The Bodhisattva

Just a couple of impressions of some books I’m reading right now.

- I started reading Lucius Shepard’s Softspoken, and broke it out while on a crowded public transportation. Let me tell you now folks, don’t attempt to do this. I have a quite natural ability to tune people out (it’s my aloof-mode) around me and generally am not inconvenienced by the barbarians* around me. But even just getting through 3 or 4 pages, Shepard’s command of the language and how he just draws the reader in makes you want to tell everybody to shut the hell up out of respect for the page being read.

- As stated previously I have been semi-underwhelmed by the Dresden Files and while I don’t take anything back, I’m sitting here reading his latest, Proven Guilty (the 8th book in the series), and find myself enjoying it. In fact going a couple books back, I can trace where this seris took a turn for the positive. It occured when Dresden beat the hell out of a dude with a baseball bat in front of two pious Holy Warriors - who were his friends - who just accepted his surrender. I’m not sure** if it’s ultimately worth it to the average reader to suffer through the first 4 or 5 books to get to the latter books - but regardless there is definite improvement and I dare say I like them.

- I have never been a big fan of David Drake and it’s all David Weber’s fault. You ever associate authors with each other? Like I associate Nick Mamatas, Jeffrey Thomas and Michael Cisco together, because I was introduced to their work in the same couple of weeks - a time where I was also really getting introduced to the small press - and all of them write kick-ass Speculative Fiction that make all 3 of them must read writers. It’s completely not fair, and has no basis in reason, but I do this quite a bit. When I was young stud making rounds in the book store (for the young people think Amazon but with 4 walls and a roof) David Weber was the guy whose books took up its own section that I could ignore and thus cut down my search perimeter and the guy’s covers just looked like Drake’s to me (the Military SF stuff) and thus Drake got blacklisted. 15 years later or so, I’m a sucker for short fiction and I get Balefires a collection of Drake’s shortfiction, and I’m quite impressed at how Drake is deeply rooted with what a lot of fans would consider SF/F/H publishing history. Each and every piece in this collection has a paragraph or two by Drake detailing the origins of the story - both conceptually and in terms of publishing. It’s damn intriguing reading about Drake and his interactions with the likes of August Derleth, Karl Edward Wagner, and just his insight and perspective on the short fiction markets and editors at the time. Really, I had no idea - and I’m really enjoying this selection. So much of the time we read wannabe genre historians and there is just a real authentic feel to Drake’s thoughts that I find quite refreshing compared to the usual babble.

_{* When I was younger one of my favorite TV shows was the Shogun mini-series. I dare somebody with a young impressionable Japanese kid let their kid watch this and not grow up and express his naturally egotistical thoughts by calling those around him barbarians}

_{**Bodhisattva Note 9541: 99% of the time people start a sentence or statement with “I’m not sure” - they have never been more sure of anything in their life}