*** Josh Lieb – I am a Genius of Unspeakable Evil and I Want to be Your Class President
*** Stefan Fatsis – A Few Seconds of Panic
*** Carlos Ruiz Zafón – The Shadow of the Wind

Class President was pretty fun, The main character’s evilness is well played out, and I like the gradual reveal of the depths of his villainy. I was, however, a little disappointed with the ending (no spoilers!). The Fatsis book was also pretty good, at least if you’re interested in Football. I found a lot of the details and the personal relationships interesting, though I thought the book was just a little too long. The Zafon book was one of those, what do you call it, literary mystery-thriller type things. You know, mysterious goings-on surrounding books and writing. It was pretty good, nothing earth-shattering, but an entertaining time, basically a sort of well-written literary gothic-romance. And of course Barcelona makes a great setting.

** William Gibson – Spook Country
** Jonathon Swift – Gulliver’s Travels

Thinking about Spook Country and Pattern Recognition, I kind of got them mixed up into one story that somehow involved Cayce Pollard and the footage and a mysterious shipping container but, oh yeah, I read Spook Country in October and that’s where the shipping container came from. The shipping container mystery sure was pretty interesting until we actually found out that it was zzzzzzzzzz. Whatsername, Hollis, was an okay character, but like Cayce she seemed sort of cool and shiny and not very connected with the reader at all. I don’t feel like I know them or anyone else in these books. And in terms of interesting moments and general reading pleasure, this one fell short of Pattern Recognition. I’ll still keep reading Gibson, but it’s been a while since the arrival of a new Gibson book was an “omg must have” moment.

I will probably get attacked for this (or would if anyone read my blog), but I found Gulliver’s Travels, on my first rereading since high school, to be pretty boring and flat. I know that Swift is supposed to be a master of satire (and yes, the eating babies thing is still funny), but the satire and social insight stuff supposedly found in this book is lame in the extreme. Oh, people are self important however big or small they are! People disagree over silly things and will kill over them! Were these observations shocking even when Swift made them? Some of Swift’s imagining of how Gulliver would interact with people so large or so small (sorry, I got bored by the end of the Brobdingnag section and skipped the rest) was fun to read.

** F. Scott Fitzgerald – The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button
*** Robert E. Howard – Three Conan stories (The Scarlet Citadel, The Pool Of The Black One, The Tower Of The Elephant)
** Jules Verne – 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea
*** Fritz Leiber – The Best Of Fritz Leiber
*** Fritz Leiber – Swords and Deviltry
*** William Gibson – Pattern Recognition
** Oscar Wilde – The Picture Of Dorian Gray

September was the month I finally started to explore ebooks. I tried the Kindle and Aldiko apps on my phone, reading a variety of free stuff (Fitzgerald, Verne, Howard), and then I ended up getting a Kindle for my birthday (thanks, Mom and Dad!). The phone app is usable for short amounts of time. I like the Kindle pretty well, though it’s a little awkward if you get bored with a book and want to skim. Also, I think my tolerance for boring stuff is lower in ebook format (and even lower in the phone app) — I’m not sure if I would have enjoyed 20,000 Leagues more on paper (or even on the Kindle, which I hadn’t gotten yet).

I was curious to read Benjamin Button; I didn’t actually see the movie, but I wanted to read the story behind it. There’s not much to this short story aside from its strange premise and some good jokes. The movie must have had to make up basically an entirely new story to give the audience something to get interested in. The story was fine, but more of a one-off joke or thought experiment than anything emotionally involving.

I’ve been wanting to reread some good, old fantasy stuff lately, and both Howard’s Conan and Leiber’s Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser were on the list. I found several Conan stories free on Aldiko and enjoyed reading them. They’re entertaining reads and written in a lively way, but a little too dependent on the ol’ telling rather than showing. Howard does a lot of what I think of as the Lovecraft move: he tells you something is unspeakable, indescribable, evil, perverse, etc., rather than explaining it in such a way that it makes your skin truly crawl. Still, for all that, there’s a lot of good description and action going on; I’d like to read more Conan and more of Howard’s other writing.

20,000 Leagues was pretty good but required heavy skimming. I believe I read this and some other Verne when I was young, but didn’t remember much in detail. There was a lot of zoology and other nature detail that I wasn’t that interested in, and a lot of attempted scientific explanations that were not unreasonable at the time but seem kind of silly now. Nothing against Verne per se, but I would have preferred a little more adventure storytelling and a little less scientific (or pseudo-scientific) detail. I suspect I’d have a similar reaction to a lot of his other books, though I will probably try some more, since they’re free on the Kindle.

Fritz Leiber is really good. I enjoyed his “Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser” books as a kid (handed down from my father, who loves them too) but hadn’t read anything else of his. All of the short stories I read in these two volumes were pretty good; my only complaint is I’d like more novels, since I often find the short story form a little lacking. I want something involved that I can sink my teeth into.

Pattern Recognition was pretty good. It was a little silly and one of those author-wish-fulfillment (“omg how cool is my main character, right?”) type things. For all that, I kind of enjoyed Cayce’s weird phobias and talents, and the way a community people grew up around the mysterious footage. The resolution wasn’t particularly satisfying or interesting though. An enjoyable read, but I’ve already forgotten most of it (as I did after the first time I read it) except for a few nice details.

You know, the modern image of Oscar Wilde is a guy going around spouting off witticisms (e.g. this) which is pretty much what I pictured. What I didn’t realize is pretty much all of those Wildean witticisms (okay, a lot of them anyway) are from the first couple chapters of Dorian Gray. I mean, I read it in high school, but who remembers that stuff? Dorian Gray was pretty good, if a bit melodramatic. You will get tired very quickly of some of the more emotional characters and their interminably yip-yap. But hey witticisms, corruption, sex, drugs, and scandal, am I right?

I purged a bunch of stuff off the shelves. Of course, not everything I got rid of is something I didn’t like — I just figure it can remain part of my virtual library without having to take up real space. And of course, some of the stuff I got rid of I’ve already forgotten and hope to never think about again. Here are a few that stay in the virtual library.

*** Walter Gropius – The New Architecture and the Bauhaus. I took a modern architecture class in college, for which this was one of the textbooks. I love modern architecture, both the good and the bad, both the successes and the magnificent failures, and I love the Bauhaus. I kept this so long mostly as a reminder of that.
*** Julian Barnes – Talking it Over. This was the book that taught me terms like “crepuscular” and “rebarbatively quotidian”. It’s also one of the first “unreliable narrator” books I remember really noticing and appreciating. Its Rashomon-like structure makes for some very funny bits. I may even want to reread this one again someday (though I somehow never connected that much with other of his books), but had gotten kind of tired of it.
** Milorad Pavic – Dictionary of the Khazars. One of the few books that survived the wax and wane of my interest in experimental fiction. I read a lot of gimmicky books for a while there, and this was one of the few in which I thought the gimmick (story told in a series of encyclopedia entries in multiple conflicting encyclopedias, and the user must do his own cross-referencing) had something to it. Though as often happens, the decent gimmick was somewhat wasted on a story that wasn’t itself that compelling (see e.g. Timecode).
*** Roald Dahl – My Uncle Oswald. I love Roald Dahl, but Uncle Oswald isn’t really one of his better inventions.
*** Dorris Dorrie – Love, Pain, and the Whole Damn Thing. I really liked this book sometime in the 90s (and the lovely Edward Gorey cover on my edition), but I just didn’t think I’d want to read it again.
Leo Marks – Between Silk and Cyanide. Already reviewed.
Charles Yu – Third Class Superhero. Already reviewed.
Patrick Neate – City of Tiny Lights. Already reviewed.
Patrick Suskind – Perfume
Jeffrey Steingarten – The Man Who Ate Everything
Georges Perec – Life A User’s Manual. I mostly enjoyed this. It was left behind by an ex-girlfriend.

** Matt Ruff – Sewer, Gas, and Electric
*** Michael Moorcock – Elric (the original six novels)
*** Wendy Pini – Law and Chaos
*** Jim Thompson – The Grifters

I really enjoyed Sewer, Gas, and Electric the first time around. This time it just felt like someone trying too hard to throw a bunch of “funny” stuff into one book in order to create the best-sounding back-cover blurb. Giant killer sharks in the NYC sewers! A shark named after a beer!!! Etc! It was an okay time, but eh.

Michael Moorcock is not a bad writer. Or so I’m told — I don’t feel like I can judge very well, since I read most of his stuff when I was much younger and perhaps not a great judge of writing quality. However, the Elric books are really not that well written. There’s a lot of the cardinal sin of telling rather than showing — we’re often told things are evil or unnatural or whatever, and we have to take it on trust. It’s all fairly trashy — and yet, I pretty much sped through the entire six-book series (six thin, lightweight books, I admit) at full speed, compelled to see the whole thing through. So he’s got something going for him. Anyway, Elric is a lovable hero, the tortured emo anti-hero, doomed to kill those he loves and agonize about it to the uncaring gods. Plus, he looks cool.

Having finished the Elric books off, I decided to dig out Law and Chaos, Wendy Pini’s book of drawings from her never-realized animated Elric movie. I’ve had that book about as long as my Elric books (and going back to when I read ElfQuest and may even have admitted to reading it in public), and so her images are inseparable from Moorcock’s words in my head. It’s probably been 20 years since I even looked much at that book, and many of the scenes were still perfectly familiar. The art isn’t great — it’s a little too elfish/fey for Elric perhaps (not surprising from a very young-at-the-time artist who would go on to create ElfQuest) and it certainly doesn’t shy away from the emo aspect of Elric (again, not surprising), but it’s mostly a good fit for Moorcock’s character, and anyone who likes Elric would probably appreciate it.

The Grifters was good stuff, makes me want to read more Jim Thompson.