books

As I drink my celebratory snifter of port…

PETERMBALL Journal , , , , , , , ,

It’s a cool winter evening and I’ve turned off most of the lights in the flat, shuffling around the study by dim glow of the desk lamp, swaying in a slightly dreamy manner to Bauhaus songs while I poke bits of Flotsam with a stick.  In theory I should be writing right now, but I figure if I don’t sneak off and blog now, I’ll get all caught up in drowning Keith Murphy in the demonic equivalent of a baptismal font and it’ll be another week before I post here again.

I’m going to mention, first off, that Angela Slatter is in the process of delivering a very special series of Friday Drive-By interviews focusing on the contributors to the forthcoming Stephen Jones anthology A Book of Horrors. The first link takes you straight to the page she’s set up for it on her website, which means you miss out on the very charming otters that appeared on the post announcing the interview series, but it’s definitely worth keeping an on eye on things if you’re a fan of Angela’s work (as I am),  Stephen Jones’ anthologies (er, yes, fan of them too), or just Angela’s drive-by interview series in general (yes, sorry, I’m a fan of those too).

Hold on, I’ve run out of Bauhaus songs. It’s time to move on to Joy Division (If you’ve never seen the Australian film Three Dollars where David “Faramir” Wenham dances like Ian Curtis, you’re missing out).

Okay, so, other things. I wrote a little more of my morning commute story today, figuring out a bit more about the characters involved. Lunch breaks at work seem to be a boon to getting things done on the writing front, since there’s enough time there to get about two or three pages filled in the Moleskin notebook I’m using, which adds up pretty quickly when the page or two I get done on the train is factored in. The weird part, of course, comes with writing things out of order – I’m just kind of putting down scenes and seeing what the characters do and trusting that sooner or later a beginning and an end will show up.

Interestingly, this isn’t a story I could write electronically. Short bursts of time are terrible when I’m trying to type things on a computer, where the pages are infinite and the keys make pleasant clattering sounds as I work, but a fifteen to forty-minute stretch is kind of ideal for hand-writing. I suspect it’s got something to do with the page itself imposing a kind of structure on the writing, but I wouldn’t swear to it.

I’ve discovered, once again, that working above a bookstore is a dangerous proposition. Last week I picked up Brett Easton Ellis’ Lunar Park while strolling through the shop before work; this week I found myself buying a copy of Notes from the Underground (a book I’ve always meant to read, but never gotten around too) and China Miéville’s Kraken. Fortunately, I’m back to reading books faster than I buy them, so I don’t feel too bad about the purchases.

I also discovered that my Klout profile lists me as an expert of pancakes, which suggests I tweet far to much about breakfast, I suppose. Admittedly, I am only a very small expert of pancakes, but that’s more-or-less in keeping with my pancake consumption. Given the option, I’d choose to be an expert in something much cooler: ninjas, perhaps, or obscure seventies punk bands from Brisbane, but considering I know even less about those topics than I do about pancakes, perhaps it’s best the option isn’t mine.

A friend emailed with the question have you ever googled sinister ducks, which I hadn’t prior till then, but immediately gave it go. I’ve already posted the results almost everywhere, but suffice to say that a good search engine and youtube will satisfy your curiosity and it’s well worth it.

And, since it seems to be the thing to do at the moment, I should mention that I’m on the googleplus in a very “well, this thing exists, lets wait for it do something interesting” kind of way. I’ve never really been an early-adopter of social media before and, based on this experience, I’m rather glad of that. Facebook and twitter were both much more fun to learn when there were lots of people already using it. Google+ just feels like I’ve shown up for a party a few hours early, so I’m standing in the corner and looking mawkish while I wait for the rest of my friends to arrive (I am, rather sneakily, hiding behind the pseudonym Peter M Ball, should you be +enabled and looking to add me to a circle).

  • And with that, the spokesbear says I’m done, for it’s time to go back to the wordmines.

5 Books

PETERMBALL Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption , , , , , , , , , , ,

If you were to ask me for book recomendations right now – and yes, I know you aren’t, but lets just say you were – you’d probably get a list that runs something like this:

The Thin Man, Dashiel Hammett: Screw The Maltese Falcon – if you’re only going to read one hardboiled detective story by Hammett then you really should start with this one. I picked it up on the back of watching Nick and Nora’s Infinite Playlist when it was mentioned that the title characters in the film were based on the relationship between Hammett’s Nick and Nora Charles in the film version of this book, and it’s not hard to see why they were taken with the couple. Nick and Nora Charles are fricken’ awesome – their banter, their affection for one another, their goddamn chemistry as a literary couple – and it’s refreshing to see a hardboiled investigator who is actually happy much of the time.

The Jane Austen Book Club, Karen Joy Fowler: I keep talking to people who haven’t read this, even if they’re fans of Fowler’s other work. Apparently there’s some combination of the cover art and the movie that was made that warns people off, thinking it’ll be a very different book than it actually is. And I keep telling people “no, no, you’re wrong. It’s fricken’ awesome!” and occasionally they’ll listen to me and actually read the book and get in contact and say “yes, actually, you’re right, it is kind of awesome.” From the communal narrator to the unabashed love of books (both Austen and SF) that permeates the narrative, it’s just good.

Blush: Faces of Shame, Elspeth Probyn: There are very few books in the world that make me miss working in universities, but this is one of them. Essentially a long essay examining the role shame and embarrassment plays in contemporary culture, complete with a series of eloquent and personal arguments for the many ways they can be recontextualizes as positive things. Utterly fascinating.

The Conversations: Walter Murch and The Art of Editing Film, Michael Ondaatje:Just what it says on the tin – this is essentially the transcripts of several conversations Ondaatje (who wrote The English Patient, among other things) had with Murch (who edited a bunch of films, Apocalypse Now among them). I have this working theory that there is nothing better than getting two smart, passionate people together and letting them talk about the stuff that interests them, regardless of whether it how interesting it seems on the surface. Despite its title, this ranges across a variety of editorial approaches (including poetry and fiction) that makes it one of those books all writers should read. I keep coming back to it, again and again.

The Chains That You Refuse, Elizabeth Bear: One of the first books I picked up ’cause I saw it mentioned on livejournal, which then lead me to a series of novels that were similarly cool. But this, Bear’s short story collection, remains my favorite thing that she’s done – it’s wide-ranging in terms of genres, voices and approaches, setting seeds for the seemingly disparate approaches  she’s touched upon in longer works since, and there are several stories that are worth the price of entry on their own (including Two Dreams on Trains, And the Deep Blue Sea, One Eyed Jack and the Suicide King, This Tragic Glass).

Awesome Things about 2009 Fiction Edition

PETERMBALL Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption , , , , , , ,

2009 is totally going down as the year that I rediscovered how much I enjoy reading for pleasure. It’s one of those habits that eluded me a while back, which was kind of unfortunate given that my book-buying habit didn’t exactly die off at the same rate. And it’s not that I stopped reading, exactly; I just fell into the trap of rereading old favourites with the occasional new work creeping in. By the end of June I’d made the decision that this should be rectified and promptly started ploughing my way through the seemingly endless array of novels and non-fiction that fill my too-read bookcase.

Since then I’ve managed a fairly steady pace of two books a week. I’ve barely made a dent on the unread book read pile of doom, but it’s still exposed me to a lot of kick-ass fiction. To whit, I give you the fourth and fifth instalment of Awesome Things about 2009:

 Our spokebear approves The City & The CityThe City and the City, China Mieville (4/15)

‘Tis probably not to everyone’s tastes, but for my money The City and the City was a phenomenal novel that utterly blew my minds and reminded me why I enjoy reading fiction in the first place. There’s a part of me that’s a little bit in awe of this book, even as the other half of me is busy rereading chunks and trying tofigure out how Mieville pulled of the neat trick of taking such an absurd idea and making it seem totally fricken’ natural within the context of the novel. It’s the kind of book that makes me wish I still taught undergraduate writing theory classes, because it’d be fricken awesome to spend a semester watching other people process the book and respond to the narrative.

To put it simply: I heart this book. The Spokesbear hearts this book too. It’s one of those things that’s going to plague me for years as I try to figure out how it works, why it works, and whether I can eventually pull of something that’s equally as awesome as a writer (odds are, I can’t, but it’ll be fun to try). And awesome fiction is awesome.

 It Comes with Steampunk Zombies!A Whole Stack of Books by Cherie Priest (5/15)

One of the things that brings me considerable joy as a reader is that rush of reading someone for the first time and realising they’re still at the point in their career where you can both catch up (thus ensuring the immediate gratification of more books *now*) and follow their progression while new work gets released.

2006, for example, is always going to be the year where I picked up Elizabeth Bear’s short story collection and rushed through her first SF trilogy in the aftermath; 2007 is the year where I started picking up anthologies purely on the basis that they contained Kelly Link’s work; 2008 saw me rush through the noir novels of Christa Faust (with Hoodtown immediately earning its spot as one of my favourite novels ever)*.

I’m not entirely sure what separates these writers from other new writers I came across in the same years, but I suspect it’ll come down to some combination of: an interesting web presence where the writer talks about process, having new releases on the horizon just as I finished their first few books, and the release of smaller projects via Indie Presses (I speak here, primarily, of Subterranean; oh, how that company taunts me with the shiny hardcovers and special editions from writer after writer I enjoy reading).

2009 quickly became the year where I read a lot of Cherie Priest. Sure the entire process may have started in 2008 when Tor gave away free copies of Four and Twenty Blackbirds at Conflux, but 2009 was the year that I finally got around to reading the other two books, RSSed Priest’s blog so I wouldn’t miss any new books when they came out, and preordered Boneshakerso there’d be minimal delay between the end of the trilogy and the start of the next fix (because nothing says “fan for life” like the promise of steampunk zombies).

*Intriguingly, I have to retrace my steps back to 2004 (aka the year I read Etgar Keret for the first time) before there’s any testosterone in the list. And 2005 was a bust for fiction, although I followed a bunch of game designers that year instead. It made sense at the time.