Today I read and enjoyed both The Gashleycrumb Tinies by Edward Gorey, a macabrely funny picture book about adorable little Victorian children dying 26 different ways in alphabetical order, and Tolkien Treasures by Catherine McIlwain, a concise but beautiful book on Oxford University’s collection of J.R.R. Tolkien’s hand-drawn illustrations, book covers, maps and Christmas letters to his children.
Finished Benchmarks: Galaxy Bookshelf , by Algis Budrys. It’s a collection of SF book reviews which I got for Christmas. I enjoyed it a lot, and will be reading a number of books and short stories based on his recommendations. That said, it’s filled with spoilers, which in this particular case didn’t bother me, although it normally would.
Now I’m reading When Worlds Collide, by Philip Wylie and Edwin Balmer.
I just finished Suzanne Palmer’s novel Finder, an action-adventure space opera by the Writer Guest of Honor at next month’s Virtual Arisia science fiction convention. I hadn’t read anything of hers, and thought that, as I’m a panelist, I ought to. A good read – better than I’d expected. Although her theory is apparently that you should throw just about everything awful at your hero that you can until he emerges triumphant but by no means unscathed at the conclusion, like Elaine Isaac does.
Florida Man was a quick and funny read. Someone collected a year’s worth of headlines that have “Florida Man” in the title (a notion that has been discussed on this Board before. I think we had a thread on it). You start thinking that “Florida Man” is the same guy that all of this is happening to, like some gonzo super anti-hero (“Florida Man gets head-butted, knocked out by Alligator”)
Tall Tales by Al Jaffee. Arisia is having a panel on Jaffee, which I thought I might get onto, and this is background, as well as fun reading. He published it when he was between his regular stints at Mad, and it preceded any of his books published under the “Mad” logo.I’d write more about it (and him), but it’d derail the thread.
Stupid History by Leland Gregory. A gift. A lot of this consists of very familiar misconceptions about history, and some of it is demonstrably wrong, but it’s a long book, filled with lots of factoids I hadn’t encountered before.
The First Brain: The Neuroscience of Planarians by One R. Pagan (there need to be a couple of accents in that name). The title is completely misleading. This is not a book for specialists (despite being published by Oxford University Press), but a book for laymen, taking you from essentially scratch to an exploration of the flatworm brain. It’s background for an article I want to do on flatworm vision.
And I’m almost finished with the very thick book of Will Shortz presents Challenging Ken-Ken
Here you go: Florida Man, the worst superhero ever
New thread: Welcome to the New Age!
Finished When Worlds Collide , by Philip Wylie and Edwin Balmer. Some of the action scenes were well done, but on the whole, I didn’t care for it.
I’ll start my next new book in January.
Don’t read the sequel, After Worlds Collide, by the same team.
Whoops. (I read the first book because it was chosen by my science fiction book club, and I skimmed the second because it’s in the same volume so I figured I would just in case “what happens next” came up in the discussion.)