Ecce Signum

Stopped by the bookstore on the way home from work. Intended to grab No Country for Old Men and leave, but there next to it on the new release shelf was The Summer He Didn’t Die by Jim Harrison. Of course, I couldn’t pass that up, especially seeing as how they were both discounted.

I haven’t read Harrison in several years. The last of his novels I picked up was The Road Home about seven years ago. More recently was The Beast God Forgot to Invent, a collection of novellas. I like Harrison’s shorter works more than his novels, so finding the new book was quite a treat.

The new Harry Potter book was quite good. I won’t say better than I expected because I expected it to be good. J.K. Rowling is consistently doing a very good job of both changing the tone of her novels as the protagonists age, and improving the quality and complexity of her writing. It will be interesting to see where she goes after the next (and last) Harry Potter.

A couple of hour ago I finished reading Olympos, which exceeded my expectations by a wide margin. The great thing about reading Dan Simmons in general, and this book in particular, is the great sense of the joy of writing which comes out of his work.

Next on the stack, and probably done by morning, is H.P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life, by Michel Houellebecq.

As everyone in the universe knows, the latest Harry Potter book, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, went on sale this morning at midnight. I waited until 4:30 in the afternoon to pick up my copy from Argos Books, along with a boxed set of The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, Unbeliever by Stephen R. Donaldson, and The Sterile Cukoo, the first book by John Nichols, whose The Milagro Beanfield War I read back in June.

And this should keep me busy for the rest of the weekend, up to Tuesday, when Cormac McCarthy’s newest book, No Country for Old Men, will hit the shelves.

Mmmmmm…books.

In the few fragments that remain of [Roger Fenwick’s] own story, he records that he learned but three things in two years at Oxford. The first, on which he placed the greatest value, was that “Yea” might be turned into “Nay” and vice versa if a sufficient quantity of wordage was applied to the matter. The second was that in any argument, the victor is always right, and the third that though the pen is mightier than the sword, the sword speaks louder and stronger at any given moment.

Leonard Wibberly, The Mouse That Roared

On a whim I stopped by George R. R. Martin’s site, and discovered that At Long Last, after untold decades of feverish expectations, A Feast for Crows is moving into production. For fans of the fantasy genre, this is indeed big news, as the third book in the series (Feast is the fourth) was published in October of 2000.

As for when it will hit the shelves—as near as I can tell, sometime between late July and December of this year. Use the intervening time to read the rest of the series.

Well, I finished everything on my stack. The Milagro Beanfield War was remarkable, and Twisty Little Passages offered up many interesting insights into the development of all kinds of interactive experiences.

Next up: Dark Age Ahead by Jane Jacobs (chiefly known as the author of The Death and Life of Great American Cities):

We in North America and Western Europe, enjoying the many benefits of the culture conventionally known as the West, customarily think of a Dark Age as happening once, long ago, following the collapse of the Western Roman Empire. But in North America we live in a graveyard of lost aboriginal cultures, many of which were decisively finished off by mass amnesia in which even the memory of what was lost was also lost. Throughout the world Dark Ages have scrawled finis to successions of cultures receding far into the past.