I'm still working my way through the giant Stack-O-Books™ I picked up at the NYT Book Festival. This morning, I started Light Before Day, the most recent book by Christopher Rice. I was really excited for this one, because I've heard wonderful things about his previous novels, and honestly I just really want to like an author named Christopher for entirely narcissistic reasons. Unfortunately, and I know I've only had one subway ride in which to form my opinion, I can already tell it's going to hurt to get through. A lot. Judging from the Amazon reviews (which I didn't have a chance to check while hurriedly snatching books off the shelves and shoving them into my totebag in a crowd of people all trying to beat me to picking up the good stuff), this one doesn't measure up to his other stuff, and I still intend to give, say, A Density of Souls a try. After I get through the rest of this one, of course. I'm no quitter.
On the other hand, last night I stayed up until 3 am finishing Carter Beats the Devil, by Glen David Gold. I need to look him up today and see if he's coming out with anything else; it was fucking fantastic. Shiv mentioned that it reads a lot like Kavalier and Clay, and she's absolutely right. (It seems, by the way, that Amazon agrees.) Carter has that same richness of language, that same attention to detail, that same way of mixing the true and the speculative, and most importantly, that same way of making my heart race and the pages flash by in a blur. There are few things in life better than a really engaging book; I already want to go back and read the whole thing again.