I just finished Jules Verne’s The Survivors of the Chancellor (Jules Verne tries to create the Worst Possible Shipwreck in fiction, with everything going wrong) and have started his The Giant Raft/800 Leagues on the Amazon.
Finished Beyond the Farthest Star last night. It’s one of Edgar Rice Burrough’s last books and the first in what was supposed to be another “man transported to another planet” series. Stupid Death, interrupting my series. This one starts of with Tangor (not his real name) being shot down in WWII and waking up to find himself on the planet Poloda which is 450,000 light years from Earth and fighting an endless war. I liked it.
I don’t find this too bad in most sci-fi, but the jargon is what keeps me from reading Cyberpunk. I don’t want to have to learn a whole new vocabulary just to be able to read a book.
Jim Butcher’s Small Favor was good, better than the last few Dresden Files books. I see that he is still adding on an appendix to hawk his fantasy series to the Harry Dresden fans. I hear that those are good, but I must say that the description he gives doesn’t interest me at all.
I read Murder Must Advertise over the weekend, one of the last two Lord Peter Wimsey books I hadn’t read. Now I only have The Nine Tailors to go.
I’ve just started A Gladiator Dies Only Once, a collection of short stories set early in Steven Saylor’s Roma Sub Rosa series (mysteries set in Ancient Rome).
Dung Beetle, Mary Roach’s *Bonk *sounds good. I read Stiff not long ago, and enjoyed it.
Finished Cormac McCarthy’s Outer Dark. Rather creepy.
Today I start Rabbit at Rest, the fourth and final novel in John Updike’s Rabbit series (although I understand he has a followup novella called Rabbit Remembered).
I swung by the bookstore yesterday while in the mall and happened to see that a new Confederation Novel was out, so I picked up Valor’s Trial and a few others. So far a good read. I really like Tanya Huff’s series. She does military science fiction surprisingly well. She and Jack Campbell are probably my two favorite in that genre right now.
My Baroque Cycle books arrived yesterday from a half.com seller (three 900-page hardbacks). They were packed in a big box, floating loose among styrofoam peanuts (which isn’t the best way to ship books, the pages could easily have gotten bent).
The box had been opened and inspected by the post office to make sure it qualified for the media mail rate. I guess that’s understandable, because the box wouldn’t have looked or felt like it contained books. There was little note inside explaining about the inspection, with two checkboxes to indicate whether it did or did not qualify as media mail. I wonder what they would have done if it hadn’t qualified? Would they have sent it back to the shipper?
What’s the point of the media mail rate, anyway? Why is it cheaper to mail books, CDs, etc. than to mail anything else?
Huh, I’ve been waiting for that one, but Amazon doesn’t show it releasing until June 3. I really like Tanya Huff.
Eleanor of Aquitaine, that happened to me once. The stuff in the box wasn’t media mail and I had to pay the proper postage. It rather ticked me off that the sender tried to fudge.
I don’t know why books/CDs/DVDs are cheaper to mail. My guess is that it’s to subsidize/support literacy, culture, education, etc. And the post office doesn’t have to be careful about handling – those things aren’t fragile. Except when they’re not packaged right and they’re first editions and the corners get dinged!! I hate when that happens.
I’m just now reading the Baroque Cycle too. If I’d know they were historicals, I wouldn’t have waited so long. I thought they were steampunk.
Have you read any of the Lost Fleet series by Jack Campbell? Same sort of genre. His next one is due out in a few weeks.
Now reading Why We’re Liberals: A Political Handbook for Post-Bush America, by Eric Alterman.
No, but I just read the Wikipedia page, and they sound like something I would like. Have you read Lois McMaster McMaster Bujold’s Vorkosigan series? Those are excellent.
Link to a very early June thread. My apologies, but I will be out starting tomorrow and I wanted to make sure this thread was started.
Since Sunday night, I have read:
[ul]
[li]The Lost Fleet: Courageous by Jack Campbell[/li][li]Small Favor and Captain’s Fury by Jim Butcher[/li][li]Sister Time by John Ringo & Julie Cochrane[/li][li]Ring of Fire II edited by Eric Flint[/li][li]An Ice Cold Grave and [*]From Dead to Worse by Charlaine Harris[/li][li]Victory Conditions by Elizabeth Moon[/li][li]Kris Longknife: Audacious by Mike Shepherd[/li][li]The Sunrise Lands and Ice, Iron, and Gold by S. M. Stirling[/li][li]Iron Kissed by Patricia Briggs[/li][/ul]
If you enjoy Jack Campell’s Lost Fleet, see if you can find his JAG in space stuff under his real name, John G. Hemry. The first is A Just Determination.