How Do You Read?

I don't know about the rest of you, but I'm typically reading a couple books at once at any given time. Right now I'm reading:

THE SHADOW YEAR by Jeffrey Ford
MEAT by Joseph D'Lacey
THE AUDACITY OF HOPE by Barack Obama
STRANGE TOYS by Patricia Geary

And in the past five days I've finished MAKE LOVE NOT WAR by David Allyn and SHINJUKU SHARK by Arimasa Osawa. At one point I was reading all six of those books. The current four I've just started. That is to say, I'm not very far into the book, as opposed to I just pulled the book out and started reading it recently.

Now, in some ways I was reluctant to list the books I'm reading, as I don't feel like I'm really reading any of them at the moment. For me, I need to be at least 100 pages into a book before I really feel like I'm reading it. At the moment, I'm not 100 pages into any of the books I'm reading.

For some reason, once I get past that 100 page mark, I feel like I'm really into the book. I remember what's going on every time I pick it up, I don't need to skim back a few pages to catch myself up on which book this is, and I'm usually sucked into the story to want to keep going.

Sometimes I don't get to that 100 page mark. Sometimes that mark comes much later. Rarely, it comes sooner than that. And, I try to not have more than five books in which I'm past the 100 page mark. That's just too much to try and handle.

However, until I start getting some books at the 100 page mark, I will keep adding more and more new books. I have the following books queued up: BLOOD ENGINES by T. A. Pratt, THE BAUM PLAN FOR INDEPENDENCE by John Kessel, THROUGH A GLASS, DARKLY by Bill Hussey, and SHARP TEETH by Toby Barlow (I think there are others, like A CONFEDERACY OF DUNCES, but I'd have to look at the my to-read stack to be sure). Any of these books could suddenly get added to my currently reading stack.

How about you?

Looking for Reviewers

For people who are interested in reviewing either Robert Freeman Wexler's Psychological Methods to Sell Must Be Destroyed: Stories or Electric Velocipede #14 and are willing to read PDFs, please e-mail me: editor [at] electricvelocipede [dot] com.

I've disabled comments on this post because I want people to contact me.

More Book Listy Meme-ness

From Del Kytlar. The Big Read reckons that the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books they've printed.

1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read.
3) Underline the books you LOVE.

There was something about adding this to your LJ, which I'm not sure that I'll do or not. The point was to find the people who have only read six books on the list and foist more on them, but I suspect that I've read more than six. And where the hell is Frankenstein on this list?

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald*
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones's Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte's Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole**
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare***
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

So I've read 31 on this list. Not too bad. I've obviously got big gaps with no Russian or French authors' books read, and only a handful Dickens. I'm sure I've read more Austen, but I don't know what. There's all those Masterpiece Theatre mini series, so perhaps I just THINK I've read them. I've also missed out on all the Brontes.

Now . . . Mr. Wheeler, I am looking directly at you. You're next.
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*I absolutely LOVE this book. IMO, the greatest American novel ever written.

**I just bought a copy of this over the weekend. Now I will get my chance to read it.

***My second-favorite Shakespeare play (right behind MacBeth); do yourself a favor and read it, don't bother seeing any of the movie versions. And if can, see it live. It's amazing.

Paolo Bacigalupi

Paolo is one of my favorite 'new' writers. He's written a bunch of stellar short pieces (including a disturbing piece "Softer" for Logorrhea) and I always look forward to something new from him.

Right now, you can go here and learn a little bit about Paolo over on NPR. Very cool.

Jeff VanderMeer and Women Writers

I'm hoping that Jeff enjoys the new issue* when it arrives, since he just posted about some of the writing he enjoyed most while reading for the Best American Fantasy 2 was done by female writers.

This list is a fantastic round-up of writers that I hope get wider exposure and bigger audiences in the years to come. On top of that, three people that I've published made his list: Beth Adele Long ("The Rose Thief in Electric Velocipede #4), Michelle Richmond ("Logorrhea" in Logorrhea), and Rachel Swirsky ("How the World Became Quiet: A Post-Human Creation Myth" in Electric Velocipede #13).

Other authors that Jeff lists that I really enjoy reading include Aimee Bender and Shelley Jackson. There are many more that I need to become familiar with.
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*In case you forgot, the new issue was all female contributors in honor of Wiscon, the world's largest feminist science fiction convention.

Hits Me Right Between the Eyes

So, I can't remember why I started reading Ugly Hill* but today's strip really hit home for me today. It was . . . eerily familiar . . . apt? Just replace 'strip' with 'zine' and you could have me talking. The punchline is:

"Hey that's . . . ! Wow, that's kind of comforting. Yes! I'm defective!"

It's the set up to the punchline that I think fits me to a tee.

I'm totally digging on Ugly Hill right now. Everyone in Ugly Hill is some sort of monster or creature. They are all unique. Siblings, parents, children, very few characters look like each other. However, at the same time, the strip references things that happen in our world, such as current movies or music. It's a bewildering array of zaniness that I can't stop looking at.

The strip completely loves the fact that it's a comic. The characters are completely ridiculous--the main character's brother goal in life is to be an over-worked drone in a soul-sucking corporate office, and he KILLS or EATS people who get in his way--but the strip seems to revel in that fact.
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*OK, I totally remember, but it's REALLY boring. Suffice to say, it was because of Lore Sjoberg and we'll leave it at that.

Since I've been getting questions

For the moment, we are damp but above water here in IA. We're in Davenport, which is right on the Mississippi, but it's typically the tributaries over-flowing their banks that causes the most trouble.

That's not to say that the Mississippi can't overflow its banks. Downtown Davenport--right on the river--is flooded this morning. I-80 is closed between Davenport and Iowa City (where the flooding is bad), so to get to Des Moines from where I live, you have to drive through Dubuque, a detour that adds 110 miles onto your trip.

We are fine. There are a lot of people worse off then us, but we appreciate being in your thoughts.

Best American Fantasy 2

I have it on excellent authority* that some of the work I edited and published last year will be holding a spot in the Best American Fantasy vol 2:

Michelle Richmond - "Logorrhea" (from LOGORRHEA)
Rachel Swirsky - "How the World Became Quiet: A Post-Human Creation Myth"

(from Electric Velocipede #13)

The year's best reprints for LOGORRHEA keep coming, don't they? And I can't tell you how excited I am for Rachel's story to be reprinted. It means a lot to me when stuff out of my little magazine gets recognized. It's things like this that can make my whole week . . . or month.

I know I've spoken before on this, but it's one thing to enjoy the stories I select, and have fun laying out the issue, etc.. I should feel all those things. It would be ridiculous to go through all this effort for something I didn't enjoy. But to have an impartial third party validate your choices, to acknowledge that you're finding and publishing good work . . . that means a lot.

It doesn't hurt that Rachel is fantastically talented. I think we're going to see a lot more amazing fiction from Rachel in the future. I know that I have at least one poem from her in the near future, and I hope to see more work from her once I re-open to submissions.
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*I also was given permission to speak about this even though the final ToC is not official yet.

OMG, I am giggling over here...

All I can say is:

http://lolthulhu.com/

plz to insert 1d4 adventurererers

kthnx

Selling My Childhood

Just a word of warning, what follows is crass commercialism. If you'd rather not read about stuff I'm selling, go check out my list of World Fantasy Award nominations instead. After finally getting the chance to go through the boxes my parents brought to our house last summer when they helped us move. These were apparently things I had 'forgotten' at their house, and now that I had a house of my own (and more importantly, now that I was close enough to drive to) they thought I should have them back.

To that end, I have some of the material up for sale on eBay. These are the big things. My Micronauts, my Shogun Warriors, and my Metagaming Microgames.

You'll also see a few books that I have listed. There are two ARCs for books that I have purchased in the final format (in the case of INK, I have a British edition and an American edition) and a copy of Jeff VanderMeer's VENISS UNDERGROUND, which I realized that I had two copies.

There are a few more things that I haven't done any research on like an old ripcord yellow Tron vehicle (without the rider) and a few boxes of comic strip books, choose-your-own-adventure books, and other ephemera. I have the Hobbit and Return of the King 45 RPM book sets, and the double album Hobbit set. I also have a bunch of weird comic book + 45 RPM record of Spiderman, Batman (I think), and Star Trek. A lot of these things are either too saturated on eBay, or haven't generated a lot of interest. If anyone is excited by these unlisted items