Saturday, October 10, 2009

\ Rea-dying \

Read/listened to since the last update:

Stories:

329. "The Men Who Read Isaac Asimov" by William Brittain (Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, May 1978)

330. "Northwestward" by Isaac Asimov (The Further Adventures of Batman, 1990)

331. "Yes, But Why?" by Isaac Asimov (The Armchair Detective, Spring 1990)

332. "Lost in a Space Warp" by Isaac Asimov (Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, March 1990)

333. "Police at the Door" by Isaac Asimov (Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, June 1990)

334. "The Haunted Cabin" by Isaac Asimov (Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, October 1990)

335. "The Guest's Guest" by Isaac Asimov (Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, August 1991)

336. "The Last Story" by Charles Ardai (The Return of the Black Widowers, 2006)


Book: That was it, the very last Black Widower stories by Asimov. He wrote sixty-six of them (beating out Doyle, who wrote fifty-six Holmes stories, though Holmes did pen four novels featuring the sleuth), and I've now had the pleasure of reading all sixty-six. The mysteries were wildly uneven, ranging from the obscure to the simple, with a good amount of "fair" mysteries and delightful teasers in between.

I haven't met any of the real people on whom Asimov based his cerebral characters, and I'm certainly intrigued by Harlan Ellison's comment in the introduction that Lin Carter "was really weird" -- that calls for further research. Of course, if I could have met anyone at all, my first wish would have been to get to know the Master himself.

The Return of the Black Widowers by Isaac Asimov is book 29 of '09.

This week I also read Flood by Stephen Baxter, huge in every sense of the word, book 30 of '09.

No comments: