The Other Airport Read

A couple of weeks ago, I spoke of one of my usual airport purchases: Scientific American.  Well, there’s another mag I often buy in airports, and that one is The New Yorker, proving that I’m not only a pretentious twit, but that I’m a stereotyped pretentious twit.  I guess I can live with that.

My most recent moment of weakness came in September of 2017 (see cover above) but, as you can see, I’m reviewing it over a year later.  Just like my scientific American, the reason for that is that I only read the first few articles, the ones that are time-based such as concert dates and the like, before tossing the mag onto by To-Be-Read pile, which is a beast about a year in height.

Of course, once I got to the mag, the concert dates were no longer relevant, and many of the theater reviews referred to shows I could no longer watch, but I read through them again anyway.  The reason for this is that I’m always fascinated by The New Yorker’s combination of two things: an appreciation for the finer things in life such as symphony orchestras and the breathtaking capacity to discuss run-of-the-mill stuff in terms that makes you think they belong among the finer things in life.  As an example of this latter trend, it’s impossible to tell whether a couple of the lesser-known bands they talk about are just a bunch of friends who’ve been practicing in a garage and sound like it or the second coming of the Jimi Hendrix Experience.

I spend this time on the social news at the beginning of the magazine because that sums up the whole attitude perfectly.  It’s a local section that doesn’t feel local: you get the idea that the writers truly feel that a concert happening in a bar in New York needs to have a global audience, but it’s also an exercise in discussing everything, regardless of relative quality or banality, in the most exquisite language possible.

Of course, 95% of the people who pick up a copy of the mag will fall into one of two groups: those who shake their head in disgust at the pretentious nature of the writing, and those who think that reading it will somehow “improve” them (some of the latter group may be right, so I encourage them to keep trying).

For the five percent remaining, this one is a guilty pleasure.  We know what the editors are doing, and yet we love the magazine anyway.  We can take the pretentiousness, or leave it aside to read less opaque prose, but whenever we do come back, we find it charming.  I like to think that a lot of the readers of Classically Educated are the same way (although I often hope they don’t think we’re in any way pretentious twits…).

A final note for the fiction section, which, as you can imagine, I always read with particular attention.  The story in this one was well written… but I always seem to buy the editions with the suburban angst and sorrow.  Where are the great, bold stories of yore?  I guess they’re gone to wherever the bold men and women of yore have been laid to rest–after all, the fiction does reflect the readership, or at least it should.

Anyhow, if you’ve never picked up a copy of The New Yorker and read it cover to cover, you owe it to yourself to do so.  Even an old copy bought used is a good bet.

 

Gustavo Bondoni is a novelist and short story writer based in Buenos Aires.  His literary heroes include Borges, Wodehouse and Asimov, and if you can reconcile those three, you are a better psychologist than he is.  His short fiction has been collected in Virtuoso and Other Stories, and you can check it out here.

 

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Global Warming Antho – My Take

I love reading publications that contain my stories.  Unlike many authors who just keep cut sheets of their own stories and discard the rest of the book or magazine (for reasons of space), I not only keep everything, but I also put it in my to-be-read pile.  Eventually, they cycle to the top (my TBR pile is an epic thing which holds a year or more of reading material at any given point in time).

The latest contributor copy to make it to the top of the pile was Ecotastrophe II.  As explained in the Amazon book description (see link), this one is a follow-up to an antho that Sam’s Dot published a decade or so ago – this one is from Nomadic Delirium Press.  I have a story in this one called “The Wrong Kind of Ship”, which is an SF piece that I like quite a bit.

Sometimes small press anthos can be hit and miss, but I found this one to be solid all the way through.  The seven stories are entertaining, and though they all speculate about global warming, and therefore fall in the realm of science fiction (for now), there are different styles, ranging from the horror of “The Last Polar Bear” to the bleak outlook of “Pelagus”.

My own favorite was “The Perisphere Solution” by Robert J. Mendenhall, which is a futuristic thriller.

So, recommended not only for the eco-consciousness, but also for holding a number of good stories.

 

Gustavo Bondoni’s is an author whose short fiction has appeared in dozens of publications, but a good place to start is with his reprint collection Tenth Orbit and Other Faraway Places.  You can see it here.

Contributor Copies – Largish Monkeys at the End of the World

Today, we continue with our review of different contributor copies.  Se here and here for earlier posts in this series.  As I’ve mentioned before, I enjoy the huge variety of themes and, particularly takes on what, at first glance might appear to be a very tightly-focused collection.

For example, when I saw the guidelines of the book that became Zombie Kong, I truly wondered just how many takes on the fifty-foot zombie gorilla could be possible.  In order to avoid getting caught up among dozens of what I thought would be identical stories, I put the beginning of my story in Congo and the end in Brazil.

What I remember most vividly about writing this tale (“Shadow of the Gorilla) is that I was sitting in a coffee shop researching Congolese ports when I realized that there was one particular town on the Congo River which was located exactly where I needed it.  Unfortunately, the port was called… Banana.

I groaned out loud in the middle of the restaurant, and my wife, who was working beside me (we were supposedly on vacation at the beach, but we were both toiling) looked at me sharply, wondering what was wrong.  I responded that no one was going to believe that the port in a giant monkey story was called Banana.  It would seem like a cheap authorly cop-out in order to avoid doing any research.

Nevertheless, the story got written and sold to the antho, and I received a contributor’s copy which I read (like every book that ever falls into my hands) years later.

I needn’t have worried. The subject matter which I felt would be so constricting, was treated every which way by the talented authors in the book.  Some, like me, played it straight.  Others went the “news story” route, or made it a funny story (not sure how funny a fifty-foot undead ape looking to tear you to pieces might seem to the people involved, but the authors captured the tone perfectly).  From the gory to the laugh-out-loud funny, this is a book with something for everyone.

The second book I’m looking at today is entitled Enter the Apocalypse.  It’s a collection of short stories about how the apocalypse happened.  This one contains my story “Passing the Torch” which was accepted after I agreed to change the complete structure of the tale (who says a writer’s life is easy?).

But the rest of the stories followed a similar pattern to Zombie Kong: they were clearly written by people with an incredible capacity to think outside the box while, technically, remaining within the box.

We were privileged to be able to host author Nick Barton here with his particular take on what makes an apocalypse appealing.  Reading between the lines of his post, you will get a clear picture of the kind of writer who can use the constraints of a prompt to write something truly special.

But I think the hats must truly go off to the editors of these two books.  Selecting the right stories to give variety without being too gimmicky must be a difficult balancing act, and both Gondolfi (Apocalypse) and Daley (Kong) have managed that tightrope walk beautifully.

 

Gustavo Bondoni has published more than two hundred short stories.  Two collections of his previously published work are available: Tenth Orbit and Other Faraway Places and Virtuoso and Other Stories.

Contributor Copies Continued

Unlike many authors, I read every single contributor’s copy I am sent.  Why, you ask?  For many reasons.  The first and most obvious is that It helps me keep up with what’s happening in those corners of the genre that I frequent.

In a less pleasant vein, I sometimes find that the places that published my work might not be up to the expected standards–which means I won’t sub there again.  Or, conversely, the other stories might be so good that I feel like a third grader walking taking that stroll with Virgil and Dante… completely out of my depth.  I always send my best stories to people who make me feel that way.

So I get a lot more than just reading pleasure from this practice–it’s professionally useful, too.

It’s nice to have a serious-sounding excuse to read more stories, isn’t it?

Anyway, before this digression gets overly long (yes, I know it’s already too late for that), today’s post deals with a couple of contributor’s copies from a couple of years ago (never said I was fast, did I?).

Visions III: Inside the Kuiper Belt is one of those anthos that did the Dante thing to me.  To be completely honest, I didn’t like the cover art, so wasn’t expecting too much from the stories inside.  And then, one after another, they all turned out to be absolutely brilliant.  Every one of them was a space adventure that was both well written and entertaining, a combination which, as anyone who’s picked up a Year’s Best antho lately can attest, is getting as rare as three dollar bills.  Better still, middle-class guilt and political concerns are nearly completely absent.  What joy in this day and age!

Not only do I recommend this anthology wholeheartedly, but I also put my money where my mouth was and sent the editors stories for two more anthos in this series, both of which are sitting in my TBR pile, and both of which I am looking forward to anxiously!  Go out and get one, you won’t regret it.

Strangely Funny III is a different animal altogether.  Humor can often be hit-or-miss, but this series takes the risk and handles it well.  Of course, there are a few stories that don’t quite work for me, but most of them do really well in both telling their story and getting some laughs – admirable goals both!

The stories skew towards horror and the humor sometimes tends to the ghoulish over the slapstick (or combines both).  Not something I’d normally pick up at a bookstore, but definitely a genre it’s good to be familiar with – especially since I have been known to write humor every once in a while.

So yes, I’ll keep reading my contributor copies, and let the cutsheet bandits to do their own thing.

 

Gustavo Bondoni is an Argentine novelist and short story writer.  His novel Siege is for those who think they’d enjoy Visions III, and The Malakiad for those who think Strangely Funny would be more their cup of tea.  He aims to please!

When the Anthologist Gets it Wrong

Before Martin H. Greenburg died in 2011, Gardner Dozois had a tradition of dismissing his anthologies (usually filled with major genre writers) as “pleasant but minor”.  In general terms, I disagree with Mr. Dozois because I found Greenbergs antho’s to be both entertaining and solid.  Whenever I gought one, I knew that great writers were going to take me on a fun ride.

However, I’ve got to give the nod to Dozois if he happened to make any snide remarks about the book Olympus, edited by Greenberg and Bruce D. Arthurs.

This one is pleasant enough, and a reasonably entertaining read, too, but it truly is minor in the most Dozoisian use of the word, and it isn’t 100% the fault of the anthologists.  Greenberg and Arthurs got together a stronglineup of writers–Friesner, Watt-Evans, De Lint, Huff, Michelle West–and asked for tales based on Greek mythology.

The writers, I feel, fell on their faces.  Sitting here looking over the stories, I think what may have gone wrong is that the book was published in 1998, when the fantasy genre was in the midst of the urban-fantasy doldrums.  Stoies about Greek gods set in 1980s-style cities with late 90s morality are just unmemorable.  Comptently written by a raft of professional writers, but not very noteworthy.

The best, in my opinion was “To Hades and Back” by Karen Haber, mainly because it goes the full 80s rockstar route.

Anyway, there are better Greenberg anthos out there.  Perhaps finding one of those is the best bet.

 

About the blogger: Gustavo Bondoni, apart from reading everything he can get his hands on, is also a novelist.  His latest book, The Malakiad, is a hugely entertaining take on the Greek heroic era.  He doesn’t want to say it’s better than the book reviewed above, but…  Paperback here, Kindle edition here.

Reading Pratchett, Tinged with Sadness

I’m going to be honest.  If I was allowed to take the complete works of one humorist with me to a desert island, that writer would be P.G. Wodehouse.  For my money, he is the funniest author ever to grace the English language.  And I do mean grace: his sentences are a thing of beauty.  Without ever getting in his own way or using obtuse vocabulary, he managed to build perfect gems of writing… in almost every single sentence.  I can’t overstate the difficulty of managing that.  Sometimes you just want to write a sentence to get you from point A to pint B, but Wodehouse never allowed himself that.

If I had to keep ranking them, the second on my list would be Douglas Adams.  The perfect distillation of the English sense of humor.  Sadly, his oeuvre is too small to keep me entertained for an indeterminate period of time out in the south seas after a shipwreck but it is more intense.  He is more laugh-out-loud funny than Wodehouse is.

But though he doesn’t top my list on the pure humor and entertainment front, Terry Pratchett is by far the best novelist of my three favorite humorists.  He was the man who picked up the torch left by his predecessors and decided that he would not only write humor for humor’s sake, but he would break Wodehouse’s rule about writing a novel and make the books about something.  And they would be funny.

So, you get social conscience and human foibles and difficult topics with your humor.

I’ve read widely, and I’m here to tell you that only Pratchett has managed to handle that particular volatile mix without having it blow up in his face.

Most humorists fall into two camps: the ones that exploit the human condition for a few laughs and the ones who attempt to make us care.  The first group doesn’t really give a damn about humans as a group (or at least they aren’t there to make us think about humanity).  They just want their humor to be relatable enough so you’ll laugh at the right time.  The second group is usually preachy, holier-than-thou and so, sooooo concerned.  They are anything but funny.

Pratchett pulls it off.  You end up caring deeply about the issues in his book without ever having the sense that the writer is obsessed, and that the issues have taken over his work.  (actually, this happens to issue-driven books in any genre, not just humor.  When the agenda pushes the plot and characters aside, it’s a recipe for disaster).

So it’s with great sadness that I am reading the final few Pratchett books for the first time.  One can enjoy a book upon re-reading, but you never have the same sheer joy of discovery as you did the first time you encountered the words.  Since his death, a Pratchett book that I hadn’t read before became a priceless treasure.

Over the last year, I’ve consumed three of those treasures.

A Blink of the Screen is a rare treat.  It collects Pratchett short stories.  Some of them we’ve all read before, but many are early work published in tiny magazines or very local newspapers.  They show a master at work before he was a master, with flashes of the genius that made him world-famous, but without the skill at weaving it all together.  Still, there are some gems in here, and punchlines that will make you chortle.  I enjoyed it.

Snuff made me even sadder.  It’s a Discworld novel.  If having any unread Pratchett book is a treasure, a Discworld book is like having the Crown Jewels and the Romanoff treasure all at once.  To make things even better, this is a Sam Vimes book.

A side note about Vimes.  While there are many amazing characters on the Discworld, Vimes became the most important of all after Pratchett discovered him halfway through the series.  He represents the everyman, but also the fatalist.  I have a friend who swears by the witches, but it’s Vimes who serves as the backdrop to Pratchett’s most mature work.  I like him even more than I like the Luggage and Death, and that’s saying quite a bit.

The only consolation I had when I finished this one was the knowledge that Raising Steam is still safely buried somewhere in my TBR pile.

The last book of the three I had to hand was The Shepherd’s Crown. The Tiffany Aching books fall in the Young Adult category and are a lot less funny.  Pratchett’s sense of humor is still there in the background, but these aren’t meant to be laugh-out-loud funny, but a coming-of-age story for a young witch growing into her powers.  All of Pratchett’s humanity is on display in these, but I wouldn’t necessarily recommend them to someone out for a laugh.  However, it is to Pratchett’s eternal credit that he manages to make a Young Adult story aimed at girls compelling to a not-particularly-young adult male who (as attested to by earlier entries) is more likely to pick up a spy thriller than a book about a teenage witch.

I don’t think we’ll ever see another writer quite like this one for a while.

 

 

Gustavo Bondoni is an Argentine novelist and short story writer.  He has a comic fantasy novel entitled The Malakiad coming out on March 22nd (it can be pre-ordered through this link).  If you enjoyed reading Pratchett, you will likely enjoy this one.  Also, the title comes from a very rude word in Greek, so there’s that.