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This one got passed to me by someone in Korea. My wife is a fan of Kundera. Or was, before I ruined her taste with comic books and Fritz Leiber.

The Joke details several "jokes", none of which are the haha kind. The first one is a postcard written by Ludvik Jahn when he was a student that caused him to be sentenced to the coal mines. This event propels the plot in so much as the plot is about Ludvik's quest for revenge fifteen years later. In the ways his plan gets fulfilled and in the ways...

My vacation's about over. I'm in Boston until Thursday when I'll once more enter the air travel relay race and fly back to Korea. It's been a great trip. I've had time to catch up with family and friends, and in between all the running around and socializing I got to be pretty damn lazy. No complaints there. Now to figure out how to fit that pile of books above into my suitcases.

All of which is to say things are still on hiatus here.

There's likely to be a lack of posts while I'm visiting the USA.

My flight was more or less fine. The whole thing "door to door" took close to 30 hours. I think only 15 of those hours involved being on an airplane. The rest was spent in transit or sitting around. No highlights, except for the leg early on between Korea and Japan where the woman seated beside me burst into tears halfway through the flight. Yeah� fun times.

All right, this book is one of those I wish I had read as a fifteen year old. At fifteen I would have gobbled this up as I did Moorcock's Eternal Champion. A Mohawk-sporting, telepathic juvenile delinquent hops through time and dimensions to raise an army to do battle with mind parasites?

Yes. Sign me up.

Now sometimes this is a mixed bag. Often encountering something that speaks to our teen-self only increases our awareness of time's passing, and you either succumb to wistful nostalgia or get ...

"There is no better way of obtaining useful information than by mixing with people. According to a wise saying of the ancients: "The eye never tires from seeing, nor the ear from hearing."

Therefore, I decided with the help of God to blacken these pages with what I saw and heard during this voyage, be it clear or obscure. For I am but a woodgatherer of the night, the one who lags behind, a horse who is out of the race."

- Disorienting Encounters: Travels of a Moroccan Scholar in France in 1845...

It's time for another edition of one book, four covers. This time Lolly Willowes.

Once again I read the NYRB edition. That's the one all the way over on the left. I think it's a bit lousy–misleading and unappealing. It calls to mind Native American or folk artwork and certainly doesn't tell you what the book's likely to be about. The second one� umm.. yeah� First I guess it was published during the 60s/70s Gothic boom where a cover required an old house, a young woman, and some stuffy...

Here's the first read for 2012: Sylvia Townsend Warner's Lolly Willowes. Yup, it's another New York Review Book and it hasn't shaken my conviction that all of their books are great. Warner combines the perceptiveness of Jane Austen with the supernatural touch of Shirley Jackson.

Laura "Lolly" Willowes is a single woman in the early 20th century, and the novel concerns her spiritual renewal late in life (well after she has been consigned to the role of spinster aunt by her family) when she...

Writing-wise I'm pretty happy with this year. Here are the highlights:

- My Lovecraftian, sex tourism gone awry story, "Go Home Stranger", was published in the anthology Bewere the Night.

- Space Squid reprinted my story "Your Mother" in their Best of Space Squid anthology.

- Shimmer Magazine interviewed me in their Five Authors, Five Questions series. That was cool.

- I sold my Joe Mitchel meets Fritz Leiber story, "Shadows Under Hexmouth Street", to Beneath Ceaseless Skies. So I should have at ...

Have a happy New Year everyone.

My resolution for 2012 is to sweep the floor more often.

(And, yes, I'm not much of a Tom Waits fan. I pretty much like three of his songs and this one is two of them.)