New Reviews: Several of them
June 19, 2003 (10:18 PM) ( link )

ADDED reviews of Robert Cormier's I Am the Cheese, Norman Mailer's The Executioner's Song, Dan Rhodes Anthropology, Michael Marshall Smith's Spares, and Sheri Tepper's Grass. (Note, several of the reviews are missing the final paragraph: I'll fix things up with my scripts by tomorrow at the latest.)

Sorry for the long absence: I've been reading, intermittently, but the huge backlog of books I haven't yet reviewed has been scaring me away from this website for a while.

Nevertheless, here's a mix of old and new reviews: Cormier's and Tepper's books are from way back, while Mailer's and Smith's books are from much more recently.

Last week I discovered the D.C. Public Library. It's a great place: very large, with an impressive graphic novel collection (though it skimps on the tights-and-flights genre); its only problem is that many of the fiction sections are terribly organized, with the Si's before the Sa's and the Ta's after the Tu's. Also, when I went there, the air conditioning was down; not pleasant in a muggy D.C. afternoon.

That being said, there are plenty of good books on the horizon. I've actually already finished China Mieville's The Scar, his sequel to the excellent Perdido Street Station; that review should be popping up here over the weekend. I have sitting before me Michael Marshall Smith's second book, One of Us, as well as Greg Bear's Nebula-winning Darwin's Radio and Dan Simmons's Summer of Night, which is pretty creepy but also sort of cliched. Finally, I'm starting on Iain M. Banks's next Culture novel, Excession, which has a pretty cool initial concept. Before I sign off, here's a taste:

Two and a half millennia ago, the artifact appeared in a remote corner of space, beside a trillion- year old dying sun from a different universe. It was a perfect black body sphere and it did nothing. Then it disappeared. Now it is back.