The first book we’ll discuss is Crossing California by Adam Langer. A Chicago tale that takes place in the waning days of the 1970s, this looks to be a coming of age novel featuring several families in a Jewish neighborhood. It’s a first-time author, which I figure is appropriate, and landed on several year-end best-of lists.
Plenty of copies available at local libraries, so no excuses. We’ll get together and discuss at a site to be determined next month on Tuesday, May 20th. (I originally wanted to make it a full month, but that puts us into Memorial Day Weekend, and I figure all of us will likely have other things going on.)
Hope the book doesn’t suck. And if it does suck, at least we’ll have something to talk about. Enjoy!
Are there any other KC bloggers out there who would be interested in starting up a book group?
Bloggers are people who, almost by definition, read a bunch, keeping up with dozens of blogs in a week, if not in a day. We also are people who are good at organizing their thoughts for posting – two qualities that make ideal book group participants. Throw in the fact that there are a bunch of crazy, diverse, and intelligent folks that blog in the area, and I think we’d get a great group together. I was thinking of trying it as a one-time thing, meeting at a centrally-located bar for drinks and discussion. And if the response is good, it could then develop into an ongoing thing. And it’d be a great excuse for a blogger meetup, if nothing else.
And if you’re interested but can’t make the book group for whatever reason and want to play along at home, you can post your thoughts on your blogs. We all can than comment back and forth, prompting further discussion, expanding the conversation.
So if anyone’s game, leave a comment or email me at the gmail at gregg dot winsor and mention what kinds of books you like to read. Anyone who has a blog in the KC area is welcome. And if you’re already in a book group that might need a new member, keep me in mind.
(I’m sending out extra special guilt vibes to some of the KC librarians who I know are out there. You guys game?)
I’ve recently cleaned house on the social networking front – I’ve nixed my Facebook and my MySpace accounts, as I wasn’t really using either and dislike them for various reasons. But if you want to catch me elsewhere on teh interwebs:
My Goodreads. (Which needs updating.)
Twitter. (Trying this out.)
Flickr. (Cute baby photos!)
And, y’know, here.
The wife and I were exhausted Monday evening after a long weekend, so after putting the little guy down we decided to crash early. During the night, Gav started to fuss, as he’s an incredibly light sleeper. I went in to hold him for a little bit and turned on the television to watch the college basketball championship with the sound off and the closed-captioning on. I (or Gavin) happened to have excellent timing, as I got to see the entirety of the KU comeback, down eight with just a handful of minutes to play in regulation. I went back to bed after KU forced overtime.
About a half hour later I was awakened by a loud boom, which I assumed was a severe thunderstorm that was supposed to be coming our way. On the second boom, I wondered if there was a rolling gun battle in our neighborhood. After the third, I realized it was local KU yahoos shooting off weaponry in celebration of the win.
So congrats, KU! I just wish that at such a late hour you would have been more respectful of families with kiddos.
Someone out there on the internets wrote me a nice email about my blog, however I couldn’t read it as it was routed into my spam folder. I caught just the barest glimpse of the subject header right after I clicked the “delete all” button. Gone forever, alas.
(Please don’t take this as a slam against the Almighty Google, whose applications and search engines I use every day, praise be to the nice folks over at Mountain View, California.)
According to the crew over at Cinematical, looks like Dark City, one of my all-time top-ten desert island films, will soon be getting a DVD rerelease with more features, toys, and interviews. Woo-hoo!
I’ve blogged about Morgan’s first novel, the wonderfully futuristic and gritty
Altered Carbon, before. Jumping into his more recent and equally critically acclaimed novel, Thirteen, I find that Morgan is still writing excellent sci-fi, however some of the problems I saw in Carbon are still there.
Thirteen is sci-fi in the old-school sense of the word – not spaceships and lasers and Star Wars knockoffs, but novels as thought experiments, taking concepts and hot-button issues going on in the world now and extrapolating them into the future, giving them a voice, face, and a plot. Here, Morgan takes on genetically-modified soldiers – in the future, civilization has been ‘bred’ into the population, and nations must create their own soldiers in the lab to do all the nasty work, which horrifies the regular folks. The warriors – throwbacks to a more primal, hunter, alpha-male part of mankind’s history – are quarantined and outlawed. The plot is ganked from Blade Runner, among many other sources, where a more reasonable genetically engineered warrior must track down his own kind for the public good.
Like Altered Carbon, the prose is tough, hard-boiled, and just this shy of brilliant. The science is sound and would make the basis for one hell of a movie. However, instead of just creating a nasty little tale, which would have been ideal, Morgan tries to get epic with things, and it’s why the novel didn’t quite work for me. His story (where America is divided
Jesusland style) tends to meander and lacks focus. What he’s left us with is still interesting, to be sure, but the story doesn’t hum along the way it should. Worth reading? Sure. But just be aware of its flaws going in.
Oh – I took part in a book discussion group for the Kansas City Star last weekend. I’ll post links to my no-doubt stunning and insightful comments when they publish them – probably this Saturday. Watch as my brilliance gets left on the cutting-room editing-room floor.
