Eddie's Fancy

I’ve started playing with Pandora; very, very cool. You suggest a song or artist and it calculates close matches based on a large set of parameters. It then generates a flash-based music stream out of those recordings.

I only wish the licensing restrictions were looser and I could just access as an mp3 stream.

Yes, I know, I’m a sucker for pulp. I also like Lovecraft, what can I say. For a long time I’ve been a fan of F. Paul Wilson and his Repairman Jack series but I just didn’t care for the last two in the series. The resolutions seemed a bit tacked on and didn’t really follow from the rest of the book. But hope springs eternal so I sprung for the paperback version of his new book.

It was a definite improvement over the last few but not up to the level of The Tomb. Using Muslim terrorists as the bad guys seemed a bit too easy and the ending was a bit heartbreaking, but then given the events of Nightworld it probably couldn’t have gone any other way.

The new one, Bloodline, is out in hardback but I think I’ll just wait for the paperback.

I admit that Joe Lansdale is an aquired taste and this is one of his harsher stories. Obviously influenced by Tod Browning’s Freaks, Bill Roberts in the run from a robbery gone wrong and his mother’s rotting body still in her bedroom, he ends up working in a sideshow. And then things get strange.

I admit, I’m a sucker for the old pulp adventure stories and no one did it better than Robert E. Howard. I read the Solomon Kane stories twenty years ago and found a copy formatted for my Sony Reader and decided to go through them again. They aren’t quite as much fun as the Conan stories but the later ones are better than the earlier. A Puritan who rights the wrongs of the helpless, Kane a facinating character. I wish he had written more.

I’m torn. I read the first two Covenant series in High School and I remember anxiously waiting the release of “White Gold Wielder”. I also remember throwing “The Mirror of Her Dreams” across the room when I got to the end and realized it wasn’t a stand alone book.

That mean I actually like Donaldson’s books with all of their flaws. He’s a wonderful world builder, great a keeping you going to the next page, and usually ends his books in ways that I didn’t expect. Exactly.

But I’m a big “Meh” on “The Last Chronicles of Thomas Covenant”. Fatal Revenant kept me up late finishing the book, it’s still a page turner, but most of the plot seems to revolve around visiting characters we’ve seen before. There doesn’t seem to be much new going on.

Donaldson has two more books to go, hopefully he’s just building up to something.

I’m 40.

Really, ouch, I’m 40.

Does this mean I can yell at kids to get them off my lawn now?