Stratofanatic's Emporium

So, returning back to James Gifford's blog ( click here  for my previous thankful post on his comments about blind peer reviewers). This time, he's discussing book reviewers , which, needless to say, as a reviews editor , I found highly interesting. Overall, Gifford offers some pretty standard, but good, commentary, but I was particularly intrigued by his remarks that book reviewers should always keep in mind an author's material conditions -- that is, the job and tenure pressures that affect the overall strength of a monograph. I quote: . . . . fast research during the most pressure-filled years of an academic career . . .  written amidst new course preps and the potentially prickly entrance to the profession. . . . . This is to say, the reviewer really cannot and should not overlook the nature and needs of the book. Books that fulfill career requirements simply cannot be read the same way as those that come after tenure and therefore without the same material deman...

This is the second half (July through December) of my 2019 reading list -- the first half may be found here . As usual, I'm not including my non-fiction reading & research, mostly because I've gotten so good at "gutting" those texts that page counts are pretty irrelevant. At least with the fiction. I paid pretty good attention to every page. So, without further ado: Poul Anderson, The Broken Sword , 200 pg. Poul Anderson, Three Hearts and Three Lion s, 150 pg Poul & Karen Anderson, The Unicorn Trade , 250 pg. Glen Cook, The Swordbearer, 250 pg. Paul Edwin Zimmer & Jon DeCles, Blood of the Colyn Muir , 250 pg. Lawrence Watt-Evans, The Misenchanted Sword , 250 pg Michael Moorcock, Elric of Melnibone and Other Stories , 200 pg. Marie Brennan, A Natural History of Dragons , 350 pg. Terry Pratchett & Neil Gaiman, Good Omens , 400 pg. Trudi Canavan, The Black Magician , 400 pg. Karen Miller, The Innocent Mage , 600 pg. T. H. White, The Sword in the...

So, after reading A Modernist Fantasy (2018) last month, I've turned into a major fan of James Gifford. And I've recently discovered that he's had a small blog series going where he describes the blind review process . . . . which is helpful because, as he says in one of the posts, academia is notoriously secretive, and my experience with the "blind peer review" genre comes entirely from common sense and the few blind reviews I've received. So, from this post , here was a particularly helpful bit of information: I made a quasi-promise to myself three years ago to resolve that contradiction. When asked to review an article, I either decline or complete the review by the end of the next day. It’s not really a matter of hurrying or spending more or less time – it’s simply when the time is allocated. I could race at the end of the deadline or just read the materials on the train the same day I receive them and send off comments the next morning (sometimes eve...

Well, retweeted by Beagle's publicity team, most likely, but it's still cool. But apparently they were happy to see the new entries ("Peter S. Beagle" & The Last Unicorn ) in The Literary Encyclopedia .

I just earned $4.33 in royalties from my entries in The Literary Encyclopedia for 2019. Now, everyone who told me that earning my doctorate in English was a bad investment is eating their words.  Revenge is a dish best served cold. . . . mostly cuz adding heat would take the total price to over $5!

In the last month or two, I've been learning to "twitter." The experience has brought one thing home to me: the academic left is truly, honestly radical. For years I've read articles that claimed to be radical, that championed being radical, but somehow never quite grasped how sincerely some writers have meant it. "Revolution" isn't just a metaphor here.  For example, I'm currently reading Mitchum Huehl's After Critique: Twenty-first-century Fiction in a Neoliberal Age (Oxford UP, 2016). Not a radical book in itself, but it's part of my recent interest in the topic of postcritique. And, in the book, I was struck by the following passage: "This is why Latour suggests [in Irreductions ] that reformist politicians, always ready to compromise, negotiate, and reconfigure, as opposed to revolutionaries, armed with their righteous critiques and utopian dreams, embody the ideal form of politics, even of existence itself" (Huehls 21). A...