John Varley – “Blue Champagne;” “The Manhattan Phone Book (Abridged);” “The Unprocessed Word;” Zoran Zivkovic – Time Gifts; Ellen Datlow ed. – Lovecraft Unbound

Blue Champagne’s a novella that sits roughly in the Anna-Louise Bach timeline, although only features her as a side character in her early days as a lifeguard in the environment for the story, a huge spherical body of water in space. If Persistence in Vision looked at the deaf and blind from a science fictional point of view, Blue Champagne looks at the severely paralyzed from the partial perspective of a woman who uses a device to be able to move after an early accident left her paralyzed. The story comes from the perspective of a male lifeguard who she becomes interested in, who is also casually paired with Bach and through the story not only do we learn about her accident and how she became mobile again but about a very unique technology, perhaps similar to virtual reality in a way, that might allow a computer to capture the moment someone falls in love. Interwoven are issues of fame and relationships in a future where sex has long ceases to be a taboo, one of the major aspects that tends to find these stories mixed up with the Eight Worlds lineage. Another great one from Varley, in fact I suspect this one didn’t make the Reader due to its length more than anything else.

The other two Varleys here are minor shorts, one a unique take on nuclear war (from an anthology regarding such if I’m not mistaken) and the other a cute series of letters between author and publisher decrying the need for the new (then) word processing software just hitting desktops.

Zoran Zivkovic’s Time Gifts was, I believe, his first work translated into English and seems to be a novella length story cut into four parts about three different people displaces in time visited by a mysterious figure who gives them a greater perspective on the outcome of their lives work by way of an unusual time machine. Each of the three are affected in the same way and the fourth and concluding part tie them all together in a metafictional way that probably won’t work for everyone, indeed, it was one of those stories conscious about the writer itself and I’m not sure there are all that many ways to get away with that. In the end it posits a lot of interesting questions, which continues to make Zivkovic’s work of interest to me.

Ellen Datlow’s latest anthology covers the influence of H. P. Lovecraft’s work on many of today’s more literary and between-the-genres sort of writers and as such, it was one I was greatly looking forward to, after all, so much of post-Lovecraft Cthulhu pastiches are poor, ridiculously imitative or overall too self conscious to capture anything of the style that makes Lovecraft such a beloved horror writer despite his many detractions (and today that would be misogyny, racism and verbosity, at least the first two unfortunate products of his era). Of course with Datlow in the driver’s seat we’re coming from a much more modern viewpoint in many of these stories and I was happy to see there aren’t any poor ones here and a few well worth writing about. I’ve read a few prior reviews of this anthology and I appear to be one of the first who really admired Anna Tambour’s “Sincerely, Petrified,” perhaps a story more resonant for those who’ve ever visited a petrified forest. Although it was perhaps one of the least (overtly) Lovecraftian stories in the book, I thought it was devastatingly clever as we look through the viewpoint of a conspiracy of two people, a professional and amateur scientist who become later embroiled in their own myth used to scare forest theives from stealing petrified wood. On the other hand I seem to be in full agreement with previous reviewers that Caitlin R. Kiernan’s House Under the Sea (one of the book’s four reprints) was outstanding, the thoughts of a Lovecraftian scenario after the fact from a man peripherally but heavily, emotionally involved with a cult’s leader. Like all great Lovecraft the grandness and coldness of the universe is only seen in fleeting glimpses and is so much creepier for the sake of it. This is the type of story that will make me want to get more familiar with the author’s other work. The third of the really brilliant stories was Laird Barron’s “Catch Hell,” a story about a couple, perhaps on the last legs of their relationship, who visit an out of the way rural Washington hotel in what seems like an innocent getaway but ends up being the result of occult interests on the part of one of the couple. I almost wish I had read this story 10 or 15 years ago when the story’s dovetailing of occult/satanic mythology with Lovecraftian pagan horror would have really frightened me, but all in the same it was brilliantly constructed with the type of heated and horrifying ending that seems to be rarer in modern literary horror (on the other hand I get a little weary of the tying in of hermeticism with satanism, but I’ll put that aside for now). Oh and I almost forgot, perhaps my favorite story of the lot, Sarah Monette and Elizabeth Bear’s science fictional take on a future where the incursion of extra-dimensional horrors is a very practical problem, fought with a near-symbiotic relationship between a man and his “Mongoose,” another alien, mysterious being whose name perhaps reflects almost everything about the story. This was the kind of milieu I wish a whole series was written for, it seems too perfectly constructed for a novellette alone.

To be honest there’s just a lot of really good stories that don’t quite come up to the previous four. I’ll take a new Michael Shea short any day, and “The Recruiter” with its story about an old man who makes a bizarre deal with a lich is true to form. Marc Laidlaw’s “Leng” mixes Tibetan motifs with the famous Lovecraftian “Lost World” and mycology to superb effect and fantastic imagery, certainly I’ve never read anything from Laidlaw I didn’t really like. Even the classic sorts of Lovecraft tales here, including the Arctic “Mountains of Madness” turns like Dale Bailey and Nathan Ballingrud’s “The Crevasse” and Holly Phillips’ “Cold Water Survival” are well done and capture the right spirit (impending doom, mystery and vastness rather than lists of  books), not to mention the Innsmouthian “In the Black Mill” by Michael Chabon and the slighty “Whisper in the Darkness” like “Din of Celestial Birds” by Brian Evenson, a title perhaps the old Mahavishnu Orchestra could have used. And I’d be remiss not mentioning the collection’s final short, which is one of the most unique and original takes on Lovecraft here, the story about a few survivors in their last moments reflecting over the oncoming Cthulhian apocalypse. Nick Mamatas does a lot with very little here and it would be a shame to forget this, especially given that it follows Barron’s tour de force.

A great collection overall and a credit to everyone that it’s writing much better than usually found in Lovecraftian collections without verging too purple. It’s tough territory to mine, but even the stories I don’t mention do well with it.

Jack Vance – Emphyrio, The Domains of Koryphon (The Gray Prince); Philip K. Dick – A Scanner Darkly; Ramsey Campbell – Alone with the Horrors; Fritz Leiber “Be of Good Cheer;” “The Square Root of Brain;” “The Princess in the Tower 250,000 Miles High”

I’m actually about three posts behind in terms of noting books I’ve read in the last month or two, in fact looking back I’m kind of surprised how many words I’ve crunched of late, I can’t remember the last time it was so effortless. And I’m about to take some time off of work for the  holidays, so I suspect the run will be fairly interrupted. So I hope to finish a couple of these before I totally forget about the books.

Subterranean put out a three book omnibus a little while ago collecting three of Jack Vance’s books and as most Vance releases these days the texts are from the big Jack Vance Integral Edition project. I used to have access to a library copy of the whole series for a while, I’m not sure why we lost it as I probably had a year off from even checking out books when it happened, but I had gotten pretty close to reading everything in the IE I might have trouble finding elsewhere. A few exceptions were Bad Ronald and the Dark Ocean; which fortunately were released as Print on Demand titles so I own one with the other on the way, but I’m having to check out older versions of The House on Lily Street and The View from Chickweed’s Window (which I suspect are probably not terribly different from the IEs as they were released later in the game). But showing up at the library was the Reader which contains The Languages of Pao (which I already a while back in the IE version) and these two, Emphyrio and The Domains of Koryphon, so I decided to check these out to get back into Vance after a gap of some time.

Emphyrio is most definitely one of Vance’s best works, certainly his best novel that isn’t part of a series. It’s tight, measured, well contained, and surprisingly epic in scope. It posits a tightly controlled and tyrannical society where a woodworker and his son live, often beat down by the nosy and meddlesome officials. Naturally, as often with Vance, both characters are very self sufficient and clever and after attending a puppet show, the son shows signs of wanting more than his current life, with his father in quiet support. What happens over time is a number of circumstances and events are set up, both coloring the planet’s society and giving the protagonist a method to finally get off world. But it’s less a science fiction story than a mystery at this point as he more or less unravels exactly what is behind the society by managing to decipher some earlier mythical documents. Many authors would take twice the length to tell such a story, but Vance, as always, is economical and visionary.

The Domains of Koryphon is later and the imagination perhaps even more vivid although the story as such is less mystery and more a planetary adventure or romance. Issued originally as the Gray Prince it demonstrates Vance’s unparalleled skill in world building, or at least in every case where he does it, I’m drawn in by the way humankind (and even aliens in this book) has reconstituted a planet to its own devices. The books sets up with the sort of explanatory prologue that rarely works in the fictions of others and then places a number of characters in the midst of a mystery when the father of two dies in a crash. Cultures clash and there’s definitely a depth to the planet’s society and history that really gives it vividity (not to mention great descriptions, one of Vance’s many strengths) but to some extent it was maybe a bit of a lark and a little thin in places. But there’s still so much to like and I still came away from it thinking I was elsewhere for a while. I love the way bizarre cultural ethics and bartering are set up, which tend to be even unusual for the protagonists, and the consequences of these. And of course the fact that most of Vance’s characters are competent and able. This is also somewhat notable for having one of Vance’s rare female protagonists although this thread seems to almost be dropped halfway through as the three main men take off on the expedition to solve the mystery.

I finally finished Philip K Dick’s A Scanner Darkly. I started it ages ago and even saw the movie of it in the middle somewhere which struck me as being a lot different (in particular the end point which in the book was fairly ambiguous but ended up in the movie like a “Soylent Green is people” moment). In fact I felt Dick really captured a very Californian manner of drug patois that the movie obscured by missing the riffing dialogue style and even while reading the latter half, I couldn’t picture Keanu, Woody et al in any of their characters places. Don’t get me wrong, I think Dick was cracking to some extent at this point (after all VALIS and the Gnostic stuff was up next) but at the same time he was on that fence where he captured something particularly unique and subtle about paranoia and a future United States where its tendrils have extended themselves well into law enforcement and just about everything else. Dick may be one of the hippest of the SF world in these days and ages, but at least what I take from his books seems to often be what Hollywood almost always misses, a lack of concretization, letting the ambiguity and complexity of a situation speak for itself.

I’ve been reading the huge Ramsey Campbell short story collection “Alone with the Horrors” also for what seems like ages, but when I picked it up again I was well into his evolution and surely enough the work gets better as it goes. Campbell’s crazy subtle which can’t possibly be for everyone, his is the horror that hides in the cracks, that’s implied, glanced at, but, however no less inexorable than it is when it’s graphic elsewhere. There’s so many stories they’d be too hard to cover in their entirety but some of the scenes I’ll never forget, like the end of ”The Companion” in a carnival at night as the protagonist rides one of the scary rides only for the final ride to begin with one of the most chilling endings ever in a horror story. I couldn’t do it justice, but it was severely creepy. The kids in “The Apple” whose innocent pre-adolescent torturing of a neighbor has its consequences, the horror of which is no less hidden in that it hides behind a costume during a Halloween party. The slow decay of a nephew who’s uncle mysteriously disappears, leaving behind a mysterious ship in a bottle and the redolent atmospheric doom that closes in around him.  A teacher frustrated with his students begins to hallucinate impending catastrophes. Several stories where buildings or topographies become hypnotic and deadly labyrinths.  If the legacy of a man’s writing is partially how long his work stays with you then Campbell has to be commended with a fine legacy as I remember bits and pieces of many of the stories, some unforgettable. So many of them start with almost dull, “normal” situations where one thing about them starts to slow and turn black, while the psychological effects are never shied from. Sometimes what is most frightening is what is implied rather than splattered.

And of course several more Leiber shorts: Be Of Good Cheer, a reply from a government official to a woman who is concerned about the direction the world is going with robots taking over. “The Square Root of Brain” about a Hollywood Party filled with conspiracy theorists interspersed with dictionary definitions. And, “Princess,” a poetic short short where a man in the far future and his daughter traverse a gigantic bridge from the Earth to the Moon. It ends fairly bizarrely but is beautifully written.

Charles De Lint – From a Whisper to a Scream; “The Bone Woman;” “Mr. Truepenny’s Book Emporium and Gallery;” “Waifs & Strays;” “The Wishing Well;” “Dream Harder Dream True;” “Pal o’ Mine;” “Dead Man’s Shoes;” “Coyote Stories;” John Varley “Good-bye Robinson Crusoe,” “Lollipop and the Tar Baby;” “Equinoctial,” “The Barbie Murders;” “The Bellman;” “Options;” “Beatnik Bayou;” “Manikins;” “In the Hall of the Martian Kings;” “Air Raid;” “The Persistence of Vision;” T.E.D. Klein – “Renaissance Man”

The Charles De Lint works takes me well into the Newford series,

Fritz Leiber – “Appointment in Tomorrow” (aka Poor Superman); “A Pail of Air”; “When the Last Gods Die;” “Dr. Kometevsky’s Day;” “The Foxholes of Mars;” “Yesterday House;” “I’m Looking for “Jeff”;” “The Big Holiday;” “X Marks the Pedwalk;” “Time in the Round;” Borderlands

This line of Fritz Leiber stories takes me from roughly July 1951 to somewhere in 1953 (as well as one a decade later). A few of the stories in this order are not here as I read them earlier, either as part of library check outs or the Fafhrd and Grey Mouser series.

“Appointment in Tomorrow” or “Poor Superman” by the time it made The Best of Fritz Leiber is one of those 1950s stories obsessed with the McCarthy era and the whole impending nuclear war that always strikes me as dated in the modern age where the USSR was dismantled and the epithet “socialist” apparently meaning “liberal” in the modern age, which I guess shows to some extent that McCarthyism maybe never went fully away. One of Leiber’s obvious interests is the whole war between science and magic, a theme visited in his Gather, Darkness! novel originally written in 1943. Here it’s all mashed up as a future US is dominated by an organization with a supercomputer. However much is not as it seems as the story unfolds the secret story of the country being controlled by a group of people not interested in science and the scientists who have finally had enough and attempt to confront them. I honestly found it tough to keep interest in the story as it definitely verged on the preachy side.

“A Pail of Air” I liked a lot better, the Earth pulled out of its orbit by a “dark star” ends up killing most of its inhabitants due to the freezing of its atmosphere, except for a small family living in a somewhat preprepared building who periodically dons space suits to bring back frozen oxygen in pails. Of course the young boy whose perspective we see from sees an unusual light on one of his trips implying he’s not alone…

“When the Last Gods Die” is one of those Leiber short shorts that reminds me something of Lord Dunsany’s work, sort of vast epic and poetic but ultimately not terribly filled out. “Dr Kometevsky’s Day” wasn’t great, a futuristic short where the eponymous Dr’s prophecies about planets disappearing appears to be coming true when the moons around Mars disappear and a group of people, all married, notice it. I found that the group marriage concept was probably better explored in a previous story “Nice Girl with 5 Husbands.” ”The Foxholes of Mars” was also very short and more like Last Gods, having to do with a future war and its effects. “Yesterday House” I’ve totally forgotten without a reminder, but I remember liking it quite a bit (will have to come back and fresh).

“I’m Looking for “Jeff”" is a creepy ghost story about a woman’s ghost who only certain people in a tavern see who seems to cause trouble with those who do. Her goal like many a spectre is to unleash revenge on the man who killed her, the eponymous Jeff, via the seduction of another bar patron. This one might have fit right into Night’s Black Agents had it not been written so late. And finally “The Big Holiday,” a surprisingly upbeat short short about the inhabitants of an off world town and what they do periodically to celebrate. This takes me up to right before The Green Millenium novel, which will give me a chance to pause a while with Leiber.

Two more, from library books, first the short short “X Marks the Pedwalk,” about the war between pedestrians and drivers and the rules of road rage and what happens when it’s taken a step too far and the attempts to change the rules. It just ain’t like it used to be… Second, “Time in the Round” from Galaxy May 57 (and the Third Galaxy Reader), another future vision where entertainment comes in the form of viewing past time events and a trio of kids who decide to view it, one too young and bloodthirsty who manages to circumvent the strictures keeping him out and the resulting chaos.

So I’ve got to mention the video game Borderlands, which was something of an addiction for a couple of weeks, a loot heavy first person shooter/role playing game hybrid on a planet that’s something like a futuristic wild west. Many of the NPC characters had almost redneck-like accents that were hilarious, particularly the car boss Scooter, who was virtually classic and amazingly I never got tired of. It’s a simple story, you’re trying to find the pieces of a key to open an alien vault that supposedly has secret weaponary or some such thing. Honestly the whole finale really wasn’t much to my taste, but I think maybe I hadn’t upgraded my weaponary enough to make the penultimate stage of the game all that fun (I honestly took off running when I was close enough to the vault). Then I though the boss was too difficult at first, but fortunately there was a teleport I could use to go reload and come back. When I did I figured out that all I needed to do was use a certain area of the map for cover and the boss was pulverized no problem. I also found the car battles a lot more difficult than the straight shooting ones. But for the most part it was just extreme fun throughout the game, one of those “alright just one more mission” games that keep you up late. At the time I’d even put Lost Planet on hold to play it and then after this reading got the best of me, after I got lukewarm with Dragon Age: Origins. But I assume I’ll return to that one when the latest reading frenzy ebbs.

Marion Zimmer Bradley – The Planet Savers, “The Waterfall;” John Varley “The Ophiuchi Hotline;” Roger Zelazny “The Salvation of Faust;” Return to Castle Wolfenstein; Aleister Crowley – The Book of Thoth

I’ve been reading a lot lately, it’s actually pretty easy to get into the mood when you start hitting gold and starting with this installment I have definitely hit a rhythm. The Planet Savers is the very very first Marion Zimmer Bradley Darkover book, a series that is very large and one which I’ve never seemed to find much consensus on as to how good it really is. What it basically turned out to be was something of a mountain climbing adventure as a group of humans and Darkover natives attempt to find a cure for a periodic disease on the planet. As it turns out the protagonist is hiding something of a mystery in his own being that actually turns out to be fairly fascinating in the end. I expected to like this a lot less than I ended up which bodes well for later books in the series. It’s definitely a product of the time period or at least the influence of the classic age of science fiction when not everything had to be some sort of deep psychological and layered manifesto, and sometimes I tend to appreciate that. “The Waterfall” was a short story thrown in the same omnibus from a bit later down the line, 76-ish, that was a bit of witchery in a way and kind of creepy as a member of Darkovan nobility seduces a guard on an escapade, which doesn’t work out too well for the guard in the end.

I have to claim “The Ophiuchi Hotline” as the book that really started my reading in earnest. In fact I’m not totally sure I hadn’t read the book in my childhood as it gave me some deja vu and I know I did read quite a bit of Varley back then, probably before I more fully understood the adult themes in his writing, such as the Gaean trilogy. Ophiuchi is the first novel in the Eight Worlds series following a half to a full dozen short stories and it’s about at this time that Varley’s writing is peaking like noone’s business. The whole series really does strike me as a viable future universe where things are so advanced that human sexuality is totally different and cloning abundant (and actually doesn’t even seem particularly dated today). It starts with the protagonist in jail and facing execution for cloning crimes only to be broken out by a shady politician who needs her for research. Deaths are abundant and through the book the protag becomes more than just one operating person. In many ways this is the book that threads together a lot of the Eight Worlds concepts, such as the symbiotes that live in the rings of Saturn; the large underground environments found under the surface of Pluto; the Ophiuchi Hotline itself, a transmission from a different star that’s been feeding humanity most of its future technology for quite some time and has just sent an invoice for its services; and the outer solar system hunt for black holes, the primary means of generating energy for a humanity that has been ousted from its planet by gas giant-based invaders. I’ve since gone on to read the next several stories that all concentrate on some of these specifically (not to mention even characters from the book) so it’s all on my mind. It was impossible not to rocket through the book it was so good, a credit to Varley’s smooth and measured prose. No wonder he was one of the great writers of the 70s and 80s and now I seem to be in the peak of the work and it’s like one home run after another. Few writers are this good on novel #1.

The Zelazny story is a short work based on the Faust myth, basically Faust wanting out of his deal and the resulting state of affairs. I found it a touch confusing but it was colorfully rendered. Wouldn’t have picked it up had it not been in an anthology another Leiber story was in.

And a short step to video games. Wolfenstein, of course, was one of the very early first person shooters, in fact I seem to remember playing the very original even before it was a FPS way back when. Return is an Xbox title and for both the Xbox and the 360 probably the most primitive game I own, somewhere betweem, say, Quake 4/Doom 3 and the previous games in those series. It was fun enough, sure, like most of these games, but the graphics seemed very dated and for once distracting. Course I got to play through some of this with the nephews so it’ll be a bit more memorable than it might have been otherwise. And it managed to unlock the previous Wolfenstein 3D when I finished it so that might be fun later. Oh and I should mention it was terribly easy, even the bosses were little problem.

And finally, Crowley’s Book of Thoth, his latter work on his own tarot set which, for some reason, tends to scare a lot of people, even including people who use other tarots and for some reason I just don’t get why. Maybe I’m just getting too skeptical about this stuff to think of it in terms of Ouija poltergeists and such. Book of Thoth is terribly advanced though, definitely past my ability to truly get what I could out of the book. As it is with most western occultism, everything is couched in symbols, often symbols within symbols, so it definitely read as graduate work, not to mention every few pages saying something like “this can only be truly understood by the most advanced members of the OTO.” Whatever you might say about Crowley he had an almost genius level understanding of a dozen world occult schools to the point where he was synthesizing them into one system, which is something very prevalent in his tarot. In just one card one might encounter tantric, Greek mystery school, kabbalah, alchemic and several other concepts all meshed into one card. Everything has meaning, the colors, the directions, facial expressions, you name it. Of course the issues that held me up as a previous Golden Dawn student are his embellishments on the system based on his Book of Law experiences and the whole change of an Aeon paradigm, which struck me as needing an extraordinary amount of faith to go on, but that’s the thing about Crowley in general, you study him enough and you’re likely to gain surprising and revelationary insights on symbols that show his teachings to be a lot more subtle and well thought out that one might have originally thought. I’m just at the point now where I’d rather be living my life than being embroiled in such intense esoteric work, which strikes me as totally all consuming at this point and nearly as faith based as any other religion.

Two things…

First, the new Magma is out. Oh happy day. I’d state the title but my Kobian spelling and umlauting is awful. But if it’s anywhere near a fraction as good as KA is (and considering I’ve heard the whole thing live anyway I suspect it will be), I’ll be very, very happy. They’re still one of the greatest bands of any age and I ordered my CD post haste. Can’t wait. Besides, a skit in Kobaian by Christian, Stella and Vander? Is this the first crack in the exterior? Are those age lines in Christian’s scowl or a hint of a smile?

Second, video game crack is Borderlands. As my pad gets messier and my obligations and other dreams are pushed aside, as I neglect friends and family, as even the new Dragon Age: Origins waits untried, all I can think of is just 30 more minutes please. OK maybe an hour. Oh how did I ever live without a tivo. Is it full yet? No. good.  Oh did that expensive incense stick just burn all the way through without me noticing it? Oh wait that was a few days ago. Let me shoot just one more skag. OK and those bandits. But I could get a much better shotgun. Mine can electrify but the one I have for level 22 is even better. No, I don’t need sleep anymore, they’ll just have to put up with the snoring at work. But wait maybe I can buy a second 360 for work, if I just keep the volume down. Kee-hee another varmint toast. OK I need y’all to clear out, I’ve got a lot of things I need to catch up on and no please don’t turn on the lights…

Fritz Leiber – “Coming Attraction,” “The Dead Man,” “Nice Girl with Five Husbands,” “Cry Witch!”; Lucius Shepard – Life During Wartime; Dead Space

Am getting a lot of reading done of late.

Zoran Zivkovic – The Fourth Circle, Robert Anton Wilson – Sex, Drugs and Magick; Joe R. Lansdale – The Shadows, Kith and Kin, Fritz Leiber “The Ship Sails at Midnight,” “The Enchanted Forest,” “Later Than You Think”

Zoran Zivkovic’s “The Fourth Circle” was the Serbian’s (I hope I got that right) debut novel in his original language, although it made it as a translation some time after that. It’s a bizarre piecemeal sort of science fiction book that throws together alien races and historical and fictional characters into a soup that progresses like a mystery. It hops around not only from the perspective of the aliens but primarily that of an artificial intelligence and a monastic like figure who works with an artist as they encounter mystery in the symbolism of the circle. Gradually these point of views are mixed in with four different scientists, including Archimedes and Stephen Hawking, including a wild and hilariously outlandish sequence where the immobile Hawking is drawn into a bizarre fantasy of his nurse’s. Later in the book the point of view switches to Sherlock Holmes’ sidekick Dr. Watson, a milieu where strangely enough the author of the Holmes books Arthur Conan Doyle is actually a part of, surmising a slightly different world. All of the pieces come together quite well in the end, nothing particularly surprising from a science fictional point of view but not unsatisfying either. Certainly I look forward to checking out some more of the author’s work as this struck me as wildly imaginative if not quite perfectly realized.

Joe R. Lansdale – Vanilla Ride, Joe R. Lansdale – Bumper Crop, Star Ocean: The Last Hope

I go through weird phases in my reading and I’m realizing that one of the best things I can do to start a new phase is by reading something that’s easy to read. Lately I’ve gotten about 100+ pages into Alastair Gray’s Lanark, but its very Kafka-esque feel to it has left me cooling towards the book despite its set up of an intriguing mystery and out of order narrative structure and ultimately cooling me down on reading.

Parsons robbed

Just gotta say it, Jim Parsons was robbed of the Emmy on Sunday by Alec Baldwin. After watching the Big Bang Theory Season 3 premiere, even more convinced. Ratings on Monday even surpassed its lead in, Two and a Half Men, of late the #1 comedy on TV. Seriously why aren’t you watching Big Bang Theory yet?!?! Downright funniest show since Seinfeld.