Over Thanksgiving break, my wife and I made a deal: I'd read Twilight if she read the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. It took me a month of on and off reading, but I finally did so. Completing that teen romance horror novel let me read the book I've been waiting months for: The Gathering Storm, Book 12 of the Wheel of Time.

In between the two I've been sneaking quick reads of Star Wars: The Essential Atlas, which is sure to become an indespensible reference for my Star Wars RPG campaign.

The spring hasn't been a great time for fiction reading. After my winter reading spree, I fell into back into my video game reviewing routine, but I did manage to get a few new books in: The New Space Opera, The Open Game Table, and The Space Opera Renaissance.

The New Space Opera

First up is The New Space Opera, one of two space opera anthologies that I got for Christmas. It's a weird duck -- they've cast their net widely, including a bunch of stuff that I'd classify as as belonging to the transhumanism genre rather than space opera. The unifying elements of the book are two fold: faster-than-light travel and intergalactic colonies/empires. Working along that continuum however, and you'll find plenty of transhuman stories in which we've warped ourselves almost beyond recognition.

While I'm not opposed to such stories, they seem out of place in a space opera anthology, even a "new space opera" anthology, particularly if they've muscled out more traditional stories.

After a long, hard-fought autumn spent coding, organizing projects and reviewing way, way too many video games, I've got the urge to read. It's a compulsion really, a strong desire to find a quiet corner of the house (or even a noisy, chaotic corner of the house) and lose myself in a good paperback.

I'm also looking for some good inspirational material for my Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic campaign; not necessarily things I want lift to include in the story, but rather ideas that can serve as a spring board for my own creative wanderings.

I'm particularly interested in reading newer space opera, stuff published since the turn of the century (that would be the turn of the 21st century, for those who forget which one we're living in ... which happens to me from time to time). I'm also interested in some current hard SF, but with an emphasis on Thinking Big; give me super-sized space structures, transhuman wars or encounters with alien civilizations; anything but another round of grim, near-future cyberpunk derivatives. Yeah, I like that stuff too ... but it's not what I'm shooting for right now.

Summer is in roasting and roaring its way across the United States, which means its time for me get cracking on my summer reading list. As I discussed in Radio Active #69, this summer I've decided that rather than buy a new armload of books, I'd delve deep into the Nuketown library and dig out a bunch of unread or unfinished books that I already own.

There are a few exceptions to that rule, but for the most part I'm reading books that I've meant to read for the last few years, but abandoned in favor of whatever was thrilling me at the moment.