In a Perfect World

In a perfect world, the new Dan Brown novel would be sliding under the radar: no one would be able to find it, no one but the most serious consipracy theorists would at all be interested in it, and it would be published by some crummy print-on-demand company that would cheaply bind it and overprice it. The fact that Dan Brown can become so popular is a kind of sad, and the reason I say kind of is because while Dan Brown simply exists in a realm of mediocrity or horridness (choose whichever one you think would be the worst), he is bringing people into bookstores -- despite the fact that the books, like the Twilight series, do nothing to make people think about anything apart from or inside the narrative.

The point is: the new John Crowley was released last Thursday and I have yet to see a single bookstore in Colorado Springs carry a copy. Even the indie bound ones, although being indie bound doesn't necessarily mean that a bookstore is going to stock an item. Let's take into consideration the trouble I had finding John Wray's Lowboy, which is very good and I think that you should read it. I looked everywhere, all the indie outlets first, but they were stocking about the equivalent, in terms of new releases, of what is stocked at Walmart or Kmart or Target (the chain department store I like). Finally I found and bought a copy at Barnes & Noble and did I feel guilty? No. But then again you have to take into consideration that this is Colorado Springs we're talking about, a city that's not exactly the pinnacle of culture or thought. The same thing kind of happened with Wells Tower's Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned but I eventually decided not to buy a copy of that book and just check it out from the library (I actually did hold a copy today, not from a downtown bookseller, but again from Barnes & Noble).

All right all right, Barnes & Noble isn't exactly the best place in the world either. What happened was this: I preordered the new John Crowley, Four Freedoms, from the store expecting, as with all preorders, that it would arrive on the day it was released. Most times I've preordered, books have come early, which is nice. I figured that with Memorial Day weekend and everything, my book might be a little delayed, but it's almost a week later and there has still been no word on its arrival. I called a store and they said, "Oh yeah, it should be here in 3 to 8 business days." Don't you think that totally defeats the purpose of a preorder? Which is making me frustrated because I've been looking forward to this book for some time already and there's this hindrance.

Also, in a perfect world, no one would stop and record over the first new episode of Pushing Daisies in months for some stupid basketball game. I'm going to find that person and punch them in the eyeball. Several times. Despite the fact that they could probably turn around and beat me up without a problem. Still. It's the principal of the matter. Now I gotta go to the ABC Web site and fight through all the download this download that junk to finish this episode, which was going so good and was a great reminder of what made this TV show such a wonder in the first place (although I hear that it went virutally unwatched: this, however, could be part of ABC's plan to validate their decision to 86 it: I still hope that ABC goes totally under -- once Lost is taken off the air). I missed Ned so badly.

The New John Crowley Book

On May 26th, John Crowley is publishing his 11th book, Four Freedoms, which seems to be more in line with The Translater and The Evening Land: Lord Byron's Novel than it does with Little, Big. Or maybe it is a conflation of everything, that undefinable thing that makes John Crowley John Crowley (check out the Aegypt cycle). Regardless of that, it's another book that I want to read and the second-most that I'm anticipating.

Sorry Professor Crowley, but a new Thomas Pynchon book is a new Thomas Pynchon book....

New Dæmonomania Cover

I was just thinking about last night or this morning -- actually, I'd been thinking about it for quite sometime, constantly checking Amazon.com or the Overlook Press website, trying to find news of the latest edition of Dæmonomania, the third part of John Crowley's Ægypt cycle.

All four books of the cycle have been released so far: Ægypt (now The Solitudes), Love & Sleep, Dæmonomania, and Endless Things, all in different editions from different publishers. Overlook Press, this small independent publishing company who pretty much delivers what their name promises, have so far put out the first two books in the series, with the latter two coming out in May and September respectively. They are trying to make the books look like they belong together in a series (only time will tell if anyone ever puts all four books together in one massive omnibus; all together there are still much longer books: War & Peace, Against the Day, the Spanish edition of 2666, which is coming out this November, more on that later) and I'm all about that.

John Crowley is quite possibly the best living author in America; he ranks with the best living authors of the entire world; he'll probably be someone revered and studied decades from now. He's that good. He has magnificent prose, spectacular characters, relatable but still bizarreevents . . . pretty much anything you could ever ask for in a book. And in the end, it's all very human and beautiful and you go through wide ranges of emotions and all stuff. On top of all that, it's just fantastic writing.

If I had $100 at my disposal, I would've totally ordered the 25th anniversary edition of Little, Big, but I don't.

Anyway, to help clear up this sporadic entry, here's the cover of Dæmonomania, which I cannot wait to read. I hear it's the most hyper, energetic, and wild entry of the series, which would make sense, since the first book serves as an introduction, the set-up; book two is like a dream, lyrical and with everyone amazed at where they're at; so the third book would have to be when all hell breaks loose, and the final part brings up the conclusion.

Read the other books in the series. Or Little, Big, which is my favorite book right now (I'd say of all time but at this time last year that was One Hundred Years of Solitude, which I still find fantastic).