I Still Walk The Earth
Hello, prose-starved friends. I'm in the middle of a book deadline and haven't had time or even interest in posting here. But perhaps you're feasting on my prose elsewhere, like my recent Slate piece on the important topic of articles about football players doing yoga, or my final Nerve.com Bad Sex column.
There is much going on in the world, as opposed to during any other time in human history. There are hundreds of other blogs that handle the coverage better than I can, or want to. Meanwhile, I've read some more books, bringing me up to 35 for the year. There was a Hard Case Crime pulp job that was my least favorite that the publisher has put out, full of cliched characters and situations, so I shall not mention it here. I also read John McDonald's first Travis McGee novel, The Deep Blue Goodbye, because I think if I love this genre I'm supposed to do that. And I definitely liked some of the book. McDonald really hda a sense of place. But I'm tired of noir hero as existential superman. The problem with a protagonist who appears in 20 books is that his or her "adventures" in ONE of them would be a lifetime for a normal person. So I guess after a while the genre starts to wear.
What else? Arthur Phillips The Egyptologist, which was amusing for about 50 pages but after that I found it a bit over-stylized. And I read Jared Diamond's Collapse, which is a kind of environmental history book about why societies choose to thrive or fail. I think he thinks we're about to fail. It was an interesting read, if a bit textbook-y. And now I'm working on book 36, a British science-fiction novel from the 1950s called WASP, which is the best book about politics, war, and terrorism that I've read. Nothing that I've read since 9-11 describes our current situation better, which is strange, because, again, it's a British science-fiction novel from the 1950s.
And now back to my hole.