bookwyrm posts

1. Most of what I want to say about Sky Daddy would spoil the afterword, which was a minor revelation for me. “Oh, jeeze.”

   Set in San Francisco and viciously deadpan about it.

   

2. A lovely coming-of-age (I learned from a Bookwyrm post that you can call these a Bildungsroman) New York City story with a lot of heart. Another reviewer called it a “funny-sad” which: yeah it’s that too. While I also more than enjoyed Auster’s similar 4, 3, 2, 1, in this case, the same kind of story (or, one quarter of the same kind of story), follows someone just under two years older than me to New York City so rather than the former’s dips into period-overexposure I had lots of “yes, hello” moments. I’m not a nostalgic person but that was a nice personal bonus.

   (Also Cheers gets another well deserved tip of the hat in Beautyland, like it did in Exit Zero.)

   

3. Fun twist on time travel, but also I think this might have worked better as a novella in some places, a play in others, a few short stories, an X-Files episode or something like that, etc. I don’t remember why I picked this up, used (in retired-library-book plastic sheathing even) or when. It’s been on my “to read” pile for a year or so. I’m probably going to drop my copy in a little free library rather than keep it.

   

4. “there’s a Cheers story in it” set me up to expect lighter stuff but these are pretty damned serious stories. I particularly liked “Exit Zero”, “Can Only Houses Be Haunted”, “The Ecstasy of Sam Malone”, “Flowers and Their Meanings”, and “Viola in Midwinter”, which is nearly half the stuff here.

   

5. gravely finished reading Strange Monsters of the Recent Past

   

6. Read along with Hubert Dreyfus’s “Philosophy 6” Berkeley lectures (archive.org/details/ucberkeley_webcast_itunesu_461120619) from 2007, which helped motivate me. Before I started, I wasn’t sure I would continue through and finish the comedy. Having read this Inferno, I’m pretty sure I will.

   

7. Fun page turner alt-history of an American dropped into a world without the west. Almost YA, and much of it’s time, and I’m unsure how it would survive critical analysis today, but I liked it.

   

8. My third Waldrop collection, and as a completionist confonting a best-of, I ended up skipping a few stories I’ve already read in “Howard Who?” and “Going Home Again.” Still a must for Waldrop readers. I particularly enjoyed “Night of the Cooters” and “Flying Saucer Rock and Roll.”

   

9. My first exposure to Waldrop, via a Kelly Link interview and small beer press opens with a bang, “The Ugly Chickens,” but I think my favorite was “Man-Mountain Gentian” about the Waldrop-invented world of profeesional zen-sumo wrestling. I immediately started to seek out the rest of his work.

   

10. I particularly enjoyed “The Sawing Boys” and “El Castillo de la Perseverancia.” Waldrop’s unique voice has me working through all of his (often overlapping) story collections, and makes me wonder if I should start going to SF cons to hear the current generation’s readings of their own works.