Electric Dreamstate

In chronological order the books that I finished in the time between when I left Edmonton on April 27 until now.

In the audio book version of Fragile Things Neil Gaiman narrates superbly. So well, in fact, that it makes you hate him a little bit. He's good at that too? The story collection itself is a mixed bag (as most story collections are) and flits from being engrossingly fantastic to disturbingly psycho-sexual. Enjoyable if you're a fan of his work, but not a great place to start if you haven't read him before.

Fun and forgettable. The story of a messed up girl who becomes a bail bondsman. A true airport book.

Unfortunately I never saw the movie, but the book is quite a nice little read. It isn't especially heavy and it has a very pre-Tolkien vibe to its fantasy. Unlike Fragile Things, this is a good place to begin if you want to start reading Neil Gaiman. One could also say that it's like the Princess Bride, except that it really isn't anything like the Princess Bride except that it's more like it than anything else that I can think of.

This one is sort of a cheat since I read the first half back in Edmonton, and then read the second half in spurts while doing my laundry after I got here. It's essentially about a group of technologically advanced post-humans recreating the battle of Troy on Mars. Sort-of. The book is dense and a bit imposing, for example there is a chapter which entirely consists of robots from the moons of the gas giants considering the finer points of Shakespeare's sonnets as they compare to the writing of Proust. However, it's worth picking up and giving a glance through to see if it's your thing. Simmons' earlier series of books (starting with Hyperion) is perhaps a bit more welcoming and emotionally satisfying though.

Yes another Neil Gaiman book. This one follows two brothers who are the sons of Mr Nancy (also known as the god Anansi the trickster and storyteller) and their trials as they find their place in the world. It is tangentially related to American Gods which had Mr Nancy as a side character. The book has a sense of playfulness that befits the trickster nature of Anansi although there is rarely a true sense of danger. Again a fine read, but probably not a great place to start reading Neil Gaiman.

The last Gaiman book I promise. This was the second time that I read American Gods and it was still an excellent book the second time around. It's a fine merger of folklore, genre fiction and the modern literary novel*. In fact, this second time around made me realize that the genre fiction stuff was really subdued here, and that Gaiman is just one book about his mid-life crisis and wanting to bang Katie Holmes away from a Pulitzer. Also the book has zombie sex in it. Kind of.

A strange alien vessel enters the solar system and some astronauts go and check it out. The documentation of their perplexing and unknowable findings takes up most of the book. The novel is notable for two reasons: First, like most eastern European Sci-Fi (and especially Stanislav Lem) one of the main themes of the book is the unknowability of the alien. Second, the characters are all astronauts who confront the unknowable and don't go crazy, or turn on each other or otherwise act so unprofessionally that you wonder how they got trained. It's quite nice actually.

I read this when I was 16 and I loved it. Reading it now, I can see what I liked (the amazing world building), but a lot of new issues popped up. First off, the prose is ... underwhelming. I didn't think that the overuse and misuse of "presently" could irk me so much. And then there is the underlying (and most likely unintentional) dismissal of female characters. Still a fun read, but not the borderline hard Sci-Fi that I remember.

A classic unnecessary sequel, The Ringworld Engineers is like the first book only not quite as good. The healthy doses of retcons don't really detract from the first book too much, but the introduction of the concept of "rishathra" which is ... well lets just say that the writers on Futurama had to get the idea for "snu-snu" from somewhere. I didn't read the third or fourth in the series.

I listened to all of these back-to-back-to-back-to-back-to-back-to-back-to-back. I think I'll talk about them in a future post.

A fun little number about a guy taking LSD and then taking over the Universe. Dune is another novel that I read when I was 16 and it holds up much better than Ringworld. In fact I don't think I really liked Dune back then. The novel drops you into a foreign culture and then assumes you can fill in the blanks. The use of full third-person unlimited omniscient narration is a change from most genre novels and gives the book an almost psychedelic feel.

Yup done.

*You can tell these books because they say "a novel" on the front, and the cover is usually textured in eggshell. Also the cover is usually something abstract or takes a picture of a person and makes it austere. Sometimes this differentiation between literary novel and genre novel is a bit strained such as in the case of books like The Time Traveler's Wife which is marketed as a literary novel but could have easily been sold as either a sci-fi novel or a romance novel. Also the movie version of the Time Traveller's Wife is shooting about a block from my apartment.