Greg McElhatton

For the past few years, I tracked which movies that I saw in the theatre. It was fun to look back and see how many (and what) I’d seen, and this year I decided to take it a step further and add books and graphic novels into the mix, with the help of Goodreads. (I also decided to allow movies I saw on DVD, even though that tally turned out to be just one.)

I ended up tying 2007’s movie tally with 20 films, and amusingly enough that was also the number of novels I read. As for graphic novels… well, let’s just say the final tally was a wee bit higher.

Movies:

1. The Women (the 1939 version)
2. Frost/Nixon
3. Watchmen
4. Every Little Step
5. Star Trek
6. Little Ashes
7. Away We Go
8. Up
9. Public Enemies
10. The Hurt Locker
11. (500) Days of Summer
12. Paris
13. Inglorious Basterds
14. An Education
15. Precious: Based on the Novel ‘Push’ By Sapphire
16. A Room With a View
17. A Serious Man
18. Fantastic Mr. Fox
19. Up in the Air
20. A Single Man

Books:

1. Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë
2. Altered Carbon by Richard Morgan
3. Wicked Gentlemen by Ginn Hale
4. All Seated On The Ground by Connie Willis
5. Consider Phlebas by Iain M. Banks
6. Dead Until Dark by Charlaine Harris
7. Sea, Swallow Me and Other Stories by Craig Laurance Gidney
8. The Cabinet of Light by Daniel O’Mahony
9. The Player of Games by Iain M. Banks
10. Shell Shock by Simon A. Forward
11. Farthing by Jo Walton
12. The Baum Plan for Financial Independence and Other Stories by John Kessel
13. Listening Is an Act of Love edited by Dave Isay
14. A Companion to Wolves by Sarah Monette and Elizabeth Bear
15. Pride and Prejudice and Zombies by Seth Grahame-Smith and Jane Austen
16. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz
17. Psycho by Robert Bloch
18. After the Quake by Haruki Murakami
19. The Host by Stephenie Meyer
20. Kindred by Octavia E. Butler

(more…)

One of my Christmas traditions is that every year, I read James Joyce’s “The Dead” from Dubliners on Christmas Eve. This year, for the first time in about a decade, I ended up spending the evening at my parents’ house instead of going home to my own bed. So it was then that I realized I had left my copy of the book at home.

But! Since I now have a Kindle (thanks to a deal I could not refuse!), all was not lost. I went onto the Kindle Store, found a free copy of Dubliners, and before I knew it I was spending Christmas Eve curled up in bed with Gabriel and Gretta Conroy. Christmas was saved, and the future is now. Sometimes, technology is awfully handy.

Ok! Better late than never, right? Here’s another great gift idea, and it’s one that you can just as easily give to yourself as to someone else. Even better, it’s a gift that helps others and is on sale. What might that be you ask?

My favorite small press publisher of prose, Small Beer Press, is having a sale. And, for every book you buy from them, they’ll donate $1 to the Franciscan Children’s Hospital. SBP co-owners Gavin Grant and Kelly Link have had a family member in their hospital for a while now, and in general I think the idea of a hospital specifically for long-term care of children is such an incredibly necessary thing. (You can read the full story of their time with the hospital at this link.)

Anyway, they have a lot of great books for sale. Some of my favorites include:

The Baum Plan for Financial Independence and Other Stories by John Kessel. Kessel’s “Lunar Quartet” is alone worth the price of admission, but “Pride and Prometheus” and its merging of Pride and Prejudice with Frankenstein has to be read to truly be believed.

Perfect Circle by Sean Stewart. Stories about people who can see ghosts are a dime a dozen, but Stewart’s book is about family and dead relatives and promises and the things that bind us. Breathtakingly beautiful prose. (His book Mockingbird is also available and I love it to death too.)

Magic for Beginners by Kelly Link. In the future, everyone will know about Kelly Link’s genre-defying short stories. They’re hard to describe and all peculiar but in a twisted, wonderful sort of way. Seriously, if there’s one book you’re going to buy, make it this one.

Second Line by Poppy Z. Brite. I haven’t actually read this one, but I have read Liquor, her novel which also stars the same characters (two chefs in New Orleans who eventually open a restaurant where all the food is cooked using alcohol in some way, shape, or form). Brite made her start as a horror author but it’s her novels about cooking and living in New Orleans that have made her into a must-read author for me. Seeing someone shift genres so effortlessly was a real revelation, and a reminder not to automatically push someone into a narrow box.

Or, buy something entirely different! Those prices are ludicrously cheap. I rarely buy prose books these days because of space; instead I keep visiting the library. I make an exception for books from Small Beer Press.

I was just reading a press-release about Viz launching their upcoming SIGIKKI website, which is going to serialize all sorts of comics from Japan. The pre-launch series running right now, Children of the Sea, is fairly fantastic, with strange things going on with the ocean and teenagers. The official launch for SIGIKKI rolls out over the next two weeks.

Of all the new series that will show up at the site, it’s this one that starts showing up on July 23rd that I’m really excited about.

Saturn Apartments By Hisae Iwaoka

A touching, character-rich vision of an intriguing new world.

Far in the future, humankind has evacuated the Earth in order to preserve it. Humans now reside in a gigantic structure that forms a ring around the Earth, thirty-five kilometers up in the sky. The society of the ring is highly stratified: the higher the floor, the greater the status. Mitsu, the lowly son of a window washer, has just graduated junior high. When his father disappears and is assumed dead, Mitsu must take on his father’s occupation. As he struggles with the transition to working life, Mitsu’s job treats him to an outsider’s view into the various living-room dioramas of the Saturn Apartments.

To me it’s got everything—an interesting setting, and what sounds like a combination of a mystery (the vanishing father), drama (having to inherit something unwanted), and sociological examination (the observing of other people’s lives). It sounds like there’s an almost infinite number of potential stories to be told here. Hopefully it’s as good as it sounds!

(Any books in particular that you’re dying to read based on the description alone?)

Last night I finally finished my Artomatic installation for this year. I’ve been around 95% of the way done for a week and a half; my wall was painted, my lights were installed, my photographs were hung, my business card holder and guest book holder were both attached to the wall. Happily, the last piece of the puzzle showed up yesterday—yellow vinyl lettering for my name—so I placed it last night (along with labels for the photographs themselves) and it went up with no problems.

I wasn’t smart enough to bring my camera with me, but I did snap a quick photo with my cell phone, enough to give an idea of the finished product. (I suppose I should’ve turned on the lights and taken off the yellow registration card on the left-hand side, but oh well.)

Afterwards, I took the metro back over to L’Enfant Plaza (there was a Nationals Game next door to Artomatic so getting parking there just wasn’t going to happen) and I just kept marvelling at what a beautiful night it was. I can’t remember the last time I’ve walked around DC at night where it wasn’t a busy city street; just a stroll through the monuments, or around the Mall, that sort of thing. It’s so beautiful and peaceful then, and you really feel like you have the whole place to yourself. I need to make time to do just that over the summer.

But more importantly, walking back down the street, looking at the Capitol up ahead, I remember thinking how great it was to still find myself in a real “work in progress” stage of my life. My photography is still in its early stages but it’s been really uplifting to feel like I’m learning. I’m still finding new things I enjoy to do, or rediscovering old forgotten ones. Over the past few days I’ve gotten some really nice e-mails regarding reviews I’ve written. It’s like, yeah, it’s starting to fall into place.

In unrelated news, I had my first allergy serum shot this morning. So far there has been no mutation into some sort of supervillain. Very disappointing. But it did give me time to read 80-odd pages in John Kessel’s The Baum Plan for Financial Independence and Other Stories, and I’m enjoying the anthology so far. I’ll almost certainly finish it and several other books on my trip up to Indiana, PA this weekend for a family reunion. This reunion closes out two months of craziness when it has come to my weekends. I have almost nothing on the calendar for June and I’m making a concerted effort to keep it that way. Don’t get me wrong, it’ll be really nice to see a lot of the extended family this weekend, but I’m going to be happy once it’s over and I’m home and getting to focus on little things, or doing nothing at all.

Isn’t that what warm pre-summer nights are for, after all?

Am I the only person who misses chain letters?

No, not the current, “You must forward this onto 35 people for good luck, otherwise your house will be crushed by Cthulhu” spate of chain letters, or even the “tell me 25 things about yourself” series of questions (although at least the latter makes the person write something). I’m talking about the old school chain letters, where you added your name onto the bottom of a list of six people, and sent something like a recipe to the person at the top before sending the new letter out to six more people. If that chain went somehow unbroken you’d end up with over 46000 recipes, but of course the reality was never that good.

I was overjoyed, then, to recently get an old school chain letter mailed to me from a friend and former co-worker who lives up in the wilds of Wisconsin these days. It’s a much simpler chain, one with only two rungs. You send a paperback book to the person at the top, add yourself to the bottom (and do so by adding in mailing labels, which is an elegant solution so that there’s no retyping or such), and if it ends up unbroken you’d end up with 36 books in the mail.

The letter referred to it as an informal book club, and I love the idea of it. I actually spent a bit of time trying to figure out who to send my six letters to. They had to love books, of course, but I also didn’t want to send the letter to friends who knew each other, so that  it wouldn’t get stuck on the same people. (So for example, I sent it to only one person in my book club; that way he has the option to pass it along to other members.) I also tried to spread the locations out a bit; one letter went to Oakland, another to Boston, still another to Williamsburg.

Now, of course, I’m waiting to see if I get anything in the mail. How far will the chain reach? Will all six people I’ve sent it to break the chain? (Hopefully not, I tried to think of people who would be equally enamored with the idea.) If nothing else, hopefully the person I sent Connie Willis’s Doomsday Book to will love it. It’ll be fun to see what if anything arrives here. Mind you, I love getting mail that isn’t a bill or junk. So hopefully, I’ll hit the jackpot before too long.

Until then, though, I’m going to be dreaming of chain letters involving chocolate chip cookies arriving at my home. Mmmmm, cookies.

Last Saturday was a little crazy busy for me; I had a 12-mile run in the morning (with another one scheduled for Sunday morning), business to take care of at my parents’s house out in Vienna, and dinner with some of Charlie’s co-workers up in Chevy Chase. And let me first get out of the way, the run was great—Charlie and I ran it together, and despite some nasty headwinds beating us down, we had a really good time. Likewise, dinner (at La Ferme) was also excellent, with good company and good food.

But I have to say, the best part of Saturday? It may have been after I’d finished taking care of everything out at the family estate, and I got to sit out on the deck and read my book for about an hour.

I know, it doesn’t sound like much. But one of the things that I’ve really missed when I moved into Arlington was having my own porch or balcony; it’s something that while in both Falls Church and Tysons that my place had and I somewhat took for granted. There are a lot of nice parks in my current neighborhood that I can walk to and kick back and relax at… but there’s something extra-special about being somewhere all by yourself and just able to really and fully unwind. Especially in the spring.

It was just a great way to spend the afternoon; finishing the second 400 pages of Yoshihiro Tatsumi’s A Drifting Life, drinking a (rare for me) soda, letting the sun keep me warm, and not worrying about anything else. It’s a great way to spend an afternoon, and being outside means that I don’t find myself looking at everything in my home and thinking, “I really should take care of that.”

I also got to fiddle around a bit with a new camera lens; it’s a macro lens that lets me get some tight focuses on objects and blur everything else out behind them. I’m definitely still learning its finer points but so far I’m pretty happy with what it’s letting me do.

Mom’s daffodills are already getting a little droopy and towards the end of their cycle, so it was nice to have someone appreciate them while they’re still out. (You know, for someone who hated hated hated weeding the garden all those years, every now and then I think that it would be nice to have a garden of my own. What sort of horrible subliminal brainwashing is going on with me?)

And speaking photography, I started looking at alternate lighting ideas for Artomatic this year, and may have found paydirt. Of course, what I really need to do is get up early on Saturday and hopefully finish up the set of photos for the exhibit. And then print the photographs, and buy frames… and paint for my wall at Artomatic… get new business cards…

It’s no small wonder I still owe some people e-mails from two months ago. Or why updates here are few and far between. I’m ready to become fabulously wealthy and live a life of leisure, can’t you tell?

This morning I was really tired and it took me a while to figure out why—it’s because I’ve been using my psychic powers at full-blast to try and make spring arrive ahead of schedule.

Well, perhaps not, but it’s a nice idea, isn’t it? I’m so sick of it still being dark when I wake up to hit the gym on Monday mornings, or perhaps to do some before-work running on Tuesdays or Thursdays. If it’s still dark out, it just drags me back into slumberland. At least we’re at the point now where it’s not pitch-black when I leave work so I can get the running in then, but still… not a fan. I don’t know how people live up near the Arctic Circle during the cold months; not even so much for the brutal temperatures but the lack of sunlight.

On the other hand, I’ve been having taking three virtual trips into Japan as of late to get through my desire of being somewhere else. As I think I’ve mentioned before, Animal Crossing: City Folk on the Wii is still intensely a funny, an adorable and low-key simulation game where my biggest worry is trying to eventually catch all 64 fish for the local museum’s aquariums. Also in the game realm, though, is Phoenix Wright, Ace Attorney: Justice For All, which I finally started playing on the NintendoDS. It’s a fun cross between an adventure game and a novel, as you navigate the twists and turns of Phoenix Wright’s latest cases before coming to the inevitable conclusion. In many ways it’s like reading a mystery/investigation novel where you have to solve the crime before the author point-blank tells you. I enjoyed the first of these games, and it’s fun checking out the second one.

Last night I also started reading the 856-page comics autobiography A Drifting Life by Yoshihiro Tatsumi. I’ve really enjoyed reading Tatsumi’s comic short story collections as they’re translated into English; they’re always slightly twisted and depressing little vignettes of life in Japan by slightly pathetic people, with something just off-beat enough to attract as a reader. What’s great about A Drifting Life so far (although to be fair I’m only on page 80!) is that Tatsumi is able to really plunge the reader into a different place and time without ever overtly doing so. There’s no huge info dumps or exposition, but it really gives me a strong feel for 1949 Japan.

In many ways, A Drifting Life is just the kind of autobiography that I really like, because it lets me “travel” to not only a different place but a different time as well; it’s a much less expensive way of visiting somewhere that would otherwise be inaccessable. Really good stuff, and once it’s officially released (next month?) I think it’s going to knock people’s socks off. I hope so, because I love the Tatsumi short story collections and want there to be many, many more down the line.

(And, with no exercise scheduled for tomorrow morning—my spinning class is in the evening—that means I can stay up a little later and read some more of the book. Yay!)

Today was the first morning in which there was almost no hacking/coughing at all. Could I actually be on the mend? I sure do hope so, that would be nice. I might go to the gym tomorrow morning for a little bit and see what happens. But we’ll see.

Last night, having officially given up hope of it ever being reprinted, I broke down and bought a used copy of Sheri S. Tepper’s The End of the Game, an old Science Fiction Book Club omnibus of three of her novels (Jinian Footseer, Dervish Daughter, and Jinian Star-Eye). I absolutely adored Tepper’s True Game books when I was growing up, of which there were nine in all. The initial three (King’s Blood Four, Necromancer Nine, and Wizard’s Eleven) were published by Ace and reprinted ages ago in a big The True Game omnibus. The books were all marketed as YA novels, but there’s an increasing complexity with each new installment. I often joke about re-reading King’s Blood Four years later and nearly falling over in shock at having completely missed as a teenager what was clearly a post-sex/afterglow scene very early on, but there’s more to the books’ adult nature than just that.

Anyway, the other six books (three Mavin Manyshaped books which were a prequel, and then the three Jinian books) were published by Tor, who let them all go out of print years ago and have shown no signs of bringing them back into print. I regularly see individual copies of Jinian Star-Eye going for $60, $80, $100 a pop. And of course, I somehow lost my old copy of The End of the Game about 15 years ago and have given up hope of it ever, impossibly re-appearing. So when I saw copies of the omnibus going for less than $20, well, I bit.

I absolutely cannot wait to re-read these books. The imagery in them has stuck with me for years, from the living pathways that once webbed across the land, to the twin bells that create light and darkness when they ring, to the planet’s desperate dreams of warning appearing in jewels that you allow to dissolve on your tongue. Hopefully some day I’ll find a reasonable price for the Mavin books (which I read from the library as a child but have never owned), or against all odds they’ll be reprinted. But until then, I will treasure my hopefully-arriving-quickly copy of The End of the Game. I’ve read and enjoyed other books by Tepper since then, but she never hit the sheer wonder that these always evoked in me. Hopefully someday I can create something that does similar things to other readers.

Do you have books like that in your past? Ones you haven’t read for decades but which will always stick with you?

With everything else going on I forgot to mention it, but I became even more of an Arlington resident stereotype last week; I donated money to WAMU, our local NPR station. I started listening to WAMU around the start of the year on my drive to and from work, and I have to admit that I’ve grown to really love Morning Edition and All Things Considered. And from there, well, I’ve started adding podcasts to be automatically downloaded, like StoryCorps, Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me, or NPR roundups of the week’s news relating to specific subjects (my two favorites are Food and Pop Culture), and most Monday mornings at the gym I spend my hour on the rowing machine and the elliptical listening to the weekend’s episode of This American Life.

So yeah, they’ve given me a lot of entertainment, so with the latest pledge drive I finally crumbled. (It does help that I can make it split over 12 months. That’s not so bad.) But it did make me realize that I really have not picked up much in the way of new music this year. There are still a few albums I’m hoping to get for Christmas (new ones from Aimee Mann and Pink leap to mind), but I didn’t feel the need to rush out and get them. The newest album I can think of acquiring was Tod loaning me Sophie Ellis-Bextor’s Trip the Light Fantastic, which was pretty darn good.

Is this a bad year for music? Or merely a bad year for me finding music that I’m interested in?

On the other hand, I’ve definitely done a lot more reading this year; getting those two hours on the bus at least once a week has certainly helped, of course. I’m almost done with Pride and Prejudice and all of you were absolutely right, it’s very enjoyable. At some point I’ll finally tackle Wuthering Heights, but that will have to wait for a little bit. I took advantage of Small Beer Press’s fall sale and ordered the “everything we published in 2008″ set (which may sound like some huge crate of books but it’s actually just five).

It helped that three of the books were already ones I wanted; a new Geoff Ryman book is reason to celebrate (Cambodia? Really? I’m in!), I’ve been wanting to read Joan Aiken’s works for a while now, and I’d heard very good things about Benjamin Rosenbaum’s The Ant King and Other Stories. So that made the decision easy; doubly so because Benjamin Parzybok’s Couch sounds entertaining, and I’ve always heard very good things about John Kessel too. (And hey, one of the stories in The Baum Plan for Financial Independence and Other Stories involves the Bennet sisters from Pride and Prejudice meeting Dr. Frankenstein and his Monster. It’s like it was meant to be.)

Also on my radar (but for 2009) is NESFA Press’s planned six-volume set of anthologies collecting every single Roger Zelazny short story. I cut my teeth on Zelazny’s Amber novels, and from there went to his anthologies (I still vividly remember telling a friend about Unicorn Variations in the sixth grade and wishing that I could write a short story like Zelazny did) and many of his novels. With half of his anthologies out of print and the other half all scattershot and over the place, a complete, definitive edition of everything? Oh yes. Yes yes yes. It’s just as well that it’s a minimum of four months away.

(Oh, and World of Goo for the Wii is one of the coolest games out there, and for $15 at that! A steal and a half. I actually have to stop myself playing it at times because I don’t want it to come to an end. It’s that good. I would talk about wanting an Xbox 360 Pro, here, but I fear that you lot will just egg me on to buy one. And, um, no. I cannot justify one. Maybe next year.)