Over the weekend I started Barry Hughart's Eight Skilled Gentlemen, which so far seems good but not quite on par with Bridge of Birds (which was excellent). Last night, however, I took a break from it and finished Rudy Rucker's Transreal!, a collection of short stories, poems, and essays. It had been in that embarassingly large pile of books on my bedroom floor with bookmarks in them for quite awhile. The pile keeps growing because for some reason I have a tendency not to be able to sit down and read straight through books that are non-fiction, poetry, short stories, essays, hardcover books, etc, while I have a complementary tendency to sit down with a novel and barely move until I get through (well, at least reading-time speaking). I should probably work on shrinking the pile, but there's always another novel to be read (and I've got a lot of those sitting around without bookmarks). Other books sitting in that pile currently include Seek by Rudy Rucker (yes, there were two of his), Monkey Brain Sushi, What Book?, A People's History of the United States by Howard Zinn, Otherness by David Brin, and Reading Jazz by Robert Gottlieb.

I started Transreal! so long ago I don't remember the beginning, except to know that it included the entire text of the collection The 57th Franz Kafka which I'd already read. The ending (which is what I was reading last night) is all essays about science fiction, computer science, Lynchburg, VA, and more. I've always liked Rucker's stuff and this was no exception.
posted by Kristin Buxton at 9:40 AM