re: your brains (Zombiesque!)

My dear, bebearded friend Laszlo Xalieri, who formerly guest-starred in this textual/pixelated adventure of mine as a lecturer at the Atlanta Zombie Symposium, has a story in a newly published book of short fictions written from zombies' points of view.



It's called Zombiesque, and it's available on Amazon for only $7.99, and you need something new to read. (You always need something new to read. No matter how many unread books you already have cluttering your bookshelves/other horizontal home surface areas. Don't argue, you'll risk giving me a catastrophic paradigm shift proportionate to the number of pages in all of my unread books combined.)

Mockingjay and Top Flr

Just picked up my long-awaited copy of Mockingjay, the third and final book in the YA Hunger Games series by Suzanne Collins! Along with a keychain so's I can properly advertise my dorkiness (since Scholastic has, for some reason, decided not to cash in on the pins they're making but rather to offer them only as prizes and student incentives).*

Please note that I'm being responsible and doing the writing/editing I've promised to finish tonight and tomorrow, and that I'll bloody well put an arrow through the pig of anyone who spoils me before I get a chance to read this thing. ^____^




In quick food updates, I had dinner at Top Flr last night -- they do a $15 3-course prix fix on Mondays, and you should really go the next time you've got a Monday evening free.

Last night, the first course was a salad of peppery-green arugula with sweet slivers of dried fig, heat from slices of pepperocini, bright cherry tomato halves, creamy-sharp parmaggiano flakes, and a bare, tart lemony dressing to bind the lot together.

The second course was an option of a crumbled chorizo, jalapeño, onion, and arugula flatbread or a seared scallop with a warm, Asian-inspired salad of kale, cucumbers, cherry tomatoes, celery, onion, and octopus. The flatbread was tasty in a distinctly late-night-college-snack sort of way, but the scallop dish was really delightful -- the sugared soy & sesame dressing playing against the bitter of the vegetables and the sweetness of the tomatoes and seafood, and both the scallop and octopus cooked to tender-chewy excellence.

The third course was an option of a chocolate ganache tart, which I didn't try, or a coconut bread pudding with a spiced sauce and carmelized sliced bananas. Though I didn't detect much coconut in the bread pudding, the dessert was warming and lovely, not too sweet and slightly strange for the Indian-inspired heat of the sauce. Fans of chilies + chocolate should be on the lookout for this one.

For $15 it was a light dinner (dessert doesn't count as filling. Hungry diners might want to order a pre-prix fix snack), but an excellent value for the experience of such playful flavors. Service was polite and attentive, but the kitchen didn't seem to be in a rush to get the courses out -- I would reserve Top Flr for a night that you don't have a schedule to keep. And I feel obligated to mention feeling a little foppish when the price of my dinner nearly doubled upon ordering a cocktail -- which was terrific, something they're calling A Sordid Affair: smoky Scorpion Blanco mezcal tequila, bittersweet Cynar artichoke liquor, spicy black peppercorn simple syrup, bright blackberries, and a squeeze of balancing citrus, served over ice with a straw for sipping and a pretty circle of lime set against the interior of the glass. But yeah, I'm just sayin' -- even with the prix fix in hand, Top Flr isn't tight-budget friendly. Which is okay sometimes! I'll definitely be back to try the regular menu and more of the cocktails. Let me know what's best there if you've been before.


* Scholastic, won't you please let me give you cash monies for a Mockingjay pin? I approve of ALSO using them as prizes and student incentives, and I'll make one myself out of the aforementioned keychain, but you're making fandom difficult, here.

romance, knives, and one particular parasol

Two books I've managed to cross off my reading list lately:

If you read Ellen Kushner's Privilege of the Sword like I told you to, I just wanted to remind you that you might want to go back and read Swordspoint if you haven't done that -- or jump ahead and order a copy of Kushner's short followup story to Privilege, "The Man with the Knives". It's being sold, via mailed request only, as a limited-edition paperback chapbook sort of thing for $20 including shipping, is printed on paper that's gorgeous to the touch, and comes with a folded bit of artwork by Thomas Canty. Kushner's use of the language in this short is just as decadent as its presentation, making the story, altogether, a pleasure to read. However, if Privilege was double chocolate chip cookies? "The Man with the Knives" is lemonade that no one's told you is being served add-your-own-sweetener style. The sugar bowl is right there, but you might find yourself cursing at the cook after your first big glug.


A book which I didn't curse at even once is Gail Carriger's Soulless, the first in her Parasol Protectorate series. But I did giggle at it a lot. Or with it, rather, because although it’s a book about people who take themselves Victorian levels of seriously (i.e., Seriously with a capital “S” and, probably, multiple layers of undergarments), Soulless is in it for the romp. And it's a wondermous romp, featuring all the nude werewolves, gay vampires, daring escapes, and canoodling that I've come to expect & adore in urban fantasy/romance -- just, the "urban" is an alternate-history 19th century London. Which is really just an excuse for added hilarity and fabulousity, assuming that you're as amused and impressed by comedies of errors, bustles, and dirigibles as I am. The plot and characters tend to be a bit predictable in this book, but that's not preventing me from craving the second one in the series. (It doesn't hurt that someone or something in the book is at least as obsessed with cephalopods as I am. Go Team Cephalopod!)


Loosely relatedly (erm, to urban fantasy, not cephalopods), and not to criticize Soulless for what it is but as an open question to all authors & consumers of supernatural romance at large: Why is it that there aren’t any books in popular circulation in which the female lead is the ancient beastie and the male lead is the human ingénue who catches her interest?

If such books do exist and I just don’t know about them, please enlighten me! But, assuming there aren't, I figure it’s a combination of it being more simple/fun to tell a story through the eyes of the person who'll be most like the readers -- a human and a n00b who’ll need the supernatural parts explained -- and of age and gender stereotypes indicating that the man should be the older, more powerful party in the relationship.

But I wanna hear your opinion! Would you want to read a story about Civil War-era vampire Sookie moving back to her hometown and falling for the psychic boy next door? Or, say, assuming that Darla and Angel were interesting characters, about Darla’s decision that Liam was a person she wanted to chat up eternally?

reading list: summer '10

I have this problem where I can't help buying discounted books that look really interesting. It's a combination of wanting to read everything, having a secret hope of one day possessing a library with tall rolling ladders and padded leather armchairs to contrast with all my tattered paperback SF, not having all that much disposable income but feeling like it's okay to spend a little if I'm getting a deal, and thinking of discounted books like they're discounted puppies -- oh they are so cute I know I can't save all of them but can't I take just a few?? Books need love too.

Which is how I end up like this:



But of course, that's not enough books. I'm also embroiled in no less than 4 pop urban (or, in one case, rural) fantasy series, which I alternately beg from the library, borrow from friends, or order from the UK 'cause it takes how long?? for them to be published here and I need them sooner than that.

So, yes. In addition to the books pictured above and a few stray issues of comics that I at some point purchased and promptly forgot about, I've also got on my list: Turn Coat, from the Dresden Files series by Jim Butcher (who, in addition to the great humor he's always given the series, learns to write by the fifth or sixth book, and is a rare SF author who doesn't look down on geeks 'cause he is one), The Naming of the Beasts, from the Felix Castor series by Mike Carey (much grittier wizard noir than the Dresden series, reviewed here), and The Lunatic Café, from the Anita Blake series by Laurell K. Hamilton (don't judge me, I like vampire pr0n and earning the right to be indignant about poor writing). Usually there'd also be a book from the Sookie Stackhouse series by Charlaine Harris on that list, but I just this past Saturday read Dead in the Family, and the next one hasn't been announced yet. (Harris is the Paula Dean of modern fantasy -- an unabashedly Southern-voiced & pervy-minded purveyor of things you know are bad for you that you'll devour anyway.)

Um, also? Every time I read an issue of Publishers Weekly (i.e., once a week), I'm moved to add a few new or old books to my Amazon booklist.

What I'm actually reading right now is... well, I'm between books, so technically nothing. But my copy of The Man with the Knives by Ellen Kushner just came in last week, so I think I'm gonna go for that.

So! What're you reading right now -- and do you have a backlog of books? Also, because I'm a reading-list masochist, you should give me recommendations for anything you think I'd dig.