Red Queen’s race
A little over six months ago, I noted that I had 17 books stacked next to my bed waiting to be read.
Since then, I feel like I've been reading pretty much nonstop. I've certainly finished a fair number of books during that time.
Tonight, I have 25 books stacked next to my bed waiting to be read. (And that's not counting the dozen or so less-urgent ones those editors sent me a month or two back, or the magazines and chapbooks that are also on the to-read-soon stack.)
Maybe the thing to do is to stop reading entirely; maybe the books would get bored and go away.
In other news, one of the items I unearthed from that stack tonight was the October/November 2001 issue of Asimov's. I had started to read the issue some time back, but apparently never finished it. In particular, I suspect I had been saving Charlie Stross's "Troubador" (the second in the Manfred Macx series, which is to say the sequel to "Lobsters") as a special treat for after I finished the rest of the issue, only I'd forgotten all about it. So I read "Troubador" tonight and loved it. I find that the Macx stories work best for me if I read them at relatively high speed and just let the impossibly cool ideas and tech jargon and in-jokes wash over me like rain into a windshield at 100 mph (tonight seems to be my night for mangling metaphors), laughing out loud every couple of pages when something particularly startling and funny comes along.
Memo to self: don't wait too much longer to read "Jury Service." Yes, it's a novella, but chances are very good you'll enjoy it.
Oh, and in other other news, I finally ordered the premiere issue of 3SF, the new British print sf magazine published by Big Engine (Ben Jeapes's highly-regarded British small press) and edited by Liz Holiday, former editor of the now-defunct magazine Odyssey, which I never saw but have heard good things about. I sent my PayPal payment on Monday 1/6, California time. The magazine arrived on Saturday 1/11; it took less than 5 days to get here from the UK. That seems pretty remarkable to me, given that Interzone seems to take months. (I assume IZ goes by surface mail, and this came by airmail; also, the issue of 3SF was a bit pricey. But still, mighty quick.) I haven't read anything in 3SF yet, but a glance shows that the production values are almost as high as IZ's, which is a compliment, and its cover is printed on nice heavy paper stock. I know, I know, that looks like damning with faint praise, but it's really not. I'm just tired. Good production values are very important to me; I appreciate a magazine that looks good as well as containing good material. And this one's got some good writers in it; am looking forward to reading it, in my copious free time.
I find it interesting that two out of two British sf magazines I've sampled treat gaming rather more seriously than most US print prozines do. In particular, Warhammer and Warhammer 40K novels seem to be respected and taken seriously. But maybe I'm reading too much into various comments.