Things I read during April

[roadrunnertwice]

Things I read during April

• Yet more Bleach. (4/5) This time reading scans of the manga. On my computer. In Japanese. (Forgive me; I don't know where to get tankoubon in the Twin Cities.) I think I'm finally done with this series for a while. I'll be back when there's once again a large backlog, preferably in a manner that doesn't involve staring at the computer for hours.
• Martha Wells -- "Wolf Night" (short story) (4/2) Nice little tale about a wandering thief with a thing for married werewolf ladies.
• Cory Doctorow -- "Anda's Game" (short story) (4/2) -- Didn't finish; it was too didactic and too depressing. Turns out I like a bunch of Cory D and hate a bunch of Cory D. (Read Power Punctuation in Starlight 3 a few days prior, and ended up thinking it was pretty great.)
• Pamela Zoline -- The Heat Death of the Universe (short story). Liked it. Mental breakdown of a trapped suburban housewife, as told through, wait for it, the triumph of entropy and the heat death of the universe.
• Starlight 3, edited by Patrick Nielsen Hayden. (4/10) Otherwise known as Starlight: The Totally Fucked Up Religion Edition. Between Chiang's "Hell is the Absence of God," Colin Greenland's "Wings," and Terry Bisson's "The Old Rugged Cross," I mean, holy crapcakes. (I'm not counting "Wolves Till the World Goes Down," though I suppose I could.) Anyway, a bitchin' collection all around.
• Martha Wells - The Death of the Necromancer (4/17) LIKED. Nicholas Valiarde is still awesome. And it has one of those fun titles that can have three or more meanings once you've finished reading the book.
  
  The book qua object (or at least the copy I got from MPL) was a piece of shit, though I wouldn't have been able to identify why without having read Abi's intro-to-bookbinding comments on Making Light. It was one of those hardbacks that's secretly just perfect-bound instead of using signatures like they're supposed to. Didn't even have any headbands. No, you should not care about that, and neither should I -- nevertheless, I'm glad that Wheel of the Infinite was the one I shelled out for in hardcover.
  
  Also, I noticed slightly more errors in this one than in some of her later ones, which may have been attributable to that story I heard about the Bad Copyedit it originally got. Also, since the version of The Element of Fire I read was the one that brought her prose up to 2006 levels, this is the oldest intact book of hers that I've read so far, so the language and the, erm, flow of idea? The language and flow of idea were much younger, and she got better later. ANYWAY, regardless, it was a damn kickin' book. And it seemed to hold true with my observation about her antipathy toward nostalgia -- the undead need to just chill out.
• Charlie Stross -- "Missile Gap" (Novella, posted on the Subterranean Press site.) (forgot the date) This one uses a central image very similar to something from Hal Duncan's Vellum, albeit executed differently and for a very different effect. I found that kind of distracting, but still enjoyed the story.
• Wang Ping - "House of Anything You Wish" (short story, published in The Rake.) (late in the month) Remedially catching up on a Macalester prof's oeuvre. Didn't really like it, though. I thought setting up the lucky roulette game as a combined metaphor-for and catharsis-of the protagonist's doomed marriage felt kind of forced. And I didn't find the protagonist all that interesting, either; there were occasional flashes of detail that brought him alive, but he felt flat and non-present the rest of the time. It's possible that that was the point, but since the whole story consists of his ranting and maudlin internal narration, I still wouldn't be able to forgive it. In conclusion, eh.

Also, I've been reading LeGuin's The Left Hand of Darkness (75¢; god bless the Friends of the Library shop), which is incredibly good and actually rather difficult. She's a hell of a writer, isn't she? Anyway, this one's on hold for a few weeks, because I rashly checked out three books off the non-renewable new releases shelf.