Hey! I’ve read some things lately, and I thought I would share them with you.

Tango Charlie and Foxtrot Romeo and The Star Pit, by John Varley and Samuel R. Delany, respectively. This is a “Tor Double”—both these novellas were too short to warrant a book unto themselves, so Tor packaged them as one. (They’re, like, flipped, so that the book has two front covers—one for each story—and no back cover.) I have recently mentioned my love of Samuel Delany, and The Star Pit did nothing to diminish that. There’s a detached sadness in so much of his work, a—forgive me, I am going to sound a little pretentious here—not quite existential bleakness shot through with hope. Delany’s protagonists so often seem to understand that life is worth living—but also to grasp just how much work it takes to live, and to grasp it so aptly that they can’t help but sink into periodic despair. I read him because that is more or less how I think life is, too; and because he manages to capture the mundanity of everyday life while still making it feel alien and odd but no less true; and because he offers such striking images (this story begins with the description of an ecologarium—a large terrarium built over a small patch of land to allow kids the chance to observe real life-forms growing and dying); and because his ideas are that perfect mix of simple and wonderful (the plot centers on how only a select few humans are genetically capable of traveling outside the galaxy; others lose their minds when they get too many light-years out). Tango Charlie was just fine, too, but unremarkable to me; and anyway, John Varley suffers here almost necessarily, because the two stories must inevitably be compared (packaged as they are, as one), and Delany leaves me with a head too full to really dwell on anyone else’s merits.

The Time Machine, by H.G. Wells. This has been on my shelf for a while, and I wanted something quick and light to carry with me when we went on vacation at the start of the month, and Gene Wolfe told me H.G. Wells was more or less the founder of modern science fiction (because the oft-cited Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein has no children, he said). So I was like, I should probably finally check this out. The story I pretty much knew, even though I hadn’t read it; the Eloi and Morlocks are lodged reasonably firmly in the cultural consciousness by now (although I was unaware how simple the former are). What surprised me was how clean and elegant and easy the writing was. I mean, yeah, granted it’s got “Scholastic Classics” printed right on the cover; I shouldn’t have been astonished. But jeez, man, I was—the book really zips along. Almost as if it were a time machine itself. (In other news: What’s up with this tiny mass-market paperback—I’m holding it in my hand; trust me, it’s slight—selling for $18 on Amazon?)

A Visit From the Goon Squad, by Jennifer Egan. You know, my friends are so smart that long before this book won the 2010 National Book Critics Circle award for fiction—like, more than half a year ago—they had recommended it to me and I had requested it from the library. It came in a few days ago, and I finished it the other night, and I most heartily recommend it to EVERYONE ON EARTH. This is a book that will make you feel smarter. It dances on the (surprisingly narrow) line between depressing (because it is about things ending) and uplifting (because it is also about things beginning; but more to the point, because in content and in form it reminds you of the joy that comes from things simply happening—that is to say, not only are the things that happen to the characters delightful* to read about, but the structure of the book is such that you are delighted* by the act of reading it). It ends with a vision of the near future that veers palpably close to dystopia—and really, it might be. But it feels so unsettlingly like our own time that we either have to conclude that things after the close of the book are Going to Be OK, or confront the fact that Jesus Christ, everything right now is a terrible mess. (A little of column A, a little of column B is probably the right answer, as usual.)

(*Not quite the right word, but yes, “delight” is pretty close to what I mean, though I could see how you might disagree if you’ve read it.)

I also just finished One and the Same: My Life as an Identical Twin and What I’ve Learned About Everyone’s Struggle to Be Singular, by Abigail Pogrebin, and the fourth and fifth books of Michael Moorcock’s Elric saga (The Vanishing Tower and The Bane of the Black Sword, respectively). The twins book I read to get some insight for a fiction project I’m working on, and I would suggest it for anyone looking for a readable, thoughtful, human examination of what it means to share your DNA with someone else. As for Elric, he probably deserves (and probably will get) a post or two of his own here. I’ll just say that I’d never read beyond Book III (The Weird of the White Wolf) until now; and although it’s always been pretty easy to see why an albino warrior-sorcerer wielding a sentient, evil, soul-eating magic sword, and occasionally traveling through other dimensions, has been such a long-standing favorite of the F&SF community, I did not really appreciate these stories as stories until early in Book V. Something just clicked there; I’m not sure what. Anyway, only one book left in the series (not counting the couple of extras Moorcock later wrote), and frankly, I cannot get through my work-related reading fast enough.