Done.

The end of this past August marked Dazed Rambling's third anniversary. I didn't even notice. Truth is, I haven't spared the blog much attention in a long while. My last review for the site, a proper review, was written a little over three months ago. I had to go all the way back to November of last year to find a review that I thought was even halfway decent.

I have been writing for Dazed Rambling for three years and, well, it has been a pretty static three years. My readership started small and never grew from there. If the blog ever showed up on publisher radar, it was only for a split-second blip before disappearing below notice again. You won't find this place on many blogrolls. Dazed Rambling was not a success, was never going to be a success, and I have always been, and still am, OK with that. My small readership, a mixture of readers, bloggers, and friends, is made up of some great people who have steered me in the right direction time and time again. The lack of books coming in from publishers allowed me a great deal of freedom in choosing what to read and, I have little doubt, encouraged my growth as a reader.

There is no list of accomplishments for me to go on about or haters to condemn. Greener pastures do not await me and there is nothing in my life that requires I take a step back. I'm done because the only thing I see in the future for this blog is a gradual fading away. It is not that I have lost interesting or that I don't care or that I have stopped reading. I just don't feel like reviewing anymore.

There is a good chance that I will be back, eventually, but it won't be here. Dazed Rambling came into existence with a shrug and it goes out with a 'meh.'

I'd include something about how great it has been to meet you all, but this isn't a parting of ways. I will still be around, plaguing your comment sections and annoying you on Twitter. 

Introducing Adam McOmber

It is rare for me to stir from my torpor and go out of my way to promote an author. The last time this happened, I was reeling from having finished Michal Ajvaz's The Other City and horrified that so few people had even heard of it. I really haven't shut up about that book since. With that in mind, I want to introduce you to Adam McOmber.

Before last week, I probably couldn't tell you who Adam McOmber is. I once saw his name mentioned on Larry's blog, but that little splinter of info only gets me to 'vaguely recall' territory. If I kept up with literary journals or paid more attention to short fiction, I would stand a better chance of recognizing the name. After all, his short fiction has been appearing in literary magazines for the past decade and a collection, This New & Poisonous Air, was published just last year. Vague recollection is better than nothing. If I hadn't heard the name before, compared to Erin Morgenstern, no less, I would have passed by his upcoming debut novel, The White Forest, without any thought spared. Instead I paused, searched Larry's blog, and then clicked the request button like mad. Since then, Adam McOmber has gone from being a name I could barely place to being the author of one of the best books I have read this year.

There is a little more than a month to go until publication, but I have yet to see The White Forest receive any attention elsewhere in the SFF community. I am afraid that the book will hit shelves next month and fly right under the radar. And I don't want to see that happen. It'd be a shame if it did. There is some hope to be found in the book being compared to Erin Morgenstern's The Night Circus, which was one of last year's big hits. The comparison to Morgenstern is poppycock, the two having so little in common, but if that slice of hype gets this book into more readers' hands, I am supportive. Considering my small readership, it will certainly help more than my weak signal boost.

For those interested in reading some of McOmber's work, I was able to turn up some of his short fiction online:

Poet and Underworld, Juked

What Follows Us, A Capella Zoo

Egyptomania,Web Conjunctions

For those interested in reading the novel that I consider one of the best (vague, I know, but I try not to pick favorites) novels I have read this year, here is the link to that:

The White Forest, Touchstone | Also, The Book Depository - Indiebound - Powell's - B&N - Amazon UK

["]Young Jane Silverlake lives with her father in a crumbling family estate on the edge of Hampstead Heath. Jane has a secret—an unexplainable gift that allows her to see the souls of man-made objects—and this talent isolates her from the outside world. Her greatest joy is wandering the wild heath with her neighbors, Madeline and Nathan. But as the friends come of age, their idyll is shattered by the feelings both girls develop for Nathan, and by Nathan’s interest in a cult led by Ariston Day, a charismatic mystic popular with London’s elite. Day encourages his followers to explore dream manipulation with the goal of discovering a strange hidden world, a place he calls the Empyrean.

A year later, Nathan has vanished, and the famed Inspector Vidocq arrives in London to untangle the events that led up to Nathan’s disappearance. As a sinister truth emerges, Jane realizes she must discover the origins of her talent, and use it to find Nathan herself, before it’s too late.["]

Unfortunately, I have not been able to turn up a sample.

If you are interested in reading more of McOmber's short fiction, I provide the link to Amazon below. If you prefer to buy it elsewhere, click on one of the retailer links above, buy The White Forest, and then search for:

This New & Poisonous Air, BOA Editions

My review will be up in September. In the meantime, take this post as a measure of my enthusiasm and get this book!

Read, Reading, Upcoming

I have heard good things about The Book Thief for the past couple years, but never bothered with it. All it takes it being bored enough at work to wander into our horrible little book section to prompt action. As it turns out, it was a fantastic book. It was hard to put down and I could have gone through it in a single sitting, but I wanted to take it slow and had to force myself to put it down after every chapter or so. By the end, I had shed a few tears and was reluctant to let it go, but all good things must come to an end.

The author's name is one of those that lodges in your head, vaguely remembered and hard to place. I finally matched the name to Bed Bugs, a novel that hit the Vine lists a few months back sounding interesting enough to consider, but not interesting enough to request. As it turns out, I know his name from further back, as well. I have Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters sitting unread on one of my shelves down in Florida. I had to give in someday, I suppose.

The Last Policeman is a detective story set in the months leading up to an end of the world as we know it asteroid impact. Anarchy and order get along like old friends, striking a balance somewhere between Everything's Kind Of Fucked and Not Yet Gone Completely To Shit. In the shadow of our extinction, suicide has become almost as common as deciding to skip out on work to crack down on that bucket list of yours. So when an insurance actuary is found hanging in a McDonalds bathroom, why does Detective Hank Palace figure it a murder? No one else really gives a damn. In hangar town, if it looks like a suicide it is a suicide. Don't waste your remaining time on it. Palace doesn't buy, isn't convinced, and goes hunting for the truth.

The Last Policeman is part success, part failure. Winters has created a compelling setting and atmosphere in the shadow of the asteroid and I loved every bit of it, but the mystery does not live up to it. For all of the detective work Palace does, remarkably little of it does anything to aid in advancing his case. One might expect it to open up useful leads, get the ball rolling, but more often than not, it just leaves Palace at a dead end. The case and plot advance at random, as if Palace decided to see if exclaiming 'Aha!' might magically summon a new turn or lead or revelation. It does, it must, because the work he puts into certainly gets him nowhere. It comes off as convoluted and half-assed. For all that the mystery aspect of the book disappointed me, I still enjoyed the book. The other two in this proposed trilogy will no doubt find their way to me. I'll be hoping for improvement.

I have never been fond of superhero comics, so I tend to be wary of superhero novels. I read Devil's Cape a couple years ago and thought it was decent, but it didn't quite relieve me of the feeling. Prepare To Die! was skipped over a few times before I finally decided to see what it was about. This is what it is about:

Nine years ago, Steve Clarke was just a teenage boy in love with the girl of his dreams. Then a freak chemical spill transformed him into Reaver, the man whose super-powerful fists can literally take a year off a bad guy's life.

Days ago, he found himself at the mercy of his arch-nemesis Octagon and a whole crew of fiendish super-villains, who gave him two weeks to settle his affairs--and prepare to die.

Now, after years of extraordinary adventures and crushing tragedies, the world's greatest hero is returning to where it all began in search of the boy he once was . . . and the girl he never forgot.

Exciting, scandalous, and ultimately moving, Prepare to Die! is a unique new look at the last days of a legend.

Chances are, I'd have skipped over the book if it wasn't for that third paragraph. Watching a superhero brawl on film is one thing, a very enjoyable thing, but put it to page and it bores me. My years reading Forgotten Realms tie-ins provided more than enough battles and fights to satisfy me for a lifetime or three. This looked to be something different and, at about halfway through the book, it is quite different. This is not a book to read if you want action and adventure. There is introspection, a lot of it, peppered with flashbacks of events both happy and sad, pre and post hero, and rarely about putting down the bad guys. It is not great and not likely a book to remember for years to come, but I am enjoying it.

Larry mentioned it on his blog, a debut novel from one of the authors slated to appear in the aborted Best American Fantasy 4, and reported early comparisons to Erin Morgenstern's The Night Circus. That was all I needed to jump at the chance of getting an early copy. It is next up on my to-read list, but I have been asked to hold review for the week of publication (Sep. 11), so it will be a while for that.

It is Valente and I tend to enjoy her work. I expect it will earn me some odd looks at work though.

Everyone seems to love this. Hell, everyone seems to love Parker. I tried reading Devices and Desires some time ago, but found it tedious and dull. Maybe this will be better.

A Horrible Reading

To match Larry's post from this morning, I have a snippet of something terrible:

A Reading

This was recorded earlier this morning and posted to my Tumblr account, to the amusement of some. Larry quickly followed suit with an earlier recording of his own. I would very much like to see this trend continue.

Recent Arrivals/Now Reading

The Orange Eats Creeps has been on my list for a good long while, but there was always some other book that took precedence. I was in a mood for something weird, something different and interesting, and this book stood out. Unfortunately, I was not in the mood for Krilanovich's style. It was not a bad book, not at all, and I plan to get back to it. Eventually. 

When The Orange Eats Creeps' style failed to worm its way into my good graces, I was left to look elsewhere for something to sate my craving. Somehow, I ended up reading through Westeros' standalone recommendation thread and came out the other side with The Fade on my Nook. The clipped prose agreed with my mood and the setting, a subterranean world that pricked an old interest, was just interesting enough that I actually wanted to see it explored despite my usual disinclination toward world-building. There are times when I question the strength of characterization surrounding Orna, our narrator. Just when you think the author has pinned her into a cliche, he switches things up and reveals another side of her. Her character is constantly evolving and no one role (be it warrior, wife, mother, spy, friend, prisoner, assassin, or slave) defines her character. At halfway through, the book is shaping up to be a solid read.  

Though I was not introduced to fantasy through Drizzt, those books were the first ones to really kick things into gear and make me interested in reading more. The year following my discovery of The Dark Elf Trilogy miss-shelved at the library was spent reading through the rest of the Drizzt books and then branching out further into Salvatore's other series. His message board was the first that I ever joined and, all these years later, I am still semi-active on it as a moderator. I met Mal through that forum. That said, it has been several years since I really enjoyed these books. Times goes on, tastes change, blah blah blah. The Pirate King was the last one I actually liked, even though I put the first book of that series down in disgust. Strangely enough, other fans--real fans, I guess--didn't seem to like it all that much. Chances are, I won't be reading this. Mal will though, which means she will finally be writing a review for this blog. Who knows, I might read it... maybe if Artemis finally gets gutted or something. Hate that fucker.

A free short story from Carlos Ruiz Zafon! In epub so I don't have to read it online! Yay! It is amazing what publishers will go through when they want to publicize/market one of their better selling authors. Rose of Fire is a very short story, so short that it takes up probably a third of the e-book. The rest of the space is devoted to the excerpt from Zafon's forthcoming novel, The Prisoner of Heaven. It is hard to look at this and not see it as an excerpt with a short story attached, a way of spreading the word that something amazing is about to drop and you really, really need to buy it. With everyone going on about how much it costs to design and format e-books (not to mention cover art), I can't but think there are cheaper ways than this to do it, especially given the length of the story. 

When people keep going around saying that a new book is Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy reborn in our modern times, I have to investigate. Stumbling across H2G2 in high school brought a great deal of joy to those four years of boredom and introduced me to science fiction that didn't make me want to pound my head against a desk. I have had a place in my heart reserved for them ever since... even the last two, which were pretty shit. Year Zero is not the new H2G2 and there is such a difference in content and humor that trying to compare the two is a mistake. There are aliens and there is humor, but having the two is not grounds for comparison. It is strange seeing him compared to Adams when there is another popular science fiction author with a sense of humor readily available.

Rob Reid is PopCulture Scalzi. Reading Year Zero immediately reminded me of Scalzi's The Android's Dream and I couldn't shake the feeling. That's no bad thing either. The Android's Dream was a very entertaining bit of fluff and I enjoyed it immensely. The same can be said of Year Zero, which is entertaining and often hilarious, but nothing that you'd call deep. It is so stuffed full of pop culture references from the past decade that its relevance and a large part of its humor is on unsteady ground. Another decade, maybe less if the world ends at the end of 2012 or the internet eats away our ability to remember trivial shit, and a large part of what makes this book so good is likely going to go poof. I suggest reading it while you can still enjoy it.