GeeCee's Not-Entirely-Original Miscellany

69. Heavy Words Lightly Thrown: The Reason Behind the Rhyme, Chris Roberts. An impulse purchase at B&N while waiting to meet Chris for dinner after the Jim Webb rally in November. It's billed as "the seamy and quirky stories behind favorite nursery rhymes". Very entertaining read, although I wish there'd been more than one page of references. For the Americans, this edition even has a handy glossary in the back to help translate English to American. =)
    
70. A Swiftly Tilting Planet, Madeleine L'Engle. I found a hardback copy of this for 50 cents at the local library book sale, and figured that I'd pick it up to re-read it. The more I read though, the more I'm convinced that I never read this as a kid. *hangs head in shame* I find it hard to believe that I didn't, since I know I read A Wrinkle in Time, but I have no memory of this story at all.
    
71. A Child's Book of True Crime, Chloe Hooper.
    
72. Our Girl in Washington: A Kate Boothe Novel, Michele Mitchell. One of the reviews posted on Amazon calls this "the chick-lit version of Syriana"; I don't think it comes anywhere close to the level of "Syriana", frankly, but it's certainly entertaining enough. Plausible? Eh, I don't think so. I like Kate though, I'll probably hunt down "The Latest Bombshell" (the previous novel) at some point.
    
73. Irresistible Forces, Catherine Asaro (editor). I didn't expect to see Catherine Asaro and Lois McMaster Bujold filed in "romance", but that's where this was. It's an anthology of romantic science fiction and fantasy ("speculative romance", Asaro calls it in the introduction). I kinda like that sort of thing, but you'll want to avoid it if you can't stand to get romance in your science fiction or vice versa.
    
74. Tangled Up In Blue, Joan Vinge. This is set during the time of The Snow Queen, towards the end of Arienrhod's reign, and features BZ Gundhalinu. You can read it as a stand-alone story, although a lot of things that are mentioned in passing will make more (any) sense if you are familiar with the universe already. It was a quick read and I enjoyed it as I have all the other books by Vinge that I've read, but I though The Snow Queen was much more rewarding in terms of character development. It felt short, but maybe that was because there weren't as many subplots to keep track of.
    
75. Love Kills, Ed Gorman (editor). I was reading the next-to-last story when midnight hit on New Year's Eve, but I'm still going to count this as a 2006 book since I was almost done. An anthology of stories about the ways in which love can kill, literally or figuratively. There are stories from Lawrence Block, Ruth Rendell, Donald Westlake, and 28 others. Not terribly cheerful ("Pretty Eyes" by Evan Hunter was particularly depressing I thought), but hopefully you'd not be expecting otherwise just based on the title alone.
    

Seventy-five for the year, not too bad. Not nearly as much as I used to read before the advent of the Intarwebs, but much better than my count of 45 for last year.

Placeholder "recent reading" post, in no particular order other than "oh yeah, and that one".

49. Neil Gaiman, Fragile Things
    
50. Ian Rankin, Black and Blue
    
51. John Crawford, The Last True Story I'll Ever Tell: An Accidental Soldier's Account of the War in Iraq
    
52. Alex Garland, Coma
    
53. Nancy Holder/Nancy Kilpatrick (editors), Outsiders
    
54. Jasper Fforde, The Well of Lost Plots
    
55. Phil & Kaja Foglio, Girl Genius Book Five: Agatha Heterodyne and the Clockwork Princess
    
56. Martin Cruz Smith, Havana Bay
    
57. Lynne Truss, Eats, Shoots & Leaves
    
58. Ian MacLeod, The Light Ages
    
59. Laurell K. Hamilton, Danse Macabre
    
60. Alan Moore & Melinda Gebbie, Lost Girls
    

Writing these down now before I forget (again), because I've already had to go stare at my bookshelf to try and figure out which book it was that ought to go on here but I couldn't remember.

41. Kushiel's Scion, Jacqueline Cary. First book in a new trilogy set in the same world as the previous three. Phèdre and Joscelin appear in this book, but the main character is their adopted son Imriel, son of Melisande. If you liked the others, you'll probably like this as well; it's not exactly more of the same, but it's certainly more of the similar. ;)
    


42. The Stuffed Owl: An Anthology of Bad Verse, D.B. Wyndham Lewis and Charles Lee. Truth in advertisting! There is much bad verse here, although as the editors point out, it's "good Bad Verse" rather than bad Bad Verse. Frequently more entertaining than the selections published here are the editorial introductions for the authors and the index, where you can look up such topics as "Goats, Welsh, their agility envied by the botanist" (page 82) or "German place names, the poet does his best with" (54) or "Fire, wetness not an attribute of" (28).


43. Don't Tell Me the Truth About Love, Dan Rhodes.


44. The Dead Yard, Adrian McKinty. Sequel to Dead I Well May Be, which, frankly, I enjoyed more. Michael Forsythe's on vacation on Tenerife when he's caught up in the aftermath of a soccer riot; in order to avoid a jail term and extradition back to Mexico, he's forced by a British intelligence agent to infiltrate an Irish terrorist cell based outside Boston. I like the charactera lot, but I don't think this book was quite as engrossing to me as his original appearance.
    


45. The Glass Books of the Dream Eaters, Gordon Dahlquist. One of the reviews labelled it "a mishmash of Sherlock Holmes, Jane Eyre and Eyes Wide Shut", which I suppose I can see (although one could wish the reviewer had gotten a character's name right in the review). At least 100 pages too long, I think. The action picks up considerably in the last part of the book, but what with all the characters to keep up with and the same events recounted from the points of view of each of Miss Temple, Doctor Svenson and Chang (until everything converges again for the final scenes), I found myself wondering "wait, what just happened here?" more than I'd have liked. Alchemy, science, romance, sex, politics, murder, sh*t gettin' blowed up (although not as much of that as of the others, in all honesty)...all in all, not a bad way to spend four or five evenings. There's an excerpt posted at Powell's for the curious.

34. The Italian Secretary: A Further Adventure of Sherlock Holmes, Caleb Carr. Caleb Carr writing Sherlock Holmes? How could I resist? Holmes and Watson head to Holyroodhouse at the request of Holmes' brother Mycroft to investigate a pair of mysterious deaths which may be related to recent attempts on the life of Queen Victoria, but also bear similarities to the murder of David Rizzio which took place there centuries before. The novel grew out of a short story Carr was writing for an anthology of Holmes stories dealing with the supernatural (The Ghosts in Baker Street). It felt a bit rushed towards the end, but I found it an enjoyable and quick read. crouchback, have you read it yet?


35. Riding Rockets: The Outrageous Tales of a Space Shuttle Astronaut, Mike Mullane. Oh, lord. This book will in short order disabuse the reader of any ideas they might've had about American astronauts being anything other than human. XD Mullane writes with highly entertaining candor about his experiences as part of the first group of shuttle astronaut candidates selected in 1978, a group that included Judy Resnick, Dick Scobee, Ellison Onizuka, Ronald McNair and Sally Ride (who he claims would hardly speak to him for the better part of a decade, considering him a sexist jerk -- which is something that in hindsight he admits more than once to being). His candor also extends to recounting what it was like working in the Astronaut Office at the time and the prevailing fear of speaking up because it might jeopardize your chance to fly. He tells a great story, but be prepared for a round or seven of TMI, starting with the first page of the book.

And now, off to watch "A Scanner Darkly". [Oops. I thought I posted this before we left, but apparently not. Speaking of books, this was reasonably faithful to the source.]

29. A Clash of Kings, George R. R. Martin


30. A Storm of Swords, George R. R. Martin. Okay, I've got about a hundred pages left to go in this one, but I think it's close enough to count as finished when you're talking about an 1100 page book and you read 500 pages the night before. Sadly, I've only got one more book to go before I have to join the hordes waiting anxiously for the next installment to come out. Curse you, quasigeostrophy and kmusser. ;)
    
    One of the things I particularly like about this series is the way that many of the major characters get fleshed out in such a way that it seems few of them fit neatly into "hero" or "villain" boxes. Not that all of them get this treatment, of course, because there are roughly 4,030,127 characters that put in appearances of varying lengths and most of them don't get particularly well-developed. Okay though, for those of you who've read up through the latest book, here's a spoiler-filled question: ( Read more... )
    The car salesman saw my copy of A Clash of Kings I was reading while waiting to give them a check and he voiced a similar complaint about character treatment, so it's not just me. ;)
    
    [Edit: There aren't (as of now) explicit spoilers in the comments, but there are some general hints as to plot points that you may want to avoid if you're rabid about not getting anything resembling spoilers.]
    
    

I know there's one more I've finished since the last book post, but it's not here with me and I can't remember what it was right now. Will update when I get home.

One of the things I like most about travelling by myself is that I have a chance to hole up in the evenings in a giant bed in a hotel room with a pile of books. During my five-day trip to Orlando, I finished two books and was halfway through a third by the time I got home. Adding to the list of stuff I've read so far this year:

18. Bangkok 8, John Burdett.


19. The Geographer's Library, Jon Fasman.


20. Scardown, Elizabeth Bear


21. Worldwired, Elizabeth Bear


22. Assassination Vacation, Sarah Vowell

Too tired at the moment to do much more than mark them here so I don't forget about them. Haven't decided yet what's up next from the unread pile, not sure whether I'll pick up some more fiction or start in on Head Rush Ajax. Probably I should make it the latter, since I have a bad habit of not ever reading tech books if I don't read them shortly after I get them.

Very quickly jotting down recent books, because I find myself forgetting what I've read since last time I made notes:

9. Lord John and the Private Matter, Diana Gabaldon. One of the Outlander characters gets the lead in this mystery, the first book of a planned trilogy featuring Lord John Grey.


10. Perdido Street Station, China Miéville. Good lord, did this take me forever to finish. It wasn't because it was overly long or overly complicated (it was neither, although there are plenty of storylines to keep up with), but because I wanted to make sure I didn't skim over any of his descriptions.


11. Close Range: Wyoming Stories, Annie Proulx. I'd been wanting to read "Brokeback Mountain" again, so I picked this up rather than shelling out nearly the same amount for just the one story.


12. Strangers in Paradise Pocket Book #4, Terry Moore. One day I'll catch up with the story, I'm sure. I'm guessing it'll be sometime right around May 2007 when it comes to an end.


13. Coyote Blue, Christopher Moore. Christopher Moore and Coyote seems like it should be an inspired combination, but this doesn't come close to topping "Lamb" as my favorite of his books. Given that one of the characters in this one (Minty Fresh) reappears in the new book, A Dirty Job, I think it was accidentally good timing on my part to pick this up when I did.


14. I'm a Stranger Here Myself: Notes on Returning to America After 20 Years Away, Bill Bryson. This is a collection of columns for Night & Day magazine on readjusting to life in the US in general and Hanover, NH in particular. Some are screamingly funny while others, like the one lamenting the death of Main Street, address more serious topics.

I also caught up with "The Book of Lost Souls" and picked up the first three issues of "Paris".

The theme so far seems to be "comic mystery/fantasy-type stuff".

1. Anonymous Rex Eric Garcia. The adventures of Vincent Rubio, L.A.-based private detective, basil addict, and velociraptor. In this series, dinosaurs never went completely extinct and are now living among us in a parallel society and disguised in latex human costumes. Vincent's partner has died in mysterious circumstances, and his determination to find out the truth leads to finding links between the deaths of his partner and several others and eventually to a dinosaur geneticist and his experiments in cross-species breeding. I thought this was really funny, and the idea of dinosaur detectives disguised as humans is pretty original. (At least I've never run across it before.)


2. Casual Rex, Eric Garcia. Vincent's back in a prequel to Anonymous Rex. This time he and his partner Ernie investigate the Progressives, a cult who want to reclaim their dinosaur heritage, free of their human disguises. Ernie's ex-brother-in-law has joined the cult, and Ernie's ex-wife asks Vincent and Ernie to kidnap him so he can be deprogrammed. Unfortunately, former cult members have a tendency to turn up dead, and finding Rupert is just the beginning of the story.


3. Hot and Sweaty Rex, Eric Garcia. In this third installment, Vincent gets caught up in the middle of a mob war between two dino mafia families, one of which he's been manipulated into working for, the other one headed up by his childhood best friend. Awkward. ;)


4. The Hollow Chocolate Bunnies of the Apocalypse, Robert Rankin. Someone's killing off all the old nursery rhyme characters, and in the absence of Toy Town's detective Bill Winkie, it's left to Eddie Bear and his new bestest (and often clueless) friend Jack to track down the killer. Hysterical. A++++, would read again.


5. Lost in a Good Book, Jasper Fforde. The second Thursday Next novel, after The Eyre Affair. In this one, everyone's favorite literary detective has to deal with the effects of her fame and SpecOps PR, the fact that Goliath has eradicated her husband with the assistance of a member of the ChronoGuard as a way to force her to retrieve the character she stranded in "The Raven" in the previous book, several near-death-by-coincidence experiences, and the fact that she has to figure out how to save the world before it turns to fluffy pink goo. At the same time, she's training as a Prose Resource Operative for Jurisfiction as an apprentice to Miss Havisham. I enjoyed The Eyre Affair much more than this one, although it's certainly got its moments (and plenty of them). I think it's mostly the "clever" naming convention that wore on me, like agents Phodder and Kannon and their successors Walken and Dedmen for instance. As with the previous book, I think it helps to have a good background in English lit to really get the most enjoyment out of it. (My own is spotty at best.) And I want a dodo of my own even more now. Plock.