All Work and No Play

Work has been kicking my butt this week, and that'll probably continue through next week. Then we'll have a little break for Mardi Gras. I don't really plan to do any parading. Been there, done that. I'll be home relaxing and reading. About all I've been able to get read is a couple of items I'll briefly review below. I also haven't been able to visit blogs as regularly but will try to get caught up today. My blog list is so big by now, though, that it's become pretty tough to make it through every post. I'm typically seeing about 80 posts a day.

Books Read:

I So Don't Do Mysteries by our own Barrie Summy. I am very much not the audience for this book. I think its target audience is 9 to 12 year old girls. There was still a lot of humor in it that I caught, and the writing was perfect for both the characters and the audience. I believe a lot of young girls will enjoy it very much. There were certainly many twists and turns, and most chapters ended with neat cliffhangers.


The Nightmare Collection by Bruce Boston. I very much am the audience for this book, which is a collection of Boston's speculative poetry. It's chock full of poems as well, weighing in at 95 pages, which is a tome compared to the typical poetry chapbook of 25 pages or so. And everything here is very good. Boston is quite possible the best speculative poet working today. His works have received numerous awards, but the proof is in the reading. Consider, "A small woman wearing a sheathe of dark feathers," or "I build engines from ivory and scrimshaw and the jaw-bones of apes."

Let me end with a quote from one of Boston's prose poems.

"When capital severed the tongues of science, when
politiicans sat in boardrooms, when the great religions of
the world would not stem the rising tide of mouths and
hands and the Earth began to wobble under the weight of
our species, you may remember that our family would often
gather for a sumptuous Christmas feast."

Nuff said!
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