So I started rereading some Vachss books. Normally I start with Flood, which is the first of the series, but at this point he's got a dozen Burke books, so when I do that I OD before I've reread the later ones. This time I started with Shadow of the Hawk and finished it Thursday. I've never reread it before, partly for the above reason, and partly because it didn't impress me much the first time.

It's an okay thriller, but not as involving as most of the books. It felt more like "one of a series" then "part of an ongoing story," and while I'm not sure that distinction will make sense to anyone but me, it's still true. Maybe just because most of the books end up with Burke having to gather his forces for the climax, and in this one his family turns up, but they could have been hired guns for all that mattered. Also, rereading it, my main question was, how the hell did Belinda become a cop? That kept nagging me, and it didn't help that we never saw her act as a cop. I'm not sure Morales' behavior made sense, either.

In the end, I think my main problem was that most of the books show a progression in theme, as he deals with different aspects and ramifications of abuse. This one was just, "sometimes abuse makes people nuts," instead of examining some part of the problem.

Now I'm reading False Allegations, which I liked a lot. Which was reassuring, after Shadow of the Hawk. It still requires some major suspension of disbelief, but it raises some very interesting questions, so that's fine.

Oh, and tomorrow I'm going to go see Bruce Campbell at a book-signing in DC for If Chins Could Kill. I'm trying to think of some clever comment to make if I have the opportunity, but so far I've got nothing.

I'm in the process of writing up my Toronto adventures, but in the meantime I'll just mention that, to everyone's shock, while in Canada, I bought some books. We spent a couple of hours wandering around Kensington Market, and I spotted a place called "Paradise Bound" which turned out to be a used book/CD store. And if you thought it might be a entirely different kind of store, shame on you. I picked up a couple more of Stephen Potter's Gamesmanship books. Including Anti-Woo: Gambits for Non-Lovers, which is the one I've started reading since I was feeling bitter anyway.

Shack and I also stopped in at a Tower at one point and I bought a couple of magazines (mostly to break the unwieldy $100 bill I was carting around). I got the latest issue of The Door which, as often happens, just hasn't been as funny as it used to be. And I got a copy of Too Much Coffee Man magazine, which was my in-flight reading. Actually it was my in-airport reading, since I spent the actual flight not-quite-sleeping.

Oh and a special shout-out to Aaron, who gave me his copy of Stephen Hunter's Point of Impact. According to the back cover, this book "does for the rifle what Tom Clancy did for the nuclear submarine." Hoo-doggie! So thanks Aaron. I'll try to find a way to pay you back somehow. [ominous chord]

Needless to say, with all the hijinks and merriment, I didn't so much as touch Titus Groan. I feel like I've let you down. I'm sorry. I couldn't take the pressure, okay? In fact, I think I need a little literary vacation. Plus, Pain Management comes out in about a month. And August makes me crabby. So I think I'm going to take a break and reread the Burke books. It won't take long, since I've read 'em before. After that I'll be all refreshed and ready to tackle some more epic fantasy, honest.

Addendum

Oh. I forgot that while running errands on Monday I went to Borders and picked up Summoning Light, the second of the B5 Technomage books. I'm not expecting it to be good, but I feel obliged to mention it.

Also, I was looking over past entries here, and there are two books from the very first entry that I still haven't read. Shame on me. I really need to stop buying new books until I've caught up on the ones I already own. It's just silly. Maybe I'll make a "three-quarters of the way through the year resolution" or something.

What a waste of a weekend. I didn't touch Titus Groan; I was busy with errands and chores and all that kind of garbage. Oh, and a goodly amount of sleeping, too. Guess Titus will have to be my travel book after all.

But, while engaged in a doomed quest to get a spare key made (just don't even ask) I did manage to get some comics. Phew. Got the Transmetropolitan: Lonely City TPB. This includes the first issue I'd bought ("21 Days in the City," which sold me on it instantly). Since I'd read most of them, I just sorta skimmed through, reading the couple I hadn't been able to dig up before. Including one very important issue, so it was nice to finally find out what the hell they'd been talking about for so long.

I also picked up Lucifer: Devil in the Gateway. Oh, it's nice. Recently people were singing its praises, so I filed it under, "keep an eye out for the TPB." It's sorta Hellblazer-ish in basic tone, but the main character isn't even trying to do right (obviously). So Lucifer wanders cheerfully along, and if it suits his purposes he might get involved with someone who's battling demons or helping a ghost get vengeance, but he's got no interest in whether they end up happily or not. So that's fun.

I'll shut up about the missing books. It's too infuriating to think about.

I also seem to be generally confused about what day it is on this page. That's because I tend to post an update after midnight, and sometimes I use the current date and sometimes I use yesterday's, because it's only barely the day after that. I refuse to worry about this; I trust you're all intelligent enough to cope.

So, I finished The People Trap on Tuesday. The stories in it aren't quite as odd as some of the other collections I have -- my guess was that they were written earlier but the copyright dates don't seem to be all that different. That doesn't necessarily prove that they were all written at the same time, though. It could also be that I've read enough of his stories that sometimes I can predict the "ironic twist ending," which he used a lot. At least until he replaced it with the "psychedelic nonsensical ending," which turns up more often in his novels. I really should check and see if Sheckley ever wrote for The Twilight Zone; in each of his collections there are always a few stories where, if you think "What's the most ironic thing that could happen?" you can guess the end.

There were also a few coincidental tie-ins to other books I've read lately. "Redfern's Labyrinth" doesn't really have a plot, but there's a... well, it's really hard to describe, but there's a maze of ideas, and it reminded me of House of Leaves a little bit. Mazes do that. Also, "Diplomatic Immunity" mentions a few bits of the Baldur myth, which sure would have been helpful to know if I'd read it before American Gods. So has everyone run across the Baldur story but me? Sheesh. Oh, and "Dreamworld" is an earlier (or at least, different) version of "The Petrified World," which is in the collection Can You Feel Anything When I Do This?. It seemed familiar when I was reading it, and then I finally figured out that it was the exact same story, and then I pulled out "The Petrified World" and did a comparison because I am obsessive like that. I think "The Petrified World" is tighter and it leaves off the anvilicious coda, which is why I think it came later.

There were also two Gregor & Arnold stories. Gregor & Arnold are recurring characters who tend to engage in quick-rich schemes that never work out. The stories are just sitcom-esque silliness. My favorite is "Milk Run" (in the collection Pilgrimage to Earth) in which they attempt to transport Queels, Smags and Firgels. Queels shed wool which gets into everything on the spaceship, and need high gravity to digest food, or they'll starve. Smags shrink and die in high gravity. Raising the humidity stabilizes the Smags, but also causes the Firgels to awake from their dormant state, which lowers the temperature... Naturally, Gregor, the pilot, wasn't warned about any of these special care requirements when he set out. Anyway, as I said, it's silly. I don't know why all of the Gregor & Arnold stories haven't been collected into one book. Actually, they probably have been and I just haven't found that book yet.

And yesterday I read If Chins Could Kill. Bruce Campbell is adorable. And such a geek! Aw. It's nothing deep, but a fun read. The chapters about The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr. and Hercules seemed short, compared to all of the shenanigans involved in making Evil Dead. On the other hand, it would be hard to top those shenanigans. I also liked reading about all of the stuff he and his brothers did when they were kids, building tunnels and a (theoretically) mobile fort/war machine, and scaring people with UFO's. Makes my brother's childhood booby traps and the giant pit he excavated in the back yard seem sort of feeble. Boys are weird, but so entertaining. Periodically Campbell talks about show-biz in general, and it's endearing to see how shocked he is by unprofessionalism and grandstanding by actors. As well as by the occasional rude email from "fans."

Of course, my favorite thing about the book is that it is now shelved between James M. Cain and Albert Camus on my bookcase. I'm so eclectic!

I'll probably read random bits of Harlan Ellison's Watching next; I am working my way through Titus Alone still, but I try to save that for times when I can devote an hour or two at a time to it. Which usually means, "weekends."

And earlier I was looking at my bookcases and thinking... I'm gonna need another one soon. I mean, there's still room, but there's some other volumes I should reclaim from my mom's house, and now I have to replace a few books (not gonna rant, not gonna rant...) and Vachss has a new one coming out this fall, so yeah, soon they'll be full. Yipes. It's gonna have to wait till Christmas, because there's no room for another bookcase in the living room until I move the computer "desk" to the bedroom, and I can't do that until I get a new TV so I can put the old one in the bedroom... Or something like that. Maybe I'll put all of the bookcases in the bedroom instead. Or maybe I should get a bigger apartment. That might be simpler. Anyway, I haven't quite decided what I'll do, but all of the options are complicated. My life is one big logic problem.

I realize this isn't meant to be "Strega's Lost and Found Page" but this is so frustrating. Katie didn't think the books sounded familiar, but she's checking to see if she has them. They're odd books and there aren't that many people I'd be likely to lend them too, so it's becoming more and more likely that I lent them to the Sociopathic Ex. Which means I must have done so years ago, making me feel even dumber for forgetting about them for all this time. And it means I'm not getting them back, since he probably wouldn't be able to find him even if I thought it was worth the effort of tracking him down and speaking to him. Which it isn't. I thought having to replace Season of Mists because of him was annoying enough, now I've gotta replace books that are hard to find. Seethe, fume.

I did locate copies on Alibris, so it could be worse. But it's still very irritating. I'll wait to hear back from Katie but it's looking like I'll have to order new copies.

Another book I need to track down is Forgotten Truth, by Huston Smith. I'd bought it along with Smith's The World's Religions, which was basically a textbook-style overview of, duh, various religions. It wasn't bad. Forgotten Truth on the other hand, is very bad. So bad that I had to write nasty little notes in the margins and, in one case, fill up the mostly blank page at the end of a chapter with a rant about how idiotic the book was. The only thing I remember at the moment is that Smith goes through a lot of effort to dismiss rational thought as a way of determining "truth" -- which might be okay if he didn't seem to think he was the first person to offer a critique of pure reason (see what I did there?), and also it would help if he could make his case without completely distorting what the scientific method actually was. I think he spent quite a while pointing out that because it depends on verifiable results, you can't use science to disprove anomalous events (like, for instance, religious/mystic occurrences). Gosh, no kidding. That's not what science is for, dude. Yes, it's just a tool; yes, it's just one way of interpreting data. The thing is, it's proved to be a pretty damn useful tool. I vaguely recall that he whined about how science didn't provide any meaning to events, it just described them. Again, yeah, that's kind of the point. That's like attacking religion on the grounds that it doesn't help you solve algebra problems. Sheesh.

It didn't help that I'd already read Cosmic Trigger, which manages to defend subjectivity without claiming that things that are subjective are somehow "more true." The first review at Amazon summarizes it fairly well, from what I can remember. Anyway, I'd like to go through and read my little rants again, but I don't know who borrowed that one, either. I thought Niels had borrowed it, but I asked him about it a while ago and he denied all knowledge of the book. It's possible I lent it to Zachary, since he might have found it interesting. Hm.

Hey! I'm actually missing two Sheckley books: Options and Dimension of Miracles. I suspect Katie borrowed them, because they seem like the kind of books I would recommend to her. I really should keep a little list when I lend out books, because lord knows there may be other books of mine floating around out there which I've forgotten I ever owned because I lent them to someone.

A new month, a new page, a new mad spending spree. This time I went to the Book Alcove, my local used book store. It's a terrible store if you're looking for something specific, but heaven to just roam around in. It's also rather large, and the shelves create lots of corridors and rooms and strange nooks, so you keep thinking you've gone through the whole store and then you spot another doorway. Sometimes you turn a corner and find a strange space lined with books, in the center of which is one of those old wooden desk-and-chair combos from an elementary school, which is a bit surreal. It's dusty and a bit untidy and sometimes you spot copies of the same book in totally different sections, and gosh, I love it. So I can't go there very often. Today I bought:

• Penn & Teller's How to Play in Traffic: I've been wanting this for a while, and for some reason no one bought it for me as a present. Probably because I kept forgetting to ask for it. I love Penn & Teller. I've seen them perform a few times, and after one show I shook Penn's hand and talked to Teller about Harlan Ellison -- apparently Penn & Ellison were both guests on a radio show at some point, which I love thinking about because I can't imagine either of them pausing long enough to let the other one talk. Anyway, I read most of it this afternoon, and maybe when I'm in Toronto in a few weeks, I'll get to use a couple of the tricks on my fellow recappers. Because I don't want to lose my geek cred.

• The Superior Person's Book of Words, by Peter Bowler: I like to think of myself as a superior person, so I couldn't really pass this up. I was thinking that I should buy a dictionary, because my old (and rather crappy) dictionary fell apart and I tossed it. The thing is, a really nice dictionary is expensive, and if you aren't going to get a really nice one, you can just use the internet to check your spelling. Anyway, I was looking at the dictionaries and spotted this, and it sounded much more interesting. (There was also a copy of the three-volume set of H.L. Menken's The American Language which was tempting but was also expensive.) The last word is "zzxjoanw," a Maori drum, and the author recommends using it in Scrabble games. I hate Scrabble, but I appreciate the idea. I'm also expecting that this book will come in handy when I'm trying to spice up my recaps and get stuck for an alliterative word.

• The People Trap, by Robert Sheckley: This is a collection of short stories. I always look for Sheckley books when I'm at used book stores. He's still writing, but the older books are really clever and original. Now he's doing Bablyon 5 novelizations. Sigh. Counting this one, I have eleven of his books. Hey... wait a second. No, this is the twelfth. There's one I don't see on my shelves -- I must have loaned it to someone. Damn, now I'll have to figure out who has it. And remember what the title is, too. Anyway, Sheckley wrote a lot of science fiction, most of which is very funny satire. Some of it's just surreal -- the one I'm missing even manages to be post-modern, with the author intruding to talk about the book he's written. The complicated part of looking for his books is that a lot of them were published under several different titles, so I have to flip through and look at the text to figure out if it's a book I already have. The other fun thing is that often the blurbs on the back cover are written as if the story is a straight adventure SF pulp story: I worry about the people who might have picked these books up thinking they were Trek-style stories. Serves 'em right, I guess. One of his stories is a hysterical parody of the original pulp adventures, which were basically WW2 dogfights in space. I first read it when I was very young, and didn't understand that it was a parody, so I was terribly confused because it didn't seem to fit with the stories about the woman whose vacuum cleaner falls in love with her, or the one about the man who discovers than an intelligent civilization has evolved on his knuckle. It's got lots of tortured metaphors and the crew consists of a bunch of generic stereotypes. It's called "Tailpipe to Disaster," if that gives you any idea. Hee.

• Camels Are Easy, Comedy's Hard, by Roy Blount, Jr.: I like Blount. I seem to have this strange affinity for Southern humorists. Actually, I think I just like people who are used to being the oddballs -- so Northern Conservatives and Southern Liberals both tend to be amusing independent thinkers. I gave a copy of this book to my dad many years ago -- at the time Blount was writing for Spy and did the cryptic crosswords along with a column. I sucked at the crossword puzzles, but I read the clues and the answers because Blount usually went on little tangents as he explained the answers. Such as: "A B.A. is often referred to as a bachelor's. The word bachelor derives from the Vulgar Latin for 'farmhand,' but it has been my observation that when a person becomes a bachelor, the plants suffer." And so on. He's funny enough that I bought a book he wrote about a season he spent hanging out with the Pittsburgh Steelers in 1973, even though I don't care anything about football. And I enjoyed it!

• If Chins Could Kill: Confessions of a B-Movie Actor, by Bruce Campbell: I'm a little worried that Scooter will get the wrong idea from the title. Joe Bob and Monty both recommended this, so how could I refuse? I was trying to decide whether or not to get it, and then I noticed that it was a reviewers copy -- with the publishers PR sheet slipped inside. I love that kind of thing. My favorite part: "Campbell truly is the 'boy-next-door,' a regular 'Joe' living a double-life as a cult movie superstar." I really love that "Joe" is in quotes. And usually, when you say someone has a "double-life," you specify both parts. Apparently both parts of Campbell's double-life are spent as a cult movie superstar. Which makes you wonder why he bothers separating them.

• Harlan Ellison's Watching: A great big book of critical essays by Ellison. Oh yes. I quickly skimmed a couple of the essays, and I'm sad that he didn't like 2001, but I figure that's balanced out by the bitter rants about Star Trek: The Motion Picture and Star Wars.

• Lifemanship, by Stephen Potter: I hadn't heard of these books until Monty mentioned them. He says they're funny, and I'm sucking up to him because he's got connections. So I saw this, flipped to a random page, and saw the heading, "How to Make People Feel Awkward about Religion." Snerk. Into the "to buy" pile it went.

Grand total: $33.55. Not bad. I came close to buying another book about George S. Kaufman that was on the $1 shelf. The book I have about him was pretty entertaining, because he was pretty darn neurotic and it's hard to write a dull biography with that kind of material. But I resisted, figuring that most of it would be the same anecdotes I'd already read.

In other news, I finished The Deadly Streets and am over halfway through Titus Groan. My goal is to finish it so I can take Gormenghast with me to Toronto as my travel-book. I don't think that will be a problem. I've dog-eared a bunch of pages in Titus Groan because the language is so yummy. I was really amused by this paragraph:

Making use of the miniature and fluted precipice of hard, white discoloured flesh, where Fuchsia's teeth had left their parallel grooves, he bit greedily, his top teeth severing the wrinkled skin of the pear, and the teeth of his lower jaw entering the pale cliff about halfway up its face; they met in the secret and dark centre of the fruit -- in that abactinal region where, since the petals of the pear flower had been scattered in some far June breeze, a stealthy and profound maturing had progressed by day and night.

That's a very long sentence that basically says, "He took a bite out of the pear." But I like it. Since I've complained to everyone who'll listen about that dreadful Spider Robinson book in which pages were spent detailing packing scenarios, I feel obliged to note that you can be long-winded about trivial things and still be interesting.