What I'm Reading

Novel: Agent to the Stars
Author: John Scalzi
Rating: Five out of five Siggies

I had just finished FIGHT CLUB and was rolling in the glee of finally finding a novel that I didn't bitch about, I just enjoyed the crap out of it. That filled my book karma quota, which usually means the next three or four books are going to either suck balls or just be so-so.

I picked up AGENT TO THE STARS at Book Expo America. I read Scalzi's OLD MAN'S WAR not too long ago and loved it. AGENT was free (a galley copy, no royalty for you, Scalzi, sorry about that) so I put the dog on the leash and dug in.

Was it possible to go two-for-two with friggin' awesome books? Apparently, it was. Scalzi writes fantastic dialogue. Funny, intelligent, full of the little digs that bounce back and forth between you and good friends. It seems clear he had fun writing this, maybe as much as I had reading it.

AGENT is a fun book. If you liked my short story CHUCKLES MULROONEY, ATTOURNEY FOR THE DAMNED you will love AGENT.  

The premise is simple -- aliens finally visit Earth, but theare not the cute E.T. variety. They are smelly gelatanous blobs. They hire a Hollywood agent to introduce them to humanity, to figure out how to show people an alience race that looks far more like snot than Alf. Aliens, snot, Hollywood agents -- you can see the hilarity begin to add up.

Having just lost a dog, I found the dog scenes in Agent to be fantastic. Loved this book. Loved it, loved it, loved it. 

NOVEL: FIGHT CLUB
AUTHOR: Chuck Palahniuk
RATING: Five out of five Siggies

My beloved dog Mookie recently passed on, so I'm taking longer walks with our 10-year-old dog Emma. I read while I walk her , which gives me about an hour of reading time a day. I finally picked up FIGHT CLUB by Chuck Palahniuk. A couple of reviewers have compared my writing style to this guy, but I haven't read him before. I'm a huge fan of the Fight Club movie so I thought I'd check him out.

Normally when someone is a critical darling, winning all dem awards and sech,  I find the book to be garbage. COLD MOUNTAIN is an example -- I couldn't make it through fifty pages of this self-absorbed work, which chooses to eliminate most punctuation that tells you who is talking, what characters are doing, etc. Apparently, if you throw grammar out the window (on purpose, not like my daily butchering of the language), then you are an artist and deserving of much praise.

So I had low expectations for FIGHT CLUB. Or to put it another way, I left my guard down, and Palahniuk kneed me in the balls and thumbed me in the eye. Holy shit. This book is an immediate entry into my Top Ten. Even though I'd seen and loved the movie, the book is even better. And even though he plays fast and loose with regular-person punctuation, and that takes some getting used to, it's a brilliant piece of work. I'd say if you like my stuff, you'd like FIGHT CLUB. If your male, you'll probably like it more. If you're male, ages 25 to 40 and you had a public school education, you will likely put it on a shelf surrounded by some little candles.

Quite honestly, I have never, ever, ever read a book that captures how I feel about my culture and my station in life with such brutal honesty and utter perfection. It's a rock-em-sock-em-robot of a story, but there's a lot of modern-day philosphy about what it's like to be a man stuck in a pacifist job when your primitive soul wants to go out and beat the shit out of something. 

How much did I dig it? I want to run out and read the rest of his work, but I'm afraid his other books won't live up to the same level of fucking awesome, and that will somehow dull the fucking awesome of FIGHT CLUB. And I refuse to let anyone dull the fucking awesome of FIGHT CLUB, even if I have to knee them in the balls and thumb them in the eye.

FREE CULTURE by Lawrence Lessig.


I was told by several people at Dragon*Con's podcasting and internet tracks that this book is mandatory reading. Matthew Wayne Selznik was one of them - hey M-Dub, thanks a bunch for giving me homework.Gosh, I missed it so ...
Just getting into it, so here's the review from BOOKLIST:
Lessig looks at the disturbing legal and commercial trends that
threaten to curb the incredible creative potential of the Internet. All
innovations are derived from a certain amount of "piracy" of preceding
innovations, Lessig argues, and he presents a catalog of technological
breakthroughs in film, music, and television as illustrations. Drawing
on distinctions between piracy that benefits a single user and harms
the owner and piracy that is useful in advancing new content or new
ways of doing business, Lessig strongly argues for a balance between
the interests of the owner and broader society so that we can continue
a "free culture" that encourages innovation rather than a "permission
culture" that does not. He reviews an array of legal actions, including
the restrictions on peer-to-peer sharing made famous by Napster, and
the threat they represent to the kind of openness the law has
traditionally allowed and from which the marketplace has benefited.
This is a highly accessible and enlightening look at the intersection
of commerce, the law, and cyberspace.
Vanessa Bush Copyright

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