In early February of 2007, Gaiman posted an entry in his blog about the break-in of his favorite local bookstore. The owners of the store are friends In early February of 2007, Gaiman posted an entry in his blog about the break-in of his favorite local bookstore. The owners of the store are friends with Gaiman and asked if he would please tell his blog readers about this and maybe encourage his readers to help out by maybe buying a book. The store, Dreamhaven, has a really nice online catalog, and I used it extensively when collecting my copies of the Sandman.
February is my birthday month, and I hadn't purchased a present for myself yet, so the timing was perfect. I wanted to buy a book by Gaiman, to support Gaiman as well as Dreamhaven, and I when I saw that Angels & Visitations was also published by Dreamhaven, I chose that one.
Dreamhaven provides the option of getting a book signed for you by certain local authors, although it delays the shipping until the author happens to come in and be available to sign. So about a month later, I got my package of this in the mail complete with a "Happy birthday" inscription.
I love presents. Receiving and giving.
The book: Gaiman's first story collection. Many of the better stories were published in other collections, also, and I'm not a fan of some of the book's design (namely the cover lettering and table of contents shadow). But the better stories are still here, and I'm very glad I bought it.
I was working in a bookstore at the time this came out, and I snatched it up immediately. I was a huge fan of Hamilton at the time, of her Anita BlakeI was working in a bookstore at the time this came out, and I snatched it up immediately. I was a huge fan of Hamilton at the time, of her Anita Blake series in particular, and I had just recently began reading and loving Robb's In Death series.
This book began my disappointment with Hamilton. First off, her story here, "Magic Like Heat Across My Skin", isn’t a stand-alone; it’s the first hundred pages of her next novel. It doesn’t even really have an ending here. The hundred pages just end where that chapter ends, and then there’s a little note at the bottom of the page informing the reader that the story will continue in the novel Narcissus in Chains coming out later that year. I finished reading it thinking what a cop-out this was.
I did purchase and read the Narcissus novel when it published, and that’s were the last of my enjoyment with Anita Blake went away. I got rid of my copy of that book, so I can’t leave a review for it specifically, but there was one scene that really stood out to me because of how poorly written it was. It wasn’t even a sex scene (I was fine with those, in this book at least); it was a scene were where Anita was confused about S&M terminology, asked what the word “top” meant, and had it defined for her... and then the same scene was repeated nearly word-for-word two hundred pages later. Argh — I despised the shoddiness of the writing, and Hamilton, her editor, and her proofreader all should have caught that duplication before the novel ran to press. Leaving it in just drives home that either Anita is too stupid to remember the simple definition of an important word, or Hamilton thinks her readers are stupid and needs to have the word spelled out for them twice, or Hamilton is too stupid to realize she already wrote the scene that discussed that word. None of which I believe Hamilton wants her readers to think.
Robb’s In Death story was very good, and I keep the book in my library solely for it. I don’t remember the other two stories in this anthology, but I don’t believe they struck me as anything special. I’m hopeful that Robb will someday do a collection of all her In Death short stories so that I can have all of them in one book — and I can get rid of this one.
This is Gardner's first collection of stories, and the stories inside are largely reprinted from previous publications. I haven't read much of GardnerThis is Gardner's first collection of stories, and the stories inside are largely reprinted from previous publications. I haven't read much of Gardner before, and I picked this book up at the library based on the awesomeness of the title of the first story ("Muffin Explains Teleology to the World at Large") and the fact that story won an award.
And "Muffin" was good, but the two stories that I really loved were: "The Last Day of the War, with Parrots" and "The Young Person's Guide to the Organism."
"The Last Day" begins with a rock star and his entourage descending upon a deserted planet to film a new music video, and ends with race to find an effective way to use the living biological weapons left hopping innocently around.
"The Young Person's" was a set of vignettes that kept building and building into a gorgeous story. An alien spacecraft is drawing towards Earth's sun, and a variety of individuals encounter it as it travels, reacting with fear, wonder, worship, joy, hate, and acceptance, not that the craft does much in response. Each vignette is separate, but each blends so well as it leads up to the next. This story was particularly interesting as it laid the basic scifi elements for the world Gardner's novels are set in.
Gardner takes this neat, rather choppy approach to quite a few of his stories. Like, for "Later Figures of the Greater Trumps," the story as a whole was compiled by a dozen individual tarot descriptions; and for "Shadow Album," the story was flashback reveiled in increasing detail as the protagonist examined his photographs. I tend to think of this writing as circular, and I've always found it fascinating.
As an added bonus, Gardner wrote an introduction to the collection that contains a little paragraph or so about the background of each story. I love learning things like that from writers....more
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