• Location: Nuevo Rancho Lake
• Mood: thoughtful
• Music: the ticking of the grandfather clock

[personal|books] Update-o-rama

Spent most of today engaged in damage control from the credit card fraud issue of yesterday. This has not become a fiasco, but it certainly qualifies as an annoying distraction. I did take a couple of hours off for lunch with my parents, who are officially moved to Portland now that they've sold their house in Dallas and bought a brand new Prius this week.

Laying low tonight, baking ginger chocolate chip cookies in the morning, then off to an OSFCI board meeting. lasirenadolce is back tomorrow, which will be very nice.

Finished The Houses of Time by Jamil Nasir [ Powell's | Amazon ] yesterday on the plane. I was frustrated by that book — it somewhat reminded me of Ted Mooney's Easy Travel to Other Planets [ Powell's | Amazon ], or to be more accurate, my years-out-of-date memory of that book. A very cool idea, or set of ideas, enshrouded in a slow-paced miasma of prose. I strongly suspect this is a matter of taste rather than objective judgment, but I think Nasir could have written a world-beating novelette with this exact material, and it's rather a shame he didn't.

Andrew Vachss' Flood [ Powell's | Amazon ] impressed the hell out of me until the last couple of chapters. The ending felt a bit forced, telegraphed even, without bearing up to the grim and glittering promise of the first 90% of the book, as well as the layered, post-noir style. This book hits a lot of the dystopian cyberpunk buttons, without actually being cyberpunk, or truthfully all that dystopian. You can quite clearly see where SF stole noir from in reading Vachss. While I found the ending a bit weak, trite even, the ending after the ending was just silly. All of which annoyed me because I wanted his punch between my eyes to carry me right out of the last pages of the book.

Right now I'm reading Presumed Innocent [ Powell's | Amazon ] by Scott Turow. I am having a bit of double vision on this one. The plot is gripping me very well, I'm deep inside Rusty's head and his fears (about halfway through the book right now), but the narrative voice and prose style rubs me the wrong way. I'll report back when I'm done.