I seem to be overwhelmed with good reading lately.
Just for starters, there is Kim Stanley Robinson’s amazing alternate history, The Years of Rice and Salt
Then there’s Gregory Frost’s brand new novel, Shadowbridge
And I haven’t even gotten to Duma Key
It’s an embarrassment of literary riches, really. I am a lucky reader indeed. I feel blessed.
My review of Joe Hill’s magnificent short story collection, 20th Century Ghosts, is now posted over at Hellnotes.
Read the review, if you’re so inclined. More important, read the book.
Since I haven’t been blogging (among other things) as faithfully as I should, I thought I’d take a few minutes to suggest some other sites for you to visit. This is a small sampling of the book-reading-writing-publishing-related blogs that I check in with on a fairly regular basis. It is, in tech-speak, my own “literary blogroll.”
This is only a partial list, but it’s more than enough to get you started. Some of these sites are independent, some commercial, some very information-and-detail oriented, some rather casual, some quite witty, some just weird. But all of them help feed my addiction for reading about reading. They help me keep up with new releases, old favorites, industry trends, new and established writers, and different ideas.
Undoubtedly, not all of these will be your cup of tea. Like me, you might find a few that you only want to visit once a month or so (or never again), but there may be others that will make it to your daily surfing list or your RSS feeds. Best of all, most of them offer their own lists of links, so that you can drop in on one site, find a few good suggestions, and head off for hours of fascinating blog visits.
In no particular order:
And if you still need something else, I must once again recommend Neil Gaiman’s Journal, which is still the one blog I absolutely can’t live without, as I discussed in considerable detail earlier.
Some day, I might plow deeper into my bookmarks file and list even more blogs, but this should be enough for now. In the meantime, feel free to share your own literary blogroll by e-mail or in the comments.
A video of the Gregory Maguire event that my daughters attended last month has now been posted at the spiffy Borders Media site. You get to see a pre-interview, the reading, the audience Q-and-A, and a few seconds of the book-signing. Oh yeah, you might catch a glimpse or two of the girls, as well.
To watch it, just click here: Gregory Maguire
While you’re at the site, you might want to check out a few of their other productions. The Ann Arbor Borders (Store 01) has hosted an awfully eclectic selection of authors and musicians. It’s nice to see their brief visits preserved as first-rate video productions.
As a fan of Christopher Moore, I’m kind of partial to this one.
Last weekend, my wife and I ventured downstate for our first visit with the girls since dropping them off at the University of Michigan in late August. It was a good time, and of course went by far too fast. It was reassuring to see them doing so well — mostly adjusted to dorm life, mostly settling into their classes, mostly well on their way into this new stage and this great adventure in their lives.
We had the grand tour, ate some wonderful food and saw a football game that was … well, not a good game, not precisely. In all honesty, Notre Dame looked as if they’d struggle to beat a decent high school football team. But after U of M’s rocky start, a win was a win.
On Tuesday, back home and back at work, I was very envious that the girls had the chance to attend a reading and signing with Gregory Maguire, who ranks right near the top of my personal “favorite writers” list. The author of Wicked, Son of a Witch, Lost, Mirror Mirror, Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister and a passel of children’s books, Maguire was visiting Borders’ flagship store in Ann Arbor to promote his newest, What-the-Dickens: The Story of a Rogue Tooth Fairy.
I would have happily let a fairy, rogue or otherwise, take away a few of my own teeth for the chance to attend this event, but I’m so pleased that my daughters now have such great opportunities available to them, just moments away. A signed book is a marvelous keepsake, no doubt, but an evening spent listening to a world-class writer discuss his work is truly a lifetime gift.
Someone who saw my last post asked if I had ever actually met Manly Wade Wellman, to which I was proud to answer, “You bet.” As a matter of fact, I was the young writer referred to in the old Hellnotes essay, the one who received some words of encouragement during a brief break in an otherwise hectic World Fantasy Convention — New Haven, 1982, I think.
I was lucky enough to attend quite a few of the earlier WFCs, starting with the fifth, which was the first one to return to Providence, Rhode Island, the convention’s birthplace. One of the best things about those gatherings, besides the giddy enthusiasm they always instilled, the contact high that didn’t wear off for weeks afterwards, was the opportunity to rub shoulders, even just briefly, with some of the old pulp masters.
I remember chatting with Manly, getting autographs from the likes of Frank Belknap Long and J. Vernon Shea, and having a pleasant conversation with Robert Bloch while he patiently signed my inordinately large stack of books. I also had things signed by Hugh B. Cave, who years later subscribed to my magazine and years after that became a Hellnotes reader — how cool was that?
One day our group found itself in the buffet line with H. Warner Munn, who ended up sharing our table and regaling us with tales of writing “The Werewolf of Ponkert,” his memories of Lovecraft and his vast knowledge of the Roman Empire, the subject of his then-new historical novel, The Lost Legion.
One of the best memories of all was riding in an uncomfortable yellow school bus with 60 or 70 fans and one very special guest to the site of Poe’s grave, where the guest — the great Fritz Leiber — laid a wreath and provided a stunning, chill-inducing midnight reading of “The Conqueror Worm.” That trip was the subject of another early Hellnotes essay, which I would reprint here … except I can’t find it at the moment.
Those were good times, rare opportunities to meet a generation that even then was slipping away from us. For a few short moments, we actually got to mingle with the same giants whose shoulders we were trying so hard to stand upon.
They’re gone now, of course, but their ghosts linger and their books and stories remain a constant source of joy.
You never know what you’re going to find when you’re clicking here and there, cruising around the Internet.
The other day, I stumbled across this old essay of mine — one of the first pieces I did for Hellnotes, back in the earliest days, when Dave and I were still trying to figure out exactly what the newsletter was going to be. I hadn’t yet started writing weekly editorials. Instead, I was putting together semi-regular pieces like “The Roots of Horror,” trying to say a lot in a very few words, which has never been especially easy for me.
I remember writing the piece on Wellman and giving permission for it to be reused. I even remember seeing it not long after it had been posted. But I was a little bit startled to discover that it’s still out there, all these years later.
Re-reading the piece now makes me wish I’d said a few more things, or at least said these particular things a little better. But Manly Wade Wellman was a nice guy and a great writer, and I suppose nothing you say about people like that is ever really enough.
As for the Wellman tribute site itself, it seems to be in a “lingering” phase, without any recent updates. I hope it sticks around. Manly deserves all the ink — virtual and real — that he can get.
