Month: August 2006

1. They need it at the hospital
   “Mortal City” by Dar Williams
2. The darkest night would shine
   “How High the Moon” by Ella Fitzgerald (or others)
3. Let’s move before they raise the parking rent
   “All Right Now” by Free, guessed by Kim
4. She’s got you shaving your legs
   “She’s Your Cocaine” by Tori Amos, guessed by Glen
5. So they put a rifle in my hand
   “Born in the U.S.A.” by Bruce Springsteen
6. We are creatures of such like desire
   “Bird as Prophet” by Christine Fellows
7. She was standing in fiction stretched high on bare feet
   “Love in the Library” by Jimmy Buffett, guessed by Kim
8. These events may have had some effect
   “Hearts and Bones” by Paul Simon
9. Throw me down on the ground
   “It’s Not Your Day to Shine” by Smoosh
10. I’ll never do you no harm
    “Oh! Darling” by the Beatles, guessed by Kim

Do I even want to talk about last week’s pitiful performance? There are still eight left to guess. Are my musical tastes really so obscure?

Fiction
David McGillveray — The Sirens of Tinwa
Richard Harland — The Tale of Tales
Roy Wilson — The Water Queen
Kurt Kirchmeier — A Peppermint Purge
David Siegel Bernstein — Deliberation
Ramona Gardea — Afternoon Delight
Mike Lansley — Mild Mannered
Sharon Cichelli — Space Dinosaurs
Nigel Willis — Probed

Poetry
Kristine Ong Muslim — A Migrating Fairy
John Kuhn — Near Sillustani
Trevor Price — Bad Weather
Bruce Boston and Marge Simon — Where Have All the Comedians Gone?
Aurelio Rico Lopez III — Two Poems
Rimone — Fission Bomb
Thomas Zimmerman — Two Poems

Nonfiction
Jim Cleaveland — The Transformers Revisited
Short book reviews

Featuring artwork from
Bruce Boston
Jim Cleaveland
Marge Simon
Rod Walker

Not all contents guaranteed; yet more not altogether unlikely. Contents © the authors. All rights reserved.

Word’s grammar check doesn’t like this. It offends its sense of subject-verb agreement. What I mean to say, Word tells me, is actually “This books” or “These book.”

I had to click on tools to make sure the language was set to English. Although I’m not sure in which language either “This books gets” or “These book gets” would be correct.

Currently reading: Consider Phlebas by Ian M. Banks, although I think I may take a short break to start Little Big by John Crowley, which I just got yesterday through inter-library loan. Plebas has sort of been slow going, especially after the last two books I read, but I am enjoying it. It’s just that Little Big has to be back to the library in a few weeks, and I own my copy of Banks’ novel.

Next reading: After Crowley and Banks? Not a clue. I have a short story collection I’d like to finish so I can review it for Kaleidotrope, but I also have a very tall stack of books waiting to read. Multiple tall stacks, actually. I was thinking about reading Mitch Cullin’s A Slight Trick of the Mind, but I suspect I probably won’t get to it until at least September.

Last read: The Brief History of the Dead by Kevin Brockmeier, possibly the best book I’ve read all year…although I may never drink Coca Cola ever again…

Last book bought: Tales from Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin. I’ve been on something of an Earthsea kick recently, reading the second, third and fourth books in the series in rapid succession. I already own a copy of The Other Wind, the sixth book in the series, so it was all but inevitable that I buy a copy of the fifth. Before that, I bought a copy of the eighteenth annual Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror — whose honorable mentions, incidentally, include not one but three Kaleidotrope contributors. I’ve been trying to read more short fiction, and to that end I’ve been picking up a number of story collections and a few zines. It’s just finding the time that’s hard.

Longest book owned: The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, probably. You could kill a man with that book.

Shortest book owned: Not a clue. I’ve got a couple of short chapbooks lying around, which probably qualify.

Favorite book: Oh, that would be a very long list…

Book read most times: I usually don’t re-read books. In fact, I think The Hitchhiker Guide to the Galaxy books and Julian May’s Galactic Milieu trilogy, beginning with Jack the Bodiless are the only books that I have re-read. And I’ve only read each of those twice.

Least favorite book: I don’t know that I have one. I stopped reading John Grisham’s The Pelican Brief maybe halfway into it, and Thomas Harris’ Hannibal lost me after just a few chapters. (It was shaping up to be pretty damn awful, I thought.) But usually I like the books I read, or at least find them interesting, or at least don’t regret reading them to the point that I’m throwing the books across the room or washing bad tastes out of my mouth. That’s a sign of discriminating taste when selecting the books, a lack of taste when reading them, or simply that I just don’t read enough.

Favorite “serious” fiction: What a loaded question. What does that even mean in this context? I’ve read plenty of what I thought was serious fiction that made me laugh. I’ve read plenty of what I thought was serious fiction that came off of the genre shelves in the bookstore. It depends on your definition of “serious” and why you feel the need to categorize books as such. I doubt I’d be able to pick a favorite.

Favorite comedy: The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, I guess.

Favorite classic: Again, what qualifies as a “classic”? And how does that differ from “serious” fiction? Is a “classic” something authored by a dead white male that I had to read in high school or college? Is it simply a book that happens to be old? And how old? I love me some Faulkner and Nabokov, but Philip Roth’s got his moments, as do Twain, Chaucer, Shakespeare, and a whole list of others. What the hell is a “classic” anyway?

Favorite Shakespeare: I think Henry V, although Much Ado About Nothing can be a lot of fun, too.

Favorite poetry collection/poet: That’s tough. I really haven’t read enough poetry. Maybe T.S. Eliot?

Favorite fantasy: I honestly don’t know. I read bits of fantasy here and there, mostly in short form or in weird cross-genre mixes, but probably not enough to have come up with a favorite. It’s not Lord of the Rings, I can tell you that. As much as I admire some of what Tolkien did, as important as his work was to the genere, and as entertaining as his books can be at times, they’re not the sort I’d plan on reading ever again.

Favorite sci-fi: Again, very long list.

Favorite non-fiction: I read so little I couldn’t even begin to say.

Favorite historical fiction: I’m usually not that big a fan of the genre, and I don’t read a lot of it. Karen Joy Fowler’s Sarah Canary, which is set in the 1800s and I guess therefore qualifies, was pretty wonderful, though.

Favorite chick lit/lad lit: I really haven’t been paying attention to what qualifies as “lad lit,” and even “chick lit” is something of a mystery to me. I may have read something that fits either category, but beats me what that something is.

Favorite horror: How do people pick favorites? Put a gun to my head, and I’d say The Shining by Stephen King. It’s still one of his best books.

Favorite YA: I really don’t read much of it, to be honest, and I can remember so few of the books I read growing up. I do have fond childhood memories of The Great Brain series, but I think YA fiction has experience something of a renaissance since I was a boy. In recent years, I think Le Guin’s Earthsea books — which I liked — Philip Pulman’s The Golden Compass — which I liked and admired but found a little cold and humorless — and the Harry Potter books — which I like very much for their story and whose deficiences in plot and style I can therefore almost overlook — are the only ones I’ve read.

Favorite manga/graphic novel/comic: I actually have a lot of favorite comics, some that I continue to read on a semi-monthly basis. Graphic-novel-wise, however, I’d probably have to say my favorite remains Neil Gaiman’s Sandman, particularly Brief Lives. (Delirium and Matthew the raven were my two favorite characters.) World’s End, my own roundabout introduction to Gaiman’s work, is also pretty neat.

Favorite “other” genre: “Other” than what? I don’t read a staggering number of westerns or mysteries or true-crimes or romances or whatever. Maybe I should.

Favorite series: I’ve read so few series, I really couldn’t say.

Favorite short story: Again, how do you pick favorites? I have a few favorites here — at one point, I actually thought it would be interesting to put together and trade short story collections like mix CDs, even though that opens up all sorts of legal issues and really isn’t feasible. The ones that come to mind right now are:

“Boys, Grow Giant Mushrooms in Your Basement!” by Ray Bradbury
“Happy Endings” by Margaret Atwood
“Most of My Friends are Two-Thirds Water” by Kelly Link
“By the Time We Get to Uranus” by Ray Vukcevich
“Ancestor Money” by Maureen McHugh
“Murder Mysteries” by Neil Gaiman
“They’re Made Out of Meat” by Terry Bisson

Given time, I’d think of more.

Favorite play: I don’t know that I have one.

Best book read this year: So far the lead contender would have to be The Brief History of the Dead by Kevin Brockmeier. I read that breathlessly, wanting to know what would happen next — and sad to know that once I found out, the book would be over. I’m definitely going to have to read more of Brockmeier’s work. I also really liked Spin by Robert Charles Wilson. It takes a bizarre but really simple idea and then follows through on it, asking the very basic questions that science fiction is designed to ask: what makes us human? in what ways could that change? how will we react to that change?