So here’s the deal. There’s this new-”ish” literary mag called G.U.D. (Greatest Uncommon Denominator). I got the first issue a while back and was really surprised at the quality of the production. So much so that I brought it into my writing class and passed it around, and pretty much everyone loved it. Not just the fiction and poetry, but the mag itself. I missed the second issue (I blame the 10,000 pages or so I had to read for grad school) but have been keeping my ear to the vine, as it were, and heard nothing but good stuff about the content.

Well, time certainly does fly, and they are all set to launch their third issue and are having this little contest. Go and check it out, and take a gander at the rest of their site, too. GUD folks over there. I have been nothing but impressed with the community they are developing. Seems to fit hand and glove with their product.

Keep up the G.U.D. work!

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Title: The Atrocity Archive

Author: Charles Stross

Publisher: Golden Gryphon Press

Year Published: 2004

First Line: “Green sky at night; hacker’s delight.”

I’ve been wanting to pick up something by Stross for a while now, as the buzz about him all across the netosphere has been tremendously positive. Needless to say I was delighted when my buddy Nick gave me The Jennifer Morgue for Christmas last year. And then I found out that while Jennifer isn’t really a sequel, The Atrocity Archive sort of sets the stage for it, and being the OCD series-whore that I am, I of course zipped over to Amazon and picked up The Atrocity Archive before I even considered starting Jennifer.

First off, there are four distinct parts to The Atrocity Archive (well… five if you count the Glossary, but more on that later). The first is an Introduction by Ken MacLeod. It’s an interesting look at Stross and how he thinks, but it’s short enough to act more of an advertisement than anything else. Not necessarily a bad thing for a newish author (in 2004) to have a “buy this now” endorsement from someone as prolific as MacLeod. The last section is a robust Afterward by Stross detailing what he sees as parallels between the spy thriller, the mystery, and his own science fiction. It is a really interesting read, and I enjoyed it as much as I did the fiction between the Intro and the Afterward.

And speaking of the fiction between, perhaps it’s because I came to it a bit ass-backwards through Jennifer, it caught me by surprise that what I assumed was a novel was actually two separate novellas, “The Atrocity Archive” and “The Concrete Jungle.” They are related in that they share the same universe and characters, but they aren’t linked and stand perfectly well on their own. And I think I actually enjoyed them more because of this. It gave me a firm breaking point where I could catch my breath before I dove back into another story.

And I needed that break. I thoroughly enjoyed both stories, but Stross’ narrative voice took me quite a bit of getting used to. I am not a real “hard” science kind of reader (or writer, for that matter). I am more interested in character development, psychology, and sociology than I am technology. Don’t get me wrong, I love technology, and I wish I was more conversant in the more complex aspects of it than I actually am, but more often than not I find hard science fiction to exist because of the “big idea” of something technological, and that gets boring for me pretty quick. Especially boring in this case was having to use the Glossary so often to refer to what the governmental abbreviations all stood for. In the end I stopped caring and just flew past the three or four letter monikers without giving them much thought, which meant all these various agencies just got lumped under “government stuff” in my brain. Perhaps that was, in some way, the point, but it bothered me that I had stopped caring about part of Stross’ world-building.

One piece of good news, though, is that even though I reached the point of tedium with having to check the Glossary, I was never bored with The Atrocity Archive itself. The ideas and development behind the Stross’ “big idea” technology kept me hooked and were strong enough to make up for what frustrated me. And what frustrated me the most, you ask? I wanted to be smarter than I am. Stross didn’t quite make me feel stupid, but the technology he puts out there is so rooted in possibility (or at least seems to be) that I was forever trying to figure out where exactly his leap from computers to magic originates. More than that, because it was all just barely over my head, I always felt that I was just on the brink of understanding something profoundly important, but that understanding was always just beyond my reach. It wasn’t until I actually stopped trying to figure it all out and just accepted it as Stross explained it that I actually began to really get into the stories.

I think that may well be the single reason why I enjoyed “The Concrete Jungle” more than I did “The Atrocity Archive.” By the time I got to it, I had lowered the bar on my Willing-Suspension-Of-Disbelief-o-Meter and was just soaking up the technology right along with the story. That and the fact that there are some fairly significant and highly technical info-dumps scattered throughout “Atrocity.” I think they needed to be there in order to establish different factors of his world, but they were the least interesting part of the story he was telling.

The other piece of good news is this…

With these two novellas, Stross has created a universe that I absolutely love. His main character is infinitely charming as he struggles with being turned from a cubicle-riding desk-jockey into a secret agent for a government agency that doesn’t exist. The relationships Stross builds along the way intermix with the technology he has created and they compliment each other supremely well. In the end, it is the building of his main character that kept me totally involved in the story. My only complaint is that there was no love-interest continued in “The Concrete Jungle.” The relationship between Bob and Mo was fun to watch as it developed, and the lack of continuation in the second novella was something that was sorely missed.

At the end of the day, The Atrocity Archive is a fun read, but not one I would recommend to anyone not at least a casual fan of technologically-focused science fiction.

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Title: Talk to the Hand

Author: Lynne Truss

Publisher: Gotham Books

Year Published: 2005

Had not my friend given me Talk to the Hand for Christmas last year, I would never have read it on my own. Even though my tastes are fairly broad, this one happens to fall outside my usual browsing area. Way outside. But that’s ok. That’s what friends are for. To steer us back onto the path when we happen to wander a bit off course. Or to take us gently by the hand, guide us over to the garden and to thrust our face down into the flower bed when we don’t take the time to stop and give them a big ol’ sniff. Not only did I sniff, I breathed deep and thoroughly enjoyed floral dunking.

Talk to the Hand is a book on manners. Now before you start with the one-liners, it isn’t a “how-to” book, something written to detail the proper etiquette of text-messaging or which fork is for the salad and which is for the shrimp. Rather, it’s a casual study of the apparent lack of manners that is so prevalent in society today. Much of it is focused on the English culture (Ms. Truss is English, you see), but as a High School teacher over here on this side of the pond, I feel safe in assuring Ms. Truss that most, if not all of what she says is just as pertinent in the States as it is in her neck of the woods.

At times uproariously funny, Ms. Truss had me talking to myself, agreeing with her own perceptions and laughing at her hysterically sad examples. Written much like a personal essay, there were times when she got bogged down with what other people think, but always she returned to the strength of the book… the power of her observations and interpretations, and the complexity and intelligence of her sense of humor.

I have another of her books waiting in the wings (Eats, Shoots & Leaves) and am happy to have it so close the top of the stack. If she treats grammar anything like she treats rudeness, it will be another fast, fun read.

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I won’t even try to describe how busy I have been between school and… well… school. I think, though, that maybe I have a handle on the workload now and can get back to updating once a week or so. Along with that comes a return to reading books for me and not for one school or another. And that’s how I am going to ease my way back into a regular posting pattern again. Talking about books. Specifically, what books are next on my reading list and why.

Before I get into all that, though, I need to emphasize that whatever order I come up with for the next 4 or 5 books is tentative, at best. I know, I say that each and every time I post something about what’s on my bedside stack. But this time it’s a little different. I haven’t heard anything official yet, but Amazon is finally listing George R.R. Martin’s A Dance With Dragons with a release date and a pre-order option. And yes, I pre-ordered it. And, also yes, I know that it will likely come out after their posted release date of September 30^th. But that’s ok. I have waited this long, another few months won’t kill me. Besides, it gives me time to re-read the first four books. I’ll probably start them in July, or maybe as early as June if I get really anxious, so it won’t cut into my next 6 or so reads. But eventually the publishing world will need to go on without me as I re-immerse myself in Westeros and have a walk with Jon and Bran and all the rest. Martin’s series easily ranks among my favorite reads of the last ten to fifteen years, and part of me is almost sad that this release will mark the end of the series [ed. ok... there are two more books left after ADOD. Thanks Ms. Gilmore for pointing this out to me. 4 more years of breathless anticipation!]

For now, though, I am content with catching up on the books I received as gifts over the holidays. First up is Talk to the Hand by Lynne Truss, and it has me in absolute laugh out loud stitches every time I pick it up. I had never read Eats, Shoots, & Leaves, and, sure enough, as soon as I started talking about Talk to the Hand, someone went out and bought me its predecessor, which will now close out the books I have on my gifted list.

After Truss, I have Orwell’s Animal Farm to brush up on before I teach it to my freshmen.

And then comes Stross. Charles Stross. I don’t even want to think about how long various books by Stross have been on my reading list. Finally though, a friend down in the Lone Star State had enough of my reading trash like Martin, Card, Hawthorne, and LeGuin, and gave me The Jennifer Morgue without knowing that I had never managed to get The Atrocity Archives, the book to which it is a sequel, off my increasingly crowded To Buy list. So, of course, me being me, I immediately ordered The Atrocity Archives and moved them as close to the front of my To Read list as I dared. And there they sit. Just two short books away. I think my palms are sweating.

Next on the list is a gift from a buddy of mine making his way out in that crazy land of Hollywood. I gave up on that town years ago, but he is well on his way to taking it by storm, so when this arrived in a padded envelope from him, I was more than a little excited. Anytime someone with dyslexia recommends a book to me, I take them seriously. And when they are a writer and filmmaker, doubly so. Peter Baskind’s Easy Riders, Raging Bulls is all about the Hollywood of legend… the mecca of sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll that both entranced and mortified the rest of the nation back in the late sixties and early seventies. Or at least that’s what the jacket says. My friend, knee deep in the same industry that I left and that this book seems to both worship and vilify, says it is quite simply the most fascinating book on the film industry he has ever read. And that’s enough for me.

Bookending the list is the other Truss book I mentioned, Eats, Shoots & Leaves. Yes, I am reading them out of order. No, I am not going to stop now and fix it. I got them out of order, they aren’t a series, so I will read them out of order. If it bugs you, then by all means, start talking amongst yourselves and get a little more coordinated as to when you get me gifts!

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