Justin Howe's Blog, page 18
February 4, 2020
January 2020 Books
And so here we are, another year of book tracking. My goal for this year is to read at least one book a month written in the past ten years, something which I failed to do this January. Here are some things I read that you might like to track down.
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Goldfinger by Ian Fleming: I am not a big James Bond fan and find the character’s continued existence to be puzzling. I can never get around how they keep changing actors without there being an explanation. At least with Doctor Who there’s an...
January 31, 2020
BWBC 04: Mundane Miracles, Mundane Horrors
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In an English cottage two old women sit and drink tea. Outside, the modernizing world makes its noisome rumbles and smoke. Inside, the women eat small sandwiches, sip tea, and gossip about the lives they’ve led. One, the sick one, begins to tell a story. It is not a love story but it is a story about love and devotion and a deserted house where something called a “token” lives. If you go to the house and stand outside the door the token will listen and let you take on someone else’s troubles...
January 25, 2020
BWBC 03: Jealous Again
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Today on Black Water Book Club dead lovers once more appear and jealousy rears its ugly head.
First, Edith Wharton’s “Pomegranate Seed” about Charlotte, a newly married woman trying to uncover the truth about the mysterious letters her husband keeps receiving. That the husband’s first wife died tragically lets you know right away where this story is going, and while it delivers few surprises it is a deep dive into an individual’s emotional landscape as they oscillate between jealousy,...
January 18, 2020
BWBC 02: Climax Joy!
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Welcome back to the Black Water Book Club. Today we’ll enjoy a very short one and a somewhat longer one.
IA Ireland’s “Climax For a Ghost Story” is an example of what would today be called flash fiction. It’s very much the kind of story places like Daily Science Fiction publishes regularly. That’s not a quality critique on flash fiction (I quite enjoy writing it myself!), Daily Science Fiction (who do what they do very well), or the story itself, just that its brevity no longer makes an...
January 16, 2020
Oh Shit! You’re Trapped in an Irish Fairy Tale
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Your step-mom will try to kill you, but she will fail. So instead she’ll turn you and your brothers into swans. After a few centuries you’ll become human again, except you’ll be incredibly old. But fear not! It’ll all be okay because you’ll be baptized before you die.
The king will send you and your brothers on a suicidal mission (because you killed his da), but when you do well the king will have his druid cast a spell so you all forget what it is you’re supposed to be doing. Then three...
January 11, 2020
BWBC 01: Enter… the Ambiguity
Welcome back to the Back Water Book Club or the BWBC as I’m going to call it from now on. This week we hit the stories!
To start off is Julio Cortazar’s “House Taken Over”.
It’s a ghost story. Sort of.
It’s more a metaphor story, but for what I don’t know. This story has ambiguity dripping all over it. A middle-aged brother and sister living in an old house find themselves at odds with a nameless unseen “they” that shows up one they and starts taking over their home. At first it’s only part...
January 3, 2020
Black Water Book Club
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Hello, folks. Welcome to the Black Water Book Club.
Today we’re taking a quick look at the book’s forward before next week when we’ll start looking at the stories proper. Fortunately, the forward’s brief and it gets to the point quickly. Manguel gives a good working definition of what he thinks fantastic literature is:
“Unlike tales of fantasy (those chronicles of mundane life in mythical surroundings such as Narnia or Middle Earth) fantastic literature can best be defined as the impossible...
December 26, 2019
Favorite Reads 2019
And so here are my favorite reads from this past year. As usual very few of these books are recent books. Some like the Westlake and the Pohl I’d been meaning to read for years. One delight from the past year was reading Tanith Lee. I wish I had gotten to read her work sooner. One thing I didn’t read much of this past year was non-fiction. Maybe only two or three other books beside the Machiavelli one listed below.
The Hot Rock by Donald Westlake
The first of Westlake’s novels featuring his...
December 19, 2019
Black Water Book Club
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Alberto Manguel’s Black Water: The Book of the Fantastic is an anthology of world literature from 1983 that’s considered a pioneering book for the weird genre. It’s cited as influential by others, in particular Ann and Jeff VanderMeer who put together their own anthology of weird literature. While Black Water‘s still leans Eurocentric, Manguel succeeded in pulling heavily from outside the English language, paying particular attention to the South American writers who formed his own...
December 4, 2019
Favorite Reads for October and November 2019
Not writing an October post nagged me all November, but I was traveling and that’s my excuse and I’m sticking with it.
Here are the books I liked from the last two months.
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The Compleat Guth Bandar by Matthew Hughes: Set during Earth’s penultimate age, Guth Bandar is a noonaut who voyages into humanity’s collective unconscious while traveling around the galaxy. Boyish and wry like Jack Vance, which it nods at heavily, but it lacks Vance’s cynicism and cruelty. Also spelling “complete” as “...
