You're Not Fooling Anyone When You Take Your Laptop to a Coffee Shop: Scalzi on Writing
Blog entries about writing and the writing business
Love and Other Near Death Experiences
Late-night Jazz DJ Rob Garland narrowly avoids being killed in an accident and starts to question every trivial decision in life. After unburdening himself on his show he's contacted by various characters with similar experiences. Prompted by his fiancee he embarks on a 'quest' to come to terms with the experience.
The book is occasionally rather funny, but is seriously let down by an obvious and laboured plot.
My verdict? This book cost me the princely sum of £1. About right I reckon.
Fargo Rock City
I've read this book before (entry missing due to db hacker)
Klosterman's aim with this book was, to quote, 'to show why all that poofy, sexist, shallow glam rock was important'. You know what? He totally failed
Klosterman is a talented writer with a witty personable voice that makes it feel like he's talking to you one on one.
The major flaw with the book is that while he obviously loves his metal, he's also deeply insecure about how unhip it is to like it.
Maybe it's his position as a music critic (a profesion full of hipper-than-thou people) that's made him so defensive, I don't know. He spends too much time trying to defend the genre with regard to sexism etc., using incoherent, poorly thought out arguments when he should just acknowledge that it existed. Of course it existed. However, a lot of the point of metal for it's creators and fans over the years has been that it pisses people off. That's all he really needed to say.
The book works when it acts as a biography and talks about how the music soundtracked his life and he should have spent more time on that.
One point that continues to hack me off is his bizarre snobbery about 80's underground music that appears in the epilogue. He gets all het up at the notion that you had to be a bit more adventurous to discover the stuff than metal. It's just fucking true. These bands sold next to nothing, had minimal radio play and ended up meaning a bit too much to the people who loved them. Get over the fact that you liked popular music. Embrace the idea.
I've watched two documentaries about the history of metal and the metallica doc recently and this book doesn't do it's subject any justice compared even to those deeply flawed projects.
The book is frequently funny, it's just that it's frequently wrong-headed too. Go in expecting that and you will get the best out of it.
The Salmon of Doubt
This posthumous cash in contains random articles, essays, speeches and letters written by Adams before he died as well as a hitchhiker's based short story and the chunk of a Dirk Gently book that never was that gives this volume a title.
No single part of this book is worth buying it for, but as a whole it is a nice reminder of who Douglas Adams was, what he stood for and the work he was capable of.
I bought this book not long after it made paperback for less than half price in a supermarket. I don't know I would have bothered if it wasn't so cheap. That I only just got round to reading it speaks volumes as far as I'm concerned.
My recommendation, unless you're a Hitchhiker's nut, is that you don't buy this for less than a bargain price.
The Big Over Easy
This book is a story of the Nursery
Crime Division of Reading police. DC Jack Spratt has to unravel the mysterious murder of Humpty Dumpty.
Yes, this is another one of Jasper Fforder's comic novels. This is the first not to feature Tuesday Next, and focusses exclusively on the novel's murder mystery rather than playing some of the meta games of his other novels. As always his jokes depend a hell of a lot on the reader's knowledge of the books that he's referencing or parodying.
The book is a slight, enjoyable read, that I'd recommend to anyone looking for a cheap, mildly funny summer read.
Diamond Dogs, Turquoise Days
This book is made up of the novellas that comprise the title. Both take place within the Revelation Space universe and shed light on various aspects of Reynolds' creation that aren't discussed elsewhere.
Diamond Dogs is about a group of adventurers who attempt to solve the puzzle of an alien artifact known as the Blood Spire. Nothing new here, in fact many of it's ideas are cribs from other better realized works.
Turquoise Days is the more interesting of the two pieces, but still nothing remarkable. This one is set on an isolationist Pattern Juggler planet and follows a researcher called Naqi as she deals with the legacy of the Jugglers and the implications of the arrival of off planet visitors. It's too short to deliver on it's promise.
I'd only recommend this to someone who has become hooked on Reynolds' universe and wants to know more. Outside of that context these are pretty forgettable little pieces
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