Book Blog

h, yes, my misspent youth. There was some game on the Atari that my best friend and I used to play, a car driving game where you drove as fast as you could, avoiding all the slower traffic, the road obstacles, all that. And what made this “cool” (that is a very time-relevant statement, given the computer games of today) was that places between cities in the game looked different. And the interesting thing here – you tried to hit all the cities across the country in the shortest possible time. So my friend and I would play and play, […]

ften people give you books to read that meant something to them but are mush to you. But The Mirror, loaned to me by a work friend, knocked me back in my seat. It delivers. And I can see why this lady tracked this one down (copyright 1978) and bought it. So Shay is a modern (i.e. 1978) girl coming up at the end of the free-love era, at the edge of matrimony to a man she’s cool to, a casual consideration towards a lifetime commitment. And while trying on her granny’s wedding dress and looking into that creepy family […]

his was an interesting tale, a little lunchtime shortie I found on my old favorite site, Project Gutenberg, from an old favorite author, Robert Louis Stevenson. The drama opens on a snowy Paris night in 1456, with drifts mounting and patrols snow-crunching and all the world asleep, save for one hovel with its wisp of smoke, its glow-through-the-shutters occupancy, its mutter of low deeds. For yes, inside is a collection of dark men, a handful of pickpockets, highwaymen and gallows-bait. The descriptive eye of the author travels through each, giving us a detailed description of every blackheart without identifying who […]

oddamn! That’s all I can say about this one. Goddamn! The full name of this short story is The Arousing Adventures of Gelato Parlour. Yeah, I didn’t have the space for the full title. But Goddamn! Okay, this comes out of The End, that Jurassic Publication collection that I reviewed before. But this one was so good, it warranted its own review. It’s written in flashy cheesy Vaudevillian style, very similar to The Further Adventures of Captain Gregory Dangerfield. But where Dangerfield is clearly, solidly planted in 1920, Parlour is set in a whimsical floating style of yesteryear, un-pinpointable yet […]

ow. 1972, I hadn’t even gotten into D&D yet. But while I was playing Speed Circuit and Jutland, there were people playing Go. And this book was published. If you’ve read any of my other blogs on this, Go is the Oriental game of strategy, simplistic in its rules but mind-breakingly complex in its execution. There are people out there who actually spend their lifetime mastering this game, and making a livelihood at playing professionally. Me? I’m still a beginner. I beat two people in the Go tourney at work and then suffered a set of losses that knocked me out. […]

…….nd Other Fascinating Stories of Spanish Life (full title) Okay, I’ll admit I was behind the eight ball here. Was reading The Wanderer (a Hugo Award winner from the 60s) and got pulled into Go for Beginners. Sometimes you need a fast filler to make a deadline. Hello, Project Gutenberg. Howdy “Short Stories” section. This one is a translation from an old book; the stories take place in the mid-1850s but perhaps it’s been Rafatinied from the mid-1900s – no information. (late breaking news – just searched around and yes, 1927. So it was written roughly the same time Captain […]

ooks are time machines and we read them in our context at our peril (or rather, our down-our-nose smarminess). The Wanderer copped a Hugo Award back in 1964, which was seven years after On The Beach (a story about a gentle yet depressing apocalypse) came out. Yet gone are the gentle civilians living out their last days in quiet contemplation of the doom that was settling over them. In The Wanderer, we’re back to people meeting their end with violence antagonism. Mobs. Guns. Killing. Drunkenness. All the things we Americans do well*. So the story opens with a half-dozen openers […]

o let’s not start by talking about this book as a story or a metaphor or anything. Let’s talk about it as a book. Been carrying this little paperback with me for 40 years or so. It was on my shelf in Drapers Meadows West in Blacksburg, it lingered in my huge shelves in my vault I lived in at York. And in the time between all these places, it sat in a book box waiting to be reread. I can’t even say why I’d have bought it. I did read some Vonnegut at University for classes and found him […]

rom out of the yellowing book box, another draw (this one happily not flaking into scraps). As usual for me (hey, I have my interests) another science fiction tale from Clifford D. Simak from 1970, a strange little story titled Out of their Minds. So this one is strange – hero-guy Horton Smith is troubled. He’s (I assume) burned out from his life as a globe-trotting journalist. Now he’s in his car heading back to Pilot Knob, the tiny town way up in the hills (somewhere somewhat close to DC, but then again, in the 70’s, the wilderness was a […]