My Chrismas Reading List for 2008 went well; I finished two novels (Revelation Space, The Last Colony) on the list and made a serious dent in the third (The Amber Spyglass), while also finishing a hefty graphic novel (Star Wars Omnibus: Tales of the Jedi, Vol. 1)

It was great lose myself in books for a week, and while it wasn't quite as intense as my reading junkets of old (meaning, before kids), it certainly helped recharge my batteries for a busy January.

Revelation Space

I was in the mood for a good, hybrid space opera/hard SF book, and Alastair Reynolds's Revelation Space delivered. Revelation Space is a novel that wraps itself around a cosmological mystery: what caused the extinction of the alien Amarantin civilization? And will solving that mystery save the human race ... or destroy it?

For my birthday this year I headed out to Barnes & Noble with my son Lucas for an afternoon of browsing books and drinking coffee. Lucas, being about 5 months old at the time, was enthusiastic about the outing, as only a baby can be, smiling, gurgling and generally looking forward to flirting with every woman he could see at the bookstore.

I arrived with short list of books I was hoping to find, including The Star Faction by Ken MacLeod, The Stars Are Also Fire by Poul Anderson and Marooned in Realtime by Vernor Vinge. Mainstream bookstores being what they are, and the Long Tail being what it is, I was unable to find any of these books on the shelf. I was forced to fall back on my secondary choices, and left the store with Ken MacLeod's novel of alien first contact Learning the World, William Gibson and Bruce Sterlings' steampunk novel The Difference Engine and Terry Goodkind's objectivist fantasy Wizard's First Rule.

For a TV series that died an unspectacular, mostly-unnoticed death at the hands of brain-dead Fox TV executives, Firefly is proving to have a remarkably lively corpse. First it sold millions of copies as a 13-episode DVD collection, then this show of interest prompted Universal to back a movie based on the series. The latest sign of Firefly's undeath is Finding Serenity, a collection of essays deconstructing the series' complex heroes, intriguing plot lines and philosophical foundation.

With the prequel New Spring, Robert Jordan returns to the very beginning of the Wheel of Time saga, with the impending birth of the Dragon Reborn on the slopes of Dragonmount.

The Dragon Reborn is a messiah of sorts, prophesied to fight Jordan's version of the devil in a "final battle" when that dark demon finally escapes his prison. New Spring tells of the search for the Dragon by two women who will come to play major roles in the main series: Moiraine and Siuan Sanche. These women are able to wield a magical energy known as the "One Power", and are part of an order known as the Aes Sedai. While they are full sisters of this order in the original books, in this one they start off as mere Accepted -- trainees still learning to use their powers.