solzhenitsyn dead

I'm sorry to say he is. Here is the account of the life.

He wanted to be Tolstoy. That was his genius, and his tragedy.

Upcoming

Spent the journey in this morning writing four short reviews (which involved reading more than a dozen books) for a roundup, to arrive and discover a large ad had sold, and they wanted two very short ones. Oh well. I suppose I may be alble to do the next one a bit sooner for that reason. What I hope you'll get soon in the Telegraph is Paul McAuley's Cowboy Angels and Charlie Stross's Atrocity Archive and Jennifer Morgue.

What's been held over from today is the Peter F Hamilton and Hunter's Run; but there are a few other books I'd like to have included, so I can add them to that pair and get another one soon, I hope. It's much harder to write 150 words on something in sf - especially if you've ploughed through 650 pages of PFH, for example, which you can only really write about if you've read the previous two 650pp tomes in the same series, than it is to knock out 850 words on anything else. Still, I suppose I asked for it.

Future Classics: Schild's Ladder arrived this morning. It doesn't really glow in the dark, or not very successfully.

Thanatophile News

I began a blog on the Telegraph site today; its basis for existence is that it will deal with obituaries, though I suspect it will become a more general thing, with the paper's obits, or issues arising from them, being used as a springboard for the usual aimless chatter. I will point from here to there when it seems appropriate (less often, I'd guess, in the other direction). Anyone especially interested in obits can find it in the list on the right. It is chiefly for those who read the paper or the online version, so its comments will probably be compaints about obits which haven't run, or perceived injustices or errors in those which have. Of course, there's nothing to speak of on it yet. But if you like obits, you might want to look at it in a couple of weeks. The Telegraph's main site is www.telegraph.co.uk. Enough.