Letter Never Sent

George R.R. Martin’s A Feast for Crows is now on sale after a long wait. Amazon’s got it for $18.48. Dang. I need to read this. Is Santa Claus listening?

On a related note: Caught with my book pants down

I’ve been reading a lot lately, although I should probably be doing a lot of the things on my to-do list.

Deliverance This is the 1970’s answer to Fight Club. Modern man in a search for meaning, what’s real and vital. The desire for meaning and the brutal force of the reality they find. The book is so real it makes you wonder if James Dickey had the experiences described in the book. The book is fast-paced and full of action and violence, and of course, the whole backwoods sodomy thing the movie is well-known for. I’d be curious to hear thoughts from a female reader.

Blind Assassin I gave this four stars too. Margaret Atwood makes me ache. She is able to reach inside and touch that quiet center we all have. Her metaphors are delicious and the depth of the story is meticulous. It’s one of those time machine books where you travel into the story. It did leave me feeling wistful and sad, but not in a bad way. More like a lingering sigh.

Day of the Locust This book is depressing. It’s the literary equivalent of watching a “Cops” marathon. It’s got a gritty all-too-real thing going, but after a while you want to go home and take a shower so you can forget about all the cockfighting (literally), midgets, and human misery.

Neuromancer This could have been written yesterday and it stands up amazingly well for 1981. For a book about the future it’s remarkably relevant despite the obsolete references to “RAM”, dot matrix printers, etc. A great story, very Phillip K. Dick in so many ways, despite it’s more pronounced techno-fetishism.

During my evening saunter to the bookstore I was delighted to discover a recently published (as of September 21st) sci-fi novel by Iain M. Banks, author of some of the most enjoyable science-fiction you’ll ever read. This new book is called The Algebraist, for reasons I haven’t discovered as of yet, and it was a Hugo Nominee for best novel. Iain Banks is one of those authors I look for every time I make my circuit through the aisles during my visits to the mega bookstores in my area. It is a very short list of authors and I was very pleased and pleasantly surprised to see his new book. I was wondering when he would get around to writing something else. I spent the next two and a half hours blissfully installed in one of the leather chairs back in the business section, which caused me to get home later than expected. I called breen on the walk home to let him know there was a new Banks book, but he quickly became less interested when he found out it wasn’t a Culture novel, the usual setting for Banks’ sci-fi where sleek machine minds run the show with characteristic dry wit. He said he might get it to read for his and Sarah‘s trip to Japan. That’s gotta be a long flight.