Gwenda

So, I’ll leave something out here, I know. (I haven’t even finished The King’s Last Soldier yet, for instance.) But in the frenzy of prepatory cleaning for Scott and Justine‘s visit later this week*, I had cause to re-sort my priority reads. You know the kind; things I wish I could lay hands on and have downloaded into my brain, emotional responses and all, because I just haven’t had the time to read them quite yet.

I’ve been writing a pretty good amount, which slows my reading, since I usually want to watch television in the downtime and, also, when the writing’s going well? You must be careful and stay very still and not love another book too much or you’ll scare it away**.

Here are some books in my stack I can’t BELIEVE I haven’t read yet:

Map of Dreams (stories) by M. Rickert
Grey by John Armstrong (this only just arrived, but it looks great)
Half-Life by Shelley Jackson
Just in Case by Meg Rosoff
The Machine’s Child by Kage Baker
Saffron and Brimstone: Strange Stories by Elizabeth Hand (in my defense, Christopher stole this one for a bit)
Chasing the Dead by Joe Schreiber
H2O by Mark Swartz
Only Revolutions by Mark Danielewski
Grand & Humble by Brent Hartinger
Death of a Writer by Michael Collins
The Future is Queer anthology edited by Richard Labonte and Lawrence Schimel
Rain Village by Carolyn Turgeon
From the Files of the Time Rangers by Richard Bowes
The Exquisite by Laird Hunt
My Dirty Little Book of Stolen Time by Liz Jensen
The Talking Horse and the Sad Girl and the Village Under the Sea (poems) Mark Haddon
The End of Mr. Y by Scarlett Thomas
Maul by Tricia Sullivan
Starred Wire (poems) Ange Mlinko
Saint Iggy by K.L. Going
Flora Segunda by Ysabeau Wilce
The Boy Detective Fails by Joe Meno

And, of course, I won’t even end up reading all these, not any time soon. For there are Yet More Books. Books that will come to displace them; books for the LBC; books, books, books.

Life is good. I wish I could perfect the absorption technique. And, wow, just realized I don’t even _have_ Eduardo Galeano’s latest yet. For shame.

(So many of these are BEA books from May. Bad reader. Bad.)

*If we’re really, really careful, maybe the house will stay all spiffed until Thanksgiving. Dreams!

**Okay, not true, but it can feel that way.

In her review of Susanna Clarke’s new collection, Ursula Le Guin writes:

Those who dislike fantasy dismiss it as inconsequential: Inconsequentiality is in fact fatal to it. Explanation is irrelevant, but coherence, inner consistency, is essential to the flight of imagination. Gabriel García Márquez does not explain where the man with enormous wings flew from; Jorge Luis Borges does not explain the mysterious appearance of the Aleph; J.R.R.Tolkien does not explain the existence of Middle Earth: They simply tell, and the narrative is both explanation and justification, because it is strictly consequential. The imaginary act has inevitable consequences; the fantastic threat is carried out; the uncanny cause has its ineluctable effect. A fantasy lacking consequence, like a spell spoken wrong, is mere nonsense.

Which is lovely and has the added benefit of being true. (Le Guin, btw, is not convinced that Clarke meets this challenge and the review is positive overall but with reservations.)

Ed’s kicking off a gigantabulous roundtable on Richard Powers’ (now NBA-nominated) The Echo Maker today. Some of us … um, that would be me … got too tied up in other things and behind on the reading and still haven’t finished the book*. But those who did participate are the smartest of the smarties and have said some amazing things. And Powers will weigh in at the end with some amazing comments of his own. So go thither.

*I’m very much enjoying the book, so I may throw some thoughts up here when I’m done.