DICKENSIAN

I feel like the universe is telling me to read Charles Dickens and not just one book either. No, his total output. I'm not sure why this is happening either. The notion popped into my head a week or so ago and since then I've seen references to Dickens here and there in my life. It's not a project I'm going to undertake right now, especially with my reading of Infinite Jest scheduled to start in a week. Once that project is over, I'll already have been in an English class for a few weeks and will have a bunch of reading to do there, I'm sure. It remains to be seen if the idea keeps afloat in the back of my brain - if that's the case, I'll probably have to do something about it.

I did just finish my 16th book of the year, Stalking the Unicorn by Mike Resnick. Originally published in 1987, it was just reissued last year by Pyr along with a sequel, Stalking the Vampire (which I also have out from the library). John Justin Mallory is a detective in Manhattan who is drunk on New Year's Eve. He is hired by an elf to recover a unicorn, which takes him to another Manhattan where such creatures life, along with leprechauns, demons, Gnomes of the Subway, goblins, trolls, and magic doesn't exist (what you think is magic is just science you don't know). Over the course of the novel, Mallory learns about the world and makes a few big decisions about his own. It's a fun book. I've been trying to decide if I should plow straight into the next book or read something in between, just because. We'll see.

This week I also read the April/May issue of F&SF. It is the first of the new bigger-sized bi-monthly issues but the only real changes are just those two things. F&SF is always dependable and if this issue didn't have any particular standouts, it also didn't have any stories that weren't worth reading. I call that a win.