What I read last month. Still going through ancient Greek classics, continuing Sarah Caudwell, and getting into some nifty SF/Fantasy series, including one serial book that only exists on LiveJournal (don't worry, I link to it). Enjoy.
Men Who Flail With the Wolves: Never Cry Wolf, by Farley Mowat
The Idyllic scene exploded into frenzied action.
The pups became grey streaks which vanished into the gaping darkness of the den mouth. I spun around to face the adult wolf, lost my footing, and started to skid down the loose slope toward the den. In trying to regain my balance I thrust the muzzle of the rifle deep into the sand where it stuck fast until the carrying strap dragged it free as I slid rapidly away from it. I fumbled wildly at my revolver, but so cluttered was I with cameras and equipment straps that I did not succeed in getting the weapon clear as, accompanied by a growing avalanche of sand, I shot past the den mouth, over the lip of the main ridge and down the full length of the esker slope. Miraculously, I kept my feet, but only by dint of superhuman contortions during which I was alternately bent forward like a skier going over a jump, or leaning backward at such an acute angle I thought my backbone was going to snap.
It must have been quite a show. When I got myself straightened out and glanced back up the esker, it was to see three adult wolves ranged side by side like spectators in the Royal Box, all peering down at me with expressions of incredulous delight.
Not even David Attenborough has managed to delight me as much as naturalist Farley Mowat on the subject of wolves. Mowat was sent to study wolves in their arctic habitat, decided to write a book about his adventures dealing with the savage Homo Bureaucratus, and ended up writing about the wolves after all.
The big problem with modern science is that scientists have to go grubbing for grants, and those willing to pay scientists want their experiments to support their predetermined findings. In this case, Canada’s conservative government ordered Mowat to do research proving that the existence of wolves was threatening Canada’s caribou population, and that wolves must be destroyed.
Mowat instead discovered that wolves hunted only old and sick caribou, and left the healthy ones alone, thereby performing a vital role in the health of the overall herd; that the wolves’ diet consisted mainly of the very prolific rodents of the muskeg; that caribou herds were being decimated almost entirely by man, who often slaughtered whole herds to feed their sled dogs, or so that trophy hunting tourists from the United States could have a wide choice as to which head they wanted to bring home; and that the threatened extinction of the wolf population would have catastrophic consequences for caribou, uncontrolled rodent populations, and man. Oh, and by the way, the savage wolf mythos is a bunch of hokey. Wild wolves are only dangerous to those people who behave like idiots around them.
Additionally, Mowat is a delight to read. He can tell true stories like a master of suspense and humor. His attempts to deal with the dingbat politics of science, his attempts to mark territory to keep his tent safe from incursions, his naked trek across a tundra, and the bemused and alarmed reactions of the Inuit to his scatological studies are not like any research paper you’ve ever seen. It will be a long time before I forget the merry pranks of the wolves George, Angeline and Uncle Albert.
Canada’s conservative government ignored Mowat’s findings, of course, and increased the bounties they offered to pay people for killing wolves, probably diverting money from schools to do so.
Seven Daffodils: The Sirens Sang of Murder, by Sarah Caudwell
"In short", said Ragwort, "did this man do or say anything which he might not have done or said if you had been a young man introduced to him in similar circumstances and whose company he found agreeable?"
"No," said Julia pitifully, "absolutely nothing."
It was infamous. Casanova would have blushed. Don Juan would have raised an eyebrow and muttered, "Cad." It was inconceivable (said Selena) that a man of mature years and wide experience of life should without design have adopted a course of conduct so precisely calculated to reduce Julia to a state of hopeless infatuation. He had done it all on purpose; and Julia, unversed in the ways of men and the world, had not suspected him of any ulterior motive.
"I don't think," said Julia, "that one can quite say that. My aunt Regina has often warned me that when men make themselves agreeable they generally have some ulterior motive, and I was not so naive as to think Patrick an exception."
"You suspected him," said Ragwort, "of having designs on your person?"
"Oh no," said Julia. "I thought he wanted free tax advice.
I’m now on my third of Caudwell’s four wonderful mystery stories, and still loving every page of it. I’m also two for three in figuring out solutions (stop reading at the end of chapter 15 if you want to figure it all out). See last month’s bookpost for the first two in the series. I’ve discovered the pattern to Caudwell’s detective, and it doesn’t detract from the enjoyment in the least.
A large part of what makes these stories magnificent is the way the characters get away with speaking in the most god-awful cliches. The five barristers and one professor are clearly deliniated as clever, witty and close to one another on a friends-since-birth level, and so when they spout off B-movie dialogue, it is with an air of ironic detachment that has a hilarious effect. In this episode, Caudwell gets to lay it on thicker than usual, by having two of the characters working on a novel complete with heaving bosoms and windswept hair (“It’s designed to make us pots of money. You can’t do that if you don’t ginger things up a bit”, says Cantrip, who gets center stage for Caudwell #3). And then we get a visit from Cantrip’s uncle the septageneric practical joker (no, really!), a visit to one of the Channel Islands said to be populated by witches, and the lamentable details of a trust without a known settlor or beneficiaries, the financial advisers to which are beginning to turn up dead.
Is this book a good read? Does a one-legged duck swim in circles? Highest recommendations.
Please Tell Me Who I Am: The Logical Tracts, by Aristotle
Whenever three terms are so related to one another that the last is contained in the middle as in a whole, and the middle is either contained in, or excluded from, the first as in or from a whole, the extremes must be related by a perfect syllogism. I call that term middle which is itself contained in another and contains another in itself: in position this also comes in the middle. By extremes I mean both that term which is itself contained in another and that in which another is contained. If A is predicated of all B, and B od all C, A must be predicated of all C: we have already explained what we mean by 'predicated of all." Similarly also, if A is predicated of no B and B of all C, it is necessary that no C will be A.
Here we have the first use of the syllogism to test the truth of a given assertion; a scientific method, begging the question, genus et differentia definitions, etc., that led students by the million to discover the reasoning behind such proofs as: All cats die. Socrates is dead. Therefore, Socrates was a cat.
Six tracts make up what Aristotle called the Organon, designed to teach people how to be sensible, logical, responsible, practical; however, only two of them, the “Prior Analytics” and “Sophistical Refutations” really address what I call logic. “Categories” and “On Interpretation” are the kind of tracts that attempt to classify all things into one of a set of what look like almost arbitrary pigeonholes; “Posterior Analytics” is an epistemology (“What the %&$# do we really know?”) book, and the “Topics”, which tries to classify which subjects of discussion are permitted, would be humorous but for its Confucian density. I skimmed a lot of it, and found it useful mostly as a foundation for things long since improved upon. Recommended for anyone who wants to be acceptable, presentable, sensible, a vegetable.
I Reek-a? Mathematical Treatises, by Archimedes
There are some, King Gelon, who think that the number of the sand is infinite in multitude; and I mean by the sand not only that which exists about Syracuse and the rest of Sicily but also that which is found in every region whether inhabited or uninhabited. Again there are some who, without regarding it as infinite, yet think that no number has been named which is great enough to exceed its multitude. And it is clear that they who hold this view, if they imagined a mass made up with sand in other respects as large as the mass of the earth, including in it all the seas and hollows of the earth filled up to a height equal to the highest of the mountains, would be many times further still from recognizing that any number could be expressed which exceeded the multitude of sand so taken. But I will try to show you by means of geometrical proofs, which you will be able to follow, that, of the numbers named by me and given in the work which I sent to Zeuxippus, some exceed not only the number of the mass of sand equal in magnitude to the earth filled up in the way described, but also that of a mass equal in magnitude to the universe.
According to Archimedes, it would take 10 to the 63rd power grains of sand to fill the universe (Oops, SPOILER!!!)
Archimedes had a fascinating life. He studied mathematics and absorbed himself in numbers to the extent of neglecting his own person; invented a screw that could water move uphill; used what he knew to create levers capable of lifting invading navy ships out of the water and lenses capable of setting them on fire; and was reportedly killed during an invasion when he threw a fit at an incoming soldier who had stepped on and disturbed an equation he had drawn on the sandy beach. Too bad none of these details, nor the fascinating machines and applications to science of his learnings are in his treatises; they tend to be an extension of Euclid, and admittedly, he lost me here and there, especially when writing about ratios between cones and spheres that failed to culminate in a big climactic discovery. His best writings, on the equilibrium of planes, on floating bodies, and the above quoted "sand reckoner" come close to crossing into applied mathematics, and are the easiest to understand for those of us who haven't really had geometry or algebra in front of us since high school. I read these as part of my current Ancient Greek Classics review and included them here for completeness.
Voice of the Silent Generation: The Stories of John Cheever
His declaration, the scene in the playground, seemed to me to be like those chance meetings that are part of the life of any large city. A blind man asks you to help him across the street, and as you are about to leave him, he seizes your arm and regales you with a passionate account of his cruel and ungrateful children; or the elevator man who is taking you up to a party turns to you suddenly and says that his grandson has infantile paralysis. The city is full of accidental revelation, half-heard cries for help, and strangers who will tell you everything at the first suspicion of sympathy, and Trencher seemed to me like the blind man or the elevator operator. His declaration had no more bearing on the business of our lives than these interruptions.
With some exceptions, the stories in this collection are intelligent but very, very depressing. Cheever wrote during America’s Golden Age, from shortly after WWII until 1978, when this collection of his best short fiction was published. Before Ronald Reagan began America’s long, slow slide into our status as leader of the Third World, with our own elected leaders proclaiming that we can’t do anything. These stories are about people maturing in the age of Truman and Eisenhower, JFK and LBJ, nationwide prosperity, expanding civil rights for all, men on the moon, and later, even, the power of the people to end an unpopular war and bring down a corrupt President.
They live as adults in a world I grew up in and want back. I used to take the Croton-Harmon to NYC train and spend summers in New England. I can’t completely relate to them, as just about every protagonist lives in a large, upper middle class suburb, and almost every house has domestic servants. I had thought domestic servants went out with the Great Depression, but hey, Cheever’s protagonists have them, as well as Summer homes, vacations in Europe...heck, they’re alive, part of the privileged class of the United States of America. They’re on top of the world.
And they’re all MISERABLE! Story after story centers on feelings of hopelessness, entrapment, rotten jobs and rotten marriages, affairs, lakes of alcohol abuse, hordes of alienated children, a suicide or two, and one poor sap trying to cross the county through eight miles of suburban swimming pools. At some point, Cheever must have lived in Italy for a while, because there’s a cluster of tales set there, mostly contrasting either ebullient rustic peasants who love life or discontented peasants who would do anything to go to America and have it so good, with jaded Americans who can suck the life out of an Italian festival.
The worst part is, it started to rub off on me over time, and I began to have thoughts like Cheever’s characters, depression, lack of fulfillment, lack of meaningful romance, fear of what neighbors would think. Since when have I ever cared what neighbors would think?
Don’t read this book. OK, it’s high quality depressing stuff, so read a few if you must, but not the whole thing in a month. I recommend “The Five Forty Eight”, “Christmas is a Sad Season for the Poor”, “The Day the Pig Fell Into the Well”, “The Housebreaker of Shady Hill” and (ironically, given the title, one of the few life-affirming tales in the volume) “The Worm in the Apple”.
That’s a Maori: The Journal of Katherine Mansfield
...to meet, on the stopping of the chariot, the august emergence.
The jewel wrapped up in a piece of old silk and negotiable one day in the market of misery.
Luxuriant complications which make the air too tropical...
The sense of folded flowers...as though the night had laid its hand upon their hearts and they were folded and at peace like folded flowers.
...plucked her sensations by the way, detached, nervously, the small wild blossoms of her dim forest.
The high luxury of not having to explain...
The ostrich burying its head in the sand does at any rate wish to convey the impression that its head is the most important part of it.
Though she did, in a way, simply offer herself to me she was so cold, so rich, so splendid, that I simply couldn’t see a spoon silver enough to dare help myself with...
If there were going to be large freedoms she was determined to enjoy them too. She wasn’t going to be perched, swaying perilous in the changing jungle like a little monkey dropped from a tree on to an elephant’s head—and possibly clinging to some large ear.
She was the same through and through. You could go on cutting slice after slice and you knew you would never light upon a plum or a cherry or even a piece of peel.
Our friends are only a more or less imperfect embodiment of our ideas...
Journals of famous people are tricky mixed bags. Way too many pages are given over to writing about how one’s stomach hurts and how dreary it is to be cooped up sick in bed...since that’s when people tend to write in their journals. When they have enough energy to open a book and write, but not enough to go out and do things.
Mansfield’s journal is interesting in that it’s full of vignettes like those quoted above, maybe snippets that she was saving to put into her stories. It’s interesting to me, to see the world through the eye of another, creative person. Among the snippets are a couple of longer anecdotes, the longest of which is the nightmarish life experience of a cook in a household Mansfield stayed at.
Foster Step Parents: What Maisie Knew, by Henry James
Maisie was not at the moment so fully conscious of them as of the wonder of Moddle’s sudden disrespect and crimson face; but she was able to produce them in the course of five minutes when, in the carriage, her mother, all kisses, ribbons, eyes, arms, strange sounds and sweet smells, said to her, “And did your beastly papa, my precious angel, send any message to your own loving mamma?” Then it was that she found the words spoken by her beastly papa to be, after all, in her little bewildered ears, from which, at her mother’s appeal, they passed, in her clear shrill voice, straight to her little innocent lips. “He said I was to tell you, from him,” she faithfully reported, “that you are a nasty horrid pig.”
Henry James often puts me straight to sleep; this one, shorter than most of his novels, did not. The exposition is shorter than usual, and the stage is quickly set for a drama more relevant to today's world of many broken families than it was a century ago, when divorce was much less common.
Take two bad parents who divorce and set about the task of using their child, Maisie, as a weapon of war against each other. Then each parent remarries, and the respective step parents each take a very fond and protecting interest in the child. Then the step parents begin to take an interest in each other. And then it starts getting interesting in a way that Henry James usually doesn’t.
I've seen enough broken families destroy their children to find this story compelling, heart wrenching and prone to make me want to take both biological parents and bang their heads together. The adults, good and bad, are portrayed masterfully; Masie herself, however, is presented as a closed book, as an adult lady in a child's body, with little evidence of imagination or feeling in her, which detracts considerably from the impact of the story. It seems to me, the whole point is that she’s the center of the story, and yet she’s presented to us almost as the “thing” that her parents treat her as, and the motives for her bewildering choice at the end are, to me at least, nonexistent. Why does she do that? Why does James?
Three thousand ducats: Operation Shylock, by Philip Roth
Dear Philip,
I enraged you/you blitzed me. Every word I spoke--stupid/wrong/unnatural. Had to be. Been dreading/dreaming this meeting since 1959. Saw your photo on Goodbye, Columbus/knew that my life would never be the same. Explained to everyone we were two different people/had no desire to be anyone but myself/wanted MY fate/hoped your first book would be your last/wanted you to fail and disappear/thought constantly about your dying. IT WAS NOT WITHOUT RESISTANCE THAT I ACCEPTED MY ROLE: THE NAKED YOU/THE MESSIANIC YOU/THE SACRIFICIAL YOU. MY JEWISH PASSIONS SHIELDED BY NOTHING. MY JEWISH LOVING UNRESTRAINED.
LET ME EXIST. Do not destroy me to preserve your good name. I AM YOUR GOOD NAME. I am only spending the renown you hoard. You hide yourself in lonely rooms/country recluse.anonymous expatriate/garreted monk. Never spent it as you should/might/wouldn't/couldn't: IN BEHALF OF THE JEWISH PEOPLE. Please! Allow me to be the public instrument through which you express the love for the Jews/the hatred for their enemies/that is in every word you ever wrote. WITHOUT LEGAL INTERVENTION.
Judge me not by words but by the woman who bears this letter. To you I say everything stupidly. Judge me not by awkward words which falsify everything I feel/know. Around you I will never be a smith with words. See beyond words. I am not the writer/I am something else. I AM THE YOU THAT IS NOT WORDS.
Yours,
Philip Roth
This was my introduction to Philip Roth, and I'm not sure whether Operation Shylock is typical of his work, but the man has boxes in his closet you don't want to see opened. The book is a novel pretending to be an autobiography pretending to be a novel. I found it in the fiction section, with the usual disclaimer stating that it is fiction and not to be considered as a true story, and so I'll take him at his word...but the rest of the book is a first person tale in which the narrator, the writer Philip Roth encounters a stalker pretending to be Philip Roth, in Israel, and then the real Roth writes about it but says that, for reasons of Israeili security he's writing the true story as a novel and pretending it is fiction. Of course, in reality, for all we know, you are a butterfly dreaming about reading my blog concerning a Philip Roth novel. It's that kind of book.
The stalker, whose real name Roth never learns, has been making public statements urging Jewish holocaust survivors in Israel to go back to Europe to save the Jewish people from being wiped out when, inevitably, the Arab countries nuke Israel. This is not the real Roth's view, and he wants it stopped. Rather than talk to the media or the lawyers or the cops about it, Roth goes to Israel to take care of it himself, all the while wondering why he didn't just call the lawyers/press/police. It would make so much sense, but it wouldn't advance the plot of the story, or allow Roth to confront "Roth" and listen to the first of many long, long monologues that various characters give him. There are long rants from Zionist Jews, rants from anti-Zionist Jews, rants from reformed anti semites, rants from anti semites, rants from sympathizers of the Palestinians and rants from the Israeli police. Poor Roth is lucky he gets to put his thoughts on the printed page afterwards, 'cause he never seems to get a word in edgewise.
As Roth interacts with his impersonator, his impersonator's girlfriend, and people who mistake him for the Roth that the other guy is pretending to be, he begins to doubt his own identity. This part may be intended as a philosophical commentary on identity; the effect it had on me was to make me figure Roth had gone crazy. In the midst of Roth's identity crisis are episodes from the ongoing Palestinian Intifada of the late 1980s and the war crimes trial of John Demjanjuk, alleged to be "Ivan the Terrible" of Treblinka, and whose defense that they have the wrong man on trial allows Roth to say more things about identity--what it means to be accountable for a crime 40 years in the past, what it means to be a conquering people after centuries of oppression, what it means to be Jewish in the first place. The self-conscious use of deadpan "Jewish schmuck from New York" humor alongside such topics as holocaust atrocities and allegations of Israeli Apartheid treatment of Palestinians is jarring, not the least because Roth keeps interjecting with words to the effect that he feels jarred too, just thinking these thoughts.
Bottom line: I recommend it, though it's not for everybody. Roth has plenty to say, and asks the right questions without offering answers. Definitely an original, one-of-a-kind work.
Wizard For Hire: Stormfront, by Jim Butcher
I brought Bob up to speed on what had happened that day. He whistled (no easy trick, without lips), and said, “Sounds sticky.”
“Pretty sticky”, I agreed.
“Tell you what”, he said. “Let me out for a ride, and I’ll tell you how to get out of it.”
That made me wary. “Bob, I let you out once. Remember?”
He nodded dreamily, scraping bone on wood. “The sorority house. I remember.”
I snorted, and started some water to boiling over one of the burners. “You’re supposed to be a spirit of intellect. I don’t understand why you’re obsessed with sex.”
Bob’s voice got defensive. “It’s an academic interest, Harry.”
“Oh yeah? Well, maybe I don’t think it’s fair to let your academia go peeping in other people’s houses.”
“Wait a minute. My academia doesn’t just peep—“
“I held up a hand. “Save it. I don’t want to hear it.”
He grunted. “You’re trivializing what getting out for a bit means to me, Harry. You’re insulting my masculinity.”
“Bob,” I said, “you’re a SKULL. You don’t have any masculinity to insult.”
I’d never heard of this series until about a month ago at a con, when a geek in awed tones introduced me to “Jim Butcher, author of the Dresden Files”. I was politely impressed, thought “Oh, cool, one of the fen who’s actually been published”, and made a mental note to see if our library had a book called The Dresden Files. It didn’t. I googled it. Turned out the guy was more wildly popular than I’d suspected. Too bad I met him; I could have challenged myself to see how much longer I could have gone on completely oblivious to The Latest Hot Thing. But then, I couldn’t have read the books.
The series is worth the hype, if Book One is representative and you like Private Eye books. Dresden is a lot like Glen Cook’s Garrett series, except that, instead of an alternate world in which the big American city has trolls and orcs adding to the immigration controversy, it’s set in modern Chicago where no one believes in real magic except a very small handful of those in the know. It’s a lot like Robert B. Parker’s Spenser books, except that the detective, at least as the series starts, is a born loser. He's put all his stats into magic powers and reckless courage, with nothing left over for muscle, wisdom, constitution or charisma. He can’t pay his rent, he’s a failure with women*, his police contacts want to arrest him, his underworld contacts want to break his legs, and the equivalent of the Ministry of Magic is on the verge of having him executed. Further, along with the usual tropes of big thugs, femme fatales, wisecracking cops and people in need of rescuing, there are monsters and demons. Really nasty ones.
But, hey. Dresden is a wizard. And he’s got a talking skull named Bob. He can’t be completely helpless, right?
It’s light reading, and definitely not the kind of mystery where you try to figure out who did it before the detective does. Identity is anticlimactic; the chase and the narrow escapes are the thing. High recommendations.
(*The vital clue that told me exactly what was going on, many chapters before the climax, parts Dresden's hair as it goes right over his head. See if you can spot it; it's something a woman tells him on the phone)
It Grows on You: The Fungus, by Harry Adam Knight
Just after 4 a.m. Eric’s staff were woken by a muffled but powerful explosion which seemed to come from their employer’s bedroom. All five of them gathered in the passageway outside his room. They banged on the door and called out his name but there was no response. Finally the bravest among them opened the door. Immediately a horrifically strong yeasty stench poured out of the room, making them gag.
Choking, two of them reluctantly entered the room and switched on the light. The others crowded around the doorway.
To begin with, none of them could comprehend what they were looking at. Then one of the girls screamed and ran down the passageway.
Eric Gifford’s head, one of his arms, and both of his legs still lay on the bed but the rest of him was spread fairly thickly over the ceiling, walls and floors.
And in the depression in the bed created by his 250-pound bulk over the years lay a bubbling and seething white mass.
Finishing out the month is a gross but masterful bit of Crypt Keeper kitsch pitting fungus zombies and the threatened end of the world against a brave team of scientists who hope they know what they’re doing. Lots of self-contained vignette chapters involving bad people dying in nasty ways, lots of scientists and military shouting at each other over whether to research a solution or just blow everything up. Fun for all the kiddies!
An experiment intended to solve world hunger by engineering large high-protein mushrooms has instead unleashed Unspeakable horror on London and, soon, the main island of Great Britain. And there are soooooo many varieties of fungi out there, and their spores are, like, everywhere, and this thing that got out of the lab interacts with every kind of fungus in a different way, and some of them grow inside you and eat your guts painfully, and some of them grow on the outside and suffocate you, and some will have a symbiotic relationship with your body and turn you into a mindless fungus zombie, and WHOO BOY are we in trouble! Other countries want to nuke all of Britain to prevent it from spreading to the continent and the world.
Our only hope lies with...A WRITER. Yes, a nerdy writer played by Rick Moranis. Together with (approximately) Samantha Carter and Jayne Cobb, he just might be able to fight his way through the fungus zombies, into the quarantined mushroom jungle of London and find the missing notebooks of the scientist who originally unleashed the fungal plague and figure out how to stop it.
If I had you at “fungus zombies”, this book may be for you. Otherwise...not so much. It can get yucky.
UPDATE: It may be that Knight did more fungal research than one might have given him credit for. The symbiotic relationship between the fungus and some human victims is described a lot like it is with the ants in this actual article: http://www.scientificamerican.com/...
The Chaos Before the Storm: Countdown, by Mira Grant
"And now they're saying that there's a cure for the common cold. Only you know who's going to get it? Not me. Not you. Not our parents. Not the kids. Only the people who can afford it. Paris Hilton's never going to have the sniffles again, but you and me and everybody we care about, we're just screwed. Just like everybody who hasn't been working for The Man since this current corrupt society came to power. It's time to change that! It's time to take the future out of the hands of The Man and put it back where it belongs—in the hands of the people!"
General cheering greeted this proclamation. Hazel, remembering her cue even through the haze of pot smoke and drowsiness, sat up and asked, "But how are we going to do that?"
"We're going to break in to that government-funded money-machine of a lab, and we're going to give the people of the world what's rightly theirs." Brandon smiled serenely, pushing Hazel gently away from him as he stood. "We're going to drive to Virginia, and we're going to snatch that cure right out from under the establishment's nose. And then we're going to give it to the world, the way it should have been handled in the first place! Who's with me?"
Any misgivings that might have been present in the room were overcome by the lingering marijuana smoke, and the feeling of revolution. They were going to change the world! They were going to save mankind!
They were going to Virginia.
I hesitated to include this, because it isn't really a book, but it's definitely a part of what I read this month, and I liked it so much I couldn't help myself.
Mira Grant's (pen name of Seanan McGuire) new book Deadline, the second book in her "Newsflesh" series about how bloggers saved civilization from the Zombie uprising but may have trouble saving civilization from itself, came out at the end of May. The first book, Feed (see Bookpost, July 2010) made it onto NPR's list of the 100 best thrillers ever written, sharing space with Stephen King, Robert Bloch and Arthur Conan Doyle, and McGuire won the Campbell Award for best new writer the year it was published.
So what's Countdown? It's a 29-episode advent calendar that Grant put up on her LiveJournal site, one day at a time. No spoilers for the series itself, which begins over a decade after the uprising has changed America forever. Instead, each sequential episode tells a bit about how the outbreak happened in the first place, who caused it, who tried to stop it, and what the unsuspecting protagonists of the future were up to.
It's amazing. Read it here and see for yourself: http://seanan-mcguire.livejournal.com/... Start with "T-minus 29" and scroll upward. You'll be glad you did.