Mother of all backlogs

I think I may give up on writing book reviews on here, and just stick them straight onto goodreads instead. I'm reasonably diligent about keeping that up to date with what I'm reading, but I just can't be bothered to write anything here. I suspect that is because I don't think my reviews are particularly useful ("it was good, read it. it was not good, don't read it"). That does mean I'll have to come up with something to put on this blog, otherwise it will fester and rot. In the meantime, here is a a set of one-line reviews for the 8 books I've read in the last 8 weeks or so.

The Fantasy Writer's Assistant: Collection of Jeffrey Ford's older stories (up to about 2003), one of my favourite authors, mixture of unsettling, weird stories and uplifting fables. Great stuff, but if you've not read anything by him before, try him out here: Empire of Ice Cream.

McSweeney's Issue 18: short stories for hipsters and poncey fans of "literature". Some great ones, some strange ones I didn't understand, and a couple of crap ones. Still worth reading (especially because McSweeney's were having a sale when I bought this for $2).

The Better of McSweeney's: best of collection, another sale purchase. Some great, some odd, not so much crap.

Everyone in Silico, by Jim Munroe: ebook read on my phone about near future transition period between Rapture of the Nerds, we all live in a yellow substrate of the global hive computing environment, and the economic collapse of the rest of the world. Kind of good, some interesting things in there. Definitely worth a read if you pick up the freebook.

Maps and Legends, by Michael Chabon: Essays on childhood and storytelling from the Pullitzer-prize winning author, wrapped up in an awesome three-layer dust jacket. Another McSweeney's sale item.

Poets Picking Poets: McSweeney's sale item, ten poets choose one of their poems and one of someone else's, to make ten chains of ten. A couple of these I understood and liked, the rest made me feel stupid because I didn't get them at all. Stupid poetry.

The Gone-Away World, Nick Harkaway. Despite working out the plot after the first chapter, this was still awesomeness and chips, with a side order of hot awesome sauce.

The Public Domain, by James Boyle. All about copyright, and how the laws being proposed and enacted today, if we'd had them in the past, would mean no World Wide Web, no Jazz, no Disney classics. Grr, big incumbent media companies, grr. I'm shaking my internet fist at you, can you see?

You should read this.

Evil Robot Monkey, by Mary Robinette Kowal. It'll take you about 5 minutes, don't worry.

Thirteen, Behemoth, Strange Country

Review backlog again.

"Thirteen" (or "Black Man" outside the US), is another Richard Morgan techno-noir thriller, with all the kick-ups, shagfests and beatings you expect from his previous work. Takeshi Kovacs Carl Marsalis is a chiseled killing machine, a hit with the ladies, and a genetic experiment. Complicated plot involving lots of violence, shagging, more violence ensues. Keeps ensuing. Never seems to stop. Eventually does, pointlessly. If you've read "Altered Carbon", stop there. The rest of his books are pretty much the same. His prose style hasn't improved much, there are still viewpoint changes mid-paragraph which dump you out of the action and make you re-read to work out who's thinking what about whom and whose leg just got splintered by someone's obscure martial art technique. At 600 pages, this book could have done with a hell of a lot of trimming and a lot less plot.

"Behemoth", the last of Peter Watts' Rifters trilogy, is a decent conclusion to the series. If you've read the other two, you're going to read this one, no point in a review. Nasty people save a world full of nasty people from a nasty person. Weirdness ensues.

"Strange Country" is a collection of Mark Dapin's articles about the less well-known aspects of Australian culture. The bogans, the camel jockeys, the tent boxers. An interesting, occasionally quite funny, read. It took me a little while to get into his style, but the effort paid off.

Too much information

As of this morning, Google Reader tells me I have 947 unread articles to view. Of these, a third are from the BBC news website telling me things about politicians I no longer recognise, celebrities I've never heard of, and sporting events in which I have no interest. Over a hundred each are from TechCrunch (companies I've never heard of going bust while trying to do things I don't understand), Wired (ditto), io9 (providing me with spoilers for programmes I'll never watch and the plots of films I'll never get around to watching), and SciFi Wire (ditto).

My twitter feed tells me all about the mundane lives of Graham Linehan, Stephen Fry, Jonathan Ross, Lily Allen and other people I don't know, doing things I'm not really that interested in.

Let's not get started on Facebook.

Time for a cull. Blogs down to a minimum, twitter down to people I have communicated with in some form.

A haiku about Big Bounce

can we still say that,

it went straight to video,

in DVD age?



a raft of big stars,

a fantastic location,

no sign of a plot.

Clean code, modern life, maelstrom, mainspring and steampunk

Review backlog to clear. Let's keep it short.

"Clean Code", by "Uncle" Bob Martin, is a manual for programmers that
care about their craft. I went to one of his tutorials at JAOO last
year in Sydney, where he successfully explained the Liskov
Substitution Principle to us. Lots of good advice in this one, and
I'll be recommending it to all my minions.

"This Modern Life" is the third in Steph Swainston's series of books
that started with "The Year of Our War". As always, interesting,
different and exciting fantasy, with a little sneaking in of SF via
the backdoor.

"Maelstrom", by Peter Watts, is the second of his three (maybe four)
Rifters books. Lenie Clarke rampages across America, spreading a
deadly microbe in her wake. Good stuff, with plenty to think about
like all good SF.

"Mainspring", by Jay Lake, a master of short fiction. I was hoping for
great things from this story, and while the world he has built is
original and interesting, the main character is just a tool for the
plot to happen to. His decisions were dictated by what the author
wanted to happen next instead of feeling like natural choices. Second
half of the book contains altogether far too much hot monkey sex
action for my liking (which is saying something).

"Steampunk", another anthology from Ann and Jeff Vandermeer, is like
most collections of short stories a bit hit-and-miss. The great
stories (a newt masquerades as Queen Victoria; a golem-maker staving
off the end of the human race; the fall of the Russian Empire
witnessed by its omniscient computer) are well worth the price of
admission.

Vegetable recognition

Vegetable recognition
Originally uploaded by No Middle Name

Turnips on the left. Swedes on the right.