Waffle

In the next few months before I go back to Tennessee to get married, I expect to be using my media collection as my ATM a couple of times - it's a way to declutter and get back some of the money I spent on DVD's, CD's, vinyl records and books over a quarter-century. None of it is going to make me rich but there is a lot of volume to get rid of.

Today I've been sorting out some of the books that I no longer want to keep. Into the "to sell" box went:

Four Glenn Cook "Adjective Metal Noun" PI Garrett novels, the latest of which I got only last Christmas. When I first read Petty Pewter Gods in the late 1990s, I loved it, but the concept and style have lost their appeal to me, so out it goes, along with Angry Lead Skies, Cold Copper Teads and Cruel Zinc Melodies.

Four Christopher Moore novels: Fluke, A Dirty Job, Lamb and The Stupidest Angel. Another writer I used to love in the 1990s, I now find time and time that his novels are fun to read once, but then I don't want to read them again (unlike with, say, Terry Pratchett, whose novels I re-read regularly).

Harry Harrison, The Stainless Steel Rat omnibus. I still like the Stainless Steel Rat, but this recent, newly typeset reprint duplicates two novels that I already had and was riddled with punctuation errors, making me wonder if perhaps I had misremembered the style of the originals.

Steven Brust, The Book of Jherek, The Book of Taltos, The Book of Athyra. A lot of people whose opinions I respect love themselves some Steven Brust, but after three omnibus collections I can safely say that I'm just not that into him.

Neal Stephenson, Cryptonomicon, a book that I've read several times. Stephenson was at one time one of my favorite writers, but this was the last one that I really liked (I gave copies to several people including my brother) and he is another writer who has lost his sheen for me - the ever increasing bloat of his work put me off it if I remember correctly, he said somewhere that his novels are supposed to end like they do, which just doesn't make sense to me. In any case, I don't want to take this big heavy trade paperback edition with me to the States; if I change my mind again, I can always re-buy it in an edition that is less of a doorstop.

That's the first batch of books I want to get rid of, but: if you are a reader of this blog and you're willing to pay shipping (or if you live in Groningen and I can just meet you to hand over one or more books), I'll happily send any one or more of them to you for free. Just let me know sometime in the next week or so, because once they're gone, they're gone.

I read The Book of Taltos during my fourth air trip to the US, some 9 months after buying the book with the intention of reading it during my first. It collects two short fantasy novels by Steven Brust, set on the planet Dragaera and featuring the human mobster Vlad Táltos. I have one other collection of Brust novels, The Book of Athyra, on my to-read list, having got both books on the strength of the first collection, The Book of Jhereg. Maybe it's the headache I had throughout the trip or maybe the very circumstance of reading a book on an airplane makes me less receptive, but I didn't really like Taltos very much. (I've also soured on the comical novels of Christopher Moore after reading them on airplanes).

Brust is rare among fantasy writers in prominently featuring an openly Marxist/Trotskist political dimension to his writing. Unfortunately, in these two novels, the political bits (the sections describing how the theoretically absolute monarchy in which the stories are set is in fact constrained by economical and material factors, the sections describing a proletarian uprising) are about the only memorable bits. While the construction of the plot and setting is outstanding and one or two characters are interesting, there's little that an experienced fantasy reader won't have seen before and rather too much that they will have seen far too often already. On the other hand, the stories get better with recollection, and may benefit from re-reading, especially in more favorable circumstances. So I'm kind of on the fence as far as this book goes.