Not too many this month, so I appear to be getting my habit a little under control. More work still needed, however. On the plus-side, it’s getting harder to find irresistible bargains on eBay; on the other hand, it’s getting easier to find obscure books that look interesting…
Three first editions. Amritvela is actually signed and was a couple of quid on eBay. It’s not sf, but I need to read more world fiction anyway. The Zanzibar Cat is Russ’s first collection. Arabian Nights and Days was given me by my mother. I’ve read several books by Mahfouz, and I have a couple more on the TBR. But I’ve yet to read his Cairo trilogy, as the only copies I have of it are in Arabic. That’s a project for one year – get my Arabic up to scratch so I can read them…
The Novel To-day was a lucky (and cheap) find on eBay. It goes in the Anthony Burgess collection. Exploring the Deep was also from eBay (and also cheap), and is a pretty good overview of its topic. Useful research material, should I ever decide to write some hyperbaric sf…
A pair of Tor doubles – No 12 He Who Shapes/The Infinity Box by Roger Zelazny and Kate Wilhelm, and No 15 The Last Castle/Nightwings by Jack Vance and Robert Silverberg. I started collecting these after a bunch of them appeared in a remainder book shop in Abu Dhabi, and over the years I’ve managed to find 28 of the 36 Tor published. Some of them are quite good, but many are rubbish. The Invincible is more Lem. The Leopard and My Struggle 1: A Death in the Family were bought as a birthday present.
I’m going to try something new this year, and rather than just make lists of books I want to read, I’m going to be a little more flexible by applying a few rules instead. I don’t think any of these are especially onerous, so they should be pretty easy to stick to.
Read 2014 books as soon as I can after purchasing them – there’s a few due this year I’d like to read (see here), so I just need to actually read them this year. This may mean reading earlier books in the series in order to catch up.
Try to maintain a 50:50 male/female writer ratio – so after every book by a man I read, I have to read one by a woman (fiction only; non-fiction, graphic novels and anthologies don’t count).
Read more translated fiction – I want to read the rest of Abdelrahman Munif’s Cities of Salt trilogy, I’d like to read more Elfriede Jelinek, I’ve also got books by Roberto Bolaño, Leila Aboulela, Naguib Mahfouz and Tove Jansson already on the TBR, but I’d also like to try fiction from countries whose literature I’ve yet to read.
I’ll also continue to document my reading – I’ve one last “recent reading” post for 2013 to come – and I’ll try to single out works I’m especially taken by, much as I have done in the past. I ought to do the same for films too – I made a start in 2012 with a series of films you must see posts, but have only managed to post two a year since then. Having said all that, I don’t want to give myself to much to do as, well, I’ve got a bit of fiction writing to do too – you know, research and write the fourth book of the Apollo Quartet, All That Outer Space Allows; I’m also keen to get started on a novel I want to write; and I have a whole bunch of short stories I really need to get finished.
Incidentally, nine days into the new year and I’ve already started as I mean to go on – after finishing MD Lachlan’s Fenrir, I started on Minaret by Leila Aboulela (her second novel, and the second by her I’ve read). Only another 356 days to keep this up…
Some people go “ooh shiny”, others go “ooh book”. Clearly, I belong to the latter category. And just to make matters worse, I even make books myself. As Whippleshield Books, I add to the great mass of books that exists in the world today – and the somewhat smaller mass of books that exists in my house. Only two so far, but a third later this year and at least two next year. Meanwhile, I continue to buy books by other people because books. Like these ones:
A trio of hardbacks: The Palace is DG Compton’s one and only (as far as I’m aware) mainstream novel, and very hard to find. I don’t think it even made it into paperback. I found this copy on abebooks.co.uk, it was not cheap. A Glastonbury Romance was a charity shop find; it’s ex-library and a bit tatty, but never mind. The Spiral Ascent is… Well, you see, it goes like this: I had a copy of the first book of the trilogy, In the Thirties, in its original Penguin paperback edition. I wanted books 2 and 3 to match… but I couldn’t find them. So I decided to get the omnibus edition instead – and I found this signed edition on abebooks.co.uk. The cover is a faded but still. Signed. Incidentally, you can download the entire trilogy in PDF format from here, but still… books. You can also get some lovely small press books by Upward from Enitharmon Press here.
Last year, I bought a copy of The Quiet War on eBay because the seller said it was the hardback edition. It wasn’t, it was a trade paperback. I complained and received a partial refund. Earlier this year, I read the book… and I had problems with it. And then this month, I found this hardback copy of it in a local charity shop. So of course I bought it. Bargain. We See A Different Frontier is a collection of postcolonial genre stories. Swords of Good Men I have to review for Interzone. Fantasy, meh; but… Vikings. Set it in Space and Shovel Coal into it is the second anthology by the Sheffield Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Group, and the introduction is by Yours Truly.
Three Women’s Press sf books for the collection – I now have two dozen of them – sent to me by The Space Merchants in exchange for a copy of Night and the Enemy, a graphic novel by Harlan Ellison and Ken Steacy I no longer wanted. Expect to see these three books reviewed on SF Mistressworks at some point.
Three paperbacks by two dead white males. I’ve read the first book of Snow’s Strangers and Brothers and I plan to read the entire series. The Conscience of the Rich and The Light and the Dark are books three and four respectively (by internal chronology, not year of publication). Of course, I will only buy matching editions – the 1960s Penguin paperback editions. A local charity shop had a bunch of 1970s Norman Mailer paperbacks in – just look at that cover – and I picked out Barbary Shore. I may go back and buy the others, if they’re still there.
Three charity shop finds. Eleanor Catton’s The Luminaries has been longlisted for the Booker and looks very interesting, so I was quite chuffed to stumble on a copy of her first novel, The Rehearsal… which David Hebblethwaite tells me is the best book he’s read in the past five years. You don’t expect to find Naguib Mahfouz novels published by the American University in Cairo Press in Yorkshire charity shops, but I found one. I read Mahfouz whenever I stumble across copies of his books. I still have his Cairo trilogy – in Arabic, of course – to read… Olivia Manning’s The Balkan Trilogy and The Levant Trilogy – also adapted for television as Fortunes Of War – are brilliant, so she’s a name I certainly look out for during my frequent trawls through books in the local charity shops. The Rain Forest was her last novel.
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