In his own words
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The Alchemist’s Dream
Review: Grabbed this one at random from the shelf. You never know what great things you will pick up by chance. This was not one of the great things. Schlocky “Can-con dude with a grant” fiction. A hidden code in an old manuscript, a mysterious map showing mysterious things. Yawn. Characters were cutouts, no depth,…
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The Drowned World
Review: A very good book. Very good. Short, dark, nervous, sweltering. Reminiscent of Conrad. Think Heart of Darkness or Almayer’s Folly. The atmosphere is oppressive, like in a swamp on the hottest of days. The real joy in this book comes from the feelings and mood, rather than the action. The action is quite attenuated,…
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The Song of the Lark
Review: “Here were the sand hills, the grasshoppers and locusts, all the things that wakened and chirped in the early morning, the reaching and reaching of high plains, the immeasurable yearnings of all flat lands.” I cannot express how magnificent this book is so I’m not going to even try. This book made me want…
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The Rest is Noise
Review: 591 pages, but as the Byzantine Emperor (Constantin’s illustrious successor Justinian) declared “Solomon I have bested thee!” Meaning I thought Life of Johnson was the most odious tome I had ever struggled through, but then this. I learned a lot: Strauss, Mahler, Bartok, and lots of history illuminated for me that I never learned…
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Death in Venice
Review: A literary triumph. I nearly said tour de force but I’m gay enough already without adding fuel to the fire. A dark, brooding tale of homosexual obsession. Kind of like a gay Lolita. The prose is magnificent without being overly wordy and pedantic. Leitmotifs abound, so many that Wagner would be jealous. And speaking…
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The White People and Other Weird Stories
Review: I really wanted to love this. But, I liked a few of the stories and some were just way too wordy, way too long, and at the end nothing happens. Like lesbian porn, there’s something missing and it leaves one unsatisfied. Machen is pronounced to rhyme with blacken. Not knowing this, I was pronouncing…
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The Adventures of Tom Bombadil
Review: What a neat little volume! A book of verse. Published in 1962 at the request of his publisher (Allen & Unwin). The poems were almost all adapted from Tolkien’s much earlier poems published in university journals, most having nothing to do with Tom Bombadil or even the LOTR franchise. Thanks to an editorial conceit…
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Mars Rover Curiosity: An Inside Account
Review: If you want an adventure in anxiety, do the job these people did to land a rover on Mars! Good grief! Sooo much that could (and nearly did) go wrong. Even reading it was a little nail-biting. OMG. But they did land and operate Curiosity on Mars. And it is still doing science 10…
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Mash Up: Stories Inspired by Famous First Lines
Review: What a great, unique concept. Take a famous first line from a classic novel and base an SF story on it. Some great authors and some great submissions. Some. Not all. Gardner Dozois is one of the finest editors of anthologies ever, but in any collection you’re going to get a range of material.…
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O Pioneers!
Review: Absolutely magnificent. The more of Willa Cather I read, the more she speaks to me. And not just speaking like to someone waiting for the bus, but speaking at a primal emotional level. Like the rich prairie soil she so beautifully describes. “The gold flecks in her irises were like the color of sunflower…