upcoming

I was excited to learn today that China Mieville, he of fantastical monster-fiction fame, has released a new book for a younger audience, and a female audience at that! Sure to be a late night page-turner, it comes out tomorrow (so you can still get your pre-order discount at Amazon). Buy it for one of those brainy kids you know who “read too much” and then steal it for a day or two yourself!

Without having read this book, I’m betting it’s one of those books for twisted children, the ones like me, who loved to read dark fairy tales and stories where good does not always triumph over evil.

Here’s a little quote from the Wired article where I discovered this:

The latest example is British fantasy writer China Miéville, whose Un Lun Dun follows a young girl’s quest to save a creepy parallel-universe London. And for Miéville, best known for a steampunk trilogy full of superhot, beetle-headed women and nightmare-eating monsters, it’s a new direction. He’s written something that kids, especially young girls, will devour.

The big book approacheth! If you weren’t able to figure out my little graphical hint in last week’s post, the first big book we’re going to read as a group on “The Puget News” is Thomas Pynchon’s new 1,120 page monster, “Against the Day”. It’s being released a week from today and has a great pre-order price of $21.00 (list price of $35.00) at Amazon.com (just click the image above to place your order. Something resemblng a phone book will show up on your doorstep soon thereafter).

A couple of you are signed up to read this with me already, but here is the tentative plan. We will get the books here no later than 23rd and take roughly a month to read it through. The goal is to finish by Christmas and then to go out and celebrate when everyone is back in Seattle from Christmas break. Everyone, feel free to join us! This is not a book to read alone - I promise.

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November is NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month), the month where thousands of aspiring novelists take advantage of the seasonally poor weather (especially here in the Puget Sound), trade in their self-censoring generally overly-judgmental attitudes, and focus purely on the production of writing a novel - no matter how bad it is. Hellbent on the production of 2,000 words a day, these folks labor towards the completion of a 175-page (50,000 word) novel while their progress is shared, encouraged, and tracked at the NaNoWriMo website.

It’s a worthy endeavor, a task to which I aspire - perhaps next year - and the folks I know who have participated have lauded the benefits of it freeing their creative processes.

The reason I bring this up is that I’ve been following Matthew Baldwin’s attempt over at the ever-hilarious Defective Yeti to read “Moby Dick” this month. I don’t know if the clever creation of the “NoNoReMo” moniker is his, but since he’s the first person I’ve seen use it, and I could find no central “NoNoReMo” website using a cursory Google search, I’m giving him credit. His “Moby Dick” reading excursions are frequently blogged and always contain hilarious observations about the experience. So far, I’m harboring doubts as to whether Matthew will be successful - he hasn’t updated the attempt since November 6th but I love what he’s produced so far - even it means that “Moby Dick” moves further down my priority list of “Books to Read”.

The reason I bring all of this up is that several people, including myself (you know who you are), have decided to collectively read a big novel coming out near the end of this month. While we have no need to tie ourselves to a 1-month goal on this, it would be best not to drag this out. We’ll probably aim to finish by Christmas or New Year. I don’t want to write about it longer than that and even indulgent readers would have their patience tested.

I’ll announce what the book is in the coming days so that anybody who wants to partake can do so (although the above image should be a pretty major hint - nudge, nudge, wink, wink). Getting people to read gigantic books is always a goal of mine though, so if I were you, I’d expect to see this exercise repeated with various works in the future. Feel free to suggest things you’d like to read and discuss online.

Well, I guess I know what I’ll be reading over my Christmas holiday. I can picture it now, “Against the Day” rocketing up the New York Times bestseller list as tens of thousands of pounds of new Pynchon pages sit snugly under Christmas trees throughout the land. How many of these will go unread just due to shear the sheer 900-plus-page intimidation factor? My guess - most of them.

Alas, I am bit of a Pynchon fiend, having read all of his works to date. No reason to stop now.

Pre-order your copy on Amazon.com today and we’ll talk about the novel after the holiday. Yes, I know it is 4 months away but when you know already with so much certitude what you’ll be doing, why not make plans now? Feel free to contact me if you want to meet about the book together. Pynchon is much more fun when you’re not alone.