Little Sunshine is designing and executing a series of redwork robots (say: roe-buts) for me. She does wonderful, evocative line drawings of robots and cityscapes–I have a folder full of them. They translate beautifully into redwork, and she’s getting to be a very skillful needlewoman. If you’d like a copy of one of these, drop me a comment–she’d be glad to share.
They go nicely with my reading these days: I got on some kind of weird Tim Powers tear while I was languishing last week and knocked off The Anubis Gates, On Stranger Tides, Last Call, and Expiration Date–all great reads, although notably what I would call Boybooks–all fights and chases, each with a girl at the end, like the Princess in Super Mario Brothers. Neil Stephenson is another Boybook author I really like. It’s like going to another country, I guess.
Then the world stopped for three days while I read Perdido Street Station. I’m not even ready to talk about it yet. Incredible.
Oh, I like those! Perky robots!
I am a little scared of China Miéville, and have not dared to plunge in yet. Though if you liked “Perdido Street Station”, maybe I should (I’m going by the fact that you have “The Merlin Conspiracy” listed in your sidebar…)
China Mieville is incredible–but scary. I tried to explain my thrilled stupor to the family, but only got as far as, “Well, there are these people who are people, but with scarab beetles for heads, and one of them is an artist who secretes her artwork and she’s in love with this fat sweaty slacker human and they live in this completely dystopian steampunk den of corruption kind of like the movie Brazil and kind of like the cantina scene in Star Wars . . .” and they LOOKED at me.
Oh, well, I am one of the few people I know who likes “Brazil”, so maybe I should go for it. In daylight. With chocolate to hand.
I’m used to The Look. Almost everything I like to read sounds fairly preposterous when reduced to a summary, too.