Sleeping with Zelazny (and other stuff)

Yes, I know the title sounds bad. And considering Roger Zelazny's dead, not a good idea altogether.

I've been conducting an experiment where I read out loud short excerpts from a book I'm reading before going to sleep. I've done this with some short stories from the Year's Best Fantasy & Horror: Seventeenth Annual Collection (yes, I'm looking at you Dean) and also The Book of Flying by first-time novelist Keith Miller.

However, I tried reading Zelazny's Creatures of Light and Darkness and an effect of his prose is that it knocks me out to sleep faster than Mike Tyson's left hook.

You know me; I've always been a fan of great prose (some of my favorite authors are Graham Joyce, Lucius Shepard, Sean Stewart). So I wondered how some writers would sound if read aloud. Now, Zelazny's a great writer: his Lord of Light still resounds heavily on my mind several years after I first read it while Amber isn't that half-bad. But COTD ain't-- to pardon the pun-- my glass of warm milk.

Not that warm milk puts me to sleep anyway. Ah well, 'tis better to read Zelazny when my brain is running at full speed.

In other news, here's an interesting rejoinder against fantasy grandmaster Michael Moorcock's criticism of J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings as written by Tolkien expert David Bratman at the Emerald City weblog (just scroll down):

What really seems to gall Moorcock is in his claim that LOTR is at root a comforting book. Actually it is, again, a lot more complex and subtle than that - look at the very unsettled closing chapters - but even if it is at root assuring the reader that there is order and meaning to the world, a lot of the world’s great literature says the same thing, and Tolkien by saying it is expressing deep moral and religious values, which may be disagreed with but are not to be sneezed at. If Moorcock and Mieville want to write different kinds of books, that’s a good thing - we need a wide variety of views and perspectives in literature - but to denounce books that are just not their style is juvenile. And while the cheap imitations that have come up in Tolkien’s wake may rub more ambitious fantasists raw, it’s particularly foolish to blame Tolkien for them. They’d have appalled Tolkien even more than they appall Moorcock.

In the writing field, the piece, "A Walking Tour of Hell", was supposed to be a letting-off of imaginative steam. From there, I was supposed to go back to my other stories. However, "Walking Tour" seems to have taken over my head at the moment so will see where it goes.

Lastly, I'll be off-line next week as I'll be covering the Philippine leg of the Asian Windsurfing Tour in Boracay. That means that once a day for a week, I'll be on a sunny beach struggling to write about the latest windsurfing happening.

*Sigh.* The things I do for my job. At least I'll be able to catch up on my reading. (And maybe get some writing done, too.)

I've also a bit behind doing reviews so next time, I'll tell you why reading Jack Cady is good for your health.