(no subject)

It's been three months since my last post, and of course it's awkward trying to figure out how to get back into it after that. So I'll make my cue from kjc007 and just post a bare list, with few comments, of what I've read since I last told you what I was reading. At least the fiction, since I still, for some reason, don't track my nonfiction the same way.

Though I can tell you that recently I read The Third Chimpanzee by Jared Diamond, and Dreaming In Code by Scott Rosenberg. The former is actually Diamond's first book, so bits of it seemed a little superfluous after reading Guns, Germs And Steel and Collapse, but I found it a very interesting, and humbling, way of looking at the human animal. The latter is a very interesting look at an ongoing open-source programming project from the inside, with all sorts of notes on programming that made me nod my head frantically and read them out loud to my wife. Both books highly recommended.

But back to the fiction, numbered from the beginning of 2007, with short, hopefully low-spoiler comments because the longer ones are too much work:

9. Glen Cook:Ceremony--finishing off his "Darkwar" trilogy/novel-in-three-volumes
10. Stephen King:Wolves of The Calla--Part V of "The Dark Tower"
11. Barry Hughart:The Story of The Stone--sequel to Bridge of Birds, and pretty good
12. R. Scott Bakker:The Thousandfold Thought--third book, and probably not conclusion, of "The Prince of Nothing"; not as good as the second, probably because this time I was expecting closure and didn't get as much as I was hoping for.
13. Gideon Defoe:The Pirates! In An Adventure With Scientists--a library book, very short, and excruciatingly funny. And first in a series.
14. Edward Willett:Lost In Translation--Not in a series at all. At least so far. Odd, isn't it?
15. Lemony Snicket:The Hostile Hospital--Eight book, I believe, in that series. Why am I not finished reading it yet?
16. Linda Smith:Talisa's Song--Second in that series.
17. Terry Pratchett:Thud!--I think I'm finally caught up in the Discworld series. If you don't count Wintersmith.
18. Cory Doctorow:Someone Comes To Town, Someone Leaves Town--Also not in a series, but a wildly surreal and bizarre book.
19. John Steinbeck:East of Eden--Not his best, and IMHO a bit heavy-handed.
20. Tanya Huff:Smoke And Mirrors--Second in its series, and pretty good.
21. Vonda McIntyre:Transition--Second in its series; it suffered mostly from having been too long since I read the first one, and having too many characters for its length.
22. Karl Schroeder:Sun of Suns--First in its series (though there may be sekrit links to his other novels), and pretty damn cool, one of those high-concept swashbuckling novels.
23. Mark Z. Danielewski:House of Leaves--Much better and more readable than I thought it would be, considering how much it plays with text layout, footnotes, and multi-level stories.
24. Dave Duncan:The Alchemist's Apprentice--A light-hearted mystery set in Renaissance Italy. Has a sequel coming out.
25. Dick Francis:For Kicks--I'm almost out of Dick Francis. He better hurry up and write some more. Also, we should see about getting him some immortality serum.
26. Michelle Sagara:Cast In Shadow--Her new series is not quite as dense as the Sun Sword, but not quite as fast-paced as the fantasy procedural it should be.
27. C.J. Cherryh:Cloud's Rider--Second in this series, and last so far, but I would actually like to see more set in this intriguing world where all the species on the alien world are telepathic.
28. Peter Watts:Blindsight--High-concept, and very, very unsettling book about the pros and cons of consciousness. Nominated for just about everything, as far as I know.
29. Terry Pratchett:Diggers--After we read the first two Bromeliad books to Simon, he went and finished them on his own. I thought I should get around to doing it myself. Not as good as the first one, though.
30. S.M. Stirling:A Meeting At Corvallis--Third in the "Dies The Fire" series, and unfortunately no better than the second one. I might be getting a little tired of Stirling, or he may just in a bit of a slump after his Nantucket series.
31. Terry Pratchett:Wings--Third in the Bromeliad; better than the second, but still not as good as the first. Has a good ending, though.
32. Julie E. Czerneda:Regeneration--Conclusion of this trilogy. A little bit disappointing, though. For one thing, an implicit promise I detected near the beginning of the book, that the main character would go to a certain place and the resolution would happen there, was misleading, because all the plot happened on the trip. And there was far too many pages of quirky aliens before we got back into actual tension and excitement. Unsatisfying.
33. Erin Hunter:Into The Wild--Another series Simon's really into, a sort of fantasy series involving cats living in the wild (but in the human world). Not too bad, though detectably juvenile.
34. S.M. Stirling:The Sky People--Yes, I read another Stirling anyway, mostly because we had them both out from the library. This one is faster-paced than the other one, set on a Venus populated by Neanderthals and dinosaurs, and is first in a series, but it took me forever to get through it. For the sequel, I think I'll wait for the paperback.
35. Spider Robinson:Very Bad Deaths--Just started this one, but so far so good.

By the way, the even numbers from #10 on are all "Aurora" reading--books by Canadian authors published in 2006. And I've still got at least five or six more. I never get them all read by the nomination deadline, and there's always a few from the finalists that I haven't read yet.

Hopefully I will post again sometime soon.