Book Log, 2009-02-22 through 2009-02-27

[ckd]

I want to get this posted before sundown, because the timing's too good to miss. (Also, posting my last booklog post late on Saturday night probably had something to do with the dearth of comments it received.)

6. I Remember the Future, Michael A. Burstein (ebook)[1]

Happy birthday, Michael!

I'll freely admit that I'm biased in favor of both this book and its author. There are authors whose work I enjoy, and authors whose work doesn't really click with me; there are authors I like as people, and authors who I would have a hard time getting along with. Michael is in the best quadrant of the truth table: an author whose work I like, and a person I would enjoy spending time with whether or not his work met my taste.

I enjoyed reading both the stories I had previously read as well as those I hadn't; I enjoyed the afterwords to each story even more, though. (Despite (or because of) my non-writerness, I really like hearing about how stories came about or how writers approach their work.)

[1] I have this in hardcover as well, but I'm much more likely to read an ebook than a hardcover when I'm reading in snippets, and short story collections are great for that.

RR20. Microcosmic Tales, Asimov/Greenberg/Olander, Eds. (mmpb)

100 short-short SF stories. Suffers a bit from Asimov's lead-in sentences, which are often both punny and spoilery, but still a good choice for extremely quick reads.

RR21. Ambulance Ship, James White (mmpb)

One of the mid-series Sector General fixups, from the timeframe where the stories within a given book were more closely linked than in the earliest books but before the point at which each book was a true novel rather than a fixup. Notable also for the "Secret History of Sector General" forematter, later included in NESFA Press's The White Papers IIRC.

Comments

[mabfan.livejournal.com]

Wow. Thank you for the kind words.

One of the hardest things is when you're friends with a writer but don't like their work. That's why I make a point of never asking my friends what they thought of any particular story, as I don't want to put them in an awkward position.

And I agree with you about afterwords. I buy and read short story collections for the author's notes on their stories, and I wanted my own book to be one that I would have wanted to read had someone else written it.

[ckd]

I find it important to keep in mind the distinction between "bad story" and "story that didn't work for me". There are some great books out there that I'm simply not the right reader for.