There’s no such thing as a quiet morning here. I was awoken by children climbing over me, gave them breakfast, and they’re now raging around the place. Reading the new Clive Barker ‘Abarat’ novel, which so far is a lot better than the first. I thought it was a fairly unimpressive book that relied too heavily on the artwork to carry the story, but Barker’s lifted his game with this one.

Have to vote today. Can’t say I’m too impressed. I think the incumbent government will be returned, but I could be wrong. Either way, I vote in a safe seat so the local member should be re-elected, pretty much regardless of how I vote.

I’ve also spent a little more time with the new REM album (hi Mark!). I was listening to it late last night and liked it a lot better than I did the other day. Maybe it’s because I like Stipe’s vocals. I stand by the idea that the band without Berry sounds structureless, drifting, but they do have moments.

I don’t know why I was surprised,but for some reason I’m always a little surprised to find out that someone based overseas is familiar with, or even passionate about, one of our Antipodean talents. When I was in Oakland last month, I found out that Locus assistant editor Liza has a thing for an old Do Re Mi song and when I was looking at Locus Online editor Mark Kelly’s blog yesterday I found out he was a big Neil Finn fan. He was sufficiently enthusiastic about Finn’s last solo effort, which I actually had forgotten that I’d bought, that I threw it in the cd player last night and started getting into it. It’s a small world.

And with that in mind, Liza is you read this and you went to Piedmont High, then someone is looking for you.

I’m not able to readily access my private web space over at my ISP so I’ve been trying to find an acceptable work around while redesigning the blog and the rest of my pages. The ugly, though hopefully not too visible, solution has been to create multiple blogs all of which are linked to one another.

At the moment I’m running this journal, as well as a main site weblog (with accompanying info pages, and a new magazines and books received weblog. I think this should do the trick for a little while, at least.

I should also mention that, while I’d be happy to pretend otherwise, that the site redesign is basically a standard blog design that Douglas Bowman of www.stopdesign.com has done for Blogger. Some day I’ll have time to redo it myself.

Around the Sun is REM’s 13th album, and the third (following Up and Reveal) without drummer Bill Berry. Who thought the drummer actually mattered? I mean, I was never that convinced that Led Zeppelin couldn’t have continued without John Bonham. After all, The Who went on without Keith Moon. A drummer, I always figured, was great, but he was just some guy whacking something really hard. Right? Right?

Well, REM have conclusively proven, in the space of just 39 tracks, that the drummer matters, and is often the critical element in the architecture of a band and their sound. When Berry left he took discipline, melody and drive with him, and left behind an aural wash that tended to be a bit dark and a bit down, but not terribly interesting. Sure there have been outstanding tracks along the way – “Daysleeper” for example – but there haven’t been any outstanding albums, and it doesn’t seem like there will be. Compare, if you want to see what I mean, New Adventures in Hi Fi with Around the Sun. It’s not pretty. The latest issue of Mojo reviews the album and asks if we can’t go back to Rockville, after all. I agree. Bill Berry come home. We need you.

I’ve already nailed my colors to the mast when it comes to Gene Wolfe’s The Wizard Knight. I think it’s a marvellous book, and one that should be considered as a single volume. Reading Charles Stross’s The Merchant Princes and looking back at John Wright’s The Golden Age and Scott Westerfeld’s Succession – all long novels cut up and published as shorter books – it becomes very clear that the real casualty is the opportunity for these books to make a major impact, to potentially break out their authors.

As singleton volumes containing parts of longer stories these books lose the chance to real knock out their audience. As long books containing all of the story involved, though, they often are knockouts. Kudos, therefore, to the Science Fiction Book Club, who have published the definitive versions of the Wright and Westerfeld books, and seem likely to do the same for the Wolfe. I will stress here, though, that I’m not particularly criticising the publishers who suggest cutting books up like this. There are sound business reasons for doing so, and I certainly understand it. But, there is a cost.