The Total Library

First post for a while. Have had a very busy spell spying on a private library in my PKD disguise, resulting in the following recommendations for reading:

Heavy Game in the Western Himalaya, Sebastian Moran
The Grasshopper Lies Heavy, Hawthorn Abendsen
The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism, Emmanuel Goldstein
The Era of Hopeful Monsters, Kilgore Trout
History of England, Herodotus (ed Fr. Rolfe)
Celtic Saints of Britain and Europe, Dunstable Ramsay
Den hemlige Fralsaren, Nils Runeberg
My Friends the Newts, Loretta Peabody
A General History of Labyrinths, Silas Haslam
Lesbare und lesenwerthe Bemerkungen uber das Land Ukkbar in Klein-Asien, Johanes Valentinus Andrea
Necronomicon, Abdul Alhazred
Codex, de Selby
Clothes: Their Origin and Influence, Diogenes Teufelsdrockh
The Dynamics of an Asteroid, James Moriarty
Camel Ride to the Tomb, X Trapnel
On the Use of Mirrors in the Game of Chess, Milos Temesvar
A Clockwork Orange, F Alexander
Fast Cars, Paul Sheldon
Don Quixote, Pierre Menard
The Fountain Pen Mystery, Harriet Vane
On the Care of the Pig, Augustus Whiffle
Notes on the Collection of Incunabula, PDB Wimsey
Poems, FX Enderby

PKD lives!

I'm grateful to the excellent PKD blogsite Total Dick-Head [ http://totaldickhead.blogspot.com/2007/05/penultimate-hoax.html ] for publishing this article which demonstrates that Philip K Dick faked his own death. I see it was a Sunday newspaper though, so there is the outside chance it may not be true. But look around you. How can we doubt its truth? I am going to add a list of Dickian sites on the right.

Something to annoy everyone

Nougat for the old bitch... and a hand grenade for the young one. Nothing annoys like a list. Here is the American canon, but only the very highest heights of it. Objections and additions will receive my full attention and probably withering scorn.

Emerson: Journals
Hawthorne: The Scarlet Letter
Melville: Moby-Dick, Billy Budd
Poe: Poetry and Tales
Longfellow: Poems
Emily Dickinson: Poems
Henry James: Portrait of a Lady, The Ambassadors
Thoreau: Walden
Edith Wharton: The Age of Innocence
Frost: Poems
Wallace Stevens: Poems
Pound: The Cantos, Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, Translations
William Carlos Williams: Poems, Paterson
ee cummings: Poems
O Henry: short stories
Miller: Tropic of Cancer
Ashberry: Poems
Dos Passos: USA
Fitzgerald: The Great Gatsby
Faulkner: As I Lay Dying, Absalom! Absalom!
Runyon: short stories
Hemingway: short stories, A Farewell to Arms
Lowell: Poems
Bellow: Herzog
Roth: Patrimony
Donald Barthelme: short stories
Pynchon: V, Gravity's Rainbow
Mamet: Glengarry Glen Ross

The greatest American book ever is Leaves of Grass.

Reviewing: the coalface

Today I am at home and am going to try to write a roundup. That will be three or four books at a grand total of about 650 words. If we're really lucky, the paper will run one of those every two months or so. The stuff on the floor is the sf pending file. The stuff on the wall is the sf background reading. This is the garden office. You should see the house.

Writers, publishers, publicity departments, this is what you are up against.

Lee Child: New Readers Start Here

A shot rang out. He’d heard shots before.

But that had been a long time ago.

He’d heard them before, all right. In every other thriller. This sounded like a Baretta .177 with 14 rounds in the clip and an extra shot in the barrel, and an NRA sticker on the soft tan leather and canvas webbing shoulder holster from www.iwantoneofthoseshoulderholsters.com. Could have been. Their shots rang just that way.

To the untrained ear, shots went bang. But he’d been trained. He’d been trained to within an inch of his life.

But that had been a long time ago.

His reflexes had been honed over relentless hours of drill. But that had been an even longer time ago, before he’d been tragically widowed in the backstory which was slowly revealed over a number of books.

Before he’d been in jail. And in Nam. And ended up walking across America with only the clothes he stood up in.
And no baggage.

No baggage that wasn’t psychological baggage. That he had in spades. He’d killed a man with a spade once. It hadn’t been pretty, what a solid steel spade with a 32” T-bar shaft, securely fastened with three galvanised rivets and available from any branch of Homebase for £14.95 could do. In the right hands.

He looked at his right hand. It was firmly attached to the arm fixed to his 6’ 4” frame. For now. Still in pretty good shape for a man his age.

Who had been through what he’d been through.

A lot of people had looked at that hand before. For some of them, it had been the last thing they had seen. And not only when he was pulling a lightswitch in a cheap rented motel room. In Dunbarton Oaks, Illinois.

He had once seen a man strangled with the cord for a lightswitch. But that had been a long time ago. Before Korea.

Before that shot rang out. He knew what that kind of shot meant. It meant that he’d been wandering. His mind had wasted valuable minutes rehashing James Hadley Chase and James Grady and James Patterson. But not Henry James, or William James, or James Joyce. Or St James the Less.

He should have reacted at once. Like Jesse James. He was out of training.

But as he thought it, he realised that his body had already begun to do the work for him. Falling easily into the old routine. Soon he would move his legs, inside the cheap denims he had bought at the general store in Crawfordsville, Indiana; move his arms, inside the checked flannel shirt he had picked up at a K-Mart in Stephenville, in the Texas panhandle.

But that had been a long time ago. Soon it would be time to find out what the hell was going on here. But something sure as hell smelt wrong. Smelt like danger, like the whiff of a minor literary flourish inserted here as what passes for an arresting image.

He had smelt that smell a long time ago, even over the clothes that he wore before they fell off his back and he bought more at the nearest dime store. Not wanting to be tied down. One is always nearer by not keeping still, he thought.

No, on reflection, he didn’t. Thom Gunn was one of the few guns he wasn’t familiar with.

The hell with it. He had nearly used up 850 words already without saying a damn thing. He had always been the strong, silent type, of course.

But that had been a long time ago.

The man with the scar and the soft grey eyes brought the gun up against his head.

“Hold it right there, tough guy,” he said.

It wasn’t going to be his day. He’d had days like this before.

But that had been a long time ago.

Fiction news

An exciting new talent hits the web at
http://www.mollymckie.com/page4.htm
An excessive use of the comma in my view, but an effectively plagent ending, striking just the right ambiguously dark note.

M John Harrison

Simon Kavanagh texts me to say Mike Harrison has won the Arthur C Clarke award for Nova Swing. Huzzah!

I reviewed it here: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2006/12/24/boha16.xml