Thursday, September 21, 2000

Watership Down -- Richard Adams

The Forge of God -- Greg Bear

Anvil of the Stars -- Greg Bear

Great Sky River -- Gregory Benford

Tides of Light -- Gregory Benford

[9/21/2000 3:08:39 PM]

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Wednesday, September 20, 2000

Pirx the Pilot -- Stanislaw Lem
[9/20/2000 2:50:16 PM]

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Friday, September 1, 2000

Hard-Boiled Wonderland and The End of the World -- Haruki Murakami
[9/1/2000 10:41:15 AM]

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Saturday, August 26, 2000

Recently . . .

A Civil Campaign -- Lois McMaster Bujold

Bread & Wine -- Samuel Delany

Fear of a Black Marker -- Keith Knight

Sunset Song -- Lewis Grassic Gibbon
[8/26/2000 7:04:44 PM]

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Tuesday, August 1, 2000

Currently slogging through:

Firece Invalids Home From Hot Climates -- Tom Robbins

Read recently (i.e. sometime in the last month):

Childhood's End -- Arthur C. Clarke

Shorter Views: Queer Thoughts and the Politics of the Paraliterary -- Raphael Carter

Zot! -- Scott McCloud

Reread recently:

Elfquest Book 1 -- Wendy & Richard Pini

Batman: Year 1 -- Frank Miller
[8/1/2000 8:59:03 PM]

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Thursday, June 1, 2000

Read recently:

1984 -- Samuel Delany Collection of letters during one (important) year in Delany's life. Highly recommended, even if you're not a Delany nut.

Fortunate Fall -- Raphael Carter

Reread recently:

Unlikely Stories, Mostly -- Alasdair Gray

The Lord of the Rings -- J. R. R. Tolkein

The Silmarillion -- J. R. R. Tolkein

"Rhinoceros Who Quoted Nietzsche" -- Peter S. Beagle

[6/1/2000 1:21:17 PM]

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Monday, May 1, 2000

Contemporary Scottish Short List

(This list was concocted for a friend who needed suggestions for books to read. It's a highly imperfect, incomplete, and subjective list of some Scottish writers who are a. really cool and b. still alive and kicking. It's a start.)

Novels

1. Iain Banks, The Crow Road
2. Janice Galloway, The Trick is To Keep Breathing
3. Alasdair Gray, Poor Things
4. Alasdair Gray, Lanark
5. James Kelman, How Late It Was, How Late
6. Charles Palliser, Betrayals
7. Alan Warner, Morvern Callar
8. Irvine Welsh, Trainspotting

Short Stories

1. Janice Galloway, Blood
2. Alasdair Gray, 10 Tales Tall & True
3. James Kelman, Busted Scotch

Some caveats to the above list: I'm not adding the more science fiction-ey Iain Banks books. I'm figuring you'll get to those anyway--The Crow Road is one of the better of his non-SF books. Of the novels, I'd start with Trainspotting, Poor Things, and either of the Galloway books. Lanark and How Late It Was are probably the two most important books on the list, but they're also two of the most difficult and/or dense. Relatively speaking, the lightest reads are probably The Crow Road, Morvern Callar (highly uneven, but fun), and Betrayals, which is sort of a giant lit-geek in-joke of a crime novel. I say lightest, but there isn't a book on the list that isn't incredibly grim--in general, the writers concentrate on talking about drug abuse, death, alcoholism, death, political repression, death, police brutality, death, mental problems, death, disability, suicide, sexual abuse, and, um, death. Even the funny ones.
[5/1/2000 1:11:51 PM]

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Thursday, March 2, 2000

Restraint of Beasts
Magnus Mills

Right, so I admit that I picked up this book because I thought it fit into my Scottish novelists fetish. And it would, except that Magnus Mills is English, as is the protagonist of this odd little novel. But while I figured out Mr. Mills' nationality after giving the back cover a closer look, I figured it might be interesting to see what he might be up to with the Scottish characters in the book.

Very little good, is the answer. Tam and Ritchie, the two itinerant fencebuilders that the English foreman is stuck with overseeing, are by turns lazy, shiftless, drunk, dullwitted, agressive, and unclean. They're also badly socialized metalheads. (I should note here that the Scottish metalheads pictured here are dead ringers, physically, for some lads I met in Glasgow. We're talking mullets here, people.) Sure, the narrator isn't much better--he's just more moderate about it, and well enough socialized to actually hit on women.

You get the picture. So I'm so busy wondering, as Mr. Mills puts these charmers through horribly tedious sounding fence-related labor, why he's bothered to portray Scots in this lovely manner while making a fairly big fuss about their Scottishness, and furthermore why he hasn't yet been put up against a wall by some of the more enthusiastic members of the Scottish National Party's unnofficial blue-faced thug brigade, that it takes me a while to notice that something of a body count is building up.

Hmmmm. Without giving too much away, right about at that point the Scottish/English aspect of the story almost disappears, and everything takes a turn for the Kafka. Why, we are instructed to wonder, would anybody be needing to build these particular fences so high in the first place? And why do we never see the factory workers leave? And why . . etc. etc.

We're never really told why, of course. Probably has something to do with the fairly heavy-handed humans are beasts and beasts should be restrained message that's fed to us early on. Essentially we get the either you're a sheep or you're a fascist choice, and if I have to put up with that sort of depressive wankery I want it from someone who's balanced it out in other, more optimistic works.

Like, oh, say, Iain Banks. Who does this sort of thing much better than Mr. Magnus Mills. And is Scottish.

[3/2/2000 10:44:17 AM]

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