28 June, 2001: Vurt
I missed reading Vurt when author Jeff Noon was briefly a science-fiction wunderkind. Rather, I didn't miss it. I picked it up in a bookstore, having heard some of the buzz, and read the first chapter. And the first chapter isn't very good, and it is especially not good for reading in a bookstore. But the book improves as it goes along; I'm glad I read it, even if it does swing the pendulum rather more sharply towards literary style over genre substance than even I might have preferred. (more...)
12:06 am 
24 June, 2001: The Night the Heads Came
William Sleator wrote Interstellar Pig, a children's s.f. book that the ten-year-old me had some difficulty getting his brain around. (The lack of closure threw me.) The Night the Heads Came is, sadly, more straightforward; Leo and his friend Tim have snuck out of their houses, and Leo is driving Tim to New York, where he'll show his drawings to a science fiction magazine that has expressed interest. The car dies, and aliens -- creepy alien heads, no less -- kidnap Tim. Tim is returned a few days later, apparently several years older and with a headful of strange memories about visiting other planets. His artistic talents have increased, too, and he's got some highly disturbing art depicting a different alien race. Leo is trying to secondguess the Heads (and the other aliens), who are secondguessing him and manipulating Tim. This is a perfectly good children's book (although I could have done without the Stephen King-esque "It's over... or is it?" ending), but it just felt more linear and less surprising than Interstellar Pig. Maybe I should chalk it up to the fact that I'm not ten any more.
10:42 pm
14 June, 2001: Tuff
Paul Beatty needs to write more. I rather liked the volume of his poetry that I read (Joker Joker Deuce, one of two poetry collections he's written); an otherwise largely unremarkable anthology I own, On the Verge, features an essay on blackness, basketball, and malt liquor ads that's one of the funniest things I read during my college years; and The White Boy Shuffle was shaping up to be a truly great first novel until its fizzle of an ending. Beatty writes like a poet, but not with the sparse, cool voice I associate with a poet turned novelist. It's dazzling, virtuoso, absurdist, delerious prose. Ishmael Reed didn't like this book, but as astute a writer as Reed is, I can't agree with him except on his praise of Beatty's voice. (more...)
12:05 am
9 June, 2001: The Boggart
This wasn't at all what I was expecting; Susan Cooper is best known for her epic The Dark is Rising series, one of the best (and earliest) of the young adult subgenre involving epic magic bursting out into the normal world. The Boggart, on the other hand, is a little trifle about the eponymous mischievous spirit accidentally shipped from its ancestral home in Scotland to the bustling metropolis of Toronto, and its dealings with two children there. The kids bicker believably, and the book is enjoyable enough -- and made the more so by some laughably antiquated computer technology; Cooper clearly isn't at ease describing the technology, so why bother? -- but unlike The Grey King, it wasn't something I'll ever want to read again.
11:46 pm