Don't Read What You Buy Month is Almost Over
It’s ‘Don’t Read What You Buy Month,’ I think that’s what the kids are calling it. If you’re not Steve Buscemi with a skateboard and a backwards hat, then you should know this a month dedicated to buying a bunch of books and not reading them. This is my first time participating and I really threw myself into it, hauling in 21 books this month. I admit, I had a cheeky read of two of them, but discounting those, I still think 19 is an impressive—what? What do you mean that’s not what it’s called? ‘Read What You Own?’ Why the hell would I do that when there are so many books out there I can buy? That’s just stupid.
Anyway, it’s a mostly homogeneous mix of science fiction old and new. I’ve recently discovered DAW Publishing and CJ Cherryh and I’m kicking myself for not having heard of them before. Seriously, Cherryh has won the Hugo Award three times, the Prometheus Award once with two more nominations, the Campbell Award for Best New Writer, and two nominations for the Nebula Award. Yet I’ve only just heard of her a couple of weeks ago. It's like nobody talks about this author. Is this a 'me' failure, or a failure of the greater literary community?
I bought about half a dozen of her books, and almost bought another half a dozen more before I remembered that money is a thing, and that I had a limited supply of it. I picked up the first three Company Wars books – Heavy Time, Hellburner, and Downbelow Station, the latter of which earning her a Hugo and Locus Award. As part of a random eBay lot I also grabbed Gate of Ivrel, Brothers of Earth, Hunter of Worlds, The Faded Sun: Kesrith, and Serpent’s Reach. I got lucky, most of these books are at the start of her series.
They’re also all DAW Publishing books, just a neato publisher from the 70s and 80s (they’re technically still around) I found from the YouTuber Jules Burt. I picked up one of their later collections of short stories, DAW 30th Anniversary Science Fiction Anthology, and four years of The Annual World’s Best SF books, date 1980, 1984, 1985, and 1986. Unfortunately these anthology books ended in 1990, a couple years before I was born, so I’ll just have to imagine what a 1992 edition would have been like.
I also picked up Daniel Hardcastle’s The Paradox Paradox. If that name sounds familiar it’s probably because you know him better as Nerdcubed on YouTube. It took him five years to write this book and there’s a hell of a story about its publisher collapsing just as it was published. Hardcastle wasn’t paid a penny, and a bunch of writers are suing the company. Real awful stuff. I just finished it a couple of days ago, and I’ll have a full review soon(ish).
The Martian by Andy Weir wasn’t a book I was initially interested in, it sounded a little too hard sci-fi-y for me, but I was so inspired by Weir’s story I picked it up anyway. If you’re still not Buscemi-ing it, the short version is that he wrote this book over the course of several years, was turned down by dozens of agents and publishers, so he decided to self-publish it and sell it for just $1. It turned out to be a huge hit, partly because Weir spent so much time researching real life technology and theories to make the book as realistic as possible. It caught the attention of publishers who made a physical version, and it won several awards the year it released including the Campbell Award for Best New Writer (now called the Astounding Award).
I bought Dune, but the copy I was sent looked like it was swallowed by a sandworm and spit back out. Reference! I still haven’t read it, and I was hoping to change that soon, but it’s going to have to wait. There's also James South America Corey’s Leviathan Wakes. I don’t know much about it, other than that The Expanse is based on it, which apparently is a TV show of some description. I don’t know, I read the description and it sounded interesting.
In a rarity, I bought two books separately. Normally I buy in lots or take advantage of those ‘buy three, get one free’ deals on eBay. But these two books were rare enough that I wasn’t able to find them in lots. Plus I wanted to read them ASAP after learning about them from different YouTubers. One is Babel-17 by Samuel R. Delany, which features a Chinese-American woman who can communicate with an alien language used to fly spaceships. We follow her developer her knowledge of the language, realizing that it does so much more than let her control ships. It completely alters her state of mind and way of thinking.
The other is Continent of Lies by James Morrow. This one’s actually more fantasy than sci-fi, but it’s plot is so bizarre (and oddly personal given its protagonist is a critic) I had to pick it up. In this world, dreams grow on trees. They’re happy thoughts that anyone clan pluck down and experience, either alone or together. Quinjin is a critic of dreams, the Roger Ebert of his world. When a dream terrorist somehow manipulates a tree to grow a nightmare, threatening to do it again, Quinjin is is dispatched to find who caused it, why, and how they were able to do it.
The last couple of books are just normie stuff. Madeline Miller’s The Song of Achilles is one. I read Circe earlier this year, and I’m not sure what drove me to do so. This whole “retelling classic tales from another character’s perspective” trend has done nothing for me, but I gave it a go anyway. And I’m glad I did, because I loved it. It’s one of the best I’ve read this year, and I picked up The Song of Achilles as soon as I finished, despite knowing nothing about it. I assume there’s some kind of home made out of silken tofu.
And finally there’s Anthony Horowitz’s House of Silk. I threw this in there because it was part of one of those “buy 3, get 1 free” schemes. I’m a huge Sherlock Holmes fan, so, hey, free Sherlock book. This is apparently one of the better Sherlock pastiches, which doesn’t mean a ton to me. That held true for The Seven Per-Cent Solution by Nicolas Meyer, not so much for the creep-fest The Beekeepers Apprentice by Laurie R. King. An underrated one, if you’re interested, is Dead Man’s Land by Robert Ryan. Don’t bother with the sequels though. I don’t know much about House of Silk, presumably somebody named Achilles sings throughout.
I think that’s everything. I didn’t bother counting all that a second time. I have been reading a lot this month, just other books I already owned. Why would I read stuff I already own when I can buy more?
