September 2005 – John Joseph Adams

Archive for September, 2005

The Bestseller Awards

On Thursday last week, I attended the first annual Book Summit put on by The Book Standard. At the event, publishing professionals congregated to discuss trends in publishing and strategies for the future. Think of it as a con for booksellers and publishers. I went on the off chance that there’d be something of interest to genre fans, and proposed to Patrick Lee of SCI FI Wire that I cover the event. That got me in for free, so that was nice, but there was nary a mention of genre, so there was little to cover. However, at the end of the evening, The Book Standard’s Bestseller Awards were announced, several of which went to genre titles. As a result, I was able to write up a summary of the winners for SCI FI Wire, which you can now read here.

Carol Pinchefsky, the F&SF Humor Competition editor, and Douglas E. Cohen, the assistant editor at Realms of Fantasy, joined me at the event, Doug as my guest, and Carol was theoretically there to cover the event for UrbanDaddy.com (she also freelances for SCI FI Wire, but I beat her to the punch on this pitch).

Market Forces by Richard K. Morgan

A brilliant and brutal near-future SF satire about businessmen who manage wars (backing the side who they think will earn them the most profit if victorious) and climb the corporate ladder by killing off their competition in gladiatorial car duels; reads as if it were written by Harlan Ellison channeling Chuck Palaniuk, and ranks with the best of what either of those two have written.

Grade: A+

The Crippled Angel by Sara Douglass

Superb historical fantasy, set in plague-era Europe, that takes the well-trod trope of angels and demons battling for men’s souls and makes it fresh again.

Grade: A

Read the Kirkus review.

Triad by Terry McGarry

Complex and ambitious epic fantasy with great worldbuilding and an interesting magical system; hardcore Tolkein-ites will probably love it, but it will prove too dense for other readers.

Grade: B-

Savage Messiah by Robert Newcomb

Robert Jordan-clone; well-written and fast-paced, but there’s nothing here that hasn’t already been done to death.

Grade: D+

Read the Kirkus review.

One-Liner Reviews

Since I’m not allowed to reprint any of my Kirkus reviews, I link to them when I can, though they’re not always available online. So, since you faithful readers of my blog might be wondering what I thought of a particular book I was reading, I thought I’d try to post a brief summary of my thoughts, a sort of one-liner along with a letter grade to give you some idea.

You keep using that word…

…I do not think it means what you think it means.

In this case, the word is “adjacent,” and the misuser of that word is my optometrist. I got a notice in the mail the other day informing me that it was time for my eye exam, and the pamphlet reminded me that the doctor’s office was located “adjacent” to Lenscrafters.

So, the thing is, it’s not adjacent to Lenscrafters; it’s inside Lenscrafters. RadioShack is adjacent to the doctor’s office.

This doctor’s office has been using that phrase for several years now to describe their location, and even so it still tripped me up when I read it.

Shimmer Magazine

Please take a moment to visit the site of our sponsor, Shimmer Magazine. Okay, well, maybe they’re not really a sponsor per se, but they do have that nice shiny (shimmery?) banner ad up there, so they kind of are. It’s coming out in October or thereabouts, and I’m sure it’ll be chock full of spectacular content, not the least of which is a brilliant book review by me.

September 2005 Acquisitions

New this month: near-future dystopic SF from Paolo Bacigalupi, about immortality and the repurcussions it’ll have on society; the tale of an unusual man and an unusual cross-country race from Robert Reed; a second tale from Reed, this one completely different–a creepy SF tale about two female roommates and a young man who comes to visit…; an avian fantasy from Gene Wolfe; a new noosphere/Guth Bandar tale from Matthew Hughes; the story of a very selective princess by John Morressy; and a very short trip back to the days of the Cold War courtesy of Bruce McAllister.

Thoughts on Reviewing

I was talking to someone about my various reviewing gigs, and she mentioned that freelance work like that sounds like a dream job for someone who loves reading. That’s true to a certain extent, but at times it can also be somewhat of a nightmare.

See, the thing is, most reviewers are assigned certain books to review, and so you have to read and review it no matter what. If you absolutely hate the book, you have to finish reading it, and then write a negative review. Doing this can be cathartic to the reviewer, since the author made him suffer through such a dreadful book. But that doesn’t really make amends for the fact that several hours of the reviewer’s life have been wasted reading the dreck in question, and suffering through those hours can be exquisite agony.

On the other hand, of course, it’s always nice to be paid to read something you would have read anyway, and it’s always a nice surprise to read and really enjoy something you wouldn’t have picked up otherwise. That’s happened to me a couple times already since I started reviewing regularly, and for that I’m grateful.

In any case, the primary reason for my unplanned blog vacation has been that I’ve had to devote nearly all of my free time to getting my reading done, and reading bad books seems to take much longer than reading good ones. I’ve been reviewing two books per week for Kirkus, and that’s become too much, so I’m going to scale back to one per week. That should make reading–even the bad books–much easier to accomplish without devoting all my time to it.

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