Crazy But Able

Bit dusty in here. I’ve been a bit lax with the updates, sorry. Combination of spending more time job hunting, not feeling like writing, and some family health issues. My grandfather was rushed to the hospital in mid-November with congestive heart failure [info]. He’s okay now, they gave him a pacemaker and some medicine cocktail that’s supposed to help his heart. They are going to give him a few months to recover and then reasses the situation to see if his heart recovered enough to perform a triple bypass. I had wanted to get over there to see him, but wasn’t able to because I got a bad cold shortly after I found out he went to the hospital.

So I haven’t been doing much writing.

I have been reading tons though. A serendipitous trip to Uncle Hugo’s netted me a used copy of Alan Dean Foster’s Slipt [amazon]. Slipt would make a really good movie if it was done right. The book itself… eh. It’s got an interesting premise… but I don’t know. I kept imagining how great it would be as a movie, instead of digging how good of a book it was.

Back to Uncle Hugo’s. This was the first time I seriously ventured into Uncle Edgar’s (the part of the store with used mystery books. Uncle Hugo’s is used science fiction books. Get it?) After dispassionately looking around, I remembered a mystery book I have that I absolutely love, called Whisper in the Gloom [amazon]. I asked the guy behind the counter if he knew who the author was. He tried very hard, but I imagine that Whisper in the Gloom is a pretty generic mystery name. Then I remembered the name of one of the protagonists, Nigel Strangeways. “Aha, of course.” *pause* “Blake. This way,” he said.

In short, the author’s name was Nicholas Blake, and of course they had a mini-pile of his books. I got There’s Trouble Brewing [amazon], and it was also really good. Blake is a master of describing people; in fact, as I was reading, I frequently would stop and marvel at his skill in describing his characters. Character description is an aspect of writing that I never really paid any attention to before; whether that’s because I haven’t been reading very much fiction for the past ten years, or because I’ve been reading fiction by mediocre writers recently I don’t know. At any rate, it’s amazing stuff. I’ve read two, and I’ve got high expectations for the rest of the books in the series.

Hmm. While googling for a bio, I discovered that Nicholas Blake is actually a pseudonym for Cecil Day-Lewis [bio]. Cecil Day-Lewis is the father of Daniel Day-Lewis [bio], in case you were wondering.

More books: today I skim-read all of How to Cheat in Photoshop [amazon] in an hour at B&N. I highly recommend it; in fact, I’m putting it on my very short Christmas list, and if nobody buys it for me I’m gonna get it myself after the holidays. The book requires some familiarity with photoshop, but it covers all kinds of simple yet powerful techniques and puts them together in interesting ways. Highly recommended.

So. I’m taking recommendations for good fiction books, especially sci-fi or mystery ones since I can probably get the books used at Uncle Hugo’s or Uncle Edgar’s. (If you didn’t get the joke… the Hugo awards are given to sci-fi books and short stories and the like; the Edgars are given to mystery stories, etc.) E-mail your recommendations to me or post them in the comments. Also, I’m experimenting with text buttons [info] for links instead of regular links. Feel free to comment on that if you like too.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 9th, 2003 at 2:13 am and is filed under general foofiness. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.