Mrs Heathen and I (as well as our pal R.W.S.) got hooked on Jim Butcher’s urban fantasy series back in 2007, when I was traveling full time. I devoured and passed on the first eight books in a couple months of long flights and hotel rooms, and since then we’ve snatched up the new installments more or less as quickly as Butcher could write them — even as, we must admit, the quality of the stories became a little uneven.

The books concern a “wizard for hire” in modern-day Chicago named Harry Dresden; he works as sort of a paranormal PI, and some of those cases turn out to be connected to giant plots by evil powers (as is so often the case). The early books are pretty stand-alone, but starting around the 7th book or so, hints of a broader over-arching plot begin. By book 10 (Small Favor, from 2008) the self-contained stories are completely in service, one way or another, of the longer narrative.

As with any “multi-installment” series, staying fresh is an issue. Butcher has done a reasonable job with worldbuilding over the years, and hasn’t exactly painted himself into a corner, but for whatever reason the last couple books weren’t quite as much fun as the earlier ones (aside, maybe, from the body count in Changes). Our little Dresden fan club was pretty unanimous in a “meh” rating for Ghost Story last year, so it took me a while to snag the 14th and latest installment, Cold Days. (Fun fact: despite the plural title, aside from a handwaved introductory period, the action takes places within a single 24-hour day.)

Yeah, well, read it in about 2 days. Loads of fun, but it’s entirely unclear to me where we’ll go next — despite the fact that Butcher apparently plans for 6 or 8 more books before Harry’s story is done. Harry’s experiencing some pretty serious power inflation to go with the ever-higher stakes, but at least this time around it worked. I reckon I’ll stay along for the ride.

I don’t remember why this one ended up in the to-read list, but smart money says a glowing review somewhere. Let me just get his out there, then, so as (hopefully) to save someone else the trouble: Holy CRAP is this book ever a tedious pile of self-indulgent nothing.

Seriously. I haven’t been this disappointed by a book since the unaccountably award-winning Among Others last year, though the book itself has more in common with Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell (which I also hated) in its apparent pleasure in its own rambling, shambling blankness.

Avoid. Seriously. Thank goodness I have a decent palate cleanser on hand.

My friend Mike wonders how Warren Ellis gets away with only writing a book every few years, but if he continues to improve at this rate, he can stay on this pace as long as he likes.

Ellis is mostly famous as the author of Transmetropolitan, an influential comic that ran between 1997 and 2002. Since then, he’s also written a wide variety of other titles, both creater-owned and otherwise (and also including the source material for the 2010 film RED, about which Ellis has said “if you don’t want to see a film with Helen Mirren with a sniper rifle, I’m not sure I want to know you.”) However, he’s also written prose, most notably the 2007 novel Crooked Little Vein, which I read and enjoyed.

Vein was a fine, if short, bit of work, and was mostly carried by Ellis’ voice. If you’re familiar with his blog and other online work, it’s easy to see its protagonist as a stand-in for Ellis himself (not in a wish-fulfillment Mary Sue sort of way at all, though, unless Ellis actually has a jones for scrotal inflations). Its plot was well into the sort of grotesque/absurd area that Ellis has explored in some detail in his graphic work; Wikipedia’s plot summary starts with

Michael McGill, a burned-out private eye is hired by a corrupt White House Chief of Staff to find a second “secret” United States Constitution, which had been lost in a whorehouse by Richard Nixon.

So. Right. It was fun and all, but it also (and obviously) absurdist.

Gun Machine (out this week) is very different. Our hero, New York Detective John Tallow, is still somewhat Ellis-ian (and, like McGill, he’s got some goofy sidekicks), but the story is an inventive and real-world police procedural mostly devoid of the absurd flourishes that formed the bulk of Vein. It’s also significantly longer without being padded.

Ellis starts us with a violent and shocking set piece that ends with our hero seeing his partner killed before killing the assailant himself; the gunfire exposes a heretofore apparently sealed tenement apartment completely full of guns. Guns adorn nearly every inch of the wall, floor, and ceiling. And, as it happens, every one they test turns out to be tied to some unsolved homicide, going back twenty years or more.

It’s a weird setup, which we expect from Ellis, and I worried a bit that the excesses of Vein would show up and run off with the story. That never happens. Instead, we get a solid and disciplined novel that I found very hard to put down. It’s still a bit weirder than so-called mainstream thrillers, but mostly in tone. (The killer’s totemic apartment ties into his own delusions, not some secret mystical power, for example.)

If I have one complaint here, it’s that the conclusion of the work is a bit abrupt — though by no means as unsatisfying as, say, some of Lee Child’s work has been (all these guys could take a lesson from the late Mr Parker on that front). I get that endings are hard, and Ellis’ isn’t bad, but I definitely came away wishing the last chapter had fleshed a few things out a bit more. That’s a nit, though. Gun Machine was big fun, and I’ll be first in line to read Ellis’ next novel even if he takes another five years to churn it out. (Confidential to W.E.: Please don’t.)

Now: I think I’ll read something completely devoid of policemen.

• Gun Machine at Amazon
• Cory Doctorow’s review at Boing Boing
• The trailer for the book, narrated by TV’s Wil Wheaton

I realized, in retrospect, that I’d read too much ephemeral bullshit online last year and not enough actual books, so my only real resolution for 2013 is to read more books. I certainly have no shortage of candidates — a revised online information diet would still include plenty of sources for new interesting tomes, and that’s where I found book 2013.1, The Last Policeman.

It’s no secret I mostly read so-called “serious” books, but my travel schedule and (frankly) age have softened that prejudice a bit in recent years. I’ve read more SF, devoured all of the Harry Dresden books, and even picked up a bit of a mystery/thriller habit that I initially thought was confined to Robert Parker’s “Spenser” novels (turns out I was wrong, and as a consequence I know in my bones that Tom Cruise is absolutely NOT Jack Reacher).

Anyway, book #1 for 2013 is a hybrid title. The Last Policeman is both a mystery and, technically, a science fiction story. The argument is this: owing to the impending and inexorable arrival of a large asteroid, Earth as we know it has about six months to go. We join the story in media res on that point; the protagonist (Detective Hank Palace) fills us in on the recent past as part of the narrative, so we get to explore how the world reacted as the likelihood of impact moved from “nothing to worry about” to “oh God, oh God, we’re all going to die.” His rumination gives us most of the speculative-fiction bits in the novel (which is otherwise set in a world basically just like our own), since obviously the impending doom of all or most of mankind is going to do some very weird things to society, to the economy, to geopolitics, and most notably to individual humans themselves.

Palace’s job as a murder cop has become very odd indeed, since, as zero-hour approaches, more and more people are opting to check out early. Suicides are rampant, which of course creates an excellent smokescreen for a murder or two. It’s not at all inventive that the story hinges on Palace deciding one particular “hanger” was in fact a murder, but it is inventive that it takes place in a world where “well, so fucking what?” is an increasingly viable answer.

The book’s not high lit by any stretch of the imagination — I read the whole thing on New Year’s Day — but it was definitely fun. I’ve learned to be kind of circumspect about recommendations from places like BoingBoing or IO9, but this time around I wasn’t disappointed. I expect I’ll read the other two books Ben Winters has planned for Detective Palace.

As of today, it has been 195 days since Achewood was updated.

How I would like to work for you! contains the text of her 1933 letter to The New Yorker seeking employment. Sadly, they turned her down.

Strongbad interprets children’s literature.

The Hairpin and Poetry magazine are collaborating; the first example is the former running two poems from Karr with an unmistakable subject.

You should not, under any circumstances, miss these if you are at all of the literary bent.

I’m really, really confused how Among Others beat out Embassytown for best novel. The latter was legitimately compelling and inventive; the former is a terribly simplistic young-adult outsider-comes-of-age story that boils down to “Are you there, Sci fi? It’s me, Mori” and leaves more plot threads unresolved than not.

Because we all need a mantra:

Breakfast is the only meal of the day that I tend to view with the same kind of traditionalized reverence that most people associate with Lunch and Dinner. I like to eat breakfast alone, and almost never before noon; anybody with a terminally jangled lifestyle needs at least one psychic anchor every twenty-four hours, and mine is breakfast. In Hong Kong, Dallas or at home — and regardless of whether or not I have been to bed — breakfast is a personal ritual that can only be properly observed alone, and in a spirit of genuine excess.

The food factor should always be massive: four Bloody Marys, two grapefruits, a pot of coffee, Rangoon crepes, a half-pound of either sausage, bacon, or corned beef hash with diced chiles, a Spanish omelette or eggs Benedict, a quart of milk, a chopped lemon for random seasoning, and something like a slice of Key lime pie, two margaritas, and six lines of the best cocaine for dessert… Right, and there should also be two or three newspapers, all mail and messages, a telephone, a notebook for planning the next twenty-four hours and at least one source of good music… All of which should be dealt with outside, in the warmth of a hot sun, and preferably stone naked.

Carry on.

This two-volume, slipcased omnibus edition of 9 classic SF novels is significantly more affordable than the last object of booklust I mentioned…

The glorious book nerds at The Folio Society have issued a new edition of Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, printed as Faulkner wished — with multiple colors denoting the time and point-of-view shifts.

It is $345, in slipcover, on archival paper, with a commentary volume, and I WANTS IT.

Gaiman returns to Sandman.

The May 28 New Yorker has a fantastic (and long) story on the extraordinary exploits of William Alexander Morgan, the American ne’er do well and wanderer who became the only American Comandante in the Cuban revolution (there was, apparently, only one other foreigner with that title).

We likely forget that there was a coalition of forces united behind Castro thanks to the excesses of Batista’s regime. Morgan joined a band of revolutionaries who were also ardent anti-communists; his star fell as Fidel moved to the left and the same sort of totalitarianism that doomed Batista, with predictable results, but the man’s story reads like something Hemingway could’ve written.

(Know anything about this cat, Gar?)

Last year, I read the otherwise brilliant A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan. It’s a fine (and interestingly structured) novel of modern life, but it’s marred pretty seriously by a hamfisted stab at “modernity” or “experimentalism”: Egan renders one chapter as a PowerPoint-style presentation (presumably because in her life as a writer she’s never really exposed to the horror that is PowerPoint in American business life).

No, I’m not kidding. It’s the sort of overly precious goofball conceit you sometimes see in experimental writers (and Egan has certainly got some metafiction DNA), but not really in good ones. Frankly, I completely support attempting something like this — I mean, why not? — but part of being “experimental” is knowing when to wash your attempts down the lab drain instead of foisting them on a reading public.

Obviously, opinions vary on this — Goon Squad won big awards — but as a veteran of an English department I know all too well that some writers’ shit doesn’t stink, and that authors with the reputation Egan has can get away with things that others couldn’t. Sometimes, they’re even praised for it. Inshallah.

Anyway, fresh off the goofball presentation chapter, we find now the news that Egan will tweet a short story for the New Yorker. What’s hilarious, sad, and graspy about this is that Egan has no real Twitter presence today. There’s nothing linked on her site, and a Google search turns up only an account (@EganGoonSquad) presumably started to promote her last book, and probably not run by her at all. It hardly matters; there are only 7 tweets spread between August 2010 and the day before yesterday.

What this suggests is that, like the PowerPoint gimmick, this will be a nonnative usage of an established form by a writer mining for novelty, not narrative or story or character. Egan is not a digital native. She has no real online presence, nor any real engagement with social media or blogging or anything of the sort. Consequently, what’s likely to happen is that she’ll chop a story into 140-character bits, have an assistant type it in, and bask in the glow of an “experimental short story” that’s essentially free of any experimental character; after all, serialization is a 19th century technique.

If she or her editors had any grasp of the culture of Twitter, this might’ve been interesting. Twitter is not a broadcast medium; Twitter is a conversation. Chopping an otherwise unremarkable short story into 140-character pieces isn’t particularly inventive, and is unlikely to include anything unique to the form.

Further, Egan’s little stunt overshadows the countless inventive uses of Twitter already happening — there’s fiction there, and character-based commentary, and a whole host of other genuinely novel expressions that Egan apparently knows nothing about.

What we’re left with, then, is an old-school magazine (which I love) and a Boomer writer establishing in a very public way how little they understand about the online world. Again.

Unfollow.

The iPad is now in its third year, and it’s difficult to overstate the impact its had on computing, especially portable computing. I know it’s certainly changed the way I interact with the richness of the web, for example, and has made it vastly easier to have a ridiculous amount of information just a few taps away — and on a big screen. I love that.

Because I am a giant literature nerd, though, one of the most exciting developments on the iPad was, at least for me, this edition of The Waste Land, T. S. Eliot’s masterwork. Dense with allusion and reference, it’s a poem that’s launched a thousand dissertations and annotations. And the folks at TouchPress realized they could bundle the text with reams of backing information, readings, annotations, and reference material in a single beautiful package on the iPad.

(Older Heathen will remember that there were attempts at this sort of rich publishing model in the initial CD-ROM boom, but the iPad gives us a much richer experience.)

I hoped that the warm reception (and immediate financial success) of The Waste Land app would mean we’d see similar treatments of important works — and especially important works that were logistically hard to carry around. The two that I’d most love to see are Ulysses and Infinite Jest, which also happen to be two of my favorite novels. In either case I’d gleefully pay for a work again just to have a bundled experience of the quality delivered with The Waste Land.

And yet: Nothing. And I’m not the only one who’s noticed, either. Won’t someone make this happen?

If you somehow missed Neil Gaiman interviewing Stephen King, well, it’s now on Gaiman’s own site, free of the Times’ paywall. Enjoy. Not terribly long, and very worth your while.

I have now fixed that.

It’s mostly about Wilbur, of course, but Charlotte does make an appearance. Not safe for work, church, life, or sanity. Nor do I think it is, strictly speaking, kosher. Or halal, for that matter.

The Awl’s “Classic Trash” feature takes on The Secret History.

Nothing else i say will make this post more interesting if you didn’t wear out a copy of that book, but everyone who did has already clicked through. It’s that kind of book.

Found at — where else? — Whole Foods:

Yesterday would have been Douglas Adams’ 60th birthday.

In his honor, tomorrow I will turn 42.

Nicholas Carr suggests that publishers include ebook downloads with regular books, in the way record labels do with vinyl and MP3, or the way you get music by default if you buy a CD.

I think record labels only do it because they sort of have to — a CD can be ripped and shared quickly, and while they tried to sell us formats that were locked down, nobody ever bought SACD or DVD-A in real volumes. They’re still stuck with CD, which means format shifting is a dead letter for the RIAA.

Book publishers may think this means they can keep trying to bill us twice for physical and electronic copies, since there’s no reasonable way to “rip” a novel onto your Kindle. But it’s still the right thing to do, for lots of reasons. The biggest one is that it’ll shore up their existing distribution channels (brick & mortar stores) at the expense of Amazon, and it’s in nobody’s best interest for any one company to control American publishing.

Sure would be nice. I pay a premium for a vinyl + CD-or-download-code package vs. what it would cost in the iTunes store, or what a CD alone would cost, because I prefer the form factor and tactile experience of vinyl. I’d pay a mild premium for books with Kindle editions included, too.

So during some interval of excess travel a year or two ago, I found myself reading an excerpt of one of Lee Child’s Jack Reacher novels on my Kindle, courtesy of an ad in the New Yorker. I remember thinking the combo seemed odd, but now that I’m 7 books into the series I guess they knew better than I.

The Reacher books are pretty dumb. Let’s get that out in the open immediately. I tend to see Child’s “clever plot developments” coming a mile off, mostly because they aren’t all that clever. But these stories of a wandering vigilante former Army major (who, famously, keeps neither a fixed address or even a suitcase) came along at pretty much the right time: we were all out of Dresden at the time, and Robert Parker is dead, and now what antisocial chaotic good badass is going to entertain me on plane rides or when I’m otherwise too braindead to read the next really good book on my stack?

So, Reacher. Six novels in, he’s fought bloodthirsty counterfeiters, insane militia separatists, megalomaniacal, crazed Vietnam vets from central casting (by way of Blofeld), a really lame serial killer, and weirdly obsessed would-be assassins of a fictional vice president. None of them are very good, but the thing is you run through the book in only a couple hours anyway. (Seriously, I never would have read so many without the Kindle’s ability to buy on the run.)

I thought briefly about a more detailed discussion of these pulp delights, but that seems pointless. I will say that order does sort of matter — each book is self contained, but later ones refer to previous adventures — so if you’re inclined, start with Killing Floor. It’s a bit more graphically violent than the others, and was published in 1997, so it’s mildly outdated, but still fun.

Apparently, in addition to penning almost exclusively annoying and poorly structured, overly precious novels about baby boomers, Jonathan Franzen also hates ebooks and considers them (I’m not kidding) incompatible with a just society.

Also, I’m sure he would like us to get off his lawn, turn down our music, tuck our shirts in like normal people, and otherwise conform to his increasingly myopic view of the world. I’d say he should just spend more time writing, but after slogging through the Corrections I sort of hope he’ll stop doing that, too. Others do it far better.

If you’re fan, you should, at your earliest convenience, go read this essay over at neil Gaiman’s site, about the influence of C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, and G. K. Chesterton on his literary development. It’s completely brilliant and wonderful.

Also, it includes photographs of all three. If you are like me, and read Sandman when you were younger, and perhaps had not at that time or since actually seen a picture of Chesterton, you will be astonished by how obvious the correlation is between the author and Gaiman’s character “Fiddler’s Green.”

Some Heathen are aware of our affection for Jim Butcher‘s “Dirty Harry Potter” series The Dresden Files, concerning the adventures of a modern day wizard (Harry Dresden) working as a paranormal investigator in Chicago. I discovered them during a period of intense travel five years ago, quickly caught up, and have read each new book pretty quickly after publication since.

Well, that sort of changed with the last one. After Changes, the penultimate volume, I was getting a little tired of Butcher’s schtick. He’s turned a certain corner by my lights such that his voice is overrunning his narrative talent, but he’s selling so well he’s got no reason to reign it in. Hey, dude’s making a living, and presumably a nice one, so more power to him, and I absolutely recognize how hard it must be to sustain a series, so this isn’t meant as a dig. It just means I was less enthusiastic about reading Ghost Story when it came out last August. In fact, I didn’t pick it up until this week, when I was reminded it existed after loaning a giant sack of Dresden books to a friend recuperating from some surgery.

Let’s just say my fears were a at last partly justified. I blew through the book quickly, obviously, as is often the case with genre work. I certainly enjoyed it more than The Trinity Six I mentioned in the last book post, but that’s not a high bar. Mostly, I’m still along for Harry’s ride because I already have a bunch of time invested, and I’m interested to see how it all resolves, but that’s the literary equivalent of being in an abusive relationship. Seriously: Ask any Game of Thrones fan.

What’s worse is that Ghost Story doesn’t resolve any of the growing backstory for Harry. There’s nary a peep of the White Counsel, the Black Counsel, or anything beyond the immediate repercussions of the events in Changes. Granted, that was heavy, but what that leaves us with in Ghost Story is a fairly thin plot with a fairly predictable end that’s telegraphed way, way in advance. (And, to be perfectly honest, the finale of Ghost Story is a clear and obvious place for Harry to end up based on the events of Changes; the plot of the most recent book ends up being almost completely filler.)

So, read it if you’re into Harry. And I can’t say the first few books (at least) aren’t fun, so the series itself is at least worth some of your time.

Oh, and how funny is it that Butcher is still putting the same plea to “please read my sword and sorcery Codex Alera books” in the back of each Dresden tome? Apparently, he only wrote the Dresden books to make cash, and his main love is a cycle of traditional fantasy. I do not have the sense that the fantasy carries any of the charm he’s managed with the Dresden Files.

(Confidential to certain parties in surgical recovery: It may be possible to steal Ghost before Erin reads it, given the pace with which you’re reading the others…)

A quasi-resolution this year is to blog more about books. I’ve finished 3 since the first of the year; here’s a brief rundown:

The one I loved

Ready Player One is a beautiful love letter to geeks of a certain age. Set in a dystopic near-future, it centers on the wild scavanger hunt set up by the will of a dead video-game billionaire equal parts Richard Garriott, Bill Gates, and Howard Hughes — a hunt that takes place entirely in a virtual world, but which has very, very high stakes in the real one. Said billionaire has left his entire 12-figure estate to the winner of an online game centered around his love for 80s nerd culture. It’s all there: the films, the books, the video games, the whole nine yards. This one’s particularly recommended if you enjoyed Stephenson’s REAMDE earlier in the year.

The one about which I’m ambivalent

Seriously, I am, and that’s a first for China Mieville. He’s move on from his Bas-Lag world in recent works, mostly to great success. The City and the City was mindbending and awesome without being full of the sort of physical weirdness that dominated his primary trilogy. Kraken was a bit more of a return to form, but set in an urban-fantasy version of London, and was no less compulsively readable and thought provoking.

So imagine my surprise when I found Embassytown too clever by half. I really had to sort of make myself finish it, and was only kinda-sorta glad I had. What Mieville is doing here is definitely interesting — this time it’s a novel-length rumination on the role of language in cognition, among other things, so if you’ve got linguistic leanings, jump right in — but it tends to overpower a narrative I found murky and slow. Having one’s Big Idea overshadow one’s Story is an ongoing risk in the world of speculative fiction — the so-called “literature of ideas,” as if realistic or literary fiction was somehow free of them — but given his past work, I thought Mieville was immune. It’s probably still worth reading if you’re a fan, or if my thumbnail description here piques your interest, but it’d be a bad place to jump into the deep pool that is Mieville. (For that, go for Perdido Street Station.) piques your interest, but it’d be a bad place to jump into the deep pool that is Mieville.

The about which I almost forgot

I am forever making notes about books I want to read. After Amazon happened, and especially after Amazon’s app meant it was always in my pocket, one way I handled this was to just order the damn book with the idea fresh in my head. In this way, I developed a fucking enormous stack of to-read books in my office.

Fortunately, the Kindle has made this process a little better, but without making the to-read list any shorter. Now, instead of buying a book I might want to read immediately, I hit Amazon and tell it to send a sample to my Kindle for free, which I’ll get around to reading eventually. I do this a LOT. If I enjoy the sample, I buy the book. If not, I found out for free.

That’s how I found myself reading The Trinity Six, which has been described all year as a “literary thriller.” I’m not exactly sure what that means, unless it’s a reference to the fact that the protagonist is a university professor instead of a special forces operative. I found it compulsively readable without being particularly filling, but also without the sort of literary hangover I experience when I read utter crap. Definitely worthwhile for air travel, but otherwise unremarkable.

I’ve enjoyed the work of David Milch for years, especially Deadwood. Longtime Heathen also know of my deep affection for the work of Richard Yates, and even that I knew him a little, in the last years of his life, when he was the writer in residence at Alabama during my time there.

It’s only in reading this bit here, about the wildly bizarre connection Richard Yates has with Seinfeld, that I discover something else:

When Yates was teaching at Iowa, Milch was one of his students.

This is awesome.

Stephenson’s latest is best skipped, frankly. It’s a turgid mismash of unearned and unplausible coincidences stapled together with NS’ trademark deep-dive research. Unlike his prior works, which typically used a fine story (“ripping good yarns,” even) to explore some other topic (nanotech, cyberspace, monetary development, etc.), this time it’s a scattershot explosion of whatever stuck on the wall — MMORPG gaming, money laundering, international terrorism, great circle air traffic planning, immigration, firearms, drug smuggling, northwestern geography, and Eritrean adoptees.

No, really. It’s kind of a mess, and feels lacking in the craft I found in even the more self-indulgent portions of the Baroque cycle, or Anathem.

Via Mohney, who’s quoting, but: “How Many Cormac McCarthies does it take to change a light bulb?” The answer:

A: Two or perhaps three, approaching now, from beyond the tree in the long low light of morning. From some black place: a reckoning neither required nor bidden, a reckoning no judge could have ordered, but a reckoning nonetheless. One of the men carries a single glove, ready to grip the hot, bright bulb and twist it dead. The other two follow, smoking, and whisper about what is to come: the treacherous scramble in wet woolen darkness, the fight to fill that space with light. One of them, the youngest, cradles the thin bowl of glass in his hands like a baby foal born too soon — partly out of gentleness, partly as if to shield it from the mare’s desperate inquiring eyes.

The men walk to the bulb. The Remover’s shadow blackens as he approaches it. A quick unnatural lunge.

Then all is dark.

Related: Yelp reviews as if written by McCarthy, which is an ongoing Tumblr.

Is it cheeky to call your book “Paradise Lost?”

What if your surname is Milton? Does that change things?

What if your surname is Milton, and the book is about the Armenian genocide?

I’ve had this story starred for a while in my Google Reader, about the anniversary of the passing of Ishi. He was the last surviving member of the Yani people, and lived out his days with a noted anthropologist called Alfred Kroeber who was bright enough to realize the opportunity Ishi presented. This part of his life was the subject of a pretty good TV movie 19 years ago, with Graham Greene and Jon Voight.

What’s finally got me off my ass to post this is a surprising fact buried in the first link: Kroeber is Ursula K. Le Guin’s father.

Writers should be more like rock stars:

Oscar Wilde. Ernest Hemingway. Hunter S. Thompson.

Each, a rock star in his own right. Oscar Wilde was put on trial for sodomy and indecency. Hemingway killed bears, fought in wars, crashed planes, had an FBI file on him. Hunter S. Thompson consumed every drug known to man, was a certified gun nut, and started FEAR AND LOATHING IN LAS VEGAS as a piece for fucking Sports Illustrated. Oh! And had his ashes shot out of a cannon made to look like a fist.

Who do we have like that these days? Neil Gaiman? He’s close, but let’s be honest — he’s just too nice. Too normal. A positively lovely human being by all reports. You never hear, “Famous author Neil Gaiman caught with seven stewardesses in a Wichita bus depot.” He doesn’t throw Bibles through stained glass windows or get into drunken beefs with other speculative fiction writers. You won’t see him roving about in public with exotic swords bought at a flea market looking to cut any dude who looks at him sideways.

Go read the whole thing.

After reading this rambling blogger broadside about Wallace (from someone who should, really know better) in yesterday’s Times, it seems like a good moment to point something out:

People can bitch and moan and whine about David Foster Wallace being to blame for this-or-that trend in the written word, or for being impenetrable, or for being long-winded, or whatever, but pretty much none of those people will write anything as inventive or as widely read as Infinite Jest, either.

Obviously writing about books involves criticism (that’s why they call it “criticism”), but now that we have some distance from his suicide I’m perceiving a bit of piling-on by wannabe pseudotransgressive pundits. Put simply, snarking about Infinite Jest or his other work now that he’s gone is kind of tiny. My thinking is that, just as with any other serious work, you need to have something genuinely interesting to say. Noting that Wallace wrote in a very conversational style, and that — holy cats! — this has become the norm online isn’t a particularly sharp observation. Newton and the Times both know better.

New Heathen faves the Decemberists have created an old-school, narrative video for their “Calamity Song” which — and this is the best part — recreates the Eschaton sequence from David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest.

This house is actually made of bookshelves.

Seen online:

There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year-old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs. — John Rogers

Fear and Loathing turned 40 yesterday, assuming we start counting from the day Hunter and Oscar took a big red convertible to Vegas to “cover” a motorcycle race.

The story ran in November, 1971, and was a book the next year. Fifteen years later, it became one of the holy text of Miscellaneous Heathenism, and in 2011 here we are.

In this letter from Hemingway to Archibald MacLeish, he has a little to say about Ezra Pound:

Thanks for sending the stats of Ezra’s rantings. He is obviously crazy. I think you might prove he was crazy as far back as the latter Cantos. He deserves punishment and disgrace but what he really deserves most is ridicule. He should not be hanged and he should not be made a martyr of. He has a long history of generosity and unselfish aid to other artists and he is one of the greatest living poets. It is impossible to believe that anyone in his right mind could utter the vile, absolutely idiotic drivel he has broadcast. His friends who knew him and who watched the warpeing and twisting and decay of his mind and his judgement should defend him and explain him on that basis. It will be a completely unpopular but an absolutely necessary thing to do. I have had no correspondence with him for ten years and the last time I saw him was in 1933 when Joyce asked me to come to make it easier haveing Ezra at his house.

Here’s something else made of bullshit fail:

This is the price matrix for a book I’d like to read. Note that the paperback is listed.

Problem number one is that it won’t actually be released until April, so fuck you very much, Amazon, for that bait and switch.

Problem number two is that the Kindle price is higher than the paperback price, but delivers drastically less value on a number of fronts:

First, you don’t really own it — Amazon can decide one day to simply delete it from your Kindle on a whim. There’s no way to back up your purchases separate from Amazon; the whole thing is a giant exercise in “Trust me!” that successful digital music plans have never replied upon.

Second, a digital book (while cute and trendy) still lacks some key factors. You can’t read it during take-off or landing on a plane, for example. You can’t read it in the bath unless you feel like endangering your $100+ Kindle. Taking it to the beach is a bit of a bad idea, too.

Third, a digital book has no residual value. You can’t sell it to Half Price, you can’t pass it on to your pal at work, etc. It’s locked to you, and that means you get less value for your money.

This is not to say that Kindle books, or e-books in general, don’t have their place. They do. But publishers need to realize that consumers are not stupid (at least not all of them), and price them accordingly. Their business model isn’t my problem; with the current crop of DRM-locked e-books, I can’t see paying more than 50% of the cost of a physical book for any e-book.

And yes, this means that when the paperback shows up, it depresses the value of the electronic version. A $9 e-book sold in concert with an $18 hardback makes sense, but the introduction of a $10 paperback of the same book changes the math. A $9 e-book “lease” is a lot less compelling if I can actually own the thing for $10.

Differing release schedules for books in the UK vs. the US. It’s completely ridiculous, and makes us want to figure out how to pirate a BOOK.

A well-reviewed SF novel I’d like to read is not currently slated for US publication until May, at which point it’ll be $24 plus shipping from Amazon in hard-to-tote-around hardback.

Instead, I just ordered the paperback from Amazon’s UK store for just under $20 (and about half that is shipping), and will have it in a week or so.

I might’ve used the Kindle option, and read it on my phone, except Amazon won’t sell me the Kindle edition because I live in the US, and that’s where the bullshit alarm goes off. Seriously, publishers, get your shit together and stop doing things like this just because you can. Silly availability decisions drive people to find ways to get your content without paying you at all. Don’t be that guy.

TalkingPointsMemo agrees with my previous assessment of The Looming Tower.

On the other hand, perhaps you already know as much as you need to know about mooslims.

In the same vein as Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters and Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, we find this excellent work.

Looks like he’s gotten into the Carver.

This is sofa king awesome I am utterly speechless.

Johnny shares a letter written to him by the good Doctor in 1996.

Marvelman is coming. Unfortunately, it’s not yet clear if the Moore/Gaiman material will get reprinted.

Check it out.