Lawrence Person's Reading Diary for 2009

I'm an incorrigible (and incurable) list maker. I'm also fascinated by what other people read. Since about 1989 or so, I've been keeping a list of all the books I've read, year by year. Though science fiction, fantasy, horror, and slipstream make up the bulk of my reading material, my tastes are reasonably eclectic, as reflected below. I also read a number of things some people might find fairly obscure. (Good luck in finding someone who's even seen copies of Peter Currell Brown's Smallcreep's Day or Jane Gaskell's The Shiny Narrow Grin.) While I also read a fair amount of non-fiction and reference material, I won't be covering that on this page. Those interested in collections of science fiction first editions might want to take a look at the page on my library.

I used to read about a book a week, but since I bought a house and adopted a Golden Retriver, my reading rate has, alas, steadily declined. Anyway, this is the list of what I've read this year. At some point I might put up commentary on some of the books I've read before 2002, but don't hold your breath.

Neil Gaiman's Shoggoth's Old Peculiar: A light Cthulhu-Mythos themed chapbook to start the year with.
R. A. Lafferty's The Devil is Dead: This is fun, like all Lafferty novels, though the third book in the loose trilogy (More than Melchisedech, broken up into three volumes as noted below) was better, wilder, and woollier (even for Lafferty).
Philip K. Dick's Confessions of a Crap Artist: Solid, effective mainstream novel. I liked it better than Valis, and perhaps a bit more than Martian Time-Slip, but not as much as most of his other novels. In many ways, Fay Hume is a whole lot scarier than Palmer Eldritch...
Joe R. Lansdale's Retro Pulp Tales: After spending time in Dick's dysfunctional interpersonal dynamics, I decided I wanted to read something where lots of stuff blew up real good, and Retro Pulp Tales fit the bill. F. Paul Wilson's "Sex Slaves of the Dragon Tong" is probably the best one here (I mean, how can you not love Little Orphan Annie being kidnapped by a yellow peril slaving ring, and a faceoff between Fu Manchu and Daddy Warbucks?), with Kim Newman's "Clubland Heroes" a close second. But I personally could have done without the Gidget story...
David Marusek's Getting to Know You: I've known David since, I think, the 2001 Worldcon, so I'm slightly chagrined that I haven't read any of his books until now. This is a very solid collection of near-to mid-future SF.
Kage Baker's Or Else My Lady Keeps the Key: Pirate novella. It swashes a pretty good buckle, but significant parts of it were a bit by-the-numbers for my taste.
Philip Jose Farmer's Down in the Black Gang: I can see why Farmer was influential and highly regarded in his day. The stories in here are quite uneven, but many are very well done. Some, like "A Bowl Bigger Than Earth," don't really work for me (the only surprise is that it makes a different obvious point than the obvious point I thought it was going to make). "Prometheus" is pretty swell, even though you know exactly where it's going. And "How Deep the Grooves" looks like it's going to be a particularly nasty story...and then ends up being even nastier.
Cory Doctrow's Little Brother: Sort of a left-wing crypto version of Atlas Shrugged. It starts out well enough, but becomes less believable as time goes on, until eventually the villains are acting the in the sort of way that only someone who takes everything they read on Daily Kos and The Huffington Post at face value would find believable. This won the Prometheus Award, and I can see why, but it's still like Ayn Rand winning the Lenin Prize.
Charles Stross' Saturn's Children: Charlie's homage to later Heinlein (especially Friday). Competent, but not one of his stronger works.
Robert E. Howard's King Conan: For some reason I've taken to reading a Gnome Press Conan right after every Stross novel, as they provide a nice sense of contrast. Rare indeed is the writer who can do Sword and Sorcery as well as Howard. (From what I've read, only Karl Edward Wagner comes close.)
Paul Park's No Traveler Returns: This thing is a mess. It can't decide if it wants to be an external manifestation of the characters inner state, a literal vision of the afterlife, or a metafictional romp, the latter choice hindered by the leaden nature of the work and the fact the protagonist is an idiot.
Joe R. Lansdale's The King and Other Stories: Mostly short-shorts. Very competently done, but pretty slight.
Basil Cooper's And Afterwards the Dark: I'd been meaning to read more classic Weird Tales/Jamesian tradition short stories, but most of these struck me as fairly by-the-numbers exercises. The exception was the SF story that concludes the collection, "The Flabby Men," which does a better job of building up a mysterious, menacing atmosphere, not to mention the sort of post-apocalyptic society that would cause Margaret Atwood to break out in hives...
Jack Vance's The Asutra: Strangely enough, I thought the second book of this trilogy was the strongest; the first and third were not among Vance's best.
Gene Wolfe's Pirate Freedom: Timeslip adventure. I liked this much better than An Evil Guest, but not as much as The Wizard Knight books.
Christopher Brookmyre's All Fun and Games Until Someone Loses an Eye: Solid, humorous mystery-thriller novel in which a son's kidnapping leadshis 40-something mother to inadvertently take up life as something of a secret agent. Charlie Stross compared Brookmyre to Joe R. Lansdale, but Lansdale is a whole lot more politically incorrect (and thus more dangerous); there's nothing in Brookmyre to even remotely offend The Right Kinds of People Who Believe in All the Right Things.
Samuel R. Delany's Empire Star: Read this on the plane to Readercon, where I got Delany to sign it (along with a bunch of other books). Interesting coming of age space opera novella with a bit of time travel thrown in. Not bad, but the "there are only three or four important people in the galaxy and you meet them over and over again" strikes me as a pretty lazy plot device.
Philip Lawson (i.e. Michael Bishop and Paul Di Filippo)'s Would It Kill You To Smile?: Humorous mystery about a ventriloquist's son searching for the dummy stolen from his less-than-perfect father's casket. Entertaining and eminently readable, but not a patch on either author's best work. (Another book I brought to Readercon to have signed, since both Mike and Paul were there.)
Richard Morgan's Broken Angels: Very solid second novel starring the protagonist of Altered Carbon and mercenary expedition to open a gate leading to the spaceship of a long-extinct race. It's interesting that I've always slotted Alastair Reynolds and Richard Morgan's books into the same mental slot, largely for reasons extrinsic to the text itself (both UK SF writers, both debuted around the same time, both publish fairly big books, etc.), but also because both deployed notably post/cyberpunk tropes in their work. However, it's interesting that Reynold's Chasm City is somewhat closer to Altered Carbon in setting and feel, while Broken Angels has a number of things in common with Revelation Space.
Wil Durant's Our Oriental Heritage (non-fiction): So, way back in the dim mists of time, I signed up for the Book of the Month Club, and got the Durant's 11-volume History of Civilization monster as my signup benefit. Since then, I've worked my way on and off (mostly off) through the first volume between other books. And now I've finally finished it. Hooray! Durant was good about conveying telling details of the everyday lives of the people, but he goes into more detail about various artistic movements than I can really assimilate. I'm hoping to get more out of Volume 2, The Life of Greece which I just started.I suspect I'll be able to report back on that sometime in 2010...
Naomi Novik's Temeraire: I'm not usually interested in dragons, but after wading through most of a celebrated collection of Serious Science Fiction stories that I found interminable, I picked this up as a change of pace, and was shocked at how engaging it was. The whole Napoleonic War Dragons idea sounded like a conceit to me, but she really makes it work. A very good first novel, and I look forward to reading the rest in the series.
John Kennedy Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces: I thought it was time for some modern literature to come around on the guitar, and A Confederacy of Dunces is one of the Pulitzer Prize winners I had in my Nearly Infinite Library. (Others in there that I considered (and the reasons for not reading them just now) were Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (slightly longer than what I was looking to read), Larry McMurtry's Lonesome Dove (much larger than I was looking for; I would have had trouble fitting it my bag to carry to work), Cormac McCarthy's The Road (more depressing than I was looking for right now), Alice Walker's The Color Purple (not in the mood), Michael Cunningham's The Hours (looks like a snoozer), and Richard Ford's Independence Day (don't know much about).) (I also have National Book Award winners like Ha Jin's Waiting, Dennis Johnson's Tree of Smoke, Philip Roth's Sabbath's Theater, and Don Delillo's White Noise on tap, should the Pulitzer prove an insufficiently target-rich literary environment...) And it had a reputation as a funny book. And it is pretty funny, albeit not in the same league as Joseph Heller's Catch-22 or Barry Hughart's Bridge of Birds. It's the story of Ignatius Riley, a lazy, overeducated asshole who annoys the living shit out of every single person he crosses paths with (most of whom are even dimmer and less self-aware than the protagonist, though none as irritating). It's virtues are those of satire rather than a plot that gets more interesting as you go along. It's also notable as a detailed evocation of a particular time and place (New Orleans in the 1960s), though it wasn't published (posthumously) until 1980. Though I didn't love it as much as some swooning critics, I did enjoy it much more than the last literary novel I read with an irritating asshole as the protagonist (J.D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye). There's also something almost quaint about a plot point involving the police busting a school pornography ring. Today you have to assume that the average high schooler has access to unlimited pornographic vistas thanks to the wonder of the Internet...
Bruce Sterling's The Caryatids: How much you'll enjoy reading The Caryatids depends on how much you'd enjoy listening to Bruce Sterling talk to himself. Because that's basically what The Caryatids is about. (This is not necessarily selling it short; Bruce's monologues are endlessly fascinating, both in person and on the printed page.) It's certainly an improvement over The Zenith Angle, in which, despite the usual array of cool Sterling stuff, it was obvious that his heart wasn't into the technothriller form. He's designed the mid-21st century post-disaster setting as a way to explore his core religious belief in Anthropogenic Global Warming, as well as his fascination with ubiquitous computing, Hollywood celebrity, the decay of the nation-state, post-national politics, etc. Unfortunately, the titular characters don't drive the plot so much as have it acted upon them; they're viewpoints rather than plot drivers. (This is not a new issue for Bruce: the protagonists of Islands in the Net and Holy Fire (to name but two) function in much the same manner.) If you haven't already read Distraction and Holy Fire, I'd read those first, but there's certainly enough here for the average Sterling fan to enjoy. I also find it interesting that the character that sounds and acts the most like Bruce ends up, at novel's end, hooked up with the most obviously evil character...
China Mieville's The City & The City : A very solid, and very interesting, novel, and speculative fiction if you consider Ruritanias fantasy. A police procedural set in a sort of Trans-Balens City-State duopoly of Beszel and Ul Qoma, which are not just side by side, but deeply intermingled with each other, different addresses on the same block geographically, for example, could be in entirely different cities, with different languages, laws and customs. Residents must "unsee" the residents of other cities as they pass through their daily life, their virtual apartheid guarded by the fearsome, unseen offices of Breach. It starts with Beszel Inspector Tyador Borlu investigating the death of a woman who believed there was an ancient third city, Orciny, dwelling in the shadows of the other two. The more Borlu investigates, the more he realizes that something is wrong, and that his victim's murderers may dwell much higher among the city (or the city)'s citizens than he ever imagined. The novel works both as police procedural and extended metaphor for the parts of their own cities that readers "unsee" every day. It displays the imagination of China's other novels, but unlike several of his most recent, engages the reader in the plot much earlier. I'm pretty sure this will have a place on both my Hugo and Nebula ballots in 2010.

Lawrence Person's Reading Diary for 2008

Robert Barlow & H. P. Lovecraft's The Night Ocean: One of the many Lovecraft collaborative stories, and one of the many Necronomicon chapbooks. Slow, atmospheric, and ultimately rather slight.
Manly Wade Wellman's Lights Over Skeleton Ridge: Readable hidden treasure archeological mystery, but not as good as his best YA novels.
Jack Vance's The Brave Free Men: A much more engaging novel than The Faceless Man, though still not among his best.
Gardner Dozois, George R. R. Martin and Daniel Abraham's Shadow Twin: Another one of the legendary stories Dozois started and abandoned in the 1970s ("the digger story" that became his and Swanwick's "City of God" was another). This is a decent novella, but Dozois and Martin have both done better work.
Jay Lake's Mainspring: The first half of this novel set in an alternate Clockwork universe where the mainspring on the earth is running down is pretty swell. Unfortunately, once he gets to the other side of orbital track around the earth's equator the narrative falters for me, and the ending struck me as a cop-out.
Richard Matheson's Man With A Club: Short story chapbook. Eh.
Tobias Buckell's Ragamuffim: This is a very solid sequel to Crystal Rain, expanding the frame to full-blown space opera. And how can you not love a scene (the one on the cover, and accurate for once) of the characters propelling themselves down the freefall center of a space habitat using a heavy machine gun as the means of propulsion?
Charles Stross' Halting State: I'd been looking forward to reading this ever since Charlie told me the plot at a con (a MMORPG calls the police after an impossible in-game raid plunders their assets). Though there are a few improbabilities to swallow, and the ending isn't quite as slam bang climatic as I would have liked, this is still a great deal of fun, and probably my favorite of his novels next to the Laundry books.
Robert E. Howard's Conan the Conqueror: After Halting State, I wanted to reading something as completely different from cutting-edge, near-future SF as possible, and this nicely fit the bill. While some of the pulp-era plot devices are incredibly creaky by today's standards (just count how many times Conan gets knocked unconscious by a blow to the head), Howard's skill at pulling you into the headlong rush of the plot is still impressive.
Michael Chabon's The Yiddish Policemen's Union: This pretty much deserves all the acclaim it's gotten. An extremely well written alternate history novel set in a Jewish settlement in Alaska in a World where attempts to establish a modern Israel failed, and featuring vivid, detailed, and entirely believable characterization. The plot follows a down-on-his-luck police detective trying to solve the murder of chess-playing, heroin-using Orthodox Jew who just might have been the messiah. I met Chabon when he showed up at the Nebulas here in Austin, and not only is he a really nice guy (and a fellow book collector), he's also a huge SF fan, gushed over meeting Michael Moorcock, and borrowed my phone to tell Howard Waldrop he's a genius.
Gene Wolfe's An Evil Guest: Gene Wolfe is perhaps the greatest SF writer alive today. However, this, his attempt to do a Cthulhu Mythos novel, is a misfire. But if you like backstage drama for a Broadway musical, you might enjoy it more than I.
Ian MacDonald's Brasyl: I'm a MacDonald fan, but it took me a long time to get into this, and having an unfamiliar Portuguese word dropped in seemingly every paragraph didn't help. (I understand the theory of show don't tell and figuring out things from context, but here it was just too much.) About halfway in it finally clicked for me, and I ended up enjoying it, but not as much as (for example) Chaga. Still another example (along with Robert Charles' Wilson's Darwinia and Greg Bear's Eternity) of The Post-Hoc Super Science Solution.
Robert Bloch's The Crowded Earth: Early SF work (available free on Project Gutenberg) concerned with overpopulation. Intermittently interesting but quite dated and suffering from a "weird solution to problem A causes problem B, leading to character to amazingly suggest abandonment of said weird solution" plot structure.
Joe R. Lansdale's Flaming London: Even sillier than Zeppelin's West. Twain, Verne, Wells, King Kong, and Ned the Seal fight off Martian War Machines. But it amply fit the bill as something light to read after Brasyl.
Samuel R. Delany's Driftglass: Reading Delany's novels always makes me appreciate how much better he is as a short story writer, and this, his first collection, confirms it, as shorter lengths play to his strengths and mask his weaknesses. He's excellent at deftly establishing a sense of place and in-depth characterization, but his plots start to seem a bit shaggy the longer they go on, and he occasionally hits you pretty hard with the metaphor stick (such as in "The Star Pit"). "Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones" still rocks, and the first two or three pages are among the best openings in any SF story. His Zelazny homage, "We, in Some Strange Power's Employee, Move in a Rigorous Line" is a also great deal of fun. But the most pleasant surprise was "Corona," objectively a very slight and obvious tale, but winningly told.
Tom Disch's Burn This: Disch was a pretty good light poet, but I think he did his best work within the constraints of traditional poetic forms.
R. A. Lafferty's Argo: The third and concluding part of More than Melchisedech, and just as strange as the other two, if not stranger.
John Scalzi's The Ghost Brigades: A very solid novel, and considerably better than Old Man's War. John ended up eating sushi with us for dinner Dillocon Friday...
Fred Pohl's Alternating Currents: Since I was going to be on a panel with Fred at Worldcon, I grabbed this (one of those rare Ballentine Books hardbacks) to read and get him to sign. Some of the stories are dated, but "Tunnel Under the World" is still great.
Wilson' Tucker's The Long, Loud Silence: I picked up Bruce Pelz's former copy from DreamHaven at Worldcon and read it on the plane back. A very solid novel of a not-particularly-nice protagonist surviving in a plague-depopulated East Coast. (Though the last section doesn't really work; absent mankind, deer would be more than plentiful enough to keep a single man with hunting and trapping skills pretty well fed.)
Alastair Reynolds' Chasm City: His second novel, and more ambitious than Revelation Space. However, overall I think I liked Revelation Space better, mainly because A.) There was just a bit too much "Hey, it's a good thing this beautiful, exotic woman just decided she'd rather help me than kill me" plotting (not unlike Conan the Conquerer on that account; and where else are you gong to find critical comparisons between Alastair Reynolds and Robert E. Howard?), and B.) I twigged to who the protagonist really was a bit too early. Still a very solid novel.
Liz Williams' Snake Agent: Novel following a paranormal police detective in near-future China, complete with demons as major characters and side-trips to Hell. I enjoyed this, but it was a little by-the-numbers for my taste. As both a fan and someone who's done the odd supernatural Chinese adventure story ("Master Lao and the Flying Horror"), I believe that when you're standing in the shadows of Ernest Bramah and Barry Hughart, you've got to bring your A-game. For one thing, her characters are too straight forward; it helps to have a certain allusive quality to their dialogue, such as when Kai Lung tells his jailer he has no money, only for him to reply "The soil is somewhat shallow for the growth of deep friendship." Also, the vision of a bureaucratic Hell presented here just can't compare to the one in The Story of the Stone. Still a fun read, and I look forward to the other books in the series.
William Browning Spencer's The Ocean and All It's Devices: Collection of short stories; like Bill and his novels, they're offbeat, very clever and dryly funny.
Geoffrey Household's The Sending: Story of a man haunted by an apparently sourceless fear following the death of a friend. He soon comes to believe that certain people possess neopagan powers...and that he might be one of them! A short but solid novel, with a lot of theorizing on animism, etc., but not in the same league as Rogue Male.
Greg Egan's Dark Integers and Other Stories: Very solid short story collection by this harder-than-hard SF writer, especially for those who don't already own a copy of his UK collection Luminous, as "Luminous" (reprinted here) and it's sequel "Dark Integers" are among Egan's top ten best stories (even if they're a stich or two below "Wang's Carpets," "Learning To Be Me" and "Reasons To Be Cheerful"). However, all of Egan's stories of post-human software after Diaspora have started to wear thin, so the two stories in here ("Riding the Crocodile" and "Glory") set in his Amalgam universe just don't measure up to his best. (Though the transporation method so intricately detailed at the beginning of "Glory" must rank among the top hard-science tour-de-forces of recent memory.)
Dan Simmons' Hard Freeze: Another Joe Kurtz hardboiled mystery, and like tha vast majority of Simmons' work, I enjoyed it immensely.
A. E. van Vogt's The Voyage of the Space Beagle: An oldy moldy fixup. Eminently readable, and with some nicely fearsome monsters, but quite dated. You can see both why van Vogt was so influential in his day, and how the field outgrew him.
John Crowley's Conversation Hearts: Enjoyable but very slight hardback chapbook with a fairly naked heart-tugging agenda.
Larry Niven & Jerry Pournelle's Escape from Hell: The sequel to Inferno, and a decent page-turner in it's own right. I may have a more extensive review in some other venue...
Joe R. Lansdale & Scott Cupp's Cross Plains Universe: Yes, it's an anthology I'm in, most of which I read before it was even published, but there were a few stories I didn't get to until recently. Mea Culpa. It's a fun book, and I have copies signed by plentitudes of contributors available.
The Best Short Stories of J. G. Ballard: Very talented, very offbeat, and generally very depressing stories. As the collection progresses, the protagonists in them react less to the external challenges and more to the distorted reflections of the world that make up the labyrinths of their own damaged psyches. The "condensed novels" at the end of the collection don't really work for me. I can see writing one as an experiment, but "Plan for the Assassination of Jacqueline Kennedy" and "Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan" are too much like each other. These stories are worth reading, but not all at one sitting; they're probably best digested between other works.
Karl Edward Wagner's Dark Crusade: A Kane novel, and quite rousing stuff in the Robert E. Howard tradition, like all the Kane tales.
J. D. Salinger's Nine Stories: I hated Catcher in the Rye. Hated, hated, hated, hated hated that book. Hated spending time in Holden Caulfield's head. OK, he's a phony who hates phonies, got it. That doesn't mean I want to spend an entire day with a neurotic, whining mama's boy who feels so terribly oppressed by his rich, privileged, upper class New York City life. Now fast forward some 15 years or so, when I start watching Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex, which is chock-full of Salinger references. So I read "The Laughing Man" (the one most obviously referenced, as the story arc for the first season of GitS:SAC revolves around an uber-hacker called Laughing Man) and, what do you know, that's a pretty swell story. So is "A Perfect Day for Banana Fish." At worst, the stories are a bit aimless (though less so than, say, the vast majority of stories in Dubliners), and at best they're intensely realized vignettes of (then) modern life. The titular protagonist of "De Daumier-Smith's Blue Period" is like a funnier, more self-aware, less annoying Holden Caulfield who knows he's full of shit, which makes all the difference in the world. And reading "Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut," I got the impression that J. D. Salinger must have hated Holden Caulfield far more than anyone else ever could...
Charles Stross' Missile Gap: An awesome skiffy Big Dumb Object (with an the additional frission of an Ontological Chasm and partial deployment of the Post-Hoc Super Science Solution) in a fruitless quest for a story in which to display it. The problem with this sort of story is how hugely dwarfed individual characters are by the BDO/Ontological Chasm, the tried and true solution to which to have them start in the dark before slowly uncovering the true nature of the BDO and/or their relationship to it (Robert Charles Wilson has done this at least a couple of times); here, entirely too much of the solution is info-dumped onto their heads by a secret Metatron. (This is also the second book I've read in as many months featuring Carl Sagan as a major character (and Charlie did a better job).
Jeffrey Ford's The Physiognomy: One problem I've found with most "New Weird" writers except China Mieville is that language and imagery frequently take precedence over the story, and that's the problem here. Ford's protagonist is not just unlikeable, but uninteresting; you don't care what he does or what happens to him. This is the same reason his redemption carries so little weight, and why the happy ending seems more forced than organic.
Neil Gaiman's M is for Magic: Solid collection of Gaiman stories, tending toward the lighter side of his work, with a number of pastiches (including one of R. A. Lafferty). I still have copies of the signed limited illustrated by Gahan Wilson available.
Walter Jon Williams' Implied Spaces: This was a lot of fun, a near-Singularity solar system space opera, with a lot of commonalities with Stross' Accelerando universe.
Fritz Leiber's Rime Isle: It had been quite a while since I read any of the Fafhrd and Gray Mouser stories, and this one gets off to a rough start. I had a friend who complained the he didn't enjoy the Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings because it was "lots of walking and bad poetry." This one starts out with lots of sailing and bad poetry (it's generally not a good idea to have your villain speak in rhyming couplets). But once they actual reach the titular isle things pick up considerably.
Tim Power's A Soul in a Bottle: Short story about a ghost. Somewhat predictable early on, but Tim throws a nice curveball a little more than halfway in.
Edward Whittemore's Sinai Tapestry: A solid, enjoyable, mainstream "secret history" novel about a diverse cast of characters and their involvement with the oldest known bible (very different than the one we know). I enjoyed most of this a great deal, but as it got darker it lost momentum for me near the end. Also, like Cormac McCarthy, Whittemore was obviously scarred by The Great Quotation Mark Shortage of 1949...

Lawrence Person's Reading Diary for 2007

Philip K. Dick's Dr. Bloodmoney. Dick's nicely creepy and somewhat overlooked post-holocaust novel. When you read the scene between the megalomaniacal telekinetic flipper-boy backing away from the mummified telepathic fetus able to speak to the dead despite being encysted inside his 8-year old twin sister, you realize that here was an author who had absolutely no fear of creeping-out his readers...
Mary Gentle's Under the Penitence: Gaak, what an awful piece of crap! Though set in the same universe as Ash: A Secret History, the setting is mostly incidental to a painfully weak plot of family intrigue, and the hermaphrodite protagonist is a headstrong idiot. Replaces Grunts! as my least favorite of Gentle's works. Avoid.
Charles Stross' The Jennifer Morgue: Though occasionally you can see Charlie biting down on his tongue hard enough to draw blood in an effort to prevent it from popping out and wagging at the reader, this sequel to The Atrocity Archive still sits firmly at the sweet spot intersection between Lovecraftian horror, cold war spy thriller, Nerdcore geekitude, and British bureaucratic comedy. (However, "Pimpf" is weaker than "The Concrete Jungle," and the essay on spying/politics/etc. is all over the map.)
Steve Aylett's Fain the Sorceror: Sort of a wacky fantasy version of Robert A. Heinlein's "By His Bootstraps." I think Aylett's postmodern slipstream works are generally better.
Jim Kelly's Burn: Just when you think you know exactly where this story is headed, Kelly throws you a wicked curveball...
China Mieville's Un-Lun-Dun: While not as entertaining as China's adult fantasy Baslag books, this ostensible YA novel has great fun demolishing the tropes of the genre, including a protagonist who is not at all satisfied with being just the funny sidekick...
Alexi Panshin's Right of Passage: Not a bad book, essentially in the Heinlein juvenile mold, minus Heinlein's skill at crafting engaging plots plus a bit more moral complexity. However, were it not for the fact that nothing about the Nebula Award going to the wrong book is surprising anymore, it would be completely inexplicable how this won over John Brunner's Stand on Zanzibar.
Vernor Vinge's Rainbows End: Vinge's own take on a postcyberpunk, presingularity world, and a tasty take it is, if not quite in the same league as Neuromancer or The Diamond Age (or, for that matter, A Fire Upon the Deep or A Deepness in the Sky).
Canon Basil A. Smith's The Scallion Stone: Some solid ghost stories in the Jamesian tradition, though only the last really struck me as first rate. With an introduction by Russell Kirk, which is what drew my attention to it in the first place.
R. A. Lafferty's Tales of Midnight: The second part of More than Melchisedech. Scene of great humor and surpassing brilliance jumblee together with extended passages of strained metaphors that don't work. In other words: It's Lafferty. It also has a dead horse in a soup pot and a guest cameo by God.
Charles Stross' Glasshouse: Set a bit further on in the Accelerando universe, depicting a deep post-human future where mind-viruses infect people traveling through transport gates, this is not as good as early Accelerando stories like "Lobsters," but better than the latter ones. Entertaining, but the problems inherent in the "recreation of 20th century humanity by people with nefarious ulterior motives" plot, even with the twists, gives rise to the same difficulties as all works in which imaginary idealized futures interrogate the present and find it lacking: The books actually say less about the general human condition of the present than the specific outlook of the person writing the story.
Gene Wolfe's Soldier of the Mist: Wolfe's celebrated novel of a brain-damaged soldier in ancient Greece who interacts with Gods, but who forgets the day's events when he goes to sleep. If I had a firmer grounding in Greek history and mythology, I think I would have gotten more out of it, but I didn't find it nearly as engaging as The Wizard Knight.
Peter Watts' Blindsight: You'd have to go back some of Tom Disch's work in the 1960s (like those two pages in Camp Concentration where one character talks about how deeply unfair it is for the universe to continue existing after you die, and wouldn't it be much more satisfying if everything (and everyone) ended when you did) to find such a coldly bleak assessment of the human condition. Take a emotionally distanced protagonist in an unpleasant situation in a book whose overriding thesis is that consciousness is unnecessary for intelligence and that self-awareness is an evolutionary mistake. Well-written, but I found the thinly-rationalized vampires unconvincing, and ultimately it felt like too much "just how bleak and depressing can I make this" piling on.
Neil Gaiman's Stardust: Light and fluffy even by Gaiman's standards, but superior to the relatively faithful movie adaptation.
The Best of Robert Silverberg: One of the genre's all-time great writing machines, Silverberg's prose is so smooth that I tend to slide right off it. The best stories in here are the ones, like "Sundance" and "Thorns," where the main character starts off completely and totally screwed, and then things get much, much worse.
Pat Cadigan's Dervish is Digital: Set in the same future, but much better than, Tea From An Empty Cup.
Kim Newman's The Man from the Diogenes Club: This was a great deal of fun, following the exploits of a team of paranormal investigators in the UK, much if it set in the 1960s and 70s, and benefiting greatly from some choice period color.
Robert F. Jones' Deadville: Western by the author of Blood Sport. Eminently readable, but not among his best work.
Steven R. Boyett's Ariel: This, like The Architect of Sleep below, is a really good action/adventure story told from "first person smartass." It's a shame that he published two swell PBOs and then various publishing issues sidetracked his career. He claims that he's almost finished a sequel to this, which I would like to see, albeit it not as much as The Geography of Dreams...
David Prill's Dating Secrets of the Dead: Light, quirky short stories, very like his novels in tone.
Dan Simmons' Hardcase: Simmons does hard-boiled mystery, and an excellent job at that. With the possible exception of Gene Wolfe, Simmons probably has the most complete toolset of any writer working today. His only weakness seems to be second books in a series...
Keith Roberts' Pavane: I can see why this alternate history of a Catholic-controlled England where the Reformation failed is so highly regarded, and the prose is indeed superbly crafted. But just like the dance it takes its name from, this is a slow, slow work. I read the American edition, which includes an additional story, "White Boat"; honestly, I wish I had read the UK edition, as it's easily the worst story in the book. ("Brother John" and "Corfe Gate" being the best.)
Matthew Hughes' The Farouche Assemblage: Somewhat amusing novelette set in Hughes' "Dying Earth Light" setting; not bad, but it lacks Vance's sting.
Joe R. Lansdale's Sunset and Sawdust: Very solid historical mystery, though not quite as good as The Bottoms. Includes one of the characters from The Big Blow to boot.
Chris Roberson's The Voyage of White Shining Night: I like Chris, but this novella set in an alternate future of a space-faring Chinese empire didn't do much for me.

Lawrence Person's Reading Diary for 2006

Jeff VanderMeer's City of Saints & Madmen: Read this in preparation for Jeff coming in for the Turkey City Writer's Workshop (which he eventually did, but not until September). Good if somewhat uneven "New Weird" fantasy (assuming anyone actually finds New Weird a useful category). "The Transformation of Martin Lake" was particularly good.
Joe R. Lansdale's The Big Blow: A solid, entertaining novella focusing on a match between two boxers (one black, one white) on the eve of the Galveston Hurricane of 1900.
Herbie Brennan's Fairie Wars: Oddly enough, I decided to pick this up because I chanced across an online game that involved dropping cats to see if there were any landmines in your path which was evidently inspired by a scene in this book, and that sounded twisted enough to tickle my imp of the perverse. Alas, this was a rather pedestrian "this worlds meets the other world" fantasy.
Vonda McIntyre's Dreamsnake: Not a bad novel, but a rather slight one for a Hugo and Nebula winner. And the protagonist struck me very much as a "Mary Sue"..
Suzanne Clarke's Jonathon Strange & Mr Norrell: At Mrs. Stropshire's high tea the other day, the subject of Ms. Clarke's Jonathon Strange & Mr Norrell was broached, leading to lengthy discussion of its merits. All present were in complete agreement that it was quite an entertaining novel, there being much affirmation of this point by many of the worthy luminaries present. "However," said Miss Pfening, "it really could have been a bit shorter." There was much nodding of heads at Miss Pfening's point, and agreement was quickly reached on the subject.
Charles Stross' Accelerando: A nice crunchy slab of deep-fried postcyberpunk goodness. "Lobsters," the first story in here, is the best thing Charlie's ever written. However, each subsequent story seems just a little bit less interesting and innovative than the preceding story, so that the book sputters out at the end rather than roaring off into the starset. Part of my mild disappointment is that I actually want to read a read a story about a society going through the Singularity rather than being shunted off to the side to watch the obsolete meat fall further and further behind the cutting edge. Sure it's hard to do; Ted Chiang's "Understand" is about the closest I've seen. But I think it would have been a stronger book (or series) if he tried...
Connie Willis' Inside Job: Read part of this when Connie brought it to Turkey City, so I was looking forward to reading the rest. Alas, I found this pretty disappointing, and slight (especially for the length) even by Connie's standards.
Robert F. Jones' Blood Tide: Not particularly fantastic (discounting the archipelago mentioned in the book not actually existing on real planet Earth), this is another solid adventure work which follows an Ex-Navy father and he equally-salty daughter tracking down two different men who screwed them over to wreck vengeance upon them, complete with a nicely bloody climax. Not as good as Blood Sport, but a bit better than The Diamond Bogo. Recommended.
Walter Jon Williams' The Sundering: The second in the Dread Empire's Fall Series, and quite a tasty bit of military space opera at that.
Ward Moore's Greener Than You Think: The world threatened by unstoppable Bermuda Grass. A well-written, sardonic, and under-rated novel.
Joe R. Lansdale's Something Lumber This Way Comes: Illustrated children's book. Nice enough, but pretty slight.
Ken MacLeod's Learning the World: Solid, competent, but strangely unexciting first-contact novel told from both human and alien viewpoints. The biggest problem is that it stands firmly in the shadow of Vernor Vinge's A Deepness in the Sky, and man, you're just not going to win in that comparison.
Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49: OK, I can see why people like it, though the weakest parts were easily the "deep ruminations on The Way We Live Now" mainstream passages that added nothing to the plot. And speaking of plots, the world is now so awash in conspiracy theories that a secret postal service evokes little more than a shrug these days.
Robert Charles Wilson's Spin: A fine 300 page novel. Too bad it was 450 pages long. I thought Blind Lake was a more interesting book, especially since the protagonist wasn't quite such a deeply passive cipher.
Robin Hardy & Anthony Shaffer's The Wicker Man: By the time the book was published, both it and the original movie were well beyond their sell-by date. Which is not to say that both aren't miles above the wretched remake.
Steven R. Boyett's The Architect of Sleep: This was a lot of fun, the story of a man transported to an alternate Earth where raccoons evolved as the planet's dominate species. I'd love to read the sequel, The Geography of Dreams, but, alas, there are difficulties...
Harlan Ellison (et. al.)'s Partners in Wonder: Collection of Ellison's collaborative stories. There are some gems in here, but, like much of Ellison's lesser work, several of the stories seem rather dated.
Peter S. Beagle's The Last Unicorn: Oh yeah, this is some good stuff, and well enough written to overcome my natural aversion to unicorns and anything overflowing with the milk of human kindness.
Gene Wolfe's Strange Birds: Chapbook of three stories, all firmly in the middle of the obscurity spectrum for Wolfe short fiction.
Scott Westerfield's Evolution's Darling: Story about a space-traveling AI art dealer. Like most SF novels on the subject of art, it doesn't really work (Alexander Jablokov's Carve the Sky is still the best of the lot), but does have enough sex and violence to hold your attention.
Tobias Buckell's Crystal Rain: A very solid first novel, set on a planet founded by people from the Caribbean, with two different races of aliens each pretending to be gods taking up either side of a nasty war.
Steve Erikson's Blood Follows: A lot of very smart people think Erikson is the Bees Knees, but this particular novella didn't do much for me.
Theodore Sturgeon's The Ultimate Egoist: The Collected Stories of Theodore Sturgeon Volume 1: Even when he was writing two page twist ending stories, you could obviously tell Sturgeon had the stuff.
R. A. Lafferty's Tales of Chicago: The first part of More than Melchisedech which is, in turn, the third part of The Devil is Dead trilogy. It's a darn shame these have never had a mass market edition, as this is right up there with some of Lafferty's best. I really want to read the other two volumes.
Manly Wade Wellman's Who Fears the Devil?: Ah, this is the stuff! This, and the stories in the Carcosa House volumes, are the weird fiction Wellman built his reputation on. I could have done without the interstial material, but the main stories in the collection are all solid, well-crafted tales, and just when you think you've figured out the exact pattern of how they're resolved, he starts throwing in some twists. Recommended.
Jack Vance's The Faceless Man: This didn't strike me as being among Vance's best work. Readable, but not a patch on his really great stuff.
Evan Wright's Generation Kill (Non-Fiction): An embedded reporter accompanies the First Marine Recon into Iraq into 2003. Fascinating stuff. A hat tip to Chris Nakashima-Brown for recommending it.

Lawrence Person's Reading Diary for 2005

Mary Gentle's Ash: A Secret History: I've been putting off reading this because it was so long, and indeed it took me a month to finish it at my current woefully slow reading rate (mainly because I just adopted a one year old Golden Retriever who wants a lot or attention). I really enjoyed this weird alternate history/quantum ontology hybrid (otherwise I wouldn't have spent all that time reading its 1100+ pages), but I didn't buy the ending, it wasn't nearly as impressive as her brilliant Rats & Gargoyles, and it really could have been shorter; 150 pages or so could easily have been trimmed by a skillful editor.
Joe R. Lansdale's The Boar: I have yet to read a bad novel by Joe, and this depression-era YA novel is no exception.
Sean Stewart's Perfect Circle: Frankly, I think Sean has done much better work. Then again, I also have a problem with novels whose protagnosts are also clueless morons. Originally this was evidently going to be a much larger work called The Glass Coffin, and do wonder if we'll ever see the original vision realized.
R. A. McAvoy's Tea With The Black Dragon: Still a charming work, but I also think one very much of its time (1983).
Cordwainer Smith's The Insturmentality of Mankind: This is the Gollancz edition, which doesn't include everyting in the NESFA edition (most of the other material I had already read the Gollancz collection The Rediscovery of Man. Fun, decent stories, but not really his best.
Jack Vance's The Eyes of the Overworld: I found this less interesting than The Dying Earth, mainly because once it becomes apparent Cugel is willing to screw over anyone, no matter how friendly or well-meaning, it only becomes a matter of how he's going to screw each person he encounters.
Michael Bishop's No Enemy But Time: I can see why this won the Nebula, but it is rather leisurely paced. Though my sample size is small, I can see why Mike regards Brittle Innings as his best novel.
Iain M. Banks' The Algebraist. Pretty middling Banks, really. Quite readable, but nothing to write home about.
Jessica Horstig & Jamie Van Hise (editors)'s Midnight Graffiti. Horror anthology I have a story in ("Salvation"), which, shamefully, I haven't read until now. Middling collection of early 1990's horror, the best stories of which appeard in the magazine. Van Hise's closing story is a good example of why inexperienced writer/editors shouldn't include their own work...
China Mieville's Iron Council. Still an exceptionally good fantasy novel, and a worthy Hugo nominee, but this novel took longer to get going than The Scar, which in turn took longer to get going than Perdido Street Station.
Avram Davidson's Or All the Sea With Oysters. Many good to excellent stories in here, including the Hugo-winning title story.
Diane Wynne Jones' Howl's Moving Castle. A decent YA novel, but not nearly as engrossing as the best examples of the genre, such as Ray Bradbury's The Halloween Tree or James P. Blaylock's The Magic Spectacles.
Venor Vinge's The Collected Stories of Vernor Vinge. Vernor doesn't write many stories, but when he does, they tend to be doozies.
Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon. Classic novel which deserves it's reputation. What it's like to be an old-line communist revolutionary waiting in prison to be interrogated for the show trials, coming to grips with the fact that the cause you worked for all your life did far more harm than good, and was about to execute you...
Brain Aldiss' Cracken at Critical. At Worldcon I brought this up to Aldiss to sign. His response: "God, what a piece of crap!" Who am I to disagree? (Actually, the two old adventure stories in here are sort of fun in an oldy moldy sort of way. But the frame sucks.)
Christopher Priest's The Prestiege: Intriguing story of a fued between two Victorian stage magicians, and how each found a different way to perform the same elaborate trick. This won the World Fantasy Award, but unless the explanation offered for how one of them performed the trick isn't the real explanation, then this is actually a Steampunk work...
William F. Temple's 88 Gray's Inn Road and other stories. The title story is a fun, short Roman-a-clef about a pre-Slan Slan Shack in London featuring a thinly disguised Arthur C. Clarke as one of the characters. (Which reminds me that I still owe him a letter.) The two stories rounding out the collection are also fun (if a bit over-congested and quite dated).
Brian Aldiss' New Arrivals, Old Encounters. The first story beats you over the head with a hammer, but the rest work to varying degrees. I especially enjoyed the section with 12 short Dadist plays, which brought back memories of composing same as a Drama major in college...
Brian Aldiss' Ruins. Found a copy in London, and read it on the plane to Glasgow, where I got signed with the rest of the Aldiss. Short, slight novella. In retrospect, I think I was reading it in the Heathrow lounge three rows of seats over from Aldiss himself. I thought it might be him, but dismissed the idea because he looked too young! You're a dashing chap for 80, Brian, and don't let anyone tell you otherwise.
Christopher Priest's The Seperation. Alternate history story of two identical twin brother's roles in World War II. Despite all the acclaim, I'm Not Buying It. Even with the Owl Creek Bridge-esque branching falsa narratives, I cannot buy how peace between England and Nazi Germany is acieved because: A.) Having studied the Nazi power structure a bit, there's no way Rudolph Hess could have deposed Hitler in 1941, as the war was going well for Germany then, and Hess didn't have the independent power base that Himmler, Goering and Goebbels did; and B.) No way do I believe that Winston Churchill would be willing to sign a peace treaty and step aside just because some pacifist makes the same sort of naive, high-minded speach pacifists have always made everywhere to absoultely no effect.
J. G. Ballard's Empire of the Sun: All Ballard's oddities, and the strange states of his character's minds, all begin to make since when viewed through the prism of this novel reflecting his experiences as a young boy in Japanese-occupied Shanghai, a world where the normal seems deeply strange and the strange surprisingly normal. "Jim relished reading Alice in Wonderland for the glimpse it afforded him of a world less bizarre than his own."
John Scalzi's Old Man's War: I can see why lots of people liked this tale of old people made young to serve as Earth's military forces out in space, but I had some problems with it. First of all, its written as though Cyberpunk never happened: People 300 years hence aren't going to have copies of Time magazine lying around in their waiting room; hell, I doubt that will be true even 30 years hence. The other scenes on earth feel just as lacking in extrapolation. It picks up quite a bit once it gets out into space, but never answered in this book (maybe in the forthcoming sequel) is the question of why you would ever have rejuvenated human soliders at all if your DNA-cloned "Ghost Brigade" soldiers are superior by just about every measure? Why not build the army entirely out of them, or with a small rejuve officer core?
Justina Robson's Natural History: Justina's done a lot fo work for Nova Express, so I was looking forward to this, but though well told, I think it's about 20% longer than the length deserved, and I don't tink any of the animal "underpeople" really added anything to the story.
Neil Gaiman's The Wolves in the Wall: Yeah, an illustrated children's book, which I read to take a break from Anansi Boys while I waited for Neil to sign for 4 1/2 hours, at which pont he quite generously signed a box of Lame Excuse Books stock for me.
Neil Gaiman's Anansi Boys: I liked this quite a bit better than American Gods, mainly because Fat Charlie is a far more engaging character than Shadow. While I personally prefer Neverwhere, on the pure level of writing craft this is Neil's most accomplished novel to date.
Gary A. Braunbeck's The Little Orange Book of Odd Stories: Back when I reviewed fiction being published in the small press circa 1989, Braunbeck was the writer I had fingered as the most talented, so I was looking forward to reading this, but by and large these are generally slick, soulless exercises, which is always a danger with short shorts. I'll try one of his regular short story collections at some point.
Richard Morgan's Altered Carbon: Pure-quill, old school cyberpunk, and pretty tasty at that.
Charles Stross' The Atrocity Archives: Yeah, this is the stuff! An almost perfect melding of Lovecraftian horror, nerdcore geekfest, tense espionage, and struggles against government bureaucracy. (Just because you saved the entire universe from an infovore doesn't mean you get any slack if you fail to turn in your espense report on time.) Now I not only want to read the forthcoming The Jennifer Morgue but I really, really want Charlie to write a book on Case Nightmare Green...
George Alec Effinger: Live from Planet Earth: I provided the introduction to "My Old Man," but pretty much all the stories in this collection are well worth reading.
Howard Waldrop's Dream Factories & Radio Pictures: I started reading Heart of Whitenesse (see below) when I realized it had "Major Spacer in the 21st Century" in it, which is the only short story in this volume I hadn't read before, so I stopped and read it and the introductions. Great stuff, but a lot of overlap if you already have all of Howard's earlier collections. I have this one available for sale on the Lame Excuse Books web page.
Howard Waldrop's Heart of Whitenesse: Howard's latest collection of short stories. The title story is one of his best.
Manly Wade Wellman's Frontier Reporter: Another slick, well-told YA novel.
Philip K. Dick's Martian Timeslip: As always with Dick, there's some good stuff in here, but it didn't grab me nearly as much as other Dick works of this period, such as Time Out of Joint, perhaps because the cultural anachronisms were more firmly on display.
Paul Di Filippo's Destroy All Brains: Light, froathy fun.

Lawrence Person's Reading Diary for 2004

China Mieville's The Tain: Very strange, very interesting novella. I've got to wonder if China was disappointed that the title The Looking Glass War was already taken...
Howard Waldrop's A Better World's in Birth: The "communist ghost story" Howard's been threatening to write for a long time. The story itself is merely OK, but it has a great ending.
Joe R. Lansdale's A Fine Dark Line: Another historical mystery. Good, but not up to the level of The Bottoms.
Jack McDevitt's Chindi: Jack's a good guy and a good writer, but this was really disappointing. He needs a better editor (150 of these 400 pages could have been excised easily), and he needs to use another setting. But worst of all is the fact that his protagonist doesn't seemed to have learned anything from Deepsix, and lets her passengers talk her into letting them do stupid things again and again. By about halfway through I was hoping that all of them would be killed for being such idiots. You can do better, Jack.
Jack Vance's The Dying Earth: I thought I read this in my youth, but I couldn't remember it and may not have. Essential.
Neil Gaiman & Terry Prachett's Good Omens: One of those rare books which is every bit as good (and funny) as its reputation. Highly recommended.
Elizabeth Moon's The Speed of Dark: Interesting novel featuring an autistic protagonist, slightly marred by the villain doing everything short of twirling his moustache and declaring "I'm evil!" Despite that this is fairly engrossing, and largely manages to stay out of the long, long shadow cast by Flowers for Algernon.
Thomas Quale's The Feaster in the Fudge Room: It seems that Willy Wonka's Oompa Loompas are related to the infamous Techo-Techo people...
Poul Anderson's Tau Zero: Big Science Concepts get a 10 but man, that stiff, by-the-numbers characterization made it really difficult to get into. I suspect this worked much better as a short story.
Steve Aylett's Atom: Comes across as a combination of Damon Runyon, William S. burroughs and Jeff Noon. Brilliant absurdist non-sequiters amidst a surreal landscape amidst action that can only with a great stretch of the imagination be called a plot. Not for every taste.
Roger Zelazny's Gone to Earth (aka Author's Choice Monthly 27): Speaking of Runyon, Zelazny has a pastiche of him in here ("Deadhead Donner and the Flintstone Cup"), but his swift-moving style isn't really suited to it. Collection of middling Zelazny, neither his best nor worst.
Clive Barker's Abarat: This "juvenile novel for adults" (see also The Halloween Tree, The Magic Spectacles, Coraline, etc.) is good enough as far as it goes, but reading it gave me a gnawing sense that something wasn't quite right. Barker's bizarre imagination is still there (and his artwork has grown on me a bit), but his prose just doesn't seem as breathtakingly sharp as it was in his early works, or even in his last juvenile, The Thief of Always. (Of course, I'm also at least four "big" Barker books behind.) And he's also tried to combine two different types of fantasy, the fully realized, internally "otherland" together with the"concrete metaphor"; (each of the Islands in the Abarat represents an hour of the day) with very uneven results. Just one example: an Abarat citizen talks about one o'clock being his "lunch hour," therefore it being appropriate to visit the one o'clock island occasionally for it. Um, no. Residents of any given island aren't going to have a specific "lunch hour" because they're always stuck on the same hour. Moreover, without the earthly concept of sequential hours (rather than unspecified intervals), how would they ever associate any hour with any specific action?
Ted Chiang's Stories of Your Life and Others. Well, this should be a great relief to writers everywhere who think that every single story Ted writes is irritatingly brilliant; it turns out that some of his stories are merely really, really good. But "Hell is the Absence of God" and "Understand" are as good as any story published in the last decade, "72 Letters" just a step below that, and even the least tale in here is well worth reading. Like Greg Egan, Ted seems to think more deeply about the implications of an idea than anyone else. This is a landmark collection, truly worthy of being compared to the likes of A Martian Odyssey and Other Stories or Howard Who.
James P. Blaylock's The Old Curiosity Shop: Speaking of concrete metaphors, here's one, this time with the weight of time and guilt made manifest. I like this better than the last two Blaylock stories I read, but the two parts of the story don't really mesh together as well as they should.
Charles Portis' True Grit: Yeah, this is the stuff! A story that just grabs you by the neck and demands to be read. Part of my Read One Brilliant Western Recommended by Joe R. Lansdale a Year Plan; while not quite as good as The Shootist (see below), it's certainly good enough (and not entirely a coincidence that both were made into movies starring John Wayne).
Christopher Priest's Inverted World: I can see why it's popular: both the idea, and the idea behind the idea, are actually quite interesting skiffy constructs (though the idea behind the idea has an unlikely, Deus Ex Machina feel to it, no matter how tidely it ties up many of the incongruities). While it does pick up a good bit of steam after a slow start, every now and then I found myself wishing I had read the shorter piece it had been expanded from.
Anne Wertz's Swedish Lutheran Vampires of Brainerd: A pleasantly light read, competently executed, and not any sillier than it had to be. I have the rare hardback edition, and I fully expect some ten years from now some insane vampire literature collector offering me ridiculous sums of money for this in order to complete his collection...
Lucius Shepard's Two Trains Running: Short collection of two stories and one non-fition article about modern-day hobos and the trains they ride. As with much of Lucius' work, there are some great, freaky set-pieces but inconclusive plots.
Charles Stross' Singularity Sky: Sorry, I just didn't find this nearly as interesting as his short fiction. There are some great Strossian ideas scattered about here and there, but he has a big problem with his comic opera imperialists. "You're going to get your ass kicked," says the heroine at the beginning of the book. "You're going to get your ass kicked," says the heroine in the middle of the book. Finally, at the end of the book (and a good 100 pages of Really Unnecessary travel time with the Comic Opera Imperialist Space Fleet), the Comic Opera Imperialists do, indeed, get their ass kicked, and not in a particularly novel way. And when he trots out the space mimes with the dissolving nanotech pies, his tongue slips out of his cheek and wags at the audience. I've got a lot more hope for The Atrocity Archive.
S. P. Somtow's The Vampire's Beautiful Daughter: Reasonably well executed but very slight. I think I'd like to read a non-LA-based story from him next.
Clifford D. Simak's Way Station: I suspect this read much better in its Hugo-winning hayday than it does now.
Robert Charles Wilson's Blind Lake: This is Wilson's best novel, with far and away his most interesting and fully realized characters, and a pretty interesting skiffy idea to boot, even if it does owe at least a slight nod to Greg Egan.
Manly Wade Wellman's The School of Darkness: I'm beginning to think I should give up on reading any of the works Wellman wrote after the two Carcosa House books were published. What I've read of them have all been competent and well executed, but the fire seems to be missing.
Philip K. Dick's A Scanner Darkly: The greatest wellspring of the "Dick as dope fiend" myth. Deep, deep inside the mind of an undercover narcotics agent who's also an addict, who's soon filling reports on his own alter-ego! Contains some of Dick's bleakest writing. Well worth reading.
Paul Di Filippo's Fuzzy Dice: An "ontological daytrip" through an even dozen alternate realities, including geek-theory infused favorites such as a cellular automata universe and another controlled by chaos theory. I thought about doing a review for Slashdot, but I fear I'm still too busy, and I still don't think they pay anything more than a T-shirt for book reviews...
Bruce Sterling's The Zenith Angle: Bruce writes a technothriller. Lots of cool sections with Bruce doing his usual riffing on cool technological and cultural trends. Unfortunately, no matter how carefully he's laid the groundwork, the slam-bang technothriller ending seems clumsily grafted onto the rest of a novel that was a lot more (and more interestingly) concerned with computer security. Still, it was a hell of a lot more interesting than Gibson's Pattern Recognition, mainly because Gibson is fascinated by things which are extremely smooth, and Bruce is fascinated by things which are extremely spikey.
Iain M. Banks' Excession: Neither the best nor the worst of the Culture books. Has some pretty nifty space battles, even if the central character plot is actually pretty dull.
George Alec Effinger's Budayeen Nights: Uneven. I think the novels were stronger, and "The City in the Sand" doesn't really belong here.
C. L. Moore's Shambleau and Others: Oldies but goodies, even if Moore's prose did tend toward the ultraviolet end of the spectrum, and all these stories could have some 20% of their length pruned. I wonder if anyone has compared Moore's work to Lovecraft's from the same period...
Alastair Reynold's Revelation Space: I like it! A big, sprawling, sublight Space Opera, with dead alien races, vast, half-deserted spaceships, strange archeological finds, and lots of other cool stuff.
Dan Simmons' Worlds Enough & Time: A very solid collection of novellas, but by and large not as good as his novels.
R. A. Lafferty's Okla Hannali: As close to a "straight" novel as I've read by Lafferty, and a damn fine one at that. The tragedy of the Indian nations in the 19th century, personified by the title character.
P. G. Wodehouse's My Man Jeeves: The Jeeves stories in here are clearly the strongest ones in this collection, and you can certainly see their timeless appeal, but I wouldn't say they were as strong as other Wodehouse works like Pickadilly Jim or Psmith, Journalist.
P. H. Canon's Scream for Jeeves: Finally read the above so I had enough grounding to read this collection of three Lovecraft/Wodehouse crossover parodies. Amusing, but not any more so than the idea suggests, and the critical essay at the back comparing Wodehouse, Lovecraft, and Arthur Conan Doyle seems quite a big stretch.
Nancy Kress' Trinity and Other Stories: Mostly very competent work (though "Ten Thousand Pictures, One Word" is a bit heavy-handed), but few really measure up to Kress' late 1980s/early 1990s short work. It's interesting that Kress, then (1985) a solid mid-list writer, could get what was then a major publisher (Bluejay) to publish a short story collection. Things have changed, and not for the better.
Gene Wolfe's The Wizard: I need time to digest it and decide whether it's brilliant or unspeakably brilliant. (Later: It's unspeakably brilliant. Get up from the computer and go read The Knight and then this.)
Gary Greenwood's Jigsaw Men: Good idea (alternate history with Frankenstein's monsters as soldiers, Martian War machine technology, etc.), poor execution. I'm unconvinced Greenwood really thought through the implications of his world.
James P. Blaylock & Tim Powers' The Devils in the Details: Three OK stories, but they've both done better work.
Greg Egan's Distress: Lord, what a beautiful mess. (And I just threw the "Lord" in there for the sake of irony.) The quantum ontology and cutting-edge physics is, as usual, brilliant, but it's overlong, the first chapter has no real payoff in the rest of the novel, the climax of the military plot is painfully obvious from the get-go, and Egan preaches his rational materialist worldview so relentlessly you start to long for the subtlty of Ayn Rand.
Karl Edward Wagner's The Book of Kane: After hectoring from Egan's vast, cool intellect, a dose of Kane's dark, sardonic S&S adventures was just what I needed. Good stuff.
Thomas Disch's 334. Overrated. Better written than Camp Concentration, but not nearly as interesting. Nearly plotless vignettes of aimless characters in a single building in a near-future dystopian New York, salted with Disch's nihlism. I can see why people might have been impressed at the time, but it just doesn't hold a candle to Brunner's Stand on Zanzibar, which covers some of the same territory in a far more compelling way.

Lawrence Person's Reading Diary for 2003

Greg Egan's Schild's Ladder. Quantum ontology among uploaded/post-human protagonists. Hate to say it, but Egan's pet themes, which were so groundbreaking for his work in the 1990s, are starting to wear a bit thin.
Paul Di Filippo's A Year in the Linear City. An extravagant fantasy novella set on a world a single street wide bordered on either side by Heaven and Hell. Fun stuff, but possibly more effective if it hadn't come out after Ted Chiang's "Hell is the Absence of God."
Jack Vance's The Pnume. Last book in the Planet of Adventure series. Old-fashioned planetary romance that holds up remarkably well.
Joe R. Lansdale's Captains Outrageous. You know, being Hap and Leonard's friend is almost as dangerous as receiving a visit from the protagonist of Murder, She Wrote...
John Pelan and Benjamin Adams' The Children of Cthulhu. The Mieville, Finch, and Hodge stories were all pretty good, but frankly I think I could have written a better Cthulhu Mythos story than any of the rest. Michael
Swanwick's The Bones of Time: By and large I'm not wild about most time travel stories, but this is probably the best Swanwick novel in many a moon.
Geoff Ryman's V.A.O: Old hackers can still be dangerous...
Glendon Swarthout's The Shootist. Joe Lansdale said during his Nova Express interview a decade ago that this book would "knock you flat," and he wasn't lying.
Tom Holt's Expecting Someone Taller: I think I was a victim of inflated expectations, having been lead to believe this was really funny, instead of merely funny. Plus it drags a bit in the middle.
Robert Charles Wilson's The Perseids and other stories: Well written, but there's much of a muchness here. Loner protagonist living within shrunken horizons stumbles across a hole in conceptual reality that destroys what little shred of meaning remains of a painfully constricted life, and also screws up/looses the love of their life, not necessarily in that order.
Neil Gaiman's Coraline: One of those "children's books for adults," in the mode of Ray Bradbury's The Halloween Tree, James P. Blaylock's The Magic Spactacles, or Clive Barker's The Thief of Always. While enjoyable, I don't think it quite reaches the heights of those fictional siblings, possibly because Coraline herself should have started off somewhat timid, or at least feckless, to make her story arc more resonant. She does heroic things, but she starts off so competent and level-headed that we never really believe she's in danger, or see an inner growth as impressive as her external deeds. Still, you could do a lot worse than giving this to a ten year old girl...
R. A. Lafferty's Fourth Mansions: Lafferty in general, and this novel especially, make you reach for phrases like "the most unique writer in the history of mankind," oxymoron and hyperbole be damned. All Lafferty's work is strange and brilliant, but this one especially.
China Mieville's The Scar: Starts off slowly, but once it picks up steam it's every bit as good as Perdido Street Station. China's Got The Stuff.
Jack Dann's Christs: Poetry. Not as good as Jack's prose, IMHO.
M. John Harrison's Light: A lot of very smart and talented people have praised this book to the sky, and I can see why: there are tons of interesting SF ideas on display here, almost as if Harrison had looked at several recent postcyberpunk works and said "Well, I can do that better than they can." But I'm afraid I cannot join in this chorus of praise, as the alternately passive and irrational main characters, driven by their rather trite and pathetic neo-Freudian obsessions, display the excessive interiority of modern mainstream fiction at its worst, and left me entirely cold. Chinese Ed was the only one of them I cared even the slightest bit about, and he was only slightly better than a walking cliche.
Graham Joyce's Black Dust: Two supernatural stories, the first better than the second. Slight but effective and well-told tales.
John Sladek's The Lunatics of Terra: Half of these are stories and half are 1000-3000 words of amusing (but not that amusing) collections of plotless satire. The stories are firmly in the fair-to-middling range, the satire is seldom sharp or funny enough to raise more than a chuckle. Unlike R. A. Lafferty, there's not an organic sense of a deeper meaning to the weirdness.
Manly Wade Wellman's To Unknown Lands: One nice thing about Wellman's juveniles is that there's a plot. Though this tale of an Englishmen and an Irishman in Columbus-era Central America (based very loosely on a few nuggets of historical fact) starts out slower than Rebel Mail Runner, the last Wellman juvenile I read, it actually picks up quite a bit after 50 pages or so.
William Goldman's The Princess Bride: Yeah, this is good stuff.
Gene Wolfe's Plan[e]t Engineering: Generally lesser Wolfe, but even lesser Wolfe is well worth reading.
Lewis Shiner's Say Goodbye: A mainstream novel about a woman trying to break into rock and roll. It's quite a good novel, but I kept looking for that scene where Laurie Moss changes from a rock and roll to a country western singer, then can't figure out why her old fans don't listen to her anymore...
Howard Waldrop et. al.'s Custer's Last Jump and Other Collaborations: This is a great collection. In addition the swell title story, this collection's original, "In the Latter Days of the Law," written with Bruce Sterling, is just brilliant. And yes, I I have signed copies for sale.
Jack Vance's The Dragon Masters; now published with...
Jack Vance's The Last Castle: I'm reviewing both of these for Locus Online. Yep, getting paid to review Jack Vance. It's a good life...
S. P. Somtow's Tagging the Moon: Stories set in LA, with illustrations by my friend GAK. Sometimes very clever, but a lot of these were obviously written for theme anthologies, and while I get the feeling that while many are among the better stories in their respective anthologies, most are not terribly fresh ("Gingerbread" in particular hits of lot of very tired modern horror cliches), and only "The Hero's Celluloid Journey" is really outstanding.
Cory Doctrow: Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom: Cory's debut novel. There are interesting ideas scattered here and there, but A.) You really have to share Cory's obsession with all things Disney (I don't) to be particularly interested in the overarching plot, B.) The "mystery" plot is way, way too obvious for anyone even remotely familiar with those tropes ("Hey, do you think that the murderer could be the only other main character besides the protagonist present from page 1?"), and C.) It uses that Banksian "socialist escatology" trope ("Hey look! A magic, cash-free socialist utopia already exists, allowing me to sweep all those messy details of how it came into being under the rug!"), when a novel depicting his "Whuffie economy" actually coming into being would be a far more interesting story than what he has here. Assuming Cory can hone his focus, I still expect him to produce a great novel or two in the future; this isn't it.
James P. Blaylock's Home Before Dark: Chapbook, and another of Blaylock's exquisitely written, near- or post-mortem vignettes in which nothing actually happens.
Lucius Shepard's Sports and Music: Another chapbook; solid work, but not among his best.
Sean McMullin's Souls in the Great Machine: I'm sorry I didn't get to this until now, as it's quite a fast-paced and engaging story set in an interesting, post-apocalyptic, not-quite-Steampunk Australian mileau. He probably juggles a few more balls than are really necessary, but I do look forward to reading The Miocene Arrow.
Herman Melville's Moby Dick: I read this a chapter a night before going to sleep, which is not a bad way to approach it. There's lots of great (and frequently very strange) stuff in this novel, and I can see why it still holds such a lofty, if intimidating, reputation. However, it's not exactly a thrill-a-minute book, and Herman does go on a bit. ("It occurs to me that in the large block of exposition making up the last chapter, I touched upon some matters that must be addressed in an equally long block of exposition in this one...") Between the eccentric characters and the strange shifts in style ("The next three chapters will be written as though it were a Shakespearian play..."), this book is really The Crazy Aunt of American Literature. Not something to pick up when you're in the mood for suspense, but if you've ever said to yourself "Gosh, I really want to read a detailed description of 19th century whaling techniques," then man, have I got a book for you!
John Kessel/Barry Longyear's Another Orphan/Enemy Mine: Among each author's best works, but what a strange pairing! I put off reading "Another Orphan" until I had already read Moby Dick. Another book "Another Ophan" is included in is...
John Kessel's Meeting in Infinity: Story collection that includes some of his best. I like John's work, but I think someone should take away his Metafictional privlidges for a few months and force him to write a straight, linear narrative to stretch some of his other writing muscles. (John was a guest at a Turkey City Writer's Workshop in September, where he brought what Chris Nakashima-Brown dubbed his "white-trash Narnia" story...)
William Gibson's Pattern Recognition: In Pattern Recognition, William Gibson has come very close to crafting an exquisitely written novel of excruciating tedium. He's one of the best prose stylists working today, but here he uses it primarily to write about the shiny surfaces of the places that the exquisitely dressed shiny people of the fashion/advertising industry inhabit. It gets slightly better about halfway through, but it's a real slog to get to that point. In theory I'll be doing a review of this for the second issue of the fanzine Inkfish Review, but since Damien Warman hasn't told me when the first issue will be out, it's sort of on the back burner right now.
Walter Jon William's The Praxis: Ah, just the tonic to ease my disappointment with Gibson: a well-written, swift moving space opera. Walter could have done a little lighter job with the foreshadowing for his female protagonist on page 58, but this is still good enough that I'm pissed off that there isn't going to be a matching hardback edition of the second book (The Sundering). Silly publisher.
Gene Wolfe's The Knight: I reviewed this for the February 2004 issue of The New York Review of Science Fiction. Short version: It's Wolfe. Go read it.
Michael Moorcock's Tales from the Texas Woods: Not among his stronger works.
The Collected Stories of Philip K. Dick Volume 1: Beyond Lies the Wub: Even early on, Dick was a slick and proficient writer.
Dan Simmons' Ilium: I like it! It starts out as a strange tale of posthumans who have set up a living recreation of The Iliad on Mars, but then gets much, much weirder.
Ken MacLeod's The Human Front Alternate world history where the cold war went hot and anti-communist forces are flying UFOs...
Robert Bloch's Dragons & Nightnmares: Slight, humerous novellas told in the style of Damon Runyon. Ironically enough, Bloch's decision to update some of the references in the story for the book's publication (1968) actually makes the stories seem more dated and anarchronistic than they would have otherwise.
Tim Powers and James P. Blaylock's On Pirates. Speaking of slight, this "William Ashbless" work is fun and about as featherweight as they come.
William Kotzwinkle's Fata Morgana: Entertaining, but it might have had more of an impact if Picard wasn't such a loner.

Lawrence Person's Reading Diary for 2002

Perdido Street Station: China Mieville (I have a review of this in the Septmber 2002 issue of The New York Review of Science Fiction.)
Zeppelins West: Joe R. Lansdale (Imagine a lot of 19th fantastic fiction fed into a blender and turned into a pulp comic with Joe R. His Ownself's trademake offbeat and profane humor, only weirder.)
Mars Crossing: Geoff Landis (A slightly disappointing first novel only because it's not up to the level of his excellent short stories.)
American Gods: Neil Gaiman (Good, but I liked Neverwhere better.)
Mission of Gravity: Hal Clemant (Boning up on the classics.)
The Chronoliths: Robert Charles Wilson (Interesting, but I liked Darwiniabetter.)
Deepsix: Jack McDevitt (Not up to the high standard of The Engines of God)
Demons Five, Exorcists Nothing: William Peter Blatty (The Exorcist was a brilliant book; this isn't.)
The Dirdir: Jack Vance (It's Vance; what more could you ask for?)
The Day After Judgment: James Blish ("I liked X better than Y" may be a trend on this page, but Black Easter is indeed a better book.)
The Dreaming Dragons: Damien Broderick (Stilted and overwritten early on, but it gets interesting later.)
The Captain of the Polestar: Arthur Conan Doyle (Not his best work, but Doyle (to use Jack Dann's phrase) Had The Stuff.)
The Club of Queer Trades: G.K. Chesterton (An oldie but a goody, well worth looking up on Project Gutenberg.)
Cosmonaut Keep: Ken MacLeod (So far I'm not finding this series as interesting as the Fall Revolution books.)
Smallcreep's Day: Peter Currell Brown (A savage absurdist condemnation of industrial work in specific and modern (or at least modern circa 1965 England) life in general; interesting, but not necessarily good. Mike Rutherford (the bassist for Genesis) made an eponymous album based on it, but then went and gave it a happy ending, which strikes me as an aggressive exercise in point-missing.)
The Crook Factory: Dan Simmons (Ernest Hemingway goes hunting for Nazi spies in Cuba; an exceptionally well-crafted, non-fantastic spin on Tim Powers "secret history" territory.)
The Shiny Narrow Grin: Jane Gaskell (A very curious book. Michael Moorcock put it on his list of overlooked classics in The Twilight Zone magazine some 15 years ago or so, and it took me more than ten years to track down a copy. Though a vampire novel, it's really more interesting as a period piece about pre-Mod English youth culture.)
Strange Trades: Paul Di Filippo (Paul's usual entertaining madness.)
The Philosopher's Stone: Colin Wilson (Written to refute Lovecraft, but only makes HPL appear that much better by comparison.)
Davy: Edgar Pangborn (A good book that could have been a great book.)
King Suckerman: George Pelecanos (A hardboiled mystery revolving around killers and drug dealers in Bicentennial-era Washington D.C. that echoes and plays off of blacksplotation films of that era.)
The Valley So Low: Manly Wade Wellman (A Collection of "Southern Mountain Stories" featuring Silver John, John Thundstone, etc. This is quite a hard book to find. These stories were written by Wellman toward the end of his life, and while very slick, they're not as good as the ones in Worse Things Waiting or Lonely Vigils. In fact, they suffer greatly from being read all in a row, as there is much of a muchness to them. But if you take this book down from the shelf and read, say, one a month, you should like them just fine.)
This Shape We're In: Jonathan Lethem (Short, slick, funny, scattershot, and shows you why Lethem writes slipstream rather than science fiction these days.)
The A'rak: Michael Shea (How can you not like a novel centered around a giant spider god? Another tale of Nifft the Lean, and perhaps second only to "The Fishing of the Demon Sea" for horrific, awe-inspiring sense of wonder. This was a Baen paperback original, so you might have to do some work to seek it out, but it's well worth it. Eight thumbs up! ;-))
The Impossible Bird: Patrick O'Leary (Read Door Number Three instead.)
The Shockwave Rider: John Brunner (Some interesting technological extrapolation, but plotwise it was like reading a left-wing version of Atlas Shrugged, only less convincing.)
The Vaccinator: Michael Marshall Smith (Pretty slight, even for a 50 page book.)
The Wolves of Memory: George Alec Effinger (RIP, George.)
Quarantine: Greg Egan (Fascinating stuff, as usual. If the OED ever has an entry for "Quantum Ontology," Greg Egan will be the guy they cite.)
The Wizard of the Pigeons: Megan Lindholm ("Get a haircut, and get a real job.")
The Business: Iain Banks (Imminently readable, like all Banks' work, but rather slight.)
Better Than One: Damon Knight & Kate Wilhelm (Quite short, and of interest mainly to those who are already fans of one or another's work.)
A Scattering of Jades: Alexander C. Irvine (If you like Tim Powers, you'll probably like this. Except for one instance where the Plot Contrivance Button is clearly visible, this is a very solid first novel.)
The Jaguar Hunter: Lucius Shepard (These stories (some of which I had read before) make it easy to see why they had such an impact when they first appeared; Lucius is obviously a very gifted wordsmith. However, his plotting isn't as deft as it could be, and some of these seem dated.)
A Writer's Life: Eric Brown (Too predictable for my taste.)
The Alchemist's Door: Lisa Goldstein (Features Doctor John Dee and Rabbi Loew, the creator of the Golem of Prague. I found this disappointing; despite the example of A Scattering of Jades above, it's a lot harder to write a Tim Powers novel than it looks.)
Kim: Rudyard Kipling (Hey, what do you know, this Kipling guy can write a little. Another book worth looking up on Project Gutenberg.)
The Castle of Otranto: Horace Walpole (Oh boy. This is generally labeled "turgid and unreadable." Actually, it's florid and nearly unreadable, and is endureable only because it's pretty short. You can find this on Project Gutenberg as well, but why would you want to?)
Ventus: Karl Schroeder (For about 4/5ths of the book, this is an excellent, large cast planetary romance, well handled, but excessive length, some unlikely plot contrivances, and a bit too much preachiness and saccharine mar the ending. Still an impressive first novel, though.)
Only an Aligator: Steve Aylett (Weird, weird, weird, weird, weird, weird, weird, weird, weird, weird. It's also weird. William S. Burroughs meets Monty Python meets Jeff Noon. Only weirder.)
They'd Rather Be Right: Mark Clifton & Frank Riley (Widely derided as the worst of the Hugo winners, I didn't hate it quite as much as Forever Peace. It's probably most notable today as an example of writers consciously pandering to all of John W. Campbell's prejudices.)
A Walking Tour of the Shambles: Neil Gaiman & Gene Wolfe. (A tour guide to an imaginary neighborhood in Chicago with a colorful and bloody history. Great fun. I also have copies signed by both Wolfe and Gaiman available over on the Lame Excuse Books page.)
Black Cocktail: Jonathon Carroll (With the usual weird, swerve off the side, out of nowhere Carroll ending.)
The 10th Victim: Robert Sheckley (A quick, frothy read. Has to rank (with some Piers Anthony) as among the least significant reprints Gregg Press ever did.)
The Truth About Dogs and Cats: Neil Gaiman (Decent stories, but not Neil's best. Like the above three books, I took this with me to get signed at the World Fantasy Convention in Minneapolis.)
Bloodstone: Karl Edward Wagner (I'm not a big Sword and Sorcery fan, but this is pretty good, even if the prose is slightly purple in places. And check out the Pink Floyd reference on page one...)
The Einstein Intersection: Samuel R. Delany (Sorry, but I just don't get it. As a novelist, Delany strikes me as a fine short story writer. I would say that it's inexplicable how this beat Lord of Light for the Nebula, except nothing about the Nebula is inexplicable anymore.)
Love Among the Chickens: P. G. Wodehouse (The usual amusing Wodehouse story, but not as good as Picadilly Jim or Psmith, Journalist. Another Project Gutenberg selection.)
Nine Hundred Grandmothers: R. A. Lafferty (There's some truly great stuff in here: "Through Other Eyes," "Slow Tuesday Night," "Polity and Custom of the Camiroi," etc. If you haven't read Lafferty yet, you owe it to yourself.)
Ubik: Philip K. Dick (All other things being equal, it is generally best to avoid getting involved with psychotic women capable of altering the fabric of spacetime. Suceeds much better than The Impossible Bird (see above) while touching on some of the same themes, because Dick's paranoid nightmares have a chilling dream-logic to them, while The Impossible Bird strives for dream logic but ends up feeling more like video game logic. Maybe Patrick is just too well-adjusted...)
Xelucha and Others: M. P. Shiel (I can see why many people like Shiel's work, but he really isn't particularly to my taste, which is a shame because he does have some great, freaky set-pieces (see "The Dark Lot of One Saul" and "The House of Sounds" for examples), and I have Reynold Morse's great Shiel bibliography. But he is a great source to increase your word power...)
Passion Play: Richard Matheson (Noir novel from the 1950s. Shows you why Matheson is a better writer today than when he wrote this, mainly because his prose is much leaner.)

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