The increasingly-rare Links post

Due to increasing demands on my time/energy (work, exercise, increase in mental/physical exhaustion), I rarely have the time to read other blogs or websites like I'd want to. However, since I unfortunately woke up a few hours ago after crashing for four hours, I have had the time tonight to read a few posts of interest, so I thought I'd post links to them, with reasons why I'm linking to them:

This Book and I Could Be Friends - Review of Thomas Glavinic's Night Work - Over the past few months, I've found myself being sure to read this blog at least once a week (even if I don't comment there frequently, I at least read it), because E.L. Fay writes good reviews, reviews books that aren't always standard-fare (lit or genre definitions of "standard," that is), and she has a good mix of approaches. This particular book is one that I read a few months ago off of a recommendation by M. John Harrison and I was going to write a formal review of it, but I was changing jobs and this task unfortunately got lost in the shuffle. But what she says in this review would be very close to what I'd say, but I believe she says it better than I would have managed, so I urge people to read this review and see if it intrigues you enough to consider reading Glavinic's book.

Mark Charan Newton - Some Interesting Things I Never Knew About Being a Writer - I've corresponded with Mark for well over a year now and many of the conversations have been about a wide range of topics. While I never got around to writing a full review of his most recent novel, Nights of Villjamur, I did think it had some promise to it (and some weaknesses that often come with authors that seem still to be developing their narrative voices). In this post, he talks about ten things. The fifth item, dealing with the "measuring" of press, I found to be the most interesting, as it deals most directly with my role as a reviewer/critic. Good stuff.

A Dribble of Ink - Review of Carlos Ruiz Zafón's The Angel's Game - Ever since I first reviewed this novel in May 2008 after reading it in Spanish, I've been curious to see what would be the reaction on SF-oriented blogs to this novel. Aidan Moher has a fairly good overview of what he liked and disliked about the novel and how it compared with his recent reading of its predecessor.

Perhaps I'll discover more later, but these are it for now. I think I might finally be getting sleepy again...