{"id":2964,"date":"2005-06-29T11:33:17","date_gmt":"2005-06-29T15:33:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/vardibidian\/2005\/06\/29\/2964.html"},"modified":"2018-03-12T16:50:08","modified_gmt":"2018-03-12T21:50:08","slug":"book-report-george-alec-effing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/2005\/06\/29\/book-report-george-alec-effing\/","title":{"rendered":"Book Report: George Alec Effinger Live! From Planet Earth"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Your Humble Blogger is aware that he recently announced he was laying off the short stuff for a while. The thing is that when I picked up George Alec Effinger Live! From Planet Earth<\/a> off the library shelf, I somehow thought it was a novel. Judging it now by the cover, I can’t imagine why I thought that; it’s much more plausible to misread the thing as a Festschrift than as a novel, but really it’s very clearly a collection of Mr. Effinger’s short stories. So. I read them anyway.\n

And, you know, I liked a lot of them. I thought “In the Bran Foundry” was very well done indeed, and “My Old Man” was better than it really should have been, and “Solo in the Spotlight” was marvelous. I enjoyed the O. Niemand stories, although of course as I like some of the authors whose style he borrows more than others, I get more out of some of the stories than others. And, in general, the stories I didn’t like so much were still pretty good, or at least not annoyingly bad.\n

I think, on the whole, it’s because I like Mr. Effinger’s sense of humor. I suspect that the thing I was complaining about in the Year’s Best<\/I><\/a> anthology, with the sameness of bittersweet emotion, was really that I don’t share Mr. Dozois’ sense of humor. This happens; not everybody finds the same stuff funny. Since I find the funny stuff in this book actually funny, I’m willing to give it a break on various other aspects. And, of course, I think there are more stories in the book, and less slice-o-life stuff, but that could be because I was generally reading it in a good mood.\n

chazak, chazak, v’nitchazek<\/I>,
-Vardibidian.\n<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Your Humble Blogger is aware that he recently announced he was laying off the short stuff for a while. The thing is that when I picked up George Alec Effinger Live! From Planet Earth off the library shelf, I somehow…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[194],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2964","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-report"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2964","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2964"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2964\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17462,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2964\/revisions\/17462"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2964"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2964"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2964"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}