I've long thought that if I ever started a used bookstore, I'd call it The Augean Stables.
Showing posts with label books. Show all posts
Showing posts with label books. Show all posts
Too Much of a Good Thing Is Wonderful
I've long thought that if I ever started a used bookstore, I'd call it The Augean Stables.
Too Much of a Good Thing Is Wonderful
I've long thought that if I ever started a used bookstore, I'd call it The Augean Stables.
What We Talk About When We Talk About Books
Band of Thebes had a post this past week about the decline of print.
There are (at least) two different things going on here, I think: one is the apparent decline of ink-on-paper publication, another is the question of free online resources. I see no reason why the Times necessarily ought to be free, and of course nothing is free, someone is paying to keep those pixels glowing. I haven't been paying that much attention, since I've never read the New York Times with anything like regularity, but I seem to recall a pay firewall for NYT content not all that long ago, in human as opposed to Internet years. I was surprised when I learned that the firewall had come down, but that was at the same time that we began hearing about the crisis of the Newspaper.
Unlike many people, I don't seem to have this sense of entitlement which decrees that all media should be available on the Web for free, even though I grew up in the age of broadcast media, with radio and TV available to all for no more than the cost of a receiver. But you got what you paid for, and you always had to deal with commercials. (Not so long ago one of my right-wing Facebook friends complained about advertising on TV and on the Internet, and claimed that he'd pay more for ad-free access to both. Pardon me if I don't believe that, if only because he loves complaining too much to give it up, and preferably complaining over trivia rather than substance.) On the other hand, print media were available for free (supported with tax dollars, of course, not really free) in public libraries. It was in libraries that I discovered print news media far superior in terms of information and variety of views to TV and most radio.
Even when cable TV came along, you were paying (at least at first) for reception, not for content. That never offended me in principle, especially with the promise of access to more stations than most of us could get outside of large cities. But all that promise quickly faded, and of course I hadn't been watching TV since the mid-Sixties. Most Americans seem to have embraced the explosion of junk content on TV (ESPN! ESPN2! Reality TV!), which didn't keep them from complaining about it. Cable ended up carrying the logic of centralized electronic media -- and really, of commercial media in general -- to its conclusion. Audiences were and are the product, to be sold to advertisers. Premium channels like Showtime and HBO have apparently provided limited niches for real creativity, but capital-intensive media are always going to have this problem.
Somewhere I saw an interview with the genius Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky, who remarked philosophically that making movies is expensive, and he wasn't really surprised if investors didn't want to support his habit, since the movies he made were not particularly commercial and wouldn't repay the investment. This has always been the problem for artists who want autonomy to do what they want, but need patronage to produce what may have no (or insufficient) audiences waiting for it. But that, I suspect, is another post.
What worries me about the decline of print is the changing model of distribution that goes along with it. You don't buy a copy of the book that you then can dispose of more or less as you please -- lend, hand down to another reader, give away, sell, or for that matter chop up or burn if you want to -- you get a license to a digital copy that you don't own and which the distributor can legally recall at will. (This is presumably a legacy of software licensing, which works according to the same model.) According to this article, which crystallized my personal wariness of the Kindle, Barnes & Noble's Nook reader allows for some book sharing, but in general libraries are still figuring out to how to adjust to e-books. Many readers blame the libraries, says the blogger, but the real roadblock lies with the publishers. (One commenter, who accuses the blogger of being "innacurate" [sic], thought that the fuss was about prices. If it weren't that so many people are so dumb, I'd suspect the commenter of being a shill for the publishers.) It's all very well if you have a Kindle and a credit card and live within range of Amazon's wireless signal, but not everyone does; and with the economy not looking good, I'm not reassured by the promise of cheaper e-reading devices or e-books. I worry about the future of lending libraries, as they used to be called, if books can't be lent anymore.
By the way, I notice that the local Borders bookstore will be closing in January. This doesn't concern me much, except to sympathize with the staff who'll be losing their jobs, partly because the store had been paring back its stock for some time. Maybe it will help the independent bookstores, mostly downtown, who always got most of my business anyway. (I bought books at Borders with discount coupons; if I was going to pay full price, I went to an independent.) Big bookstores, much as I love them (I nearly fainted the first time I walked into the University of Chicago's Seminary Book Co-op, but that was a very different kind of place), are dinosaurs; independents may be like those little ratty mammals that survived the big extinction that wiped the thunder lizards out.
By the way, lest it seem I'm dodging BoT's provocative opening questions: Yes, I bought nineteen physical books in September. Nineteen. Four new books: two from independent local bookstores, one from a chain with a discount coupon, one ordered online from an independent dealer. The rest were used, from a mix of local dealers (including the public library's book sale), and online independents. Was it a lonely experience? Not particularly -- buying books has usually been a solitary practice for me. But I'm not a typical American (surprised?).
Did you buy a physical book in September? Was it a lonely experience? The Association of American Publishers announced their September results, showing drastic declines in printed book sales, whether purchased in a store or online. Electronic book sales have nearly doubled.In addition, phone companies are phasing out physical phonebooks -- a mixed curse, as BoT concedes, and numerous big publications are going to stop publishing print editions: U. S. News & World Report in December, and the New York Times "sometime in the future." "Enjoy it online while it's still free, this month and next," BoT warns darkly. "The NYT website pay wall is coming in the first quarter of 2011."
There are (at least) two different things going on here, I think: one is the apparent decline of ink-on-paper publication, another is the question of free online resources. I see no reason why the Times necessarily ought to be free, and of course nothing is free, someone is paying to keep those pixels glowing. I haven't been paying that much attention, since I've never read the New York Times with anything like regularity, but I seem to recall a pay firewall for NYT content not all that long ago, in human as opposed to Internet years. I was surprised when I learned that the firewall had come down, but that was at the same time that we began hearing about the crisis of the Newspaper.
Unlike many people, I don't seem to have this sense of entitlement which decrees that all media should be available on the Web for free, even though I grew up in the age of broadcast media, with radio and TV available to all for no more than the cost of a receiver. But you got what you paid for, and you always had to deal with commercials. (Not so long ago one of my right-wing Facebook friends complained about advertising on TV and on the Internet, and claimed that he'd pay more for ad-free access to both. Pardon me if I don't believe that, if only because he loves complaining too much to give it up, and preferably complaining over trivia rather than substance.) On the other hand, print media were available for free (supported with tax dollars, of course, not really free) in public libraries. It was in libraries that I discovered print news media far superior in terms of information and variety of views to TV and most radio.
Even when cable TV came along, you were paying (at least at first) for reception, not for content. That never offended me in principle, especially with the promise of access to more stations than most of us could get outside of large cities. But all that promise quickly faded, and of course I hadn't been watching TV since the mid-Sixties. Most Americans seem to have embraced the explosion of junk content on TV (ESPN! ESPN2! Reality TV!), which didn't keep them from complaining about it. Cable ended up carrying the logic of centralized electronic media -- and really, of commercial media in general -- to its conclusion. Audiences were and are the product, to be sold to advertisers. Premium channels like Showtime and HBO have apparently provided limited niches for real creativity, but capital-intensive media are always going to have this problem.
Somewhere I saw an interview with the genius Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky, who remarked philosophically that making movies is expensive, and he wasn't really surprised if investors didn't want to support his habit, since the movies he made were not particularly commercial and wouldn't repay the investment. This has always been the problem for artists who want autonomy to do what they want, but need patronage to produce what may have no (or insufficient) audiences waiting for it. But that, I suspect, is another post.
What worries me about the decline of print is the changing model of distribution that goes along with it. You don't buy a copy of the book that you then can dispose of more or less as you please -- lend, hand down to another reader, give away, sell, or for that matter chop up or burn if you want to -- you get a license to a digital copy that you don't own and which the distributor can legally recall at will. (This is presumably a legacy of software licensing, which works according to the same model.) According to this article, which crystallized my personal wariness of the Kindle, Barnes & Noble's Nook reader allows for some book sharing, but in general libraries are still figuring out to how to adjust to e-books. Many readers blame the libraries, says the blogger, but the real roadblock lies with the publishers. (One commenter, who accuses the blogger of being "innacurate" [sic], thought that the fuss was about prices. If it weren't that so many people are so dumb, I'd suspect the commenter of being a shill for the publishers.) It's all very well if you have a Kindle and a credit card and live within range of Amazon's wireless signal, but not everyone does; and with the economy not looking good, I'm not reassured by the promise of cheaper e-reading devices or e-books. I worry about the future of lending libraries, as they used to be called, if books can't be lent anymore.
By the way, I notice that the local Borders bookstore will be closing in January. This doesn't concern me much, except to sympathize with the staff who'll be losing their jobs, partly because the store had been paring back its stock for some time. Maybe it will help the independent bookstores, mostly downtown, who always got most of my business anyway. (I bought books at Borders with discount coupons; if I was going to pay full price, I went to an independent.) Big bookstores, much as I love them (I nearly fainted the first time I walked into the University of Chicago's Seminary Book Co-op, but that was a very different kind of place), are dinosaurs; independents may be like those little ratty mammals that survived the big extinction that wiped the thunder lizards out.
By the way, lest it seem I'm dodging BoT's provocative opening questions: Yes, I bought nineteen physical books in September. Nineteen. Four new books: two from independent local bookstores, one from a chain with a discount coupon, one ordered online from an independent dealer. The rest were used, from a mix of local dealers (including the public library's book sale), and online independents. Was it a lonely experience? Not particularly -- buying books has usually been a solitary practice for me. But I'm not a typical American (surprised?).
What We Talk About When We Talk About Books
Band of Thebes had a post this past week about the decline of print.
There are (at least) two different things going on here, I think: one is the apparent decline of ink-on-paper publication, another is the question of free online resources. I see no reason why the Times necessarily ought to be free, and of course nothing is free, someone is paying to keep those pixels glowing. I haven't been paying that much attention, since I've never read the New York Times with anything like regularity, but I seem to recall a pay firewall for NYT content not all that long ago, in human as opposed to Internet years. I was surprised when I learned that the firewall had come down, but that was at the same time that we began hearing about the crisis of the Newspaper.
Unlike many people, I don't seem to have this sense of entitlement which decrees that all media should be available on the Web for free, even though I grew up in the age of broadcast media, with radio and TV available to all for no more than the cost of a receiver. But you got what you paid for, and you always had to deal with commercials. (Not so long ago one of my right-wing Facebook friends complained about advertising on TV and on the Internet, and claimed that he'd pay more for ad-free access to both. Pardon me if I don't believe that, if only because he loves complaining too much to give it up, and preferably complaining over trivia rather than substance.) On the other hand, print media were available for free (supported with tax dollars, of course, not really free) in public libraries. It was in libraries that I discovered print news media far superior in terms of information and variety of views to TV and most radio.
Even when cable TV came along, you were paying (at least at first) for reception, not for content. That never offended me in principle, especially with the promise of access to more stations than most of us could get outside of large cities. But all that promise quickly faded, and of course I hadn't been watching TV since the mid-Sixties. Most Americans seem to have embraced the explosion of junk content on TV (ESPN! ESPN2! Reality TV!), which didn't keep them from complaining about it. Cable ended up carrying the logic of centralized electronic media -- and really, of commercial media in general -- to its conclusion. Audiences were and are the product, to be sold to advertisers. Premium channels like Showtime and HBO have apparently provided limited niches for real creativity, but capital-intensive media are always going to have this problem.
Somewhere I saw an interview with the genius Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky, who remarked philosophically that making movies is expensive, and he wasn't really surprised if investors didn't want to support his habit, since the movies he made were not particularly commercial and wouldn't repay the investment. This has always been the problem for artists who want autonomy to do what they want, but need patronage to produce what may have no (or insufficient) audiences waiting for it. But that, I suspect, is another post.
What worries me about the decline of print is the changing model of distribution that goes along with it. You don't buy a copy of the book that you then can dispose of more or less as you please -- lend, hand down to another reader, give away, sell, or for that matter chop up or burn if you want to -- you get a license to a digital copy that you don't own and which the distributor can legally recall at will. (This is presumably a legacy of software licensing, which works according to the same model.) According to this article, which crystallized my personal wariness of the Kindle, Barnes & Noble's Nook reader allows for some book sharing, but in general libraries are still figuring out to how to adjust to e-books. Many readers blame the libraries, says the blogger, but the real roadblock lies with the publishers. (One commenter, who accuses the blogger of being "innacurate" [sic], thought that the fuss was about prices. If it weren't that so many people are so dumb, I'd suspect the commenter of being a shill for the publishers.) It's all very well if you have a Kindle and a credit card and live within range of Amazon's wireless signal, but not everyone does; and with the economy not looking good, I'm not reassured by the promise of cheaper e-reading devices or e-books. I worry about the future of lending libraries, as they used to be called, if books can't be lent anymore.
By the way, I notice that the local Borders bookstore will be closing in January. This doesn't concern me much, except to sympathize with the staff who'll be losing their jobs, partly because the store had been paring back its stock for some time. Maybe it will help the independent bookstores, mostly downtown, who always got most of my business anyway. (I bought books at Borders with discount coupons; if I was going to pay full price, I went to an independent.) Big bookstores, much as I love them (I nearly fainted the first time I walked into the University of Chicago's Seminary Book Co-op, but that was a very different kind of place), are dinosaurs; independents may be like those little ratty mammals that survived the big extinction that wiped the thunder lizards out.
By the way, lest it seem I'm dodging BoT's provocative opening questions: Yes, I bought nineteen physical books in September. Nineteen. Four new books: two from independent local bookstores, one from a chain with a discount coupon, one ordered online from an independent dealer. The rest were used, from a mix of local dealers (including the public library's book sale), and online independents. Was it a lonely experience? Not particularly -- buying books has usually been a solitary practice for me. But I'm not a typical American (surprised?).
Did you buy a physical book in September? Was it a lonely experience? The Association of American Publishers announced their September results, showing drastic declines in printed book sales, whether purchased in a store or online. Electronic book sales have nearly doubled.In addition, phone companies are phasing out physical phonebooks -- a mixed curse, as BoT concedes, and numerous big publications are going to stop publishing print editions: U. S. News & World Report in December, and the New York Times "sometime in the future." "Enjoy it online while it's still free, this month and next," BoT warns darkly. "The NYT website pay wall is coming in the first quarter of 2011."
There are (at least) two different things going on here, I think: one is the apparent decline of ink-on-paper publication, another is the question of free online resources. I see no reason why the Times necessarily ought to be free, and of course nothing is free, someone is paying to keep those pixels glowing. I haven't been paying that much attention, since I've never read the New York Times with anything like regularity, but I seem to recall a pay firewall for NYT content not all that long ago, in human as opposed to Internet years. I was surprised when I learned that the firewall had come down, but that was at the same time that we began hearing about the crisis of the Newspaper.
Unlike many people, I don't seem to have this sense of entitlement which decrees that all media should be available on the Web for free, even though I grew up in the age of broadcast media, with radio and TV available to all for no more than the cost of a receiver. But you got what you paid for, and you always had to deal with commercials. (Not so long ago one of my right-wing Facebook friends complained about advertising on TV and on the Internet, and claimed that he'd pay more for ad-free access to both. Pardon me if I don't believe that, if only because he loves complaining too much to give it up, and preferably complaining over trivia rather than substance.) On the other hand, print media were available for free (supported with tax dollars, of course, not really free) in public libraries. It was in libraries that I discovered print news media far superior in terms of information and variety of views to TV and most radio.
Even when cable TV came along, you were paying (at least at first) for reception, not for content. That never offended me in principle, especially with the promise of access to more stations than most of us could get outside of large cities. But all that promise quickly faded, and of course I hadn't been watching TV since the mid-Sixties. Most Americans seem to have embraced the explosion of junk content on TV (ESPN! ESPN2! Reality TV!), which didn't keep them from complaining about it. Cable ended up carrying the logic of centralized electronic media -- and really, of commercial media in general -- to its conclusion. Audiences were and are the product, to be sold to advertisers. Premium channels like Showtime and HBO have apparently provided limited niches for real creativity, but capital-intensive media are always going to have this problem.
Somewhere I saw an interview with the genius Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky, who remarked philosophically that making movies is expensive, and he wasn't really surprised if investors didn't want to support his habit, since the movies he made were not particularly commercial and wouldn't repay the investment. This has always been the problem for artists who want autonomy to do what they want, but need patronage to produce what may have no (or insufficient) audiences waiting for it. But that, I suspect, is another post.
What worries me about the decline of print is the changing model of distribution that goes along with it. You don't buy a copy of the book that you then can dispose of more or less as you please -- lend, hand down to another reader, give away, sell, or for that matter chop up or burn if you want to -- you get a license to a digital copy that you don't own and which the distributor can legally recall at will. (This is presumably a legacy of software licensing, which works according to the same model.) According to this article, which crystallized my personal wariness of the Kindle, Barnes & Noble's Nook reader allows for some book sharing, but in general libraries are still figuring out to how to adjust to e-books. Many readers blame the libraries, says the blogger, but the real roadblock lies with the publishers. (One commenter, who accuses the blogger of being "innacurate" [sic], thought that the fuss was about prices. If it weren't that so many people are so dumb, I'd suspect the commenter of being a shill for the publishers.) It's all very well if you have a Kindle and a credit card and live within range of Amazon's wireless signal, but not everyone does; and with the economy not looking good, I'm not reassured by the promise of cheaper e-reading devices or e-books. I worry about the future of lending libraries, as they used to be called, if books can't be lent anymore.
By the way, I notice that the local Borders bookstore will be closing in January. This doesn't concern me much, except to sympathize with the staff who'll be losing their jobs, partly because the store had been paring back its stock for some time. Maybe it will help the independent bookstores, mostly downtown, who always got most of my business anyway. (I bought books at Borders with discount coupons; if I was going to pay full price, I went to an independent.) Big bookstores, much as I love them (I nearly fainted the first time I walked into the University of Chicago's Seminary Book Co-op, but that was a very different kind of place), are dinosaurs; independents may be like those little ratty mammals that survived the big extinction that wiped the thunder lizards out.
By the way, lest it seem I'm dodging BoT's provocative opening questions: Yes, I bought nineteen physical books in September. Nineteen. Four new books: two from independent local bookstores, one from a chain with a discount coupon, one ordered online from an independent dealer. The rest were used, from a mix of local dealers (including the public library's book sale), and online independents. Was it a lonely experience? Not particularly -- buying books has usually been a solitary practice for me. But I'm not a typical American (surprised?).
Alcoholic Succession
Hey, Jon,
Wasn't it you who first introduced me to Spider Robinson's Callahan books? I'm pretty sure it was you, but it must be twenty years ago now. I also don't remember for sure if I'd already read any of Robinson's other books; I remember a glowing review of Stardance that I know led me to read that one.
But the early Callahan books did draw me in. It's a lovely fantasy, of a small tavern that attracts a misfit bunch of space and time travellers, run by a wise and solid publican. I was still young enough to want to find a place like that, where I'd belong, among my peers, watched over by an ideal father figure. Robinson's writing was light and clear, seemingly effortless; if he wasn't a new Heinlein, as he has often been called, he still seemed to have learned the right lessons from the Noble Engineer.
But something went awry over the years, as Robinson began taking his Heinlein association too seriously. In a tribute to Heinlein -- oh yeah, the title was "Rah Rah R.A.H.", wasn't it? -- I encountered Robinson's overwrought defense of the Great Man. As I remember it, he scored some points against Heinlein's less intelligent critics, but forgot that just because your opponents are wrong, it doesn't make you right. And by the time I read that, I'd noticed Robinson's own fiction starting to go soft. Still, as with Heinlein himself, I could read Robinson with pleasure even when his opinions annoyed me. And they did, they did -- the only thing I remember from the later books was the information was that Mike Callahan, the saloon's patriarch, would not tolerate anyone's referring to the Strategic Defense Initiative as "Star Wars."
By the time Callahan's Key appeared in 2000, even the storytelling had worn thin, and I missed the latest installment, Callahan's Con, when it was published in 2003. But I found a copy at the library book sale last weekend for $2 and thought, What the hell -- it won't take more than a couple of hours to read. Which it didn't, and they weren't unpleasant hours either. Robinson seems to have lost the US jingoism, which was always odd in a Canadian resident, albeit an American-born one. I suspect the accession of George W. Bush may have jolted him closer to reality again. The infamous puns were no more than a minor annoyance; I'm not constitutionally revolted by them, to each his own, yet they were tiresome, composed specifically to inspire groans, I thought. But I was zipping along too quickly to be bothered much. The characters are, as a Publisher's Weekly reviewer once noted, "collections of eccentricities rather than real people." The plot complications are obviously mechanical, and Robinson has to switch to the point-of-view of his villain for extended passages in order to keep things moving in sequence.
One thing really tripped me up, though, and that was the lapses in continuity. The least of these involves a parrot-sized toilet, fully functional, located behind the bar for the hyperintelligent parrot Harry to use. On page 106 Robinson describes it as though it were new to the narrative -- but he'd already introduced it on page 23. More serious: on page 91 we're told that "the gate Little Nuts had destroyed" had been repaired -- but it was actually destroyed by the novel's faux-baddie Bureaucrat, Field Inspector Ludnyola Czrjghnczl ("the accent is on the rjgh") on page 36. The narrator Jake Stonebender's daughter Erin has "long curly chestnut hair" on page 94, but on 141 it is suddenly blonde. On page 92 Jake's wife Zoey is frightened by the villain: "I could not blame her. This was her first encounter" with him -- but she was present, arguing with Jake and Erin, when "the man monster" first walked in on page 63. These don't affect the plot, such as it is, but I found them jarring. For a while I wondered if they were deliberate, maybe to suggest changes in space-time continua or something, but I can't see any rhyme or reason in them.
But hey, this is a fantasy novel after all, and the clearest sign of that is that it takes place in Key West, whither the saloon migrated from Long Island a few books back -- yet it's a Key West without any gay men in it. Until Robinson needs some (more?) comic relief, that is, and produces four gigantic drag queens from a van, just to scare the villain. It's now been six years since Spider Robinson entered the world of Callahan, and that is probably a good thing.
Wasn't it you who first introduced me to Spider Robinson's Callahan books? I'm pretty sure it was you, but it must be twenty years ago now. I also don't remember for sure if I'd already read any of Robinson's other books; I remember a glowing review of Stardance that I know led me to read that one.
But the early Callahan books did draw me in. It's a lovely fantasy, of a small tavern that attracts a misfit bunch of space and time travellers, run by a wise and solid publican. I was still young enough to want to find a place like that, where I'd belong, among my peers, watched over by an ideal father figure. Robinson's writing was light and clear, seemingly effortless; if he wasn't a new Heinlein, as he has often been called, he still seemed to have learned the right lessons from the Noble Engineer.
But something went awry over the years, as Robinson began taking his Heinlein association too seriously. In a tribute to Heinlein -- oh yeah, the title was "Rah Rah R.A.H.", wasn't it? -- I encountered Robinson's overwrought defense of the Great Man. As I remember it, he scored some points against Heinlein's less intelligent critics, but forgot that just because your opponents are wrong, it doesn't make you right. And by the time I read that, I'd noticed Robinson's own fiction starting to go soft. Still, as with Heinlein himself, I could read Robinson with pleasure even when his opinions annoyed me. And they did, they did -- the only thing I remember from the later books was the information was that Mike Callahan, the saloon's patriarch, would not tolerate anyone's referring to the Strategic Defense Initiative as "Star Wars."
By the time Callahan's Key appeared in 2000, even the storytelling had worn thin, and I missed the latest installment, Callahan's Con, when it was published in 2003. But I found a copy at the library book sale last weekend for $2 and thought, What the hell -- it won't take more than a couple of hours to read. Which it didn't, and they weren't unpleasant hours either. Robinson seems to have lost the US jingoism, which was always odd in a Canadian resident, albeit an American-born one. I suspect the accession of George W. Bush may have jolted him closer to reality again. The infamous puns were no more than a minor annoyance; I'm not constitutionally revolted by them, to each his own, yet they were tiresome, composed specifically to inspire groans, I thought. But I was zipping along too quickly to be bothered much. The characters are, as a Publisher's Weekly reviewer once noted, "collections of eccentricities rather than real people." The plot complications are obviously mechanical, and Robinson has to switch to the point-of-view of his villain for extended passages in order to keep things moving in sequence.
One thing really tripped me up, though, and that was the lapses in continuity. The least of these involves a parrot-sized toilet, fully functional, located behind the bar for the hyperintelligent parrot Harry to use. On page 106 Robinson describes it as though it were new to the narrative -- but he'd already introduced it on page 23. More serious: on page 91 we're told that "the gate Little Nuts had destroyed" had been repaired -- but it was actually destroyed by the novel's faux-baddie Bureaucrat, Field Inspector Ludnyola Czrjghnczl ("the accent is on the rjgh") on page 36. The narrator Jake Stonebender's daughter Erin has "long curly chestnut hair" on page 94, but on 141 it is suddenly blonde. On page 92 Jake's wife Zoey is frightened by the villain: "I could not blame her. This was her first encounter" with him -- but she was present, arguing with Jake and Erin, when "the man monster" first walked in on page 63. These don't affect the plot, such as it is, but I found them jarring. For a while I wondered if they were deliberate, maybe to suggest changes in space-time continua or something, but I can't see any rhyme or reason in them.
But hey, this is a fantasy novel after all, and the clearest sign of that is that it takes place in Key West, whither the saloon migrated from Long Island a few books back -- yet it's a Key West without any gay men in it. Until Robinson needs some (more?) comic relief, that is, and produces four gigantic drag queens from a van, just to scare the villain. It's now been six years since Spider Robinson entered the world of Callahan, and that is probably a good thing.
best,
Duncan
Duncan
Alcoholic Succession
Hey, Jon,
Wasn't it you who first introduced me to Spider Robinson's Callahan books? I'm pretty sure it was you, but it must be twenty years ago now. I also don't remember for sure if I'd already read any of Robinson's other books; I remember a glowing review of Stardance that I know led me to read that one.
But the early Callahan books did draw me in. It's a lovely fantasy, of a small tavern that attracts a misfit bunch of space and time travellers, run by a wise and solid publican. I was still young enough to want to find a place like that, where I'd belong, among my peers, watched over by an ideal father figure. Robinson's writing was light and clear, seemingly effortless; if he wasn't a new Heinlein, as he has often been called, he still seemed to have learned the right lessons from the Noble Engineer.
But something went awry over the years, as Robinson began taking his Heinlein association too seriously. In a tribute to Heinlein -- oh yeah, the title was "Rah Rah R.A.H.", wasn't it? -- I encountered Robinson's overwrought defense of the Great Man. As I remember it, he scored some points against Heinlein's less intelligent critics, but forgot that just because your opponents are wrong, it doesn't make you right. And by the time I read that, I'd noticed Robinson's own fiction starting to go soft. Still, as with Heinlein himself, I could read Robinson with pleasure even when his opinions annoyed me. And they did, they did -- the only thing I remember from the later books was the information was that Mike Callahan, the saloon's patriarch, would not tolerate anyone's referring to the Strategic Defense Initiative as "Star Wars."
By the time Callahan's Key appeared in 2000, even the storytelling had worn thin, and I missed the latest installment, Callahan's Con, when it was published in 2003. But I found a copy at the library book sale last weekend for $2 and thought, What the hell -- it won't take more than a couple of hours to read. Which it didn't, and they weren't unpleasant hours either. Robinson seems to have lost the US jingoism, which was always odd in a Canadian resident, albeit an American-born one. I suspect the accession of George W. Bush may have jolted him closer to reality again. The infamous puns were no more than a minor annoyance; I'm not constitutionally revolted by them, to each his own, yet they were tiresome, composed specifically to inspire groans, I thought. But I was zipping along too quickly to be bothered much. The characters are, as a Publisher's Weekly reviewer once noted, "collections of eccentricities rather than real people." The plot complications are obviously mechanical, and Robinson has to switch to the point-of-view of his villain for extended passages in order to keep things moving in sequence.
One thing really tripped me up, though, and that was the lapses in continuity. The least of these involves a parrot-sized toilet, fully functional, located behind the bar for the hyperintelligent parrot Harry to use. On page 106 Robinson describes it as though it were new to the narrative -- but he'd already introduced it on page 23. More serious: on page 91 we're told that "the gate Little Nuts had destroyed" had been repaired -- but it was actually destroyed by the novel's faux-baddie Bureaucrat, Field Inspector Ludnyola Czrjghnczl ("the accent is on the rjgh") on page 36. The narrator Jake Stonebender's daughter Erin has "long curly chestnut hair" on page 94, but on 141 it is suddenly blonde. On page 92 Jake's wife Zoey is frightened by the villain: "I could not blame her. This was her first encounter" with him -- but she was present, arguing with Jake and Erin, when "the man monster" first walked in on page 63. These don't affect the plot, such as it is, but I found them jarring. For a while I wondered if they were deliberate, maybe to suggest changes in space-time continua or something, but I can't see any rhyme or reason in them.
But hey, this is a fantasy novel after all, and the clearest sign of that is that it takes place in Key West, whither the saloon migrated from Long Island a few books back -- yet it's a Key West without any gay men in it. Until Robinson needs some (more?) comic relief, that is, and produces four gigantic drag queens from a van, just to scare the villain. It's now been six years since Spider Robinson entered the world of Callahan, and that is probably a good thing.
Wasn't it you who first introduced me to Spider Robinson's Callahan books? I'm pretty sure it was you, but it must be twenty years ago now. I also don't remember for sure if I'd already read any of Robinson's other books; I remember a glowing review of Stardance that I know led me to read that one.
But the early Callahan books did draw me in. It's a lovely fantasy, of a small tavern that attracts a misfit bunch of space and time travellers, run by a wise and solid publican. I was still young enough to want to find a place like that, where I'd belong, among my peers, watched over by an ideal father figure. Robinson's writing was light and clear, seemingly effortless; if he wasn't a new Heinlein, as he has often been called, he still seemed to have learned the right lessons from the Noble Engineer.
But something went awry over the years, as Robinson began taking his Heinlein association too seriously. In a tribute to Heinlein -- oh yeah, the title was "Rah Rah R.A.H.", wasn't it? -- I encountered Robinson's overwrought defense of the Great Man. As I remember it, he scored some points against Heinlein's less intelligent critics, but forgot that just because your opponents are wrong, it doesn't make you right. And by the time I read that, I'd noticed Robinson's own fiction starting to go soft. Still, as with Heinlein himself, I could read Robinson with pleasure even when his opinions annoyed me. And they did, they did -- the only thing I remember from the later books was the information was that Mike Callahan, the saloon's patriarch, would not tolerate anyone's referring to the Strategic Defense Initiative as "Star Wars."
By the time Callahan's Key appeared in 2000, even the storytelling had worn thin, and I missed the latest installment, Callahan's Con, when it was published in 2003. But I found a copy at the library book sale last weekend for $2 and thought, What the hell -- it won't take more than a couple of hours to read. Which it didn't, and they weren't unpleasant hours either. Robinson seems to have lost the US jingoism, which was always odd in a Canadian resident, albeit an American-born one. I suspect the accession of George W. Bush may have jolted him closer to reality again. The infamous puns were no more than a minor annoyance; I'm not constitutionally revolted by them, to each his own, yet they were tiresome, composed specifically to inspire groans, I thought. But I was zipping along too quickly to be bothered much. The characters are, as a Publisher's Weekly reviewer once noted, "collections of eccentricities rather than real people." The plot complications are obviously mechanical, and Robinson has to switch to the point-of-view of his villain for extended passages in order to keep things moving in sequence.
One thing really tripped me up, though, and that was the lapses in continuity. The least of these involves a parrot-sized toilet, fully functional, located behind the bar for the hyperintelligent parrot Harry to use. On page 106 Robinson describes it as though it were new to the narrative -- but he'd already introduced it on page 23. More serious: on page 91 we're told that "the gate Little Nuts had destroyed" had been repaired -- but it was actually destroyed by the novel's faux-baddie Bureaucrat, Field Inspector Ludnyola Czrjghnczl ("the accent is on the rjgh") on page 36. The narrator Jake Stonebender's daughter Erin has "long curly chestnut hair" on page 94, but on 141 it is suddenly blonde. On page 92 Jake's wife Zoey is frightened by the villain: "I could not blame her. This was her first encounter" with him -- but she was present, arguing with Jake and Erin, when "the man monster" first walked in on page 63. These don't affect the plot, such as it is, but I found them jarring. For a while I wondered if they were deliberate, maybe to suggest changes in space-time continua or something, but I can't see any rhyme or reason in them.
But hey, this is a fantasy novel after all, and the clearest sign of that is that it takes place in Key West, whither the saloon migrated from Long Island a few books back -- yet it's a Key West without any gay men in it. Until Robinson needs some (more?) comic relief, that is, and produces four gigantic drag queens from a van, just to scare the villain. It's now been six years since Spider Robinson entered the world of Callahan, and that is probably a good thing.
best,
Duncan
Duncan
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