As a life-long reader and an indie publisher it’s a little obvious, but having a good book on the go really increases my quality of life. Most recently it’s been John Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids, a great book about a post-apocolyptic Britain being terrorized by, erm, walking plants. (Wyndham, who preferred the term “logical fantasy” to describe what he did, manages to make his ridiculous Dr. Who-class monsters a plausible threat in the book. Can’t speak for the movie versions, which look as hilarious as you’d expect.)

But back to the quality of life issue: there’s something about a continuing narrative that is as soothing and enjoyable to slip into as a bath. I notice that I miss it in short story collections, for instance. I have to work at getting into the next story, while a good novel draws me back of its own accord. Occasionally I find a writer’s sensibility is engaging enough to pull me through a collection, as was Kelly Link in her wonderful (and now free!) Stranger Things Happen.

I finished Triffids this morning, and I’m on to The Subtle Knife by Philip Pullman. If you’re a little Pottered out but want a fantasy fix, Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy is highly recommended. Feel free to add your own good reads to the comments.

I met Nicholas Johnson at a Seattle zine fair nearly a decade ago. He was peddling Shark Fear, Shark Awareness at the time, and through a mail correspondence I kept up through his zine projects that were engrossing accounts of his time as a sperm donor (Burning the Ancestral Chi) and an ESL teacher (Kongju-si: Letters from Korea). His fast and trashy vid making was a big inspiration to my own initial forays into making little movies, and he actually wrote a DIY article for this site.

Big Dead Place (Feral Press, 2005) is his latest and greatest project to date. Nicholas spent the last couple of years living in Antarctica, doing the joe-jobs that keep the research labs based there functioning: washing dishes and compacting garbage. I knew from the couple of e-mails that he’d sent that his stories about the place would be hilarious and fascinating: what I didn’t expect was how deftly he would weave together the historical tragedies of Sir Robert Scott’s bungled exploration with the bureacratic tragedies of bungled room assignments. Populated by lewd characters and outlandish scenarios, it nonetheless ignores the easy targets in favour of putting forth a journalistic work of depth and craft.

I shot him a couple of questions via e-mail.
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