Inspired by a young barista’s mad passion for music, I have commenced blogging about short SF over at the Locus blog. It’s all under the moniker The All-Time Top 40(-ish) – A Quixotic Endeavor. Each week I’m reading and reviewing one of the stories from Locus’s 1999 All-Time Top 40 Short Story List, just kinda as something to do.  There have been suggestions this will lead to anthologies and such, but probably not. Mostly it’s a way of connecting with some older fiction and slowing down how I read.  On reflection I might have picked the superior looking Best Novelette list, but the dye is cast and there’s no use complaining now.

For those who are interested, if this works (and we’ll know by 5 January 2010 if it did) I intend to do something on the best short fiction of the 2000s.  That’s away aways though.  The intention is that a new review will appear every Tuesday, unless I get bored, in which case they’ll either come a lot faster or not at all. It’s an adventure. Come check it out!

Every now and then the system doesn’t forewarn you that an interesting book is coming. Instead, it arrives, unexpected, and you fall in love with it and with the surprise of it.  And suddenly you’re reminded, as a jaded old reviewer type, that all of this reading caper is still worth it.  A week or two ago Jedediah Berry contacted me to say he was getting a copy of his first novel, The Manual of Detection, sent out to me. It sounded pretty good, and I was pleased he’d done it because I’d read a story or two of his, and because I’d heard it was a pretty book. But I wasn’t enjoying reading much at the time, so didn’t think on it too hard.
Well, I came home Tuesday, tired and out sorts with the world, to find a package sitting on my desk here in the disaster zone we call my office.  Hmpph, I thought.  Another galley of some utterly avoidable book, most likely. But it wasn’t.  It was this really lovely dark green book with a big golden eye embossed on the cover. No dustjacket, but beautifully designed.  I was intrigued, but feeling jaded with reading (my adjustment to multifocal spectacle lenses is imperfect right now and reading has been hard, so I’m disenclined).  But there was rain, a city, an enormous Detective Agency that might have fallen out of Brasil, a mummy, a man on a bicycle, a mysterious woman.  I was intrigued. I was trapped. Suddenly I was sucked into the book, pulled forward by the story, cushioned by his writing.  I’m only half way through The Manual of Detection right now. It might fall apart. It might not. I don’t think it will. And now I wanted to know about “The Three Deaths of Colonel Baker” and “The Man Who Stole November Twelfth”.  I want Berry to promise to write stories for me from the casebooks of Charles Unwin and Travis T. Sivart, for I am lost and I am intrigued and I love his book quite a lot.

How much? Enough to tell you to make sure you get a copy. Enough to think I need to buy another, because this one has  a chip in the boards. And if it has a chip in the boards, I can buy a nice new to keep and use this one to lend out to others, so I can share this wonderful story. The Manual of Detection is really quite special.

My weekend was a varied one, to say the least. It started on Friday, when I left the office feeling distinctly unwell. I’ve had odd bouts of ‘unwellness’ since I cracked my rib last August.  Nothing terrible or fatal, but not good. The rib was complicated by a minor shoulder injury. I also moved from ‘normal’ glasses to these damned multifocal things. Then, on Friday morning, I had a renewed bout of dizziness and nausea. The official diagnosis was an ear infection. I’m on antibiotics, but I suspect it’s more to do with the multifocals. The doctor suggested it might be time for short-sightedness surgery, and I’m seriously considering it.  More on this, well not too much more, as it happens.

I should probably follow that with a clarification: I’m not writing this for sympathy (though I appreciate it), but to explain something.  These new glasses (and perhaps the ear infection) have kicked the stuffing out of my ability to read. Write now it’s a real struggle to focus on books and magazines. My dear compadres at Last Short Story on Earth will be snickering right now, but I assure you all it’s not simple ennui. It’s just hard for me to focus on a page (the Sony Reader is better).  For those of you who follow the dramas here at the Other Side of the World, that causes some problems. I have a book of Gene Wolfe stories to read for review (it feels like homework, which is awful) and can’t seem to focus on that.  I have a pile of interesting new books, and I have my year’s best reading. It’s all flagging a bit, right now, though I am pushing through. The only things I’m reading quickly are new story submissions, which get my top priority.

Anyhow, the weekend. I spent Friday sleeping and feeling crappy. I then read and agreed to buy a terrific submission for Conquering Swords (time to move on to line edits and story notes for that one) before sitting down to watch Rome. I’m sucked in and loving it.  Generation Kill is lined up after that, so I’m pretty happy about my DVD viewing. Saturday was a quiet family day. I got up early, had breakfast with the family, then Marianne took the girls swimming while I chatted with Charles and Gary.  After that, off for our traditional dim sum lunch. Yay.  Bought a copy of Bruce’s The Caryatids at the best bookstore in Australia, then home for a quiet family afternoon. We played charades, which made a nice change from our traditional family movie night. Good stuff. Sunday was, in some ways, even better. I stumbled out of bed and Sophie (who isn’t at all precocious at seven) suggested we go out for breakfast. This is something we’ve almost never done, so I was surprised, but we decided to go with the whim.  We had a great breakfast at Coode St Continental (an old fave near our old apt) before spending a few hours at the Hyde Park Festival.  A very successful day, climaxing with the girls getting to stay up and watch So You Think You Can Dance.

Monday was good to too. A friend of Jessica’s came over for a play date, while I ducked out for coffee. Had a peaceful time struggling to read “The Fifth Head of Cerberus”. Great story, but teeny print in the galley made for hard work (maybe this radio reviewing thing isn’t for me?). After that, a chat with Robin then home.  All in all, a good weekend with only one major downside.  The Macbook that belongs to work, and which has been my constant companion around home and the world when on tour, died on Saturday night.  The hard drive is dead and I need to look into data recovery (not much, just some snaps of the kids on Photo Booth – all else is safe). I also need to look into replacements. I doubt work will replace or repair the machine, so I need to see what I can do. Right now, I’m thinking netbooks like the new HP, but we’ll see.

And now, to the week!