A while back, after I’d downloaded Stanza for my iPhone, I came across a free sampler of ebooks from Random House. While these mostly consisted of science fiction and fantasy books, it also contained three of Charlie Huston’s novels – Caught Stealing, Six Bad Things, and A Dangerous Man. I knew Huston had written Moon Knight for a while, and I knew his name, so I downloaded them to check out later.

So, one day, while I was waiting for the subway, and in need of a new book, I loaded up Caught Stealing and started to read. I have to say that at first I had my doubts. For much of the beginning, the story, as told by the 1st person narrator, seemed mired in mundane life tasks. It seemed to boil down to sentences like – “I bundled my laundry up. Dumped it into the basket. I took the basket down to the laundry room. I loaded the colors into the machine. Added detergent.” Etc. I don’t mind slow beginnings, setting the stage, but nothing was really happening, and I wanted it to. * But as the novel continued, and as I worked my way into successive novels, I realized that what Huston has done here is capture the motion of a snowball rolling down an arctic mountain. At first it moves slowly, but soon it gathers speed and mass until at the end it’s hurtling along toward a massive collision.

And that’s what these books do. Hank Thompson starts as a normal guy with a bit of a shadowed past. But when he finds a key, all hell starts breaking loose. As the books continue, the hole he finds himself in gets deeper and deeper. Huston’s writing is extremely engaging and it pulls you in. Hank is a strange animal, too – likable and yet not completely. Someone you root for and despise at the same time. Together with the heaps of abuse that Huston piles on him, I could barely tear myself away. I went through all three books in record time.

As to making me sick, he very nearly did. One afternoon I was in the Jay St. subway station waiting for a train and reading A Dangerous Man. A particular scene in the book involves scarring from plastic surgery ** mixed with a description of multiple drug doses. Somehow this all combined to make me literally nauseous, to the point where I thought I was going to throw up. I see that as the mark of a good writer if he can provoke such a strong physical response.

I highly recommend Huston’s work and I intend to read more of his work in the future.

* This may be partly because of where I read it. Waiting for a subway can make one impatient.

** Plastic surgery is one of the few things that makes me queasy. Blood doesn’t bother me, I can watch eye operations up close, but plastic surgery or even talking about plastic surgery – boob jobs, facelifts, whatever – make me nauseous.

I feel like everyone I know has been to see Star Trek already. As usual, I am late to the party. I will rectify that tonight, however. In a way, though, I’m glad that some of the hype has been tempered by people having more critical opinions. I still haven’t seen too many people saying it wasn’t good, but I would rather go in expecting decent and not the best movie I’ve seen in recent times.

Tomorrow night is the Lost finale and it’s something I’m looking forward to more eagerly than I am Star Trek. I know Lost lost a lot of people a while back, but I have to say that it’s my favorite show on television. That title used to belong to Battlestar Galactica, but even in this past season, I found myself appreciating Lost more.

The Lost finale will also mark the end of cable television for me, for now at least. I’ve never been one to find that television was bad, or somehow lesser than other forms of media, but I do find that I spend too much time watching it lately. And I continue to stare at the books that line my bookshelves wondering when I’ll have the time to read them. So – no more television. Which isn’t to say that I won’t watch television shows – I will via downloads and DVD. I expect to watch more movies and actually take advantage of my Netflix subscription and the watch on demand service they offer. But I really want to read more and I figure this will help. I will also save some money in the deal.

Speaking of books, I finally finished Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun about a week ago and I’ve already started in on Urth of the New Sun, the sequel. I was originally going to wait, but I found that I couldn’t. I wanted a continuation of the story right away.

I’ll plan on writing a lengthier post on the books soon as I feel they deserve one. After this one, though, I intend to take a break and catch up on other reading.

More to come later…

I should also mention re: the last post that my friends and fellow members of Altered Fluid, E.C. Myers and N.K. Jemisin also were Honorable Mentions in the Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror. Because they are wonderful and talented people. And my Clarion West classmate, Carlton Mellick III, was mentioned several times in its pages. He is brilliant as well, so it comes as no surprise.

One of the nice things about moving is that it gives me an opportunity to reorganize my books and put them up on my shelves alphabetized and properly placed. I’m amazed at the number of people who look at me funny when I say that I alphabetize my books – it’s just the way that makes sense to me. This way I can find what I’m looking for. And this way there is a kind of order to all the chaos.

Having finished my second bookcase (moving slowly because all of the titles are currently out of order), I realized that I have a lot of Michael Moorcock books. I have not one shelf, not two shelves, but two and a half shelves devoted to his works. Of all my books, his occupy the most space, surpassing even Shakespeare.

This partly makes sense because Moorcock has written a lot of books in his time. But in addition to his recent releases and the nice White Wolf omnibuses that were released in the 90s, I have numerous paperbacks from the man, many of them stories that are duplicated elsewhere, that I’ve picked up in second-hand shops in England. There was a time when no matter what store I would go into, there would be a book of his there, and I would always buy them, hoping to snag up some long out of print gem to add to the canon. And that’s really what it was. Since most of his books are connected, it was like a jigsaw puzzle, filling in the pieces as it were.

This is mostly the fault of my friend Brian (ljuser=”asphalteden”). Thought I’d heard of Moorcock and Elric, it was Brian, himself a huge fan, who turned me on to the man and his works. We even went to see him at a rare appearance at a New York bookstore now long gone. I hadn’t read anything by him when I went to see him, but hearing him talk about the Eternal Champion and of the interconnectedness of his books, I felt a kind of kinship to what I wanted to accomplish one day. Thus began a systematic plan to acquire as much of his work as I could.

Looking at the titles now, I realize there are still many I haven’t read. There never seems to be enough time to read everything. But having them waiting there is like having a shelf (or rather two and a half) full of future possibilities.

Now, to shelve N-Z.

On the subway this morning, I looked across the car and a man was sitting down reading a Marvel Comics Avengers collection. To my left was someone reading a Jonathan Lethem book. To my right was someone playing a videogame on their PSP. At a later stop, someone got on reading a Terry Pratchett novel, and another person came on reading Edgar Rice Burroughs. And I thought to myself, when did the rest of the world start moving closer to me? Has there really been this shift in tastes or was I just not seeing it before?

It was a strangely surreal moment.