Due to an unexpected, and deepening, dive into some very time-consuming but long-overdue manual labour this month, I got precious little reading completed. I am on the cusp of finishing a couple of other books I couldn’t quite squeak in under the wire. But with the 1st of the month arriving in a bit over half an hour, here’s the scant bit I was able to finish in July:
Read
How To Write Funny – Scott Dikkers
Started and stopped
Eastern Standard Tribe – Cory Doctorow
Reading
The Gates of Polished Horn – Mark A. Rayner
The Expert System’s Brother – Adrian Tchaikovsky
I was a bit disappointed with How To Write Funny, only because I was looking for something about longer form writing, and as I passed the half way point in the book it was becoming clear to me that Dikkers was focusing primarily on one-liner type material, and/or the creation of headlines of the type that may be used in his wildly popular satire newspaper, The Onion. And to that end, it does it very well.
But I was hoping for something else, or perhaps… more.
Time to do some more research on books that may better fit the bill.
Meanwhile, putting aside yet another Cory Doctorow book got me closer to the conclusion that, while I follow him on social media and find him interesting and insightful in his takes on society and technology and how the former uses (and abuses) the latter, his fiction somehow doesn’t click for me time and time (and time and time) again. I’m borderline simply being satisfied with reading his posts and blog content and just skipping his books entirely, because with each attempt and pass on reading them it’s becoming evident that they aren’t for me.
On the other hand, there’s Adrian Tchaikovsky, whose imagination and breadth of subject and enjoyable prose rarely fails to engage me. And happily, he’s prolific enough that every time I look into other books of his I haven’t read yet, many others are invariably uncovered as well. From both a reading perspective as well as being a writer and wanting to learn how really good writers do what they do, I’m finding Tchaikovsky has become a recent go-to for me.
August will be interesting for reading amid my newly focusing on Blaugust. Let’s see how it goes.