Bookwyrm posts

1. Strange Monsters of the Recent Past

   Howard Waldrop

   

   gravely finished reading Strange Monsters of the Recent Past

2. The Inferno

   Dante Alighieri, Dante

   

   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.

3. Them bones.

   Howard Waldrop

   

   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.

4. Things Will Never Be the Same: A Howard Waldrop Reader

   Howard Waldrop

   

   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.”

5. Howard Who?

   Howard Waldrop

   

   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.