AndyHat

Books Received 3

lj@andyhat.net — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 03:26:35 GMT

I'm a bit behind schedule this week posting my book haul, but I had to go to Milwaukee for three days last week for the funeral of my half-brother's wife's father Don Straub, who died July 12 at the age of 82.

Now, on a much cheerier note, new books!

The Memory of Roses is a collection of 20 short pieces by Dutch composer Louis Andriessen, mostly for solo piano, though some add voice or other instruments. Some nice fairly simple music for when I'm in a piano-playing mood.

The Atlantic has published their 2008 Special Fiction Issue, with stories by Wendell Berry, Mark Fabiano, Cristina Henríquez, Aryn Kyle, Jess Row, Julie Schumacher, Carter Simms Benton and Jessica Murphy Moo. I think I preferred it when they published fiction every issue, but I suppose buying one issue a year now is cheaper than subscribing used to be.

Next are the first two poetry chapbooks from Dos Press, which feature a rather complicated binding giving them two covers and two spines and containing work by three poets. The first contains work by Hoa Nguyen, Carter Smith and Andrea Strudensky and the second has work by Michael Cross, Johannes Göransson and Michelle Detorie.

Wilde Stories 2008, edited by Steve Berman (mroctober) and published by Lethe Press is the first in what will hopefully be an annual "Best of the Year's Gay Speculative Fiction". I had somehow missed several of these stories, so I'm looking forward to reading this. I don't see a complete contents listing for this online, so here it is:

"The Woman in the Window", Jameson Currier (All Hallows, No. 42, Spring 2007)
"Awkward", Francisco Ibáñez-Carrasco (Velvet Mafia 22)
"Acid and Stoned Reindeer", Rebecca Ore (Clarkesworld November 2007)
"City of Night", Joel Lane & John Pelan (Subterranean #7)
"Lycaon", Peter Dubé (At the Bottom of the Sky, Livres DC Books)
"Lycanthropy", Jonathan Harper (Velvet Mafia 21)
"The Emerald Mountain", Victor J. Banis (Blithe House Quarterly, Vol. 11, No. 1, Winter 2007)
"An Apiary of White Bees", Lee Thomas (Inferno, Tor Books)
"The Burial", Polly Buckinham (Raven Chronicles 13.1)
"The Island of the Pirate Gods", Hal Duncan (Postscripts, Winter 2007)
"Ever So Much More Than Twenty", Joshua Lewis (So Fey, Haworth)

To the right of that, with title-less cover art, is a reprint of Rhys Hughes' collection The Smell of Telescopes from new UK publisher Eibonvale Press (this was originally published by Tartarus Press, but that edition is out of print and I failed to get a copy back in 2000). Hughes writers wonderful weird stories, so I'm glad I was able to grab the new edition of this.

Then there are a few magazines. One Story's 105th issue is "Wilderness" by Jean Thompson. Then there are the September issue of Asimov's and the October(!) issue of Analog. And Cone Zero is the eighth installment of the always fascinating Nemonymous, containing 14 anonymously authored stories, mostly with the title "Cone Zero" or variations thereof.

Off to the right is the new trade paperback edition of Jeffrey Thomas' Thirteen Specimens from Delirium Books, originally published a couple years ago in a limited edition. This collection includes stories set in the worlds of Thomas' novels Boneland and Letters from Hades, as well as a new Punktown story. Bizarre, enjoyable stuff.

Space Vulture is a retro space opera from Gary K. Wolf (who wrote the original version of Roger Rabbit) and his friend and first-time novelist Archbishop John J. Myers. It has enthusiastic blurbs from Stan Lee, Gene Wolfe, and William Tenn. And it was 50% off at Barnes & Noble, so how could I resist?

The Dimension Next Door is the July anthology from DAW and Martin H. Greenberg, this month with Kerrie Hughes as co-editor, featuring stories about alternate dimensions. Hotter Than Hell, edited by Kim Harrison, is a paranormal romance anthlogy from Harper.

Chizine is kicking off a new publishing venture with Brent Hayward's Filaria. I don't know anything about it beyond the description at Horror Mall, but it certainly looks interesting.

This month's installment of Planet Stories is Michael Moorcock's Masters of the Pit, in which American physicist and Eternal Champion incarnation Michael Kane becomes a prince of ancient Mars. This edition includes a new introduction by Samuel R. Delany.

And in the lower-right corner is I Want More Sugar, a poetry collection by James McNaughton from New Zealand publisher Steele Roberts. I'll end tonight's entry with an excerpt from the poem "Esperanto", included in this collection:

The dead try, they really do.
They queue for the only phone on the moon.
You can almost hear their complaints
across the long night of space
when they find that all the numbers have changed.

Books Received 2

lj@andyhat.net — Sat, 12 Jul 2008 23:08:42 GMT

First off, via cosinejeremiah, for anyone who things LOLcats aren't geeky enough: Lambdacats.

Moving along to this week's incoming books:

First up is the Spring/Summer 2008 issue of Ninth Letter, a lit mag co-published by UIUC's Department of English and School of Art & Design, which is far and away the best-looking lit mag I get. There's an amusing short piece by Steve Tomasula, and lots of other work by new authors to discover.

That's followed by the new issue of the irregularly published fantasy magazine Black Gate. Then there are the first two issues of a new British magazine, Polluto which bills itself as "The Anti-Pop Culture Journal." They've got a nice-looking selection of prose, poetry, and art, including contributions by Jeff VanderMeer and Rhys Hughes.

Bill Barnes & Gene Ambaum returned from ALA and re-supplied amazon, so I now have my copy of Frequently Asked Questions, the newest Unshelved collection. Unshelved remains as funny as ever; I read this one cover-to-cover the night it arrived.

Night Shade Books has published the US edition of Greg Egan's new novel Incandescence. I don't know much about it, but I've enjoyed Egan's previous work. The UK edition of this is being published by Gollancz, but thanks are due to Night Shade publisher jlassen for doing another affordable US edition of an author unjustly neglected by the big US publishers.

Next up are the three Garnet Lacey books by Tate Hallaway (aka Lyda Morehouse), Tall, Dark & Dead, Dead Sexy, and Romancing the Dead. Comedic paranormal romance with a wiccan heroine. I've only read a few chapters so far, but I'm enjoying it.

Then there's Black Dog, Black Night, an anthology of contemporary Vietnamese poetry edited by Nguyen Do and Paul Hoover, published by Milkweed Editions. That's followed by Mandarins, a collection by Japanese author Ryunosuke Akutagawa from Archipelago Books. These two were reviewed in the last print edition of Rain Taxi and sounded fascinating.

The wax-sealed letter is the latest installment in Catherynne M. Valente (yuki_onna)'s omikuji_project, a short story mailed out each month to suscribers. Since I happened to read the first couple installments by flashlight during power outages, I think I'll wait for the next power outage to read this one (with all the thunderstorms we've been having this summer, I'm guessing I won't have to wait too long).

The Pisstown Chaos is the third short comedic novel by David Ohle published by Soft Skull Press. Looks like this one features a flesh-eating parasite of some sort.

Ellen Datlow is, of course, one of the best editors working in the sf/f/h genres, so I'm quite looking forward to dipping into her newest anthology, The Del Rey Book of Science Fiction and Fantasy.

Then there are two new novels from Tachyon, Thomas M. Disch's The Word of God and Nancy Kress's Dogs. As I'm sure everybody reading this knows, tomsdisch committed suicide last weekend; he has long been one of my favorite authors, so it was a bit sad to receive this this week. If you haven't already, go read the obituaries by John Clute and Elizabeth Hand, and then go buy and read his books. Camp Concentration remains my favorite (it's one of the very few books I've actually read twice), but all of his books and stories and poems are worth reading.

Earthworm Gods: Selected Scenes from the End of the World is the newest collection from Brian Keene and Delirium Books, set in the world of The Conqueror Worms, featuring giant man-eating earthworms. Always fun.

Ed Park's Personal Days is a short novel from Random House, a satire set in corporate America. It's been getting good reviews lots of places.

At Wiscon, I heard David J. Schwartz (snurri) give a fantastic reading from his new novel Superpowers. Five college students wake up one morning and discover that they've somehow acquired superpowers like superstrength and invisibility.

The new issue of Jupiter is their 5th-year anniversary special. They name each issue after one of Jupiter's moons; I'd thought they'd have run out by now, but apparently Jupiter has more moons than I thought (Chaldene is moon XXI).

What the Mouse Found is a new Charles de Lint collection from Subterranean Press, bringing together short stories he wrote for nieces, nephews and other children.

Stef Penney's first novel, The Tenderness of Wolves, is a murder mystery set in the Norther Territories in 1867. It won some awards in the UK and looks quite interesting.

And that's it for this week...

Books Received 1

lj@andyhat.net — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 04:14:17 GMT

Lately I feel like I'm completely losing track of the new books and magazines arriving at my place. There ends up being a fair bit of lag before I get things entered into librarything, what with needing to scan covers and edit all the data to be accurate, and magazines don't get entered there at all. Plus, there the new arrivals are intermixed with my efforts to catalog my existing library. So, taking a cue from various other bloggers, I'm going to try just taking quick photos of the incoming titles a couple times a week and posting them here. At least that's the plan; we'll see how I do actually carrying it out.

So, this week's mail brought me an above average haul, I think. First up there are James Doig's two volumes of Australian gothic and horror stories from mid-19th to mid-20th century. All reprints, but the stories and authors are all completely new to me (and probably to anyone else who doesn't specialize in Australiana).

I had picked up a couple of Graham Roumieu's Bigfoot books from amazon a couple months ago and enjoyed them, so I took advantage of a gold box coupon for In Me Own Words: The Autobiography of Bigfoot, which looks as fun as the others.

A bunch of new lit mags this week: F&SF, Light: A Quarterly of Light Verse (featuring amusing work from John Updike, tomsdisch and many others), the Missouri, Kenyon, and New England Reviews, the Canadian Descant (with its charming "Genuine Canadian Magazine" seal on the front cover), and of course, the always wonderful Black Static.

Then we've got the first two books from clarkesworld's Wyrm Publishing: Realms, collecting the first year's stories from Clarkesworld Magazine, and Memorare, a new novella by Gene Wolfe.

Leigh Brackett's The Ginger Star is the latest in Paizo's Planet Stories line of pulp reprints.

From Prime, the much-delayed limited edition of Jeff VanderMeer's Secret Lives has finally arrived. My own secret life as a cat-rescuing superhero is included.

From Night Shade, I got my copy of Walter Jon Williams' new "post-singularity" novel Implied Spaces which has been getting some good buzz and I'm quite looking forward to reading. In other hard SF, I also received Charles Stross' new novel Saturn's Children (which has one of the worst covers I've seen recently; if I'd received this month's SFBC catalog before ordering the trade edition, I think I would have gone for the book club edition with its "exclusive cover" instead).

I must admit to having no recollection of ordering Jenny Davidson's The Explosionist, but it looks like it's a YA alternate history from a first-time novelist. I must have read a good review somewhere.

Read Responsibly is last year's new collection of Unshelved, Bill Barnes' and Gene Ambaum's hilarious library comic strip. There's a new collection just out as well, but apparently it's back-ordered at the moment.

The Diving Pool is a collection of three novellas by Yoko Ogawa, translated from the Japanese by Stephen Snyder, presented in a lavish paperback (complete with French flaps and rough cut edges) from Picador. Two were previous published, in The New Yorker and Zoetrope, one is new (at least in English).

Burning Babies is Noah Cicero's collection of poetry and prose, and Treatise is his new novel, both from A-Head Publishing. I don't know much about either, but I've enjoyed the poems I've sampled so far and the novel looks interesting.

From the Book Depository (who somehow manage to offer free worldwide shipping on UK books), I received the cute little Picador UK edition of Richard Hamblyn's The Invention of Clouds, a biography of Luke Howard, the Quaker and amateur meteorologist who developed the nomenclature for clouds that we still use today.

And lastly, there's the enormous new book from Taschen, publishers of gorgeous coffee-table art books, this one a history of the photography of large penises. A beautiful and fun production all around (and even the cover is a clever two-layer arrangement that allows one to remove the model's underwear...)

There's no mail tomorrow, so that should be all the books for this week.

The Tick

lj@andyhat.net — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 19:34:06 GMT

There is one downside to living on a nice wooded lot in North Carolina. Getting ready for bed last night, I found this girl munching on my leg:

She is safely preserved (and, apparently endowed by her vampiric nature with indestructibility and immortality, still alive) in a Ziploc baggie should I come down with anything in the next few weeks.

I have to say I'm amazed by what I can do with this $60 Epson scanner (model 3490). I bought it to scan book covers for my librarything catalog, but the ability to scan at 4800dpi obviously has its uses, too.

After Wiscon

lj@andyhat.net — Tue, 27 May 2008 20:49:30 GMT

So, Wiscon was great (and I stayed too busy the rest of the weekend to keep posting), and I appear to have avoided the nasty bug that was going around. I'll almost certainly be back in the future, and definitely next year since Geoff Ryman will be one of the guests of honor. After that, I might alternate years with IML, which is always the same weekend.

After the sign-out Monday, I drove back to Hartland for the Memorial Day cookout with the family, and now I'm sitting in the Milwaukee airport waiting for the flight home. Hopefully I won't fall asleep on the flight so I can make at least a little progress on the stack of books acquired at the Con.

More Wiscon

lj@andyhat.net — Sat, 24 May 2008 06:25:38 GMT

The chocolate coma was successfully averted by a quick dip in the pool (which the hotel keeps open until 1am during Wiscon), so I was sufficiently awake for the fabulous midnight reading by Will Alexander, alexotica, upstart_crow and benburgis.

lj@andyhat.net — Sat, 24 May 2008 03:39:50 GMT

Wow, Wiscon parties have fantastic munchies. I think I'm likely to fall into a chocolate coma before the night is over.

Rare videographic evidence of my existence

lj@andyhat.net — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 03:52:37 GMT

I didn't realize I'd been filmed, but there I am 35 seconds into this story on WXII.

lj@andyhat.net — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 06:44:43 GMT

Went to Southland Tales at the Colony tonight, meeting badger and jay there. I was glad I'd read the prequel graphic novel first, though the film does a pretty good job of summarizing the essentials from the book. As with Donnie Darko, I think Richard Kelly tries to put too much in the film: too many characters, too much backstory, too much philosophy, too much Revelation for a mere 144 minutes. But it's got a mega-zeppelin and a levitating ice cream truck, so I have to love it anyways. Note that the Colony's run of Southland Tales ends tomorrow, so if you want to see it on the big screen, do it tomorrow.

Music

lj@andyhat.net — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 04:48:06 GMT

Went to the second concert of the North Carolina Computer Music Festival tonight (thanks to badger for the heads-up). Conversation overheard in the row behind me before the concert:

"I like computers and I like music, so I figured I'd give this a try."
"Maybe it'll be like techno".

They were in for quite a surprise. Anyways, I enjoyed the concert quite a bit. The most amusing work was the late addition, Allen Strange's "Werebeing Split Personality Jazz", which features poetry about a musical werekraken. How could you not love that?

In other news, I'm really glad I don't still work at Motricity.

lj@andyhat.net — Wed, 19 Dec 2007 04:23:31 GMT

Went with deftly, sapphira_altair and fungi to the free sneak preview of Tim Burton's Sweeney Todd tonight at the Rialto. It was pretty good, and extremely faithful to the original, though I did miss Bryn Terfel's voice as Mr. Todd (as heard in Lyric Opera's production a few years back). Johnny Depp isn't a bad singer, but he's definitely not Terfel.

Afterward we went to Tir Na Nog to have delicious meat pies.

lj@andyhat.net — Wed, 14 Nov 2007 18:37:14 GMT

Since I happen to be thinking of it, my Wii number is 0728 4808 2519 6535. And my Xbox Live GamerTag is "AndyHat" (of course).

My weekend

lj@andyhat.net — Mon, 25 Sep 2006 03:51:30 GMT

Last weekend zinnian was giving me a hard time about how I never update this thing. So, fine, I guess I'll do a how-I-spent-my-weekend post.

Friday night was tyrian's wedding in Jamestown (near High Point) in the Crystal Garden overlooking the Castle McCulloch. I had no idea there was anything resembling a castle near High Point, but it did make for a nice venue for the wedding. Carpooled there with deftly, starchyld, and fungi, so lively conversation made the drive seem quick. Congrats to tyrian & Jenn!

Saturday was a lunar confection party hosted by jlundberg and marrael, featuring lots of yummy homemade Asian foods, and mooncake (which, admittedly, wasn't really to my taste, but came with a story involving an immortal bunny rabbit on the moon, so that was fun). andreas_black and lunablack were also in attendence along with some other folks I hadn't met before. 'Twas a pleasant evening of conversation about books and movies and such.

Today I drove up to the Kennedy Center in DC for the Washington National Opera's production of Nicholas Maw's new opera Sophie's Choice, which is apparently based on a book and movie of the same name. The plot involves a Holocaust survivor (Sophie), who has come to America and ended up with an schizophrenic boyfriend with whom she ultimately ends up committing double suicide. Unfortunately, Maw wrote his own libretto, and while he's a fine composer, he's not a writer, so that was a definite weak point. But the music was good, in Maw's unsubtle style of composition, and Marin Alsop (who has become my favorite conductor of modern works) elicited a superb performance from the orchestra. The lead singers were mostly reprising the roles from the premiere at Covent Garden, and they were all excellent. Definitely worth the trip.

Next weekend is my opera weekend in Chicago, with Gluck's Iphigénie en Tauride and Puccini's Turandot. I'm staying at Philip's place for the weekend, and if it's anything like the last time I was up there, I expect it will be a thoroughly enjoyable but exhausting weekend.

Too much space

lj@andyhat.net — Thu, 24 Aug 2006 02:45:00 GMT

The Anaheim Marriott decided that I need to have not just a regular room, but the attached hospitality suite as well. Which makes for a ridiculous amount of space for one person. And two beds. And two bathrooms. It's very weird.

Er, an update?

lj@andyhat.net — Mon, 21 Aug 2006 02:42:25 GMT

For those few of you I haven't seen recently at Gaylaxicon or Readercon or Trinoc*Con or ladykalana's Scanner Darkly outing or other real-world events, as of five weeks ago I quit my old job and started a new job with Motricity in Durham. So no more travelling elsewhere every week; though that seems likely to result in more travel on the weekends for fun (like the trip to Chicago last weekend or the trip to Anaheim for Worldcon this weekend).

I suppose it's possible I'll even have time to update this thing more frequently now, but then again, I've been home for the last 5 weeks and am just now posting this, so probably not.

Since I no longer have a company-issue laptop, I had to buy myself a new one. I went for a Thinkpad T60p, with built-in Verizon Broadband Access. Now that I've had it for a few weeks, I don't know how I ever lived without it. And with the Anaheim Convention Center's curmudgeonly policies on WiFi, I'm sure it'll be very handy this week, too.

A couple weeks ago, I dropped below 300 lbs. for the first time since around 11th grade, which means I'm down about 90 lbs. and 8" around the waist in the past 12 months. I expect to be continuing my firm adherence to my pizza-four-times-a-week not-really-a-diet for the near future until I reach an as-yet-undetermined target weight.

I got a couple new bookshelves last week. Hooray for more bookshelves! One can never have too many bookshelves.

And I think that's about it for recent news from me.

Reading update

lj@andyhat.net — Sun, 29 Jan 2006 07:08:43 GMT

I'm a sucker for ridiculously cute things, so I love adorable little hardcovers like the Borderlands Little Books series. Now Delirium Books has joined the craze with a line of hardcover chapbooks. And indeed the first book in the series, John Everson's Failure is a cute little object, albeit one adorned with cover art of razor blades, barbed wire, and blood. Unfortunately, as much as I like the physical design, the novelette inside isn't very good. The plot, such as it is, is fairly predictable: evil sorcerer offers weed to depressed, lonely teenagers to coax them to participate in evil demon-summoning sexual rituals. And, of course, the girl gets pregnant, the demon is born, and the only one who survives the bloody fiery aftermath is the one who was about to commit suicide at the beginning. This sort of thing can be fun if done well, but in this case all we get are cardboard stereotypes for characters and trite settings, so it's mostly just tedious.

Normally I spend the first 6 months of the year trying to catch up on the previous year's short fiction. I've decided if I keep doing that, I'll always be hopelessly behind, so this year I'm jumping right into 2006 publications, starting with the January 2006 Fantasy & Science Fiction. The opening novelette is Robert Reed's "Less Than Nothing", another entry in his series of stories about Raven, a Native American boy living in an isolated group as the world around them moves into the 21st century. In this story, Raven is banished from his home, haunted by the ghost of One-Less (who he apparently had killed in a story in the August 2004 issue that I don't recall). Raven goes on to learn many secrets about his tribe and the "demons" (as they call any human who's not a member of the tribe) who protect them. It's decent enough, but it feels more like the middle chapter of a novel than a standalone story.

"Planet of Mystery" by Terry Bisson is a fairly long novella (presented in two parts, the second of which is in the February issue) about the first expedition to land on Venus which discovers the impossible beneath the clouds: a breathable atmosphere, water, and a race of centaurs and Amazons. This is a fun homage to the Golden Age pulps, with amusing characters (especially Robbie the Robot) and a delightful over-the-top plot.

Matthew Hughes' "Shadow Man" is a reprint from his 2005 Night Shade collection, a very brief story about a serial killer whose voices turn out to be real. A nice twist at the end caps a neat little story. "A Daze in the Life" by Tony Sarowitz is set in a future where geeks rent their brainpower to corporate and government agencies to help sift through vast troves of surveillance data. Some interesting ideas and fairly topical in light of recent real-world events, but not particularly memorable.

Matthew Corradi's "Journey to Gantica" is a fable about a girl living in a world where one's size changes in accordance with the contents of one's heart. Adelia has grown too large for her home village so she sets off to slay giants, though her journey ends up being quite different than planned. There are several nifty scenes in this story (I especially liked the giant clock workshop), but I was disappointed by the too convenient ending.

"The Boy in Zaquitos" by Bruce McAlister is told in the form of a lecture by a former government agent who was used as a carrier to spread untraceable plagues to destabilize third-world regimes. However the story-telling is so dry that it's difficult to empathize with the narrator's guilt for his past actions or to appreciate the magnitude of his crimes.

The frame story of "Horse-Year Women" by Michaela Roessner lacks any overt fantasy content; rather it is simply the story of the friendship between an American woman and a younger Chinese friend named Thera. Over the years Thera shares the stories her mother told her about women born in the Year of the Horse, and it is those stories that justify the story's inclusion in F&SF. The history of the secret tribes of Horse-Year Women and their scattering around the world is engrossing and provides an interesting counterpoint to the tragedies of Thera's life in the real world.

I'd hoped to get completely updated tonight, but this is already much longer than expected, so I suppose I'll have to try to squeeze in another update tomorrow.

The Symphony

lj@andyhat.net — Fri, 20 Jan 2006 05:39:59 GMT

My office desktop decided to crash this afternoon at 5:02pm. Everything was saved, so not a big deal, but I chose to take it as a sign I should stop for the day rather than spend 15 minutes starting everything back up just to work another half hour.

So I went up to Maggiano's for dinner, and then over to Symphony Center for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra concert. It's been far too long since I heard them there; I'd forgotten how fabulous they sound on a good night. John Adams' Naive and Sentimental Music was superb, utterly ravishing as it built from its opening guitar solo to the sumptuous waves of sound of the full orchestra. In the past, the CSO wasn't particularly good with minimalist or post-minimalist music, but it seems some of the older players (who obviously hated the stuff) have retired since I last heard the CSO in this repertoire, and Esa-Pekka Salonen inspired the current orchestra into an incredible performance.

The Mozart 4th Horn Concerto isn't a major work by any means, but CSO horn player Daniel Gingrich gave it a pleasant reading (and the final movement does feature some rather catchy tunes). The Sibelius 5th was also thoroughly enjoyable.

And now it's time for some more Dragon Quest 8.

An update. Why not?

lj@andyhat.net — Thu, 19 Jan 2006 07:46:41 GMT

I feel compelled to update today in response to a rather silly article in yesterday's New York Times concerning the dearth of blogs written by full-time business travellers. I'm curious to know how they concluded that such a shortfall exists. I know I tend not to post exactly what my travel schedule is as that's not something I want to share with complete strangers, and I'm sure I'm not alone amongst frequent travellers in such obfuscation. So how can they claim to know how many of us there are?

Besides that methodological weakness, the article seems to assume that we full-time business travellers must have lots of interesting stuff to write about. But, really, we don't. I could post about how my Friday afternoon flight from ORD to RDU was delayed, but when the flight has an on-time rating of 31%, that's just not very blogworthy. Or I could post about how my room at the Residence Inn in San Mateo was exactly like my room in Rochester. Or how annoyingly loud the heating system in the Club Quarters in Chicago is. Or I could gripe about how they replaced Comedy Central with Court TV on the hotel cable system earlier this month. But I'm bored with stuff like that after one paragraph.

Modern business travel is really no more exciting than the average daily commute, so whatever the Times might think, I just don't see it being the next big growth area in blogs.

That said, a blog is indeed a handy way to keep friends apprised of my whereabouts for dinner and other gatherings. So, I am now scheduled in Chicago through March. I'm still at the Club Quarters at Clark & Adams, but will be moving to a corporate apartment at 555 W. Madison sometime between now and Feb. 1.

I see that tomorrow Esa-Pekka Salonen is conducting the CSO in Adams and Sibelius, along with a Mozart Horn Concerto. I certainly hope I can get out of the office early enough to make it to that one.

Let's see. Other random stuff. For those you don't know it, New York Times Link Generator is a handy thing. It generates special article links that will (supposedly) keep working indefinitely, even after an article moves into the pay archive after two weeks. A very handy thing for bloggers who don't want their old posts to be full of broken links.

In the past six months or so, I've accidentally purchased several duplicate books, proving that my collection has gotten to the point where I have no choice but to catalog it. I still haven't found any solution that completely satisfies me, but for now I'm using Librarything, which at least meets the two most important criteria of being fast and web-based. My catalog there currently contains pretty much everything I've acquired in the last couple months, plus books that happened to be on the more accessible of the stacks that are threatening to take over my bedroom and storage room. There's an RSS feed of new additions if anyone wants to watch me catalog books when I'm home.

Also, since it's a new year, I'm going to attempt to get back in the habit of recording my thoughts about stuff I read. The new issue of McSweeney's (#18) is mostly disappointing, full of annoying literary exercises that fail to tell a worthwhile story or to have any other merits to compensate. Take Edmund White's "My Hustlers," for example. In it, the narrator recounts his encounters over the years with hustlers, first in small towns then in Chicago and New York. But the narrator never grows, never really learns anything, never gives us a reason to care about this string of meaningless encounters retold at excruciating length. And the story doesn't even compensate for its tedium with a decent sex scene or two.

There were a few stories that at least managed mediocrity. Joyce Carol Oates' "Bad Habits" is a sharp little tale about the eponymous serial killer and the effects of his arrest on his wife and kids. Nelly Reifler's "The Railway Nurse" is a dark short story of a nurse's rather unusual qualification exam (apparently set in a rather disturbing alternate history). And Joe Meno's "People Are Becoming Clouds" is a cute and sentimental tale of the marital problems that ensue when the wife develops the unfortunate habit of turning into a cloud.

Moving along to something I liked better, David Marusek's new novel Counting Heads is thoroughly enjoyable. Starting out in 2092, it's set in a future where nanotechnology has recently extended human lifespans more or less indefinitely, AI exists but isn't quite sufficient to replace humans, and cities are domed to protect from attack by hostile nanotech. Society in the United Democracies is divided into a working class of iterants (clones, owned by Applied People), guilds of Chartists (who live communally), and the "affs" who have the resources to do more or less whatever they want. Samson Hargar, an artist, and Eleanor Starke, a politician, are two such affs who seem destined for perfect lives when they're married and receive permission to have a child. But everything comes crashing down when a random gene test on Samson mis-identifies him as a terrorist, resulting in his being "seared" so that he can no longer benefit from nanotech or gene therapy.

As the novel moves forward to 2134, we learn of Eleanor's Garden Earth Project, an attempt to encourage humans to move to other planets, reducing Earth's population to a level at which its ecosystem can recover from man's influence. But there turn out to be vast conspiracies at work to destroy Eleanor's plans, and after she is killed in a shuttle crash, the remainder of the novel is about the last ditch efforts on the part of those loyal to Eleanor to preserve her legacy.

It's all lots of fun, and while Marusek nicely wraps up the plotlines for these characters, there are hints of all sorts of fascinating aspects of his world that I hope he'll follow up on in future novels.

Update

lj@andyhat.net — Sun, 11 Dec 2005 21:56:12 GMT

So, I'm not going to Charlotte. I've been assigned to a Chicago client instead, starting Tuesday. Which means I get to enjoy the flight delays at O'Hare on Friday afternoons, but access to Chicago pizza is worth it. Their office is just across the street from Union Station, so I will continue to stay right downtown, at the Club Quarters at Clark & Adams this month, and then find some place nicer next month.

So, anybody know of anything cool happening in Chicago the next few months?

Where in the USA Is Andyhat?

lj@andyhat.net — Wed, 30 Nov 2005 06:32:38 GMT

I can't believe it's been almost two months since I updated this thing. There have been plenty of things I've meant to post, but somehow it just doesn't seem to happen. Oh well.

Anyways, I figure I should at least post something about where I'll be for the next few months (and my copy of Dragon Quest 8 is being borrowed for the evening, so I can't play that instead of posting).

I was originally scheduled to be in San Francisco through December, but the project I was on is coded, the critical user acceptance tests have been passed, and client personnel have been trained sufficiently to take over maintenance, so I'll now be done here tomorrow. My flight home is booked for Friday; I haven't decided yet whether to go home on Thursday or stick around and be a tourist for a day.

Pending final approval, next week I'll be in Chicago for training. The week after that I'll start in Charlotte, where I'll be until sometime in February or March when they're ready to start a new project in San Francisco. At least, that's the plan right now. It will be very weird not to have my 12 hours per week of reading on planes, and I suspect I won't be keeping up nearly as well with The Economist, New Scientist, The New York Review of Books, or the bunches of other magazines I get. But it will be nice to get home before 11pm on Fridays and be able to leave when I want on Sunday night rather than worrying about catching a 7:06pm flight.

For Christmas, I'll be in Milwaukee, with a side trip to Albuquerque for a cousin's wedding on the 27th, and then home for New Year's Weekend (4 days in a row at home! Woohoo!)

A pleasant evening

lj@andyhat.net — Thu, 06 Oct 2005 07:19:57 GMT

Tonight I went down to Palo Alto to try the oddly named Patxi's Pizza, which was recommended by trom. It is indeed another excellent version of Chicago-style deep-dish pizza. I think I like Zachary's slightly better (and I definitely prefer Zachary's ambiance to the annoying upscale pretentiousness of Patxi's. My impression is that Berkeley : Hyde Park :: Palo Alto : Evanston, and I always disliked Evanston), but Palo Alto is certainly more convenient to get to from San Mateo than Oakland or Berkeley.

In a bit of good luck, I happened to notice that the theatre across the street from Patxi's, the Aquarius, was running Mirrormask, so after eating my yummy pepperoni and sausage pizza, I went and saw that. The movie's visuals are amazing, and do a wonderful job of bringing the comic's dreamworld to life. The pacing is a bit slow, but there's so much cool stuff to look at that it's quite enjoyable.

757

lj@andyhat.net — Tue, 06 Sep 2005 07:01:43 GMT

Coach class on 757's (in a 3-3 configuration) is bad enough on short hauls. But for transcons, it's torture. What is Delta thinking using those on a route like ATL-SFO? I'll definitely be avoiding that routing in the future (at least the outbound flight was a 767, so I didn't suffer both ways).

Other than the return flight, Dragoncon was lots of fun. I went to a lot less formal programming than I did at Worldcon, but there were so many people around to talk to that I had no trouble passing the time socializing. It was good to see lots of people I rarely get to see since I'm home so little, and I met lots of great new folks. It's too bad that Worldcon and Dragoncon are normally the same or adjacent weekends, because I'd like to be able to do both again.

A brief update

lj@andyhat.net — Wed, 31 Aug 2005 05:21:39 GMT

It seems like I just got back from Worldcon, and this Friday is already time to go to Dragoncon. Time sure does go by quickly. I've given up on ever catching up on blogs & LJ from the last four weeks, so if there's anything I should know that happened in August on LJ, let me know.

I haven't looked at the Dragoncon schedule at all yet, so all I know is I get in Friday evening and leave Monday evening. If any of y'all want to reach me there, my cell number is 919-395-0011.

Friday cat blogging

lj@andyhat.net — Fri, 29 Jul 2005 21:25:18 GMT

I should really update this thing more often. I've been reading lots of good stuff, and since my last update there was Baycon and Trinoc*Con and lots of other stuff, but right now I'm in between a red eye from SFO to RDU and tomorrow's overnight from RDU to LGW (and hence to Worldcon), so I'm more interested in sleep.

However, it was necessary today to test the camera newly acquired for the Worldcon trip. And so, joining the grand tradition of Friday cat blogging, I am pleased to present, in her first ever appearance in the medium of digital photography, the real Sadie (not to be confused with the fake one in my usericon):

Book meme

lj@andyhat.net — Wed, 18 May 2005 04:27:18 GMT

I don't usually do memes, but since mme_publisher tagged me, I suppose I have no choice.

1. Total number of books I've owned:

Definitely more than 2500, probably less than 5000. I desperately need to do a proper inventory. The number of books I currently own is fairly close to the number I have ever owned; my collection has only been culled three times (when moving from Hales Corners, WI to Durham, NC at age 9, when moving from my old bedroom to my new bedroom at age 13 and when moving out of the house in Durham to my first post-college apartment in Chicago; the first two account for several dozen books, the latter for perhaps a hundred). I keep thinking I ought to cull the collection again, but I find myself utterly unable to do so.

2. The last book I bought:

The most recently ordered book is Brian Keene's Earthworm Gods, but that was a pre-order and won't actually arrive for several months. The most recent actual acquisition is the new Transgressions anthology.

3. The last book I read:

The last book I finished was Holly Phillips' collection In the Palace of Repose. I'm currently reading Georges Perec's Life: A User's Manual.

4. Five books that mean a lot to me:

This question is ambiguous, so I'll give it two separate answers. First, the books that content-wise have meant a lot to me:

Stranger in a Strange Land (Heinlein)
Job: A Comedy of Justice (Heinlein)
Crash (Ballard)
Snow Crash (Stephenson)
Democracy in America (de Tocqueville)

And second, the books in my collection where the physical object means a lot to me:

The signed first of Asimov's Prelude to Foundation (Easton Press, so one can quibble if it's actually a first, but it's likely the only signed Asimov I'll ever have)
Letter "H" of the lettered edition of Jay Lake & Frank Wu's Letters from Lake Wu
The beautiful illustrated edition of The Wind in the Willows given to me by an elderly friend back when I was first learning to read
A copy of Paul Graham's On Lisp: Advanced Techniques for Common LISP, which was harder to track down than any other book I own
My well-used sheet music for Beethoven's Sonata Pathetique, the first of his sonatas I learned to play

5. Tag five people and have them fill this out in their LJs...

OK, andreasblack, laurahcory, paulcory, starchyld and chang_o, consider yourselves tagged.