Closing tabs

I read a very good book that slightly spoiled me for others, the first volume of Peter May's Lewis trilogy, The Blackhouse. It was a recommendation from my college friend and fellow recreational triathlete Jean-Jacques; it is an odd book in certain respects, and I am not sure the unusual formal choices are entirely justified, but it's an immersive read with an appealing main character and amazing settings. Alas, though volumes two and three of the trilogy exist, I can't get them until I get back to New York: I had this one from BorrowDirect (various libraries in that system collect UK crime fiction), but even the first one isn't released to U.S. markets until September. I believe there is an earlier series I can plunder in the meantime.

Near the end of the third installment of Daniel Abraham's Dagger and the Coin quartet, but slightly regretting the sheer length of epic fantasy - it is my own fault for reading them all in a week rather than over something more like a month, I am still liking them, but it is slightly over the top!

Also: Christa Faust's second Fringe novel, The Burning Man (the Amazon reviews are unduly harsh, I quite enjoyed it, but it's true that it doesn't fill in backstory in the conventional sense - I think it is a difficult situation writing for obsessive fans!).

I was interviewed on local television this morning, which was very enjoyable but required an emergency visit yesterday to Camana Bay for a colored top and some face powder, neither of which is really in my usual repertoire! A good interview in the weekend edition of the paper, too, but not online - I may post a scan if I can get it formatted correctly.

Closing tabs:

"Her own cats now assume the iPad exists for them." (Via Marginal Revolution.)

David Epstein's new book sounds highly worthwhile.

I want to read this, but even more so I want to eat a piece of one of the cakes! (Also - via Jane - cat donuts.)

10 questions for Wayne Koestenbaum, courtesy of Dave Lull. Much looking forward to the release of My 1980s and Other Essays.

Last but not least, Matthew Kirschenbaum on archiving digital media. (Via Glenn Hendler.)

Closing tabs

Sunday's interesting failure has predictably led to a respiratory ailment - I made it to Cayman safely, but unfortunately had to exit hot yoga this morning due to ongoing lung issues. Frustration!

Good linkage:

Renovating Freud's couch

Potato cannon muzzle velocities. (Via Tyler Cowen.)

Cheese paintings! (Via.)

Light reading around the edges: Christa Faust's Fringe tie-in novel and the first volume of Ian Tregillis's Milkweed series, Bitter Seed. The opening chapters are a bit overwritten and the characters feel rather thinly developed, but once I settled into it, I hugely enjoyed it - will read installments two and three immediately.

12/12/12

Final classes plus other school obligations plus day one of jury duty have absolutely flattened me. This is all I have to share!

Thanks to the kindness of the excellent Maggie Griffin, I saw the Jack Reacher movie on Monday night - highly enjoyable, though of course I will always much prefer the books. The urban audience is seized with hilarity whenever Tom Cruise has either banter or a fight scene!

Great lunch on Tuesday with Amazon publicity people. I'm really excited about what they're going to be able to do for the book. Galleys not quite ready yet, but I should have them soon.

Light reading around the edges: Attica Locke's superb Black Water Rising and J. Robert Lennon's Familiar, which I also enjoyed a good deal, though not perhaps as much as some other particular favorites in a similar vein (1Q84, Glimpses).

I haven't been able to become enthusiastic about the current season of Fringe, but perhaps I'll give it another go this evening. I am so tired that I can hardly see straight!

Things you love

A great writing exercise from Laini Taylor, via Sara Ryan (whose lovely YA novel Empress of the World has just been reissued):

Do this exercise where you freewrite about the book you would write. (“Writing about” is so much easier than “writing”.) Don’t just describe the plot. Try to get at the feeling of it too, the mood and atmosphere. Be fanciful. You won’t have to abide by this, it’s just an exercise. Think about this too: imagine you are browsing in a bookstore or library, reading flap copy. You’ve had this happen before, you read flap copy that makes your heartbeat speed up, your mind brightens. This book is what you want, it is full of things you love, that fascinate you. You can’t wait to read it. What are those things? Come up with your own ideas that will speed up your heart and brighten your mind.

Only one novel of mine was written at all under this sort of sign - The Explosionist. My first novel was the book I felt compelled to write rather than the book I felt huge desire to read, and it was a strange and exciting feeling when I realized - after perusing the shelves of the Bank Street Bookstore to see whether anything else had come out that could reproduce the thrill for me of Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy and Garth Nix's Abhorsen books - that if the book I most wanted to read didn't yet exist, I had to write it!

The new novel has not been written under exactly that sign - it was more a compulsion to tell a story that would capture some of the intellectual charisma of the theory and practice of role-playing games, plus longterm desire to write something that reimagines The Bacchae. Then when I was revising, I kept on saying to myself, "I just need to make this world as much a one that readers want to enter as I feel about the world of Fringe...."

Closing tabs

Can't explain why it was such a tiring week: maybe it's just a tiring point in the semester? Anyway, I'm knackered, and am going to take the evening completely off for phenomenal laziness that may or may not involve novel-reading and a couple episodes of the (non-appealing) new season of Fringe.

On Tuesday I went to a lovely event - my long-ago tenth-grade English teacher Charlotte Pierce-Baker, now a professor at Vanderbilt, was at Columbia to speak about her distressing and moving memoir, This Fragile Life: A Mother's Story of a Bipolar Son. Haven't read it yet, but will do so soon.

Will Wiles on being published by Amazon's new literary fiction imprint (same publisher that's bringing out my novel in the spring).

Two takes: Phil Dyess-Nugent and James Parker on Neil Young's new memoir.

Richard Marshall interviews Paul Fry on various matters to do with theory and literature (good list of reading recommendations at the end!).

Check out Tough Mudder pics!

Light reading around the edges: Jami Attenberg's The Middlesteins (and here's a bonus link) and Invisible Murder, the second installment in an excellent Danish crime series.

Attack!

My interview with Heidi Julavits is up now at The Awl.

(I really loved her new novel The Vanishers; those who know me well and have read it will see what I mean when I say it is sort of the perfect Davidsonian novel, one that I wish I had written myself!)

Bonus link: Christopher Bollen's much fuller and more literary interview with Heidi, which I waited to read until I had composed my own questions....

Retributional geology

So tired I can't do anything!  And have made no progress today on the couple of work things that stand between me and book revision.  But I just finished reading an amazingly good novel, Vanessa Veselka's Zazen: Richard Nash sent it to me some months ago, but somehow I never opened up the file on my Kindle.  Can't find the link now, but I must have seen it mentioned this past week on some indie-best-of-end-of-year list that described it as being set in a parallel universe; since I am still in a painful condition of wanting nothing more than to submerge myself in infinite as yet unaired and in some cases unmade episodes of Fringe, this seemed like a godsend.  I loved it.

Took the plunge

and ordered tickets for Cycle 3 of the Ring Cycle at the Met - found a good friend who would do it with me, that was the clincher.  Who knows when I will have the chance again?  In a best-case scenario, it is a truly magical and transporting experience; in the worst-case scenario, parts of it are somewhat boring and it adds an onerous number of hours to a busy week, but I think there is no huge downside, it will be worthwhile whether or not I absolutely love it.

(Have uncharacteristically watched some hours of television this weekend - usually I only watch seasons of television on DVD with B. in Cayman, but we were very near the end of the third season of Fringe when we parted ways at the end of the Thanksgiving odyssey, it is a program which is very perfectly suited to my tastes, and my new laptop makes it very easy to watch videos from Amazon anywhere in my apartment - I watched the last three episodes of season 3 and then, regrettably, the first seven of season 4, which is as far as it now goes - am in horrible desiring limbo now of wanting all the rest of the season in one fell swoop, when really it will only be doled out WEEK BY UNREASONABLE WEEK over the rest of this year.  Anybody who has secret early access, tell me and get me in on it too!  Though I do observe, as always with this series, that they play overly fast and loose with the alternate universes: I feel that though high-quality television does a good job creating investment in characters over a season and its successors, the provision of too many alternates in this sort of a plot erodes general belief in and concern with the characters, to a sometimes problematic degree.)