The Pluto Files: The Rise and Fall of America’s Favorite Planet, by noted astronomer and Pluto-hater Neil Degrasse Tyson. Samwise read this book and immediately displayed signs of having drunk deeply of the haterade. It includes reproductions of well-deserved angry letters Tyson received from second- and third-graders.

Sixty-One Nails by Mike Shevdon, which I bought because of this amazing Big Idea piece by the author, and also because The Queen is very much into urban fantasy. Kids these days! I have to say that so far it hasn’t grabbed me, but I haven’t exactly thrown it across the room, either. I’m also not a huge fan of the current tendency to publish all SF/F books as a series; yes, I get from the publisher’s point of view this is a great marketing tool, but from my point of view, it’s like dating and finding that on the first date, everybody grills you about whether you’re interested in settling down and having kids. Publishers, I just want to read a book, not commit!

The Damnation Game by Clive Barker, which is still one of my favorite horror novels. At some point I’d misplaced my copy, and as it’s now out of print I was fortunate to find a used one in very good condition. I hadn’t realized until reading the new edition that Barker gave himself a cameo.

Moxyland, another Angry Robot imprint, by Lauren Beukes. It had positive blurbs from every hip cyberpunk author ever, with an especially killer comment from Charles Stross, so of course I bought it. Amazingly, archival technology has advanced to the point that the pages are actually treated to protect them from handling by the uncool, so that I was able to pick up the book for extended periods of time without any noticeable degeneration to the cover or spine. It’s currently somewhere in The Queen’s room and will require excavation to locate.

Game Theory: A Very Short Introduction, one of the VSI series from Oxford Press. I am addicted to Very Short Introductions. They are affordable, interesting, generally written by somebody who knows what they’re talking about, and you can stuff two of them into a purse, easily. Unfortunately it appears that I really am just never going to understand game theory.

The author, Thomas Wheeler, is a screenwriter by trade, and boy does it show. A trivial example: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle takes a ship to America in order to meet with H.P. Lovecraft. The chapter starting on his arrival is headed, yes in all caps, “TWO WEEKS LATER”. Now, this is something you have to do in a movie, where there’s no really good way to explain the scene shift unless you’re using a narrator. Same for the hero looking through the notebooks of a dead magician, and finding the kind of mysterious expository scribblings that, in a movie  are there to show the viewer what’s going on. In a book it’s ridiculous and reminds you that, yes, somebody is probably tilting this thing to be made into a movie.

Add in wooden dialogue, a frankly embarrassing portrayal of the lone female protagonist as a lonely sexpot, and a leaden Evil Conspiracy Opposed By A Good Conspiracy, and you’ll understand why I quit halfway through.

But when I’m deciding to invest time reading a book, I don’t want to commit to reading (much less buying) multiple books if I don’t know I already like it. It’s a bit like agreeing to a first date and then having the other person ask you what kind of house the two of you should live in and how many kids you want to have; geez, buddy, I’m not ready for that kind of commitment!

And so it really pisses me off to get to the end of a book and only then find out it’s only Book 1 of a trilogy. Because that tells me that not only could you not fit a whole tale in a book-sized package, but you figured you needed to trick me into reading it, and then hope you’d hooked me into shelling out for two more books just to find out what happened next.

Not going to happen, hopeful author. I stopped caring about the characters right there and then.

The National Endowment for the Arts is supposed to promote the arts, of course, so one is unsurprised to find them arguing that people need to, you know, spend more time doing artsy things. Especially those damn philistine kids with their PSPs and their Intertubes.

What’s unfortunate is that their advocacy piece is being taken as objective proof that “Americans don’t read.”

It actually says no such thing. What the NEA is looking at, primarily, is the rate of reading a particular class of writing: novels, short stories, plays and poems. Not nonfiction books. Not magazines. Not blogs. (Manga or comic books? Who knows if the NEA knows these exists, or considers them to be “reading”?) It also doesn’t look at the quality of any of these categories of books–we have no idea of people are putting aside the latest Left Behind novel in favor of watching the History Channel, or not getting around to a new Rita Mae Brown anthropomorphic cat mystery because they’re busy reading Glenn Greenwald.

Their excuse for dividing the reading world up into literary and printed books vs. everything else is: “Because a large population survey such as Reading at Risk can’t distinguish too many subgenres or levels of quality and still keep the responses reliable and distinct.”

Right. Add “nonfiction” or “online materials” in there and you might as well be doing primitive sympathetic-magic rituals instead of statistical analysis.

Is there a literacy crisis in America? If there were, you couldn’t tell from this report, which might as well be subtitled Why The NEA Needs A Bigger Budget. Nothing wrong with helping the NEA, but couldn’t they achieve the same result without the Chicken Little act?

I am really not happy about having to exchange a book during the hellacious shopping season.

It’s no Iron Dream, but I enjoyed it. It’s one of the novels of the “New Wave” of SF, and it shows; at times the prose is very stream-of-consciousness, hip wordplay, irritating. Jack Barron runs a video equivalent of a talk radio show, where the average person can call in to “Bug Jack Barron” with whatever’s bugging them, and then Jack, on air, places a call. And God help you if you’re the person he calls–Congressman, corporate honcho–and you’re not there to be served up as entertainment. Jack’s no hero, and the slide from his and his friends’ youthful idealism to cynical and powerful adulthood is particularly relevant and interesting now when you look at what the Boomers are up to. It’s far from a simple morality play.

That said, the book was written in 1969, and boy does it show. The slang isn’t very far at all from the ’60s (“cool it” and “dig” are common), and where the book takes two steps forward in its awareness of racial issues, it takes about six steps back in terms of gender. The female characters don’t do much but take up spac, mainly in bed. Sarah, the heroine, is whiny, wispy and ineffectual. It’s hard to see why she and Jack are each others’ great loves except that, you know, she’s the chick. His chick.