Books in English I bought this week.

It's not easy to find good books in English in Beauvais. Usually I go to Paris and her three or four English language bookstores. I'd buy on Amazon, but I just like to touch the books before I buy them, and sometimes, a quick jaunt outside of my usual haunts (viz : Sci-Fi) will net me a great new line of investigation. The last to date being the Black Dahlia book I plugged earlier this week, and the greatest to date being Stephen Jay Gould, which I can't get enough of, something which is going to hurt me sooner or later, as the gentlemen is deceased. Thankfully, he was a prolific writer. More on him in a later post, I digress. Since I'm a voracious reader, this kind of blitz happens fairly often, to the dismay of my credit card company. Vivi has a better method, which I will try to implement in the future. Anyhoo, without further ado, here's this week's catch : The Second and Third instalments in Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle, The Confusion and The System of the World, resp. I was very happy to find them in the exact same edition in which I'd found the First instalment, to whit, Quicksilver. Yes, I'm a little obsessive about editions, particularly in series. Meh, what can you do? Stephenson makes me think of a more accessible Thomas Pynchon in Gravity's Rainbow, and his best-known work is the already classic Cryptonomicon, which I haven't reread in the last two months, which means I should be picking it up again soon. I haven't finished the series, so I won't review it, just yet. Next I bought Dancers at the End of Time, an omnibus edition of An Alien Heat, The Hollow Lands, and The End of All Songs, by Michael Moorcock, best known for his creation of the fantasy character Elric. I like Moorcock's tone and the 1890's fin-de-siècle atmosphere of this time-travel story. Can't wait to read it! I also bought a recent book by John Harrison. The man who wrote the timeless classic The Centauri Device, not the equaly meritorious Harry Harrison of Stainless Steel Rat fame. This book is space opera, straight up, at least so far, and is called Light. Last I bought (aside from the Black Dahlia book mentioned earlier) another SciFi book titled Sister Alice, by Robert Reed, whose Marrow I'd enjoyed a little while back (in the same edition, psyke). We'll see where this one takes us. Thanks to blogging, my reading time has been reduced drastically, so hopefully, these will last me a while. With that, I leave you, gentle readers, as I have some laundry to do at the local laudromat, right Jason? Location : Beauvais, France