Random Thoughts

I do remember why I haven’t read this one.  I thought it was a short story collection.

I hate short story collections.

No, that’s not quite true.  I love short stories.  It’s just that they take more energy than novels.  They’re so compressed.  You have to start caring about these characters in a couple of pages, and then ten pages later, they’re gone.  And then you start on the next one.

It’s less than relaxing.

So I thought this was a short story collection for some reason or other, but it isn’t.  Instead it’s an sf/magic realism mash-up.  Sort of.

It’s quite original and fun, but it didn’t really make me want to run out and buy ten more books by Lisa Goldstein.  It’s quite good.  Quite.  Kinda.  Yes.

Rating: Ambivalific!

Do you remember back in the mid-80s where all books dealt with writers who were writing the book you were reading, or were they?

The post-modernity of this book is pretty staggering.  And perhaps not in a good way.  But that’s just what virtually all literature was like in 1984.

This one has not just one author, but two, and one or both of them is writing the book.  So freaky!  Yowza!  Zzzzzz!

Oh, I guess it was fun at the time.

And reading the in-depth descriptions of Oslo in 1984 was amusing.

And look at that book design!  Zing!  1984!  Nothing says 1984 more than that book design.

Rating: Shruggerific

Getting the festival of 1995 underway, I picked the book I knew absolutely the least about first.

It seemed like a pretty nice hard-ish SF novel, so why hadn’t I read it already?

Now I remember…  I had bought it along with a swarm of other touchy feely SF books, and I had kinda gotten tired of reading that for a while.  So it sedimented downwards.

Anyway, it turned out to be very nice.  Perhaps a tad much So Much Drama for my tastes, but The Drama passed pretty quickly, and the rest of the book is quite neat.

I’ve already bought a few more books by Eleanor Arnason.

Rating: Esseffericious