Read It In Books

I finished reading three books this past weekend.

All Star Zeppelin Adventure Stories, Jay Lake and David Moles, ed. I actually enjoyed this book a lot more than I expected. Given the limitations imposed on the authors (as suggested by the title of the book), I was expecting a fair amount of similarity between the stories, with a lot of zeppelin hi-jinx, with Nazis shouting, "Ach! Die, Amerikan Svine!", scantily clad women in peril, mysterious jewels, and the like. While there were a couple of stories like that, they were done well, and the rest of the stories ranged across genre, with science fiction, fantasy, alternate reality, even a couple ghost stories. There were only a couple of stories that I really didn't care for, but in a book that contains twenty stories, that's still way above average. Consider it recommended.

Queer, William S. Burroughs. I admit that I am not a big fan of the Beat writers. When I tried to read Kerouac, I found myself completely uninterested, and I think that a Ginsberg poem on the page just sort of lies there like a deflated balloon. (This is not true when he read a poem aloud. I actually was able to see Ginsberg read his poetry on two different occasions before he died, and while I wasn't a fan, even I had to admit that his poetry gained a lot from those experiences.) I had never read Burroughs, either, until a couple of jobs ago, a co-worker loaned me Junky to read, and I discovered that I really liked it. I also read Naked Lunch, and when the co-worker quit, he gave me a copy of The Soft Machine, that I promise to read one of these days. After seeing the film "Naked Lunch", and after hearing the author read some of his stories on a CD, I had come to the conclusion that he wasn't for me, that he wrote about things too brutal or grotesque for me to handle. Such has not been the case, at least in the books of his that I have thus far read. This book, for instance, is actually occasionally touching, making the character of William Lee emotionally vulnerable in his pursuance of a man who isn't interested in him. The narrative voice seems remarkably contemporary. There were no passages that were quite as haunting as the description of the border area between Texas and Mexico was in Junky (one of my favorite passages in American literature), butI enjoyed it a good deal.

Perfect Circle, Sean Stewart. I enjoyed this book a lot. I liked the way that something so fantastic (seeing ghosts) was integrated into reality, rendered almost mundane. My only problem was that it's hard to watch a protagonist that is so obliviously self-destructive -- I call it the "I Love Lucy" syndrome, because I get the same feeling whenever I would watch that show. But I still highly recommend the book, and will be loaning it out to my friends.

I'm currently reading Anthony Trollope's The Way We Live Now, because I feel like I'm going through these shorter books too quickly (this book is 767 pages long, with 100 chapters), and because I think the author's surname is funny, and because I feel guilty that I have a BA in English and I've never really read Victorian fiction. So far I'm enjoying it quite a bit. (Random note: I know of two pop songs that use the title of Trollope's books as their title: Saint Etienne's "The Way We Live Now" and Pet Shop Boys' "Can You Forgive Her?" I like both songs quite a bit.) I have yet to read anything by Dickens, but David Copperfield is in my To Be Read pile. That is a pile about as tall as me, however, and is constantly being reordered.

The weather today is naturally beautiful, with all the snow melted away, as if the past two days never happened at all.

Song: Belle and Sebastian, "Put the Book Back on the Shelf"