The List: Reading October through December 2015

Nino Orlandi, Carved Book

My thanks to Kristin S., Tom at Prospero’s, Our Lady of the High Papal Approval Rating and the Holy Paperwork to Prove It, Katrina H., Friend Ben-jer-min, and John A., for your recent generous book-giving. Around my late-November birthday I was actually worried that the number of incoming books would pin me into a tight spot, against the Department of Corrections’ strict property limits. But such fears were unnecessary. It turns out that I can actually read pretty quickly in a pinch. And so I spent the past three months gobbling up:

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G. Willow Wilson, Alif the Unseen
Besides the recommendation of my second-favorite fantasy writer, Neil Gaiman, I read Alif the Unseen blindly, hardly even skimming its back-cover copy and blurbs. Such is my trust in Gaiman’s judgment. As it turns out, my trust wasn’t misplaced. G. Willow Wilson’s first text-only novel (she’s written several earlier graphic novels) is by no means dumb or simplistic, and still it manages to be a page-turner. Genre works are usually dumbed down when they attain that label, so I was pleased. For this novel’s fantasy element, Wilson turns to the mysticism of the Middle East — jinn, shayateen, and Koranic metaphysics — which isn’t done nearly enough in English speculative fiction. Sure, a couple of her plot points are clichéed and there are two scenes that could’ve done without monologues, but this story was an entertainingly action-packed introduction to a speculative-fiction author with a promising future. Whatever she writes next will be worth a look.

Thomas Sweterlitsch, Tomorrow and Tomorrow
Sci-fi noir can go fantastically bad in the wrong hands. This bleak futuristic novel was so highly praised, in reviews that I read, that I had to find out what the fuss was about. The thing that struck me immediately was Sweterlitsch’s prose — two or three cuts above the norm. It’s hard-bitten and poetic by turns. Sweterlitsch has concocted a wholly feasible murder mystery, set in a debased America (just imagine!) overlain by the digital detritus of augmented reality. There are instances here where the ugliness he describes toes a razor-thin line between revulsion and reveling, and the book’s brutal ending will be too much for some readers, but Tomorrow and Tomorrow is a brilliantly conceived debut novel, overall, that I’m glad to have sought out.

Margaret Atwood, Oryx and Crake, The Year of the Flood, and MaddAddam
Broadly speaking, satire doesn’t mix well with drama — too much of one and you get inanity, too much of the other and you get cynicism. The 1987 Robocop movie, starring Peter Weller, is a great example of sci-fi that takes satire and action to their extremes without detracting from the human pathos at the heart of its story: you feel bad for Murphy, the amnesiac automaton clomping through Hell on Earth (AKA Detroit), even while he himself cannot. Dystopian-future novels are particularly rife with satiric potential. You need only look as far as Orwell’s 1984, arguably the ultimate such work, to understand why. Margaret Atwood’s classic The Handmaid’s Tale is another exceptional novel in this vein. Neither could ever be considered lighthearted, but in their dour what-if prognosticating you can spot mischievous glimmers in the authors’ eyes.

In the first book of Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy we’re given a world wiped clear — or very nearly so — of human life. The primacy of Homo sapiens sapiens has been ended by a supervirus that basically rendered people’s flesh into frothy red Jell-O. In our absence, the detritus of late-twenty-first century civilization is giving way to other forms of life, most of it GMOs: enormous butterflies; half-skunk, half-raccoon creatures; glow-in-the-dark bunnies; pseudo-pigs with human neocortical tissue. And then there’s Jimmy, the sad-sack protagonist of Oryx and Crake, the first installment of this series. He’s left alone with the race of simple-minded humanoids designed to propagate the planet in our stead, and it’s safe to say he’s not happy with his lot.

Jimmy’s a schmuck, a psychosexually disfunctional codependent whose longtime friendship with the mad genius responsible for this new world order was key to his accidental survival. His total unpreparedness for life in the wild makes for some comedic moments, as does, inevitably, his role as the humanoids’ reluctant prophet. But what stands out is Margaret Atwood’s authorial prowess here, making the reader overlook Jimmy’s sleazy tendencies and actually feel sympathy for the character. I really, really didn’t want to like him, yet Atwood still got me to cheer him on.

These books toe the line between dark and comic. The Year of the Flood and MaddAddam expand the world of Oryx and Crake while slowly pulling the thread that binds their many characters tightly together. By midway through the second book I was sufficiently wrapped up in the story that Atwood’s silly naming proclivities (e.g., BlyssPluss pills, the Paradice dome at the HelthWyzer compound, the CorpSeCorps) almost faded into background noise. Conversely, a much-foreshadowed climax with psychopathic rival survivors, in the final book, was over with scarcely a yelp. In sum, the MaddAddam trilogy isn’t perfect, but who wants their posthuman wastelands to be perfect, anyway?

Bill Henderson (editor), 2015 Pushcart Prize
This year’s collection of winners elicited more than a few wows. Barrett Swanson’s story, “Annie Radcliffe, You Are Loved,” is highly recommended. Maribeth Fischer’s essay about her months in thrall to a fraud, “The Fiction Writer,” was as well-told and agonizingly human as “The Last Days of the Baldock,”  Inara Verzemnieks’s piece on an improvised community of vagrants at an Oregon rest stop. Molly McNett won a Pushcart Prize for her story of an unhappy fourteenth-century marriage, “La Pulchra Nota,” and Michael Kardos won for his clever short fiction about modern-day disillusionment, “Animals.” The enlightening essay “Mysteries of Thoreau, Unsolved,” by Rebecca Solnit, turned out not only timely, because of the current surge of popular interest in Henry David Thoreau’s dirty laundry I’ve been reading about, but also fascinating. Tarifa Faizullah’s elegiac poem “The Streetlamp above Me Darkens” compelled me to read it again and again (and again).

The crown jewel here, however, is Wells Tower’s jaw-droppingly perfect personal essay, “The Dance Contest,” which is as surreal as it is heartbreaking, hilarious, and thought-provoking, and which, even if the rest of this anthology were merely okay, would make it worth the cover price.

Aristotle (Renford Bambrough, editor; J.L. Creed and A.E. Wardman, translators), The Philosophy of Aristotle
The first 300-odd pages of this selection of Aristotle’s writings were a slog. His Metaphysics, Physics, Logic, and Politics bear the traits of so much later philosophizing by other minds, concerned with the tedious duty of arriving at terms to describe what comes after. This is why I find so much philosophy unattractive: too much of it boils down to semantics. Shouldn’t a good philosophy deal with what is in terms that require no mental gymnastics to define? In the sciences a good theory is said to be elegant in its simplicity, containing nothing superfluous. Can a similar standard not be applied to philosophy, or does the very idea of concision run counter to the philosopher’s mode of thinking? I was far more engaged with Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics and Poetics, more relevant to modern readers who aren’t historians, philosophy majors, or weird natural-science buffs.

Alan Watts, The Way of Zen
Here’s a concise history and explanation of Zen practices. It cleared away a lot of misconceptions I had, and triggered several “Aha!” moments. The Way of Zen is the sort of informative book that sends the reader into territory with a map that’s accurate but only sketched, inviting further exploration. For instance, I’m now keenly interested in reading more about the seventeenth-century monk Bankei Zenji and his unpretentious brand of meditation practice. Apparently, people’s observation that a significant portion of my personal outlook, philosophy, and behavior is in keeping with the non-doctrines of Zen Buddhism isn’t far from the truth. Until I read Watts’s book, I would always laugh at the idea of that. But it seems that there’s something to it, possibly worth exploring.

Karl Shapiro (John Updike, editor), Selected Poems
Pieces like “Necropolis,” from Shapiro’s 1942 collection, Person, Place and Thing, establish his poetic competence from the outset:

Even in death they prosper; even in the death
Where lust lies senseless and pride fallow
The mouldering owners of rents and labor
Prosper and improve the high hill.

For theirs is the stone whose name is deepest cut,
Theirs the facsimile temple, theirs
The iron acanthus and the hackneyed Latin,
The boxwood rows and all the birds.

And even in death the poor are thickly herded
In intimate congestion under streets and alleys.
Look at the standard sculpture, the cheap
Synonymous slabs, the machined crosses.

Yes, even in death the cities are unplanned.
The heirs govern from the old centers;
They will not remove. And the ludicrous angels,
Remains of the poor, will never fly
But only multiply in the green grass.

The rest of Shapiro’s oeuvre, as sampled here, evidences a strong attachment to form. There are rhyme schemes aplenty. I preferred his free verse, as I prefer it in general, for the freedom to roam anywhere his mind took him (with Shapiro, this seems to have been frequently into the battlefield or some domestic scene). My familiarity with his work before reading Selected Poems could be compared with that of strangers who ride the same elevator every week or so — recognition, but no more meaningful acknowledgment than a nod. Now I feel as if we’ve been guests at a dinner party and pushed out the door, coats in hand, by the exhausted hosts at 2 AM, only to have old Karl continue talking as we stand in the cold, spotlit by a street lamp, his words rising, clouding, swirling into night.

Günter Grass (Breon Mitchell, translator), The Tin Drum
Having no basis for comparing this new, 2009 translation to the German-language original (nor to its first English translation), I’m declaring unqualified delight with this picaresque novel. The youthful travails of young Oskar Maserath, wending this way and that through a fractious mid-century Europe, captivated thousands around the world when The Tin Drum was first published in 1959. It’s no wonder why. The book is poetic, profane, perverted — I dare say perfect.

Alex Kuo, shanghai.shanghai.shanghai
For some readers, a novel’s winking self-awareness ruins its appeal. A lot of readers are similarly turned off when a novel shirks conventional narrative, AKA plot. Experimental fiction is often freeform metafiction, divorced from action-based structure or fourth-wall insularity. It’s rarely emotionally engaging, because, well, eliciting “feels” isn’t the point.

What can fiction be? becomes the driving question. It’s intellectual. Does fiction need an ending, a beginning? Does it even need to be linear, or can a work of fiction dispense with temporality and still function? (It’s a mistake to think that function necessarily equates with readability, in the experimenter’s world; the carrying off of the work’s so-called writing — and here you must bear in mind that much experimental work is pastiche, cut-and-paste, or partially plagiarized — is all that matters.)

Kuo’s willfully obtuse novel, if it can be said to be about anything at all, concerns itself with Chinese censorship, of the self- and governmental varieties, and with that country’s political history. But that’s like saying Gravity’s Rainbow is about World War Two. Like Pynchon’s novel, shanghai.shanghai.shanghai (published by redbat books, which also published my collection of essays and poems) leaps without warning, between characters and time periods, dragging the reader hither and yon with run-on sentences prone to changing subject or tense midway through, and practically daring her to give up any hope of following. Color-coded text and font changes help orient readers only until the next paragraph. The novel’s full-color photos are similarly chimeral. Toward the book’s “end” is a turn-by-turn description (complete with diagrams) of a tournament bridge game, which the author admits, in a very meta aside a few pages later, constitutes a metaphor you’ll fail to understand unless you’re familiar with the intricacies of the game.

Is this device clever or lazy, on Kuo’s part? Are shanghai.shanghai.shanghai’s attractive design elements intended to distract or enhance? Can one appreciate a work without truly understanding it? What is the role of ambiguity, of inscrutability, in art? Discuss.

Kenneth Goldsmith, Seven American Deaths and Disasters
As it happened the day I checked out this collection of conceptual poetry from the library (but before I'd read any of it), I watched an interview with the founder of the video app Periscope. Periscope owes much of its massive popularity to the fact that videos broadcast by users are automatically deleted after twenty-four hours — just like Snapchat posts. This ephemerality makes using Periscope or Snapchat the equivalent of building a sand castle (or the lowbrow, writing a swear word in the sand): it's very here-and-now. Its appeal also baffled me. Why trouble with recording yourself it not for posterity, to be archived for the life of the human race — or the Internet, whichever comes first? Clearly, I was missing something.

Seven American Deaths and Disasters consists of text transcribed from live radio and TV reports of seven American deaths and disasters. Clever, right? Goldsmith is infamous for his ingenious plagiarism. (He won death threats for a recent reading of a poem excerpted from the Michael Brown autopsy report.) His concept here is that there's a visceral intensity in the prose, matched by its ad libbed cadence, and that by rendering the audio as text he can show the structuralist underpinnings of the chaos. Being utterly of the moment, these reports do attain moments of horrific Zen beauty.

Once I saw that, it all came together for me. Goldsmith's conflux of "the insanely meaningful and the dreadfully mundane" is arguably seen as much in the Monday Night Football interruption about John Lennon's murder as in a Periscope video shot by a refugee fleeing Syria. Meaning and mundanity aren't mutually exclusive; in fact, one can engender the other. How inane it might seem of Periscope viewers, messaging a broadcaster to show the content of the refrigerator (a popular Periscope meme). Yet consider how fridge-peeking is a shortcut to intimacy, the same as snooping through someone's medicine cabinet. Given the format's immediacy and transience, its social interactions naturally evolved a certain incisiveness, and in that urgent, often silly-seeming sharing are planted the seeds of the profound.

Sara Eliza Johnson, Bone Map: Poems
Quiet, vaguely sinister femininity like something primal in a storybook by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, pervades these thirty-six dreamlike poems. Johnson's recurring motifs — deer, horses, bees, apples, milk, mouths, bones, blood — echo the fairy-tale imagery of old, but rather than witches or ogres we encounter barren icescapes, lonesome forests, and dark, pitiless seas. She writes, "all moments will shine / if you cut them open," then proceed to slice. The resulting blood pools in the snow.

Max Brooks, The Zombie Survival Guide: Complete Protection from the Living Dead
Research material. Why the casual zombie fan would want to read this survivalist primer, by the best-selling author of World War Z, eludes me. But I mined a few gems from it, and found my urge to work on my own zombie book reinvigorated, too. Here's to maybe finishing this long in-progress novel in 2016!

The List: Reading April Through June 2013

The time I’ve had for reading, these past months, has been less than what I’ve managed in the previous three years, due to my return to the prison workforce, and yet the number of books I read this quarter is basically the same as it always is. Strange. I guess this means I have to stop complaining about how little free time I get. 

A few of the books below were ones I wanted to read for years. I was able to place a largish order with Amazon, thanks to a long-overdue refund from a certain well-known literary quarterly that somehow never figured out how to fulfill my subscription beyond a single issue. The (pricy) subscription had been a gift, so I figured the money returned by said quarterly would be most fittingly spent on other reading material. My wish list is now a little shorter. My literary life is now a little richer.

Here are the titles that have occupied me since April. 

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Rob Ziegler, Seed
I wish it were possible to blame my disappointment with this book, Ziegler’s debut novel, on high expectations. After reading several positive reviews in Locus, then, for two years, anticipating how good it was going to be, only a phenomenal book would’ve held up, and Seed is, at best, mediocre.

Even without my overinflated sense of its literary merit, however, I’d have been sorely let down. To read the summary on its (well-designed) cover is to mistake Seed for an “idea” book about ecological disaster in a future in which extreme genetic modification — of foods and higher forms of life alike — is commonplace. The story does start out promisingly well, with shades of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, but somewhere around the point where the reader is introduced to Satori, the living, breathing city that manufactures the titular seed for a starving nation, everything wanders off into cheesy sci-fi action as various parties converge, some in rebellion, some for communion, each wreaking its own brand of havoc on the deaf, dumb, blind Satori, about which it’s impossible to care.

Add to this farrago a slew of weird quasi-homophonic typos (such as pour where it should read pore, peaked instead of peeked, and upbraided rather than abraded) that make me wonder if the manuscript was dictated and the book’s credited editor, Russ E. Lockhart, literally phoned it in. Seed germinates no small resentment in the fertile soil of this reader’s mind. 

Kevin Brockmeier, The Illumination
A defining characteristic of literature is its subtlety — deft introduction of ideas where lesser works would just bludgeon their readers heads, a modicum of ambiguity over which the readers can muse to arrive at conclusions about the text that are personal and, in this way, far more special than if the author had, as happens in most genre fiction, simply shoved it all at you, shouting, “Here, here’s my story!”

The Illumination imagined by Brockmeier in this group of interconnecting but, in a way, solitary chapters is an unexplained phenomenon: the sudden radiance of light from every cut, bruise, broken bone, and sickness the world over. Ulcers glow silver in people’s mouths, torn ligaments sparkle like a red-carpet burst of paparazzi camera flashes, leukemia casts luminous auras around its sufferers, self-inflicted cigarette burns shimmer like nighttime stars on the forearms of troubled souls. But the light and its causes are incidental to Brockmeier’s purposes here, a mere backdrop on which to project his beautiful exposition on the ways our pain defines us and our relationships.

Kenneth Goldsmith, Uncreative Writing: Managing Language in the Digital Age
In the face of unprecedented amount of digital text, writing needs to redefine itself in order to adapt to the new environment of textual abundance. If we think of words as both carriers of semantic meaning and as material objects, it becomes clear that we need a way to manage it all, an ecosystem that can encompass language in its myriad forms. No matter what we do with language, it will be expressive. Uncreative writing is a postidentity literature.

The poetry world has yet to experience its version of Pop Art — and Pop Art happened over fifty years ago In spite of the many proposed alternative uses of language (concrete poetry, language poetry, FC2-style innovative fiction, etc.), writing in the popular imagination has by and large stuck to traditional, narrative, and transparent uses, which have prevented it from experiencing a kind of Pop Art-like watershed. But then the real question emerges: why? Things get tricky when we try to nail down exactly what literary appropriation is. Once those formal decision are made, there are ethical issues to consider. Does it matter if poets write their own poems anymore or is it good enough for a computer to pen them for them?

In a time when the amount of language is rising exponentially, combined with greater access to the tools with which to manage, manipulate, and massage those words, appropriation is bound to become just another tool in the writers’ toolbox, an acceptable — and accepted — way of constructing a work of literature, even for more traditionally oriented writers. The Web functions both as a site for reading and writing: for writers it’s a vast supply text from which to construct literature; readers function in the same way, hacking a path through the morass of information, ultimately working as much at filtering as reading.

Sculpting with text.

Data mining.

Our task is simply to mind the machines. Ironies abound. The future doesn’t look promising for us as creative entities.

[Note: I composed this entirely by cribbing text from the book, typos and all. It seemed the only fitting thing to do, given the subject matter.]

Jesse Ball, The Curfew
With his surreal debut novel, Samedi the Deafness, Ball mesmerized me using a spell of simple yet evocative prose. With his second, The Way Through Doors, he led me through a waking dream. Now, with The Curfew, he has given me a puppet show.

Of course the book is not only that. The story begins as an intimate portrait of a man and his eight-year-old daughter, who eke out their happiness despite the murders and disappearances being carried out by secret police in the city of C. The father is an epitaphorist (Ball’s characters often have interesting, unheard-of professions), composing messages for the graves of the departed — fitting, for a man whose mastery of the violin is mooted by the government’s ban on music. Once he dares to venture out after dark, when “GOOD CITIZENS PASS THEIR NIGHTS ABED,” the daughter copes with her concerns by performing a puppet show with the neighbors in whose care she is left, a puppet show of such intricacy that its characters’ very thoughts are made visible and “mice” — ants to which tufts of fur have been glued — scurry at their feet.

This glancing attention to marvelous details is one of my favorite things about Ball’s writing. Another is that he doesn’t trouble himself with cohesive narratives, those meddlesome trivialities that are definitive beginnings, middles, and endings. He admits as much on page four, in the voice of an anonymous narrator:

I shall introduce this city and its occupants as a series of objects whose relationship cannot be told with any certainty. Though violence may connect them, though pity, compassion, hope may marry one thing to another, still all that is in process cannot be judged, and that which has passed has gone beyond judgment, which leaves us again, with lives and belongings, places, shuttling here and there, hapless, benighted, discordant.

Replete with quiet tragedy, love, and simple beauty, The Curfew may not quite match the success of Ball’s previous fictions; though, his alert prose and talent for… not necessarily storytelling but rendering moments made this book a pleasure to read.

Nikolay Gogol (Ronald Wilks, translator), The Diary of a Madman, The Government Inspector and Selected Stories
I was surprised, upon finally reading this collection by the Russian literary great, to find a quality that doesn’t generally spring to mind when thinking about nineteenth-century Ukraine-born authors: humor. Gogol had a firm grasp of the absurd, and, even while his writing verged on Realism, with lavish attention paid to what were often the minutest details of affect or place, he saw the ridiculousness of so may situations around him, the scaffolding on which he built all of his tales.

In his story “The Nose,” a mid-ranking civil servant awakens one morning to find his nose missing from his face, naturally assigning blame to his drunkard barber, and bounds through the city, searching for the absent appendage, only to encounter it, personified and dressed in a government uniform that signifies an even higher rank than his own, praying in a church. The nose later appears inside the hot roll being eaten for breakfast by the aforementioned barber, who, horrified, throws it in a river only for it to later reappear, without explanation, on the face of the civil servant to whom it belonged.

In “The Overcoat,” a man saves and scrimps to buy himself a coat to replace the one he’s worn nightgown-sheer, only to have the luxuriously tailored garment torn from his shoulders by a couple of muggers. The man falls ill from stress and grief, then dies. An urban legend soon arises, telling of a ghost going around Saint Petersburg, ripping off gentlemen’s coats.

It could be that I’m an unlearned simp for failing to see how “The Overcoat” deserves critics’ designation as the finest short fiction in all of Russian literature. I thought “The Nose” was a good deal more artful, also more entertaining. But for what unevenness I found in this selection of Gogol’s short works (the content is mainly stories; “The Government Inspector” is a clever play), each piece does stand on its own as a fine glimpse at what brought the author his reputation for greatness.

M. John Harrison, Viriconium
From satiric nineteenth-century Russian lit, I dived right into this contemporary British sci-fi/fantasy, craving escape of a drastic sort. China Miéville, another author who deals in genre-bending fantastical novels (and whom I quite admire), calls M. John Harrison an “anti-science fiction writer” — an ambiguous designation that nevertheless fits to a tee. The only other book of Harrison’s I’d read before this was his stunning, complex quantum masterpiece, Light, that rarest of books that inspires a reader to think of its author in terms of favorites, before ever reading anything else from the writer’s oeuvre. Viriconium, a collection of novellas and short stories, displays all of the qualities that I so loved about Light, while taking an entirely different tack with them. Continuity throughout is faint to nonexistent, and each of the tales offers a different take, sometimes meditative, often adventuresome, on the fluid existence of the endless city, Viriconium, in “a world trying to remember itself.” There’s escape here aplenty. Where Light was pure sci-fi, Viriconium swathes its science-fictional elements in the baroque garb of much fantasy, rich and thick, and sets the stories in a fluctuating future so far distant from now as to make myth of the lost sciences of a long-dead age.

J.G. Ballard, Crash
Sexual fetishists who get off on car crashes. To say this is what Crash is about would be accurate, in the crudest possible way, just as would be describing Orwell’s 1984 as being about a guy who’s just after some privacy. Okay, so the 1996 screen adaptation of Crash, moodily directed by James Cronenberg and starring the period’s go-to guy for sexual deviance, James Spader, overran with auto(mobile)eroticism. The book’s an altogether different story. Although sex suffuses nearly every page of this novel, none of it’s sexy.

Ballard is apparently known for being critical of modern technology’s increasing prominence as a bridge to human relations, so, in Crash, affairs abound without a single deep connection being forged. The style of his writing matches this clinical attitude, not least when the first-person narration provided (conveniently enough) by a character named James Ballard turns to musing about a life-changing automobile accident:

I was surprised by how much, in my eyes, the image of the car had changed, almost as if its true nature had been exposed by my accident. Leaning against the rear window of the taxi, I found myself flinching with excitement toward the traffic streams on the Western Avenue interchanges. The flashing lances of afternoon light deflected from the chromium panel trim tore at my skin. The hard jazz of radiator grilles, the motion of cars moving towards London Airport along the sunlit oncoming lanes, the street furniture and route indicators — all these seemed threatening and super-real, as exciting as the accelerating pintables of a sinister amusement arcade released on to these highways.

and climaxing coolly in this later scene with his wife, when the couple stops on a deserted service road:

When I put my arm around her shoulders she smiled briefly to herself, a nervous rictus of the upper lip which exposed her gold-tipped right incisor. I touched her mouth with my own, denting the waxy carapace of pastel lipcoat, watching her hand reach out to the chromium pillar of the quarter window. I pressed my lips against the bared and unmarked dentine of her upper teeth, fascinated by the movement of her fingers across the smooth chrome of the window pillar. Its surface was marked along its forward edge by a smear of blue paint left by some disaffected production-line worker. The nail of her forefinger scratched at this fretline, which rose diagonally from the window-sill at the same angle as the concrete ledge of the irrigation ditch ten feet from the car. In my eyes this parallax fused with the image of an abandoned car lying in the rust-stained grass on the lower slopes of the reservoir embankment. The brief avalanche of dissolving talc that fell across her eyes as I moved my lips across their lids contained all the melancholy of this derelict vehicle, its leaking engine oil and radiator coolant.

Ballard’s portrait of emotionally stunted people turning to more and more extreme proxies for meaningful connections is scathing and adroit, and as cold as shattered glass.

William Gibson, Zero History
The last title in the Blue Ant trilogy — three novels like tech-geek catnip, involving the covert bleeding-edge endeavors of intrepid multiplatform mogul Hubertus Bigend (you’ve got to love Gibson’s names). It’s as satisfying a summer read as its predecessors, Pattern Recognition and Spook Country, and perhaps more so for wrapping up with almost-forgotten characters and subplot points from the previous books in that glib manner Gibson geeks like myself revere him for.

But. The world is forever changing. Yesterday’s futures, all but the most prescient ones imagined, become nothing more than curios, quaint relics of the naive periods that birthed them. The cyberpunk masterpieces that began Gibson’s career in the 1980s, full of wetware data ports, brand-name bionic implants, and Yakuza enforcers hot on everybody’s trail, were very much of their time. The tomorrow depicted in the Blue Ant books could literally be tomorrow, when the gee-whiz gadgetry is a kludged line of Java or a stolen DARPA project. There is an iPhone in almost every hand. Am I the only fan who wishes Gibson would turn his attention back to a future more faraway? SF is risky business — predicting the future always is — but that risk is what makes it more fun. Bill, please give your readers back their distant dystopias full of exotic tech. If we want to see what tomorrow’s London, Los Angeles, or Vancouver will be like, there’s this wondrous machine called an airplane….

Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane
A man returns to his childhood hometown, in rural England, to attend a funeral, and makes startling discoveries about an unremembered past. It’s an old trope, sure, but Neil Gaiman, masterful storyteller that he is, makes it new with the elements of fantasy for which he’s so renowned.

Just as the neighbors’ duck pond, described by The Ocean’s nameless narrator, is a good deal larger than it seems, and the trio of weird women on whose land it sits are actually much, much, much older than they look, this slim book contains quite a bit more than it at first seems. A deft exploration of a meek young boy’s existential frustrations, and a tale of fell childhood adventure that isn’t for children at all, The Ocean at the End of the Lane is easily my favorite Gaiman title since his excellent American Gods. No mean feat, that.