mostly harmless books

My trip to Ukraine was awesome (saw a very good friend again, made new friends, saw cool places), but I didn’t spend all the time socializing. Long train journey + lots of downtime meant I also got to read a lot, four books to be exact:

• John Joseph Adams (ed.) - Wastelands: Stories of the Apocalypse
• Charles de Lint - The Ivory and the Horn
• Tim LaHaye & Jerry Jenkins - Left Behind
• Charles de Lint - Memory and Dream

Three of them were mine, the other borrowed from the lovely Peace Corps lounge. I was this close to also reading Richard Adams’ Shardik (solely for the Dark Tower connection, I admit), but then I saw that the “small” book I had borrowed also had really tiny fonts, so it was impossible to read in a couple of days.

Anyway, thoughts on the books forthcoming.

This is one big OMG. How did I miss it?

Via FBS: a new novel by Roger Zelazny, called Dead Man’s Brother, will be published in February 2009. There are some details here and an excerpt here. It’s published by Hard Case (which, for me, as someone who doesn’t read crime novels, means “the guys who published King’s Colorado Kid“).

The excerpt is yummy, typical Zelazny. I loved the way he used hardboiled elements in his fantasy, it should be really interesting to read a whole crime novel from him.

This makes me happy. I thought the amount of Zelazny books I could read was finite (the downside of your favorite author being dead), but yay! for new (old) books.

Not the best day I’ve ever had. Although I knew it before, today I was once again proven that the book industry is just that, an industry, and like in any economic activity some people will do anything to try to preserve their good image, even outright lie. Oh well, good thing I’m too lazy to delete my e-mails.

And in other, much better news, on Wednesday I’m meeting the friend who brought me lovely books from the US! (Ink, Wastelands and two novels by Charles de Lint) On Sunday I’m leaving for Ukraine and I will have a lovely train journey with my new shiny books :D