The New Oxford Book of Canadian Short Stories Margaret Atwood (Editor), Robert Weaver (Editor) I read  The New Oxford Book of Canadian Short Stories , (eds  Margaret Atwood ,  Robert Weaver ) because it is the textbook for a community college course I've registered for this winter called "Writing Short Stories". This is one of the worst short story collections I have ever read in my life. I noticed early on that it appeared to be the same story over and over again. A man and a woman are trapped in a desperately unhappy marriage. Maybe something happens, or maybe not. It is evident that for  Atwood  and  Weaver  plot is entirely optional. Some of the stories had one, and some did not. There were rare exceptions to the desperately unhappy marriage storyline, in which the characters were miserable for other reasons. You know that feeling of relief as you approach the end of a really bad book? I had that feeling 45 times in rapid succession as I worked my ...

Reaper Man Terry Pratchett Death (the character, not the phenomenon) is the only real hero of  Terry Pratchett 's  Discworld . Unlike every other  Discworld  character (with Granny Weatherwax and Lord Vetinari as sporadic but unreliable exceptions) Death is relentlessly competent and by his lights ethical. He's also a kind of cool guy to hang out with. Already he has developed a personality. Although  Reaper Man  is only the second book in the  Death subseries , we readers have seen quite a lot of him. In a series in which violence plays as important a role as  Discworld , and in which in addition there is a specific character who shows up every time someone dies, you can safely bet that Death is going to have at least a cameo in each Discworld novel. Not everyone loves Death. There is a body of people -- well, not people, best just call them entities -- called the Auditors of Reality who take it on themselves to make sure the universe runs as it ...

Death and What Comes Next Terry Pratchett Death and What Comes Next  is a short story (which you can read for free  here ) in  Terry Pratchett 's  Discworld . It is a conversation between Death (a character well known to  Discworld  readers) and a recently deceased philosopher. The philosopher spews a lot of vapid sophistry in which he argues that he might NOT be dead -- the word quantum is involved. Death responds with equal vapidity. Death has the last word, because... Duh... Usually, even in the worst  Discworld  production, you can rely on some  Pratchett  verbal fireworks to make it amusing. I am sorry to say that is not the case in  Death and What Comes Next . It's a dead loss on all counts, except that it is only one page long, so it is but a small waste of time. Death and What Comes Next  on The L-Space Goodreads review  

The College Handbook of Creative Writing Robert DeMaria This winter I will be taking a course called "Essentials of Writing Fiction" at my local community college, and  Cengage Advantage Books: The College Handbook of Creative Writing by Robert DeMaria  is the textbook. So, I got my Hermione on and read the whole thing in advance. In his preface,  Robert DeMaria  claims, and I have no reason to doubt it, that the first edition was the first textbook of creative writing to be published and used as a college creative writing textbook. Before that publishers were wary, thinking that the subject was too "idiosyncratic" for a text. (Apparently they all used exactly the same words to express their skepticism, from which  DeMaria  deduces that they were all talking to each other about it.)  DeMaria  managed to convince a publisher to give him a try, and he wrote a text that he used to teach creative writing courses. That was 1991. Over time the book has ...

Moving Pictures Terry Pratchett Moving Pictures , the tenth novel in  Terry Pratchett 's  Discworld  series, is nominally about clicks (which is what movies are called in the  Discworld ), but more than clicks it is about Holy Wood, which is, of course, Hollywood. The premise is that Alchemists invent a way to make clicks. Just as in our world, a click is a projection of a very large number of static pictures in a short time, producing the illusion of motion. There is also, as it happens, a multiverse connection. This is definitely not one of the most strongly plotted  Discworld  novels. The plot such as it is, is that clicks are a world-endangering technology that needs to be nipped in the bud. The novel consists mostly of a mockery of Hollywood. It definitely has its moments, for instance a giant female clicks Star climbing the Tower of Art with an ape (the librarian, as it happens) clutched in her hand. There are other such references to famous films. I ...

The Catcher in the Rye J.D. Salinger I was  recently reminded  of  J.D. Salinger 's  The Catcher in the Rye , a book I last read about 50 years ago. I remembered that I liked it a lot, and that it was short. Also, it takes place around Christmas. So I thought, "Why not?" and picked it up again. It holds up. The story is told in the first person by sixteen-year-old Holden Caulfield, a rich kid who is just flunking out of the third or fourth prep school in a row. He takes off on his own to wander around New York City. Holden makes  Catcher in the Rye  for me. I really like him. Now, to be clear, I don't mean that I would want to meet Holden in the flesh. He's a liar and a creep whose conversation would exhaust my limited supply of patience in 15 seconds. But underneath all that, he's fundamentally a good guy trapped in a world that he can't make work for him. For instance, Holden is a virgin, a fact that looms large in his self-image. He is a virgin because ...

Emberclaw L.R. Lam Humans and dragons used to live together in Loc. The humans betrayed the dragons, banishing them to the hellish world Vere Celene beyond the Veil, where they survive at the edge of extinction. This at least, is the story as dragons tell it -- humans tell a different story. In  Dragonfall , the first book of  L.R. Lam 's  Dragon Scales  duology, Everen, the last male dragon, traveled through the Veil from Vere Celene to Loc, where he bonded with thief Arcady, who had unwittingly called him to themselves. Everen's mission is to make Arcady fall in love with him, then kill them and steal their magic, bringing dragonkind home to Loc. Arcady is not an easy mark, and the end of  Dragonfall  saw Everen evicted from Loc, his bond with Arcady seemingly broken, in an act of not entirely unintentional mutual partial betrayal. Everen's mission having failed, he is treated as a criminal by his mother and sister back on Vere Celene.  Dragonfall ...

Wind and Truth Brandon Sanderson Some books contain a moment so perfect, so luminous, that it glows up an entire series. I think of the scene in  Lloyd Alexander 's  Chronlces of Prydain  in which  Fflewddur Fflam  burns his harp, or the reunion of Molly and Foxglove in  Ben Aaronovitch 's  Lies Sleeping , or  Cordelia's return from her shopping trip  in  Lois McMaster Bujold 's  Barrayar . Wind and Truth , the latest installment in  Brandon Sanderson 's  Stormlight Archive  contains such a moment. It is when Kaladin, trying to imagine something that would make him happy, realizes, "He wanted to go dancing with Syl." Kaladin, "an old spear who wouldn’t break," is a grizzled veteran who has been a solider, a slave, and a leader and who has survived the hardest of lives. Sylphrena is an honorspren -- that is, she is an audible, visible, and occasionally tangible embodiment of Honor. She and Kal are bound by oaths, not t...

Songs of Innocence and Experience William Blake I have to begin with a disclaimer. Usually I read poetry very slowly, one or two poems a day. This gives me the time to savor it. However, I had surgery two days ago and brought  William Blake 's  Songs of Innocence and Experience  along to read while waiting for the surgeons to slice me open. It is possible that these are not the best conditions for appreciating  Blake . With that caveat, I was more disappointed than pleased by this volume of poetry. It consists mostly of drivel like this: When the green woods laugh with the voice of joy, And the dimpling stream runs laughing by; When the air does laugh with our merry wit, And the green hill laughs with the noise of it; interrupted by occasional flashes of brilliance like this O rose, thou art sick! The invisible worm, That flies in the night, In the howling storm, Has found out thy bed Of crimson joy, And his dark secret love Does thy life destroy. or this The human d...

A Drop of Corruption Robert Jackson Bennett Every speculative fiction novel is a mystery. We don't necessarily call it that -- the usual term is world-building. But the best F&SF novels don't just tell you about the world you're in: they make it a puzzle that the reader gradually solves. World building becomes world discovery. Some F&SF novels are also murder mysteries, with detectives and the big reveal at the end. Robert Jackson Bennett 's  A Drop of Corruption  is both. It starts out as a locked-room murder mystery. Ana and Din figure out how the murder was done almost immediately, but who did it and why they don't know. That is the mystery that most of the novel is concerned with. It turns out to be deeply tied to the nature of the Empire of Khanum. Although  I loved   The Tainted Cup  -- it was just so much fun! -- I didn't love the world-building. It felt perfunctory to me. This surprised me because  Bennett  is an author who is not afrai...

In That Sleep Seanan McGuire In That Sleep  is  Seanan McGuire 's December 2024 Patreon reward. This came out twice, in a first post, then a corrected one. In the first post , 01-Dec-2024, she introduced it as follows, (Image: Two blue classic tabby and white Maine Coons against an orange and pink background. One, Alice, is looking at the camera.) We've had a few months of pretty short stories. So here is my Hogswatch present to you all, as I return one last time to the well of Titania's shitty version of Faerie, to see how August got on during the enchantment. Warning: quite long. If you haven't read Sleep No More  and The Innocent Sleep , this may not make much sense. I recommend picking them up if you can. Enjoy! The corrected post appeared 06-Dec-2024, with this introduction: (Image: A very green frog sits on a brown houndstooth cane, against a background of blue.) So "In That Sleep" is very long. As in, 60,000 words, as opposed to the normal 8,000 to 10,...

Lyrics 1964-2011 Paul Simon A thing I will never get used to: most people listen to popular songs, and they don't hear the words. Over and over I have had the experience of listening to a song with someone, making a remark on the lyrics, and discovering that the someone, who literally JUST HEARD THEM, is unaware of them. Over and over I have had people tell me, "I don't like poetry." The following conversation often ensues, Do you like rock songs? Yes! Then you like poetry! That's different. And it is different, because they don't hear the words as words that mean something -- they are just sounds like the drums and guitars. They listen to  Bruce Springsteen 's  Thunder Road  without hearing the poetry. It's not a thing I can do. Paul Simon  is, in my opinion, the best poet among popular singer/songwriters. This, of course, is not an objective opinion.  Simon  has been there making sounds in the background of my whole life. He burst into my consciousne...

The Lost Future of Pepperharrow Natasha Pulley I complained in  my review  of  Natasha Pulley 's  The Watchmaker of Filigree Street  that "The ending of the book left me confused. I wasn't sure what had just happened, and there were loose ends that were not tied up, or perhaps merely seemed so in my confusion." I hoped that this sequel would clear up my confusion, and it did that. And it also tells a big story of Keita Mori. Who is this "Pepperharrow" named in the title? It turns out that all this time Mori has had a secret wife, Takiko Pepperharrow, living on his estate back in Japan. Takiko's father was English -- thus the non-Japanese name Pepperharrow. Takiko is the main point-of-view character of this novel. She's an impressive woman, a theater owner who acquired her theater and her position by threatening the former owner. Mori had a use for her, so he abetted her schemes. They married and she went to live on his Yokohama estate Yoruji. We star...