I loved Powers and Blaylock soooo much when they burst onto the scene. I slowly lost interest in Blaylock, but still think Powers is a genius. It's not steampunk, but On Stranger Tides is cool and mysterious and interesting. Blackbeard! Puppets! Voodoo! Voodoo pirate puppets, and I am NOT making this up.

It's probably out of print, but Blaylock's Homonculus, probably his most steampunky, has an important character who is a street-seller of squid. I love Blaylock's matter-of-fact Surrealism.

I keep meaning to give the Lemony Snicket books another go; I read the first one and liked it, but never picked up any of the others. Daniel Handler (Lemony Snicket's alter ego) wrote a book I read a few years back, The Basic Eight, which I liked a lot. And a coworker just gave me another of his books, Watch Your Mouth, which has a review on the back that calls it an "incest-parody gothic Jewish porn opera" or something similarly over-the-top, and I can't help thinking it can't ever live up to that.

I've only read the first Lemony Snicket - am a very bad bookseller. I keep meaning to get to the others, but I'm always distracted by shinier books. I met Daniel Handler once at BEA, and I was trying to get him to come and sign at the store I worked for at the time, and hadn't had any luck. He told me if I wrote a request and worked the word "syphilis" into it, he would definitely come. Heh. He never showed.

I loved Matilda and the two Charlie books.

The Great Brain books remind me of the Alvin Fernald books. Did anyone else ever read them? Am I showing my age again?

I'm pretty sure the novel Consuela is referring to is actually Old Goriot!

D'oh! Billytea is so totally right. Although the edition I read called it Pere Goriot. I got it confused with something I read by Zola not long after, the one about the courtesan.

D'oh! Billytea is so totally right.

I am! But I didn't say that. I'm right in other, more subtle ways, some of which don't involve me saying or even thinking anything. People say, "What's with the 'tude?" That 'tude? Is rectitude.

People say, "What's with the 'tude?" That 'tude? Is rectitude.

Damn straight!

On the French thing, I have another question. The French and the Germans do Shakespeare in translation all the time. Why do so few plays move in the other direction? We get lots of Moliere and Ibsen, of course, but what happened to Racine? I understand that he's one of the Big Important French Playwrights, but I hardly see his stuff performed. Is it untranslatable? And I have no idea who the corresponding German would be. Goethe, of course, but Faust is not so much with the performability.

Thanks, Consuela, Angus, Nutty, and Fred for the Balzac recommendations.

Powers and Blaylock are friends and have both critiqued each other and written together, so you may find Blaylock worth checking out even in non-steampunk mode, Wolfram.

Thanks, I'll do that.

What do y'all think of Lemony Snicket? I read A Bad Beginning, and found his style irritatingly arch, but I know he's well-regarded.

At first it seemed very too gimmicky, but he grows on you like a bad habit. Now I can't wait for the last three.

I've read embarassingly little Moorcock, Jim. I tried the first Elric book when I was *just* too old for it--old enough to be embarassed by the extravagance I'd have liked before, not old enough to fuck embarassment and give in away. And I read an odd obscure one called -- The Ice Schooner? The Land Whale? Weird menage a trois set in a postapocalyptic glacier-covered Earth? -- that put me off.

The more I hear about how all Moorcock connects to all other Moorcock, the more bewildered I feel about which book to pick up first.