Reviewing

It's a busy time for me. I have picked up my review duties at Blogcritics.org, and will also be reviewing a book for LT Early Reviewer. I'm really happy to be doing this. I think it'll get me back into the grove of thinking and writing about books. Here's what's to come.

The Shadow Year - Jeff Ford (I'm having a minor crisis with getting the book delivered to the right address, that's what you get for moving 3 times a year. Can you believe that I have moved something like 9 times in the past two or three years?) So hopefully I will get my copy. I love Jeff Ford, so I'm really looking forward to this one.


Matter - Iain M. Banks: His new Culture novel; reviewing this one should be fun, although I have to say Player of Games was not nearly as good as everyone said it would be. I think the gold standard will always be Use of Weapons. But Culture novels are always a fun read, and this one has an incredibly complicated plot, which is never a bad thing for a Banks novel. I feel sorry for the poor marketers that had to write the synopsis though. It's pretty garbled...



The Uses of Enchantment - Heidi Julavits: I have wanted to read this for a while. I may not get a review copy, but I'll eventually check it out from the library , so one way or another I will try to write something about this book.


The View from Castle Rock - Alice Munro: I love Alice Munro, and I think it will be interesting experience to write a review for one of her short story collections.

The Unfortunates

Yeahhh!!! New Directions is going to publish B.S. Johnson's The Unfortunates (known among certain circles as the book-in-a box).

Who is B.S. Johnson? And why have I been whipped up into a frenzy over this? B.S. Johnson is an obscure, experimental English writer. The Unfortunates is his extremely rare work---27 sections in a box, to be read in whatever order best suited to the reader's fancy. Go here for a look.

I thought I was going to have to shell out a lot of money for this book (at some point in the future), seeing as its extremely rare and out-of-print. But thanks to New Directions, we will get the pleasure of owning and reading this "novel" in May of 2008. I can barely contain my excitement!

This info comes from Conversational Reading, who also tells us that the book will be printed in the original format (27 unbound sections).

Back!

Originally I had started another blog, since this one sort of died somewhere in May of last year. But after looking around here, I realized that it would be a waste to ditch this blog. I think I may think about it a little bit and keep both blogs. We will see. My career change has finally happened for me, and I'm happy to report that I will be starting a new job in February at one of the big publishing companies. (My favorite one, yeah!)

I told myself that I stopped blogging because I wanted to focus on the job hunt, but I realize now that dropping the blog and many of my other review-related obligations was how I reacted to the stress and depression of changing careers and not being sure what I was doing with my life.
But I'm here to slowly pick up the pieces, and hopefully I'll have some insight into working in publishing for others who are interested in the field once I start my new job.

All I can say is that I'm really excited about being in New York City, and finally doing something that I think I'm really going to love. It doesn't hurt that I will be getting a lot of free books too =).

Hopefully you'll will be seeing a lot more posts here.

One last thing, go see Cloverfield. I don't care what anyone says, its a damn good movie. I felt shell-shocked once the movie was over, and that's something I've never felt before. I recommend the film based on that alone. Of course David and I did agree that the the film would have been stronger if they had cut the last 2 or 3 minutes (not the coney island stuff, but the scene under the bridge and the one before that).