We get the Sunday New York Times delivered, because there's something infinitely more civilized about reading an actual paper than sitting at the computer browsing news stories on the Web. The message isn't any different, but the medium makes a difference. Also, I'm more likely to stop to read a story on paper than I am to click on a headline link in a page of links.
What with travel and all, I didn't have as much time as usual last weekend, so the Book Review ended up being set aside, and read this week. Two quick items from reading two weeks of the Times Book Review section back to back:
1) The back page of last week's section is dominated by an ad for Bauman Rare Books hawking, among other things, a first edition of Alexander Pope's translation of Homer for a cool $32,000. This week's back page is a large ad for the vanity press iUniverse.
I find it sort of amusing to contemplate the overlap between those two markets.
(Snarky second item, about Charlie Stross, below the fold.)
2) Last week's Book Revies included a couple of SF reviews-- Justina Robson's Living Next Door to the God of Love and Charlie Stross's Glasshouse. I was interested to see a review of the Stross, which sort of popped up on store shelves with no advance hype that I noticed. I definitely wanted to see a review of this one, as I wasn't real happy with the last two Stross books I bought (Accelerando is sort of the distilled essence of everything I found annoying in Singularity Sky and Iron Sunrise, and I wasn't very happy with The Hidden Family, either), so I would need to hear good things before buying this in hardback.
The premise for this one involves far-future post-humans stuck into a simulation of 21st century life as part of a mysterious experiment of some sort. The review (by Dave Itzkoff, who I don't know) includes this sentence:
The Kafkaesque scenario is a clever pretext for Stross to send up institutions and customs of our present day: to re-imagine organized religion as a role-playing game where conformist behavior is rewarded with meaningless social points; to challenge such soon-to-be-outdated customs as wearing clothes in public; and to pepper his writing with instantly memorable, anarchic slogans like "It's always a bad day at the office, insofar as the office exists in the first place."
Wow. That sounds excruciating. I'm getting this out of the library, if I read it at all.
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I'm really scratching my head trying to figure out how that slogan is "instantly memorable." It strikes me as extremely bland and forgettable, actually.
I kind of enjoyed Iron Sunrise; Singularity Sky, not so much. I've been put off everything else Stross thus far by the reviews (not the dead tree reviews, which have mostly been glowing, judging by the blurbs, but the weblog variety).
Charlie Stross is a rather flexible writer. Of his stuff, what I really like was his Lovecraftian-styled sf (but with less purple prose). I enjoyed Singularity Sky and Iron Sunrise but found the Hidden Family stuff rather pedestrian.
Most of the online reviews I have read of Glasshouse are positive, and say it is much easier to read than Accelerando, with a more standard structure, better dialogue, etc., but plays with the same ideas. If one does not like the premises of Acclerando, than I would guess one will still not like Glasshouse.