my little corner of L-space

A recent Smart Bitches post mentioned, in passing, the pleasing superstition that one cannot die while one's bedside table contains unfinished books. I am clearly meant for multiple-century, vampiric, eternal life.



From the bottom up:

• Michael Marshall Smith, What You Make It (almost finished). Borrowed from stv nearly a year ago, mostly read, very good, but it freaks me out so I have to psyche myself into going back.
• John M. Ford, The Last Hot Time (half-way through). I ordered some Ford works because his comments on Making Light are so witty, acute and funny - the man has an accomplished and extremely irreverent way with language, literature and culture. Last Hot Time is a sort of alternate-America with a very strange, gritty, surreal element of magic, faerie and what have you, all mixed in with a Chicago-gangster feel. Recommended, but slightly bewildering, which is probably why I haven't finished it yet.
• Kai Meyer, The Flowing Queen and The Stone Light (finished). These I bought more or less by accident, but they're very interesting: young adult fantasy, alternate-world Venice in a sort of 18th/19th-century state, but with most of the rest of the world taken over by the airships and ravening undead hordes of the Egyptian gods. Elements so far have included magic mirrors, living stone lions, a water-goddess and a descent into a completely bizarre version of Hell. I haven't seen the third book in the series anywhere yet, but will definitely grab it when it turns up. These aren't brilliantly written, but they're competent, and the world is wildly original enough to be compelling.
• Peter Dickinson, Walking Dead (barely started). I love Dickinson's young adult fantasy, which is intelligent, innovative and slightly dark. This is my first foray into his adult work, here a sort of colonial thriller with zombies. Apparently. It's weird enough that I haven't got far.
• Margaret Mahy, Maddigan's Fantasia (finished). This was a birthday present from pumeza, it's next to my bed because I want to re-read it. Mahy is always interesting, psychologically taut and imaginative. The weird post-apocalyptic time-travel vibe of this one is explored through a story which is perhaps slightly episodic, but I loved it anyway.
• Noisy Outlaws, Unfriendly Blobs, and Some Other Things That Aren't as Scary, Maybe, etc (finished). The McSweeney's-published collection of off-the-wall kids' stories, about which I rambled here, so shall not again. Also here because I want to re-read it.
• The September issue of Asimov's (almost finished). Quite a good month - solid, interesting stories, although nothing that really blew me away. On the pile because I bogged down in the heavy politics of the last story.
• Wilkie Collins, Armadale (just started). Feeding my fondness for Victorian pulp melodrama. This is amusing me intensely - it reads like soap opera or bad romance, with mysterious women, doubles, identity theft and old men making deathbed confessions, and I'm only in the first chapter.
• Michel Houllebecq, H. P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life (about halfway through). This is an amazing piece of writing, but his slightly luminous prose demands to be read very slowly.
• John M. Ford, Heat of Fusion and other stories (halfway through). Short stories: this man is all over the show in terms of voice, style and form. Recommended, but slightly dizzying.

This eternal life of the literary variety gives me lots of time to sort out the career crisis. And, thank-you to everyone for their insights, which have been fascinating, insightful, terrifying, illuminating, humbling and generous.

Last Night I Dreamed: incautiously time-travelling, I ended up stranded in the past with a whole group of people, including, for some reason, George Clooney, who was being quite efficiently In Charge. Bits of the past were very beautiful gardens inhabited by friendly gazelle, but fortunately we realised in time that the whole thing was a DEADLY TRAP! Returning to our own time involved taking over a giant Egyptian-style temple and setting fire to it explosively so that the central room in which we were enclosed would spin fast enough to launch us into the future. At some point in all this I had to interrupt future-launching projects to buy shoes. Quite nice shoes, actually. I'd totally buy them in reality.