The Cure is coming out with a new album. I'm very happy about this. There were murmurs that "Bloodflowers" (playing as I write this) might be Robert Smith's farewell album. I suddenly find myself needing to save up for Morrissey's "You Are the Quarry" (I've actually been hearing the first single on the radio at work), whatever The Cure comes up with, David Bowie's "Reality" (which followed so quickly on the heels of "Heathen" that it slipped under my admittedly short-range pop-culture radar), and Peter Gabriel's "Up," which I keep forgetting to buy.
I started Gregory Benford's "Across the Sea of Suns" tonight. I think I'm going to like this a lot more than the prequel, "In the Ocean of Night," which fumbled considerably. Unlike "Ocean," "Suns" doesn't waste any time. I read twenty pages and the main characters have already been whisked to another star system -- and the transition doesn't seem the least bit contrived. Not a particularly easy trick. I'm itching to read something else by Neil Gaiman, who counts as a Discovery on my list, alongside Mervyn Peake, Peter Watts and China Mieville. And I feel an obligatory, almost genetic, need to read Bruce Sterling's "The Zenith Angle" as soon as possible.
(This is possibly dangerous to admit, but in my more harried moments I sort of resemble a somewhat better-looking, markedly less demonic version of Steerpike, the sociopath from Mervyn Peake's "Gormenghast" trilogy.)
No comments:
Post a Comment