“The Swan Troika,” my last story for Realms of Fantasy (February 2011), made the Tangent Recommended Reading List for 2011. You can see the complete list here. Lots of great stories on the list, of course. I’m glad I don’t have the job of narrowing it down.
Category Archives: Reading
Not a Review – Of a Book I Will Not Name
I used to review books. That is to say, I used to do it regularly. Back when SF Age of late lamented memory was still around, I even got paid for doing them. As a kid who grew up as a voracious reader that’s the sort of gig you wonder who you have to bribe or murder to get. I mean, paid to read books? Does it get any better than that? Yet by the time SF Age was coming to the end of its run, I was pretty much burned out on the whole idea. Not because I was forced to read books I wasn’t interested in. The esteemed editor, Scott Edelman, would always ask first and if the book didn’t interest me, I didn’t have to take the assignment. I can only think of one such case when I actually did turn one down, but it was always an option, and the books usually had something going for them that piqued my interest. I read a lot of good books in that time.
No, I burned out because the job eventually got too hard. Seriously. Continue reading
Ebook Reviewing – Nice Hammer. Too Bad This Isn’t a Nail
Not too long ago I was listening to a podcast where the guest was a well-known critic/reviewer in the sf and fantasy field. I was especially struck by an exchange during the interview where the reviewer mentioned owning a Kindle and how much he was enjoying it. So the host asked him how owning the ebook reader had affected his reviewing habits. To which the reviewer replied that it hadn’t affected them at all, because he didn’t usually review books on the Kindle. There’s a reason for that, of course, and that reason—at least in theory—has nothing to do with being prejudiced against ebooks. Continue reading
Review – The Rhinoceros Who Quoted Nietzsche by Peter S. Beagle
The Rhinoceros Who Quoted Nietzsche and Other Odd Acquaintances by Peter S. Beagle, Tachyon Publications, 1997
My first acquaintance with Peter Beagle’s work, like a lot of other people’s, was the classic The Last Unicorn. I was hooked, and sought out everything else I could find, which at that time was I See By My Outfit and A Fine and Private Place, a non-fiction account of a cross-country trip on a motor scooter and Beagle’s first novel, respectively. I didn’t even know that he did any work at less than novel length until I stumbled upon the one-two pairing of “Come Lady Death” and “Lila the Werewolf” in The Fantasy Worlds of Peter Beagle back in 1978.
The Tachyon collection came along a good deal later, in 1997, and even though it also included the above two stories, I snapped it up for what else was there, including the title story which I had managed to miss in its first print appearance, plus “The Naga” (likewise) and a
story original to this volume, “Julie’s Unicorn.”
Another Such Weekend and I Am Undone
- Bill Eakin at Yuletide Souls Fest
My social and business calendars were pretty much filled this weekend, though on Saturday it was hard to tell where business ended and social began, since it was such a mixture of both. My primary event on Saturday was the Yuletide Souls Fest at the Vicksburg Public Library. Besides the locals, William R.(Bill) Eakin had come down from Arkansas. He’s the author of Redgunk Tales and another frequent contributor to Realms of Fantasy. I hadn’t seen Bill in years and we had to mourn a bit together for magazines past. Continue reading
Richard Parks 