As projected, I finished up OMNI, April 1979. It was pretty slim pickings, this issue. Bester's Galatea Galante was probably the best story in the issue, for pure atmosphere, but it still wasn't great.
I also read Lemony Snicket's The Bad Beginning. Those books have been on my reading list forever, and I finally took the time to read one... and didn't like it at all. Oh well. At least that knocks its sequels off my TBR list, so it's not a total loss.
I've made some more progress with Great Themes of Science Fiction: A Study in Imagination and Evolution. I read its predecessor, Foundations of Science Fiction: A Study in Imagination and Evolution, back in 2018, and found it poor as literary criticism, but great as a sort of annotated bibliography of scifi, showing the development of various ideas through the years. So far, the sequel looks like more of the same, which is to say enjoyable, if not terribly enlightening, and tending to increase my TBR list... a dangerous book for me to read. It's full of stuff like this:
Telepathy is commonplace in the twenty-fourth century of Alfred Bester's The Demolished Man (1952). Still one of the all-time classic visions of its kind, Bester's novel puts others to shame in its use of inventive style and typographical trickery to convey the sensations of a world in which sharing of thoughts is taken for granted.
I've begun reading Science Fiction, Second Edition, a book in The New Critical Idiom series. So far, it's devoted a few dozen pages to defining SF, and the started on trying to trace the history of sf--where does it start? Verne? Shelley? Gernsback? This is pretty unenlightening stuff, for anyone with more than a passing familiarity with sf, but the book's short enough that I'm willing to read the whole thing in hopes of it improving.