Nothing. Six weeks to vacation and nothing left in the book bag. I am not finished with Mary Gentle’s Grunts! I am about to give it to the parrot.
I read (for my book club, as it happens), finished and actually liked The DaVinci Code, despite its farfetched ahistorical silliness. Haven’t read any of his other stuff, and probably never will.
I enjoyed DaVinci Code too. It was childish but a fun read. I read a few of his other books and the result was me wanting to gouge out my eyes with a mellon baller.
I’m reading Jim Butcher’s White Night at the moment, and when I’m done, I have the choice of China Mieville’s UnLunDun, Trevor Corson’s The Zen of Fish, or Mercedes Lackey’s Fortune’s Fool. Grad school’s gotten kind of hectic lately, so may not meet the goal of 50 books this year. I’m working on #38 right now.
I’m halfway through re-reading Gravity’s Rainbow. I’m getting a lot more out of it than last time. As someone mentioned in the October thread, it’s best in small doses.
Also, Statistics, the easy way.
I read the first two novels of the Sharing Knife series and I just couldn’t get that into it, as she created this amazing world with neat creatures and abilities in it, and then wastes a lot of time on romance novel issues. Personally, it’s nice when authors acknowledge that people have sex, but I felt that it could have been better served with a little more thought into demonstrating more of how the world works.
Would you recommend anything by her that I might like better?
That’s what I’ve heard from others, too. I once asked my (Episcopal) priest what he thought of The DaVinci Code, and he rolled his eyes a little and said, “There’s a reason it’s on the Fiction shelves at the bookstore.”
I just finished A Pirate Looks At Fifty by Jimmy Buffet. A very nice, very light read.
I am just now starting Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist’s Guide to Global Warming by Bjorn Lomborg.
Making Money by Pterry.
Her Vorkosigan series (sci-fi) is very good. It starts with Shards of Honor, but you could probably pick up most of the books and read them stand-alone.
I recently read the first two books in her other fantasy series, which starts with The Curse of Chalion. I enjoyed them, and they’re light on the romance. In this series she’s invented an interesting and detailed religion, and as always with Bujold’s books, the hero/heroine is atypical; a weak and injured man in the first, and a middle-aged woman in the second.
Currently For Whom the Bell Tolls. Next, Closing Time by Heller.
Her Vorkosigan stuff is most of what I read and while the science part of the science fiction is a bit thin the writing makes them quality space opera and Miles Vorkosigan is a great character to follow. The problem I had when I was reading through is that a lot of the stuff is interconnected and it was hard to figure out where to jump in so I just read in publication order up to books that won the Hugos (The Vor Game, Barrayar, and Mirror Dance). After reading through I would recommend starting with Cordilia’s Honor (an omnibus of her first book Shards of Honor and its sequel Barrayar) to decide if you want to continue.
Her fantasy I was much less enthralled with. I read the first two books in the Chalion series (she won for the second, Paladin of Souls; she had a bad habit of winning only for books that were direct sequels to other ones) and while Paladin wasn’t as bad as the first book I wasn’t thrilled. Generic fantasy settings with as much depth as a Renaissance fair annoy me as settings. So does the tendency to have someone with modern liberal (in the broadest sense of the term) ideas as the protagonist while the people who actually kind of act like they are living under a feudal system are foils and villains.
I’ve got several 2001 editions with different covers - different from the original hardback cover also. I only have the original Fantastic Voyage cover. That is a novelization, the other two aren’t.
As for me, I’m in the middle of 4 - I got stalled all last week by a conference and workshop. Making Money is top, then Wintersmith then to finish Cryptonomicon - and I still have to finish the computer architecture book I’m reviewing for my column. I chatted with the publisher’s rep at the conference, and he gave me another one to review. (Free books - yumm!)
Then off to the library for something completely different.
Just finished CAPITAL CRIMES by Jonathon and Faye Kellerman.
I finished this yesterday with a big smile on my face. (Of course he succeeded, or he wouldn’t have written a book)! So that was a nice little chunk of feel-good, and I was also pleased to find what is surely a quote from our fellow Doper zoogirl on page 230.
Now I’m on to Little Heathens: hard times and high spirits on an Iowa farm during the Great Depression, by Mildred Armstrong Kalish. I’m really enjoying the “voice” of the writer. I was afraid it was going to be all, “those were the good old days, we walked to school two miles uphill in the snow and liked it!”, but Mildred seems like a pretty with-it gal. I’m thinking of getting this for my grandma for Christmas.
Little Heathens – the author was interviewed on the local NPR station last month. I looked for an archived recording but couldn’t find anything.
She was really fun to listen to, but the show really took off when they started taking calls from listeners. I haven’t heard such a bunch of Remember Whens since my grandma was alive. It was great!
The paperback cover for 2001 was essentially the same design - that same photo of astronaut Dave Bowman’s face as he made The Star Trip – for decades, although I admity they changed the wraparound a bit, even going from black to white.
**Fantastic Voyage[/B, though, kept that exact same cover for quite a while, until sometime within the past ten years. Planet of the Apes had that same cover – a montage of an Ape Face and the Adtronauts paddling their rubber raft - for quite a while.
I never said they were all novelizations (although 2001, written at the same time the movie was being made, and influenced strongly by it, quite arguably is.)
Noah’s Garden: Restoring the Ecology of Our Back Yards by Sara Stein. I’m sure elelle, Beaucarnea, and the other native plants folks have already read it – if not, they should. It’s crystalizing a lot of stuff I’ve been thinking about over the last few years, like my anti-lawn bias, which gets more and more vehement with every passing year.
Just started The Year of Eating Dangerously: a global adventure in search of culinary extremes, by Tom Parker Bowles. Good so far.
Current audiobook is American Gods, by Neil Gaiman, read by the incomparable George Guidall. I tried to read this before, but wasn’t in the mood for any supernatural stuff. I’m only a few chapters in, but enjoying it much more this time. The only Gaiman I’ve read previously is Coraline.
Besides what I’ve noted above, I’ve purchased three more books that I couldn’t resist. Jules Verne’s The Brothers Kip, although published 105 years ago, has just been released in its fist Englush translation (there’s still one more Verne book that hasn’t been translated out there, but it won’t last long). I need it for something I’m writing, so I purchased it through Amazon, and just got my copy yesterday. It’s a lot thivcker than I thought it’s be.
I also picked up Larry Niven’s The Man-Kzin Wars XI. It’s the first time I saw it in paperback.
And I saw a book I’d heard about, and really couldn’t resist – John Carter’s* Sex and Rockets: The Occult World of Jack Parsons. There’s anothwer recent Parsons bio out there**, but this one looks far weirder – I think the author believes in all that Crowleyan Majick.
*Presumably not the Warlord of Mars. Although I’m not sure.
** George Pendle’s Strange Angel: The Otherworldly Life of Rocket Scientist John Whiteside Parsons. As Robert Anton Wilson wrote in the intro to Carter’s book, you can tell how you learned about Parsons by whether you call him “Jack” or “John” or “John Whiteside”. None of them was his real name – that was Marvel (!!) Whiteside Parsons.
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