’ longtime (but not that bright) childhood friend Biff is raised from the dead to write the full story of Jesus, which includes going to Asia to hunt down the three wise men for his Messiah training. It’s the funniest account of Jesus I’ve ever read, and so full of teh blasphemy I’m surprised every right-wing Christian group in America hasn’t put a fatwa out on Moore for this. Wonderful, even though technically you already know how it ends.

JUST STARTED

The Yiddish Policeman’s Union by Michael Chabon
I loved The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier And Klay, but not The Final Solution, so this is a chance for Chabon to win me back. Twenty pages in, he’s already done it. Developing ...

RECENT TITLES

Little Heroes by Norman Spinrad
This is Spinrad’s big Rock’n’Roll Cyberpunk novel, and there’s a lot to love here. At the heart of it is a critique of the corporate music industry, the similarities between rock and computer hacking, and the role of sex and drugs as empowerment. It’s interesting that Spinrad suggests that when average people used technology to make and share their own music, the music industry responded by co-opting it so that they could control it – in reality, the industry ended up trying to ban the technology altogether, which has long since been judged as a major mistake. Anyway, Spinrad nailed it pretty well, although he tends to loop his prose to the point where it gets repetitive after awhile. And while there’s an insane amount of sex in it, the bright side is I no longer worry about the amount of explicit sex I’ve been stuffing into my current novel project. Clearly I’m not trying.

Briefing For A Descent Into Hell by Doris Lessing
I’ve never read Lessing before, and I confess it never occurred to me to do so until Warren Ellis mentioned somewhere that she wrote science-fiction. This isn’t exactly SF, but it is an interesting take on insanity, featuring a man who ends up in a mental ward and may or may not be trying to remember his past life as an alien god. The first part is really dense, but once it gets going, it’s pretty compelling. I liked it, and I don’t have nearly enough female authors on my shelf, so I’ll be trying some more Lessing in the future.

Agent To The Stars by John Scalzi
My very first e-book, read entirely on my Nokia N95 via Mobipocket, thus serving as a proof of concept that there is indeed a future in e-books. I don’t think they’ll replace dead-tree books, but as a reading experience it’s not that bad. As for the novel, it was Scalzi’s practice novel that he’s since offered as a free e-book. The story about a Hollywood agent hired by aliens to sell them to the human race is fun, and as a Hollywood satire it’s pretty clever, though the ending was a bit sudden. Anyway, the real moral is that Scalzi gave me a free book to try, and as a direct result, I bought a copy of his first proper novel, Old Man’s War. Did you catch that, Book Industry? Free e-book = sale.

The Sprouts Of Wrath by Robert Rankin
The fourth episode of Rankin’s Brentford series, this one about an evil plot to hold the Olympics in Brentford. I’m pretty much committed to reading everything Rankin’s ever done, and this one has a lot of the usual fun and humor you get from a book with John O’Mally and Jim Pooley in it, but storywise, it’s a little weak. Not bad, but Rankin’s done better.

Everything’s Eventual by Stephen King
The short story collection that has “1408” in it. It was a cheap copy, and the movie was good enough that I wanted to see how the story compared, and as overexposed as King is, he has written a few good things in his time. Anyway, some stories are all right, some not, and I can’t say I’m any more enriched as a result for bothering.

Checking out,

This is dF

Comments

[ziyda.livejournal.com]

Sweet!