I have a lot in my mind and saved on my computer so I’ll probably be getting a new round of posts in about a week (please contain your excitement).

Burning Chrome by William Gibson was the book I’ve read lately that I like the most. I give this book five stars but I’m very biased in Gibson’s favor. I’ve read many of his books and find him smart, prescient and at times poetic. I have to admit his writing is over my head at least once every ten pages but his vision of the future is so compelling that I suffer through my shortcomings. He is well-known in Sci-Fi circles as the writer who came up with the concept of “jacked-in” the idea that there will someday be a computer plug installed at the top of your spine that would connect your brain to computers. Author of “Johnny Mnemonic”. I read three of his books which all take place in the future (natch) and seem to form a trilogy of sorts centering around a neighborhood formed on the Golden Gate Bridge with many stories of dwellings built up on and through the cables. The time is after  “normal civilization” has ceased to be but there is still lots of commerce and business is what makes the world go round. Amazing at what he comes up with that is valuable in the future.

An Object of Beauty by Steve Martin I finished a week or so ago. It moves along well enough if you are a patient reader, if not it might be too slow for you. Martin seems to be the kind of writer that puts his real self in a character in a book (or play) and goes from there. This book is concerned with the NY Art World circa 1990-2005, and the central character a woman who uses whatever she has to get ahead. She starts at Sotheby’s (auction house) and moves upwards from there using men and handling women along the way. The narrator  is an art critic and it’s obvious by his various interfaces with patrons and dealers that Martin did a lot of research on galleries, museums and conferences. (I also saw Martin’s play Picasso at the Lapin Agile several years ago and it was pretty good,  so kudos to Steve for all the good art and music he’s producing).

It seems like a month doesn’t go by without me talking about Elmore Leonard but I swear I’m gonna run out of books soon. Now I’m reading Djibouti and so far so good. I like that Leonard experiments with his writing. I think he’s so well-established and has worked so long that he entertains himself by taking different tacks in his work. There’s a great hard-boiled angle in all of his novels, warranted because of the dubious morality of many of his characters. But reading his old Westerns shows a very straight-ahead approach to story telling whereas nowadays he goes off wherever: and who’d say anything negative about that? There are few authors as prolific and well-thought of as he is. When I read Q is for or L is for etc, I know I’m going to get a certain style of writing that’s the same throughout the series. With Leonard it’s varied. In my favorite of his books, Killshot, the interior monologues of the characters are fabulous; with Djibouti there is a long part of the story which is told by two of the characters looking at a screen and commenting on film they’ve taken when they were making a documentary; and Get Shorty is more the omniscient author POV.

That’s probably enough reading/writing for now. Please don’t forget to pass on my snowmobilewerewolf.com  link/website where my YA Ebook is available (cheap). BTW, I am making the book free for libraries and librarians. If you fit into either of those categories or know someone who does, contact me and I’ll send along a coupon for a free download.