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.
I'm off to a good start on my Summer 2009 Reading List, having made a considerable dent it during my early summer vacation by reading Alistair Reynolds' Redemption Ark, Peter F. Hamilton's The Dreaming Void and finally finishing the audio version of Patrick O'Brain's The Far Side of the World.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
I got off to a great start to my summer reading list, but it slowed down significantly after July, when my spring-summer run of work conferences ended (which had given me plenty of time to read on cross-country plane trips), and I had to double-down on my projects to meet start-of-semester deadlines.
The other problem? I ran into Moon of Skulls, a collection of short stories by Robert E. Howard.
Moon of Skulls features a lot of his early work, as well as two Solomon Kane stories, but unfortunately it also has a lot of overt racism. The opening story "Skull-face" is a tale of an Atlantian wizard who's escapes from his millennia-long imprisonment to unite the tribes of Africa and Asia to overthrow the civilized world. These themes show up repeatedly throughout the book, returning again when the raging Puritan Soloman Kane heads to Africa to confront a secret kingdom of lost Atlantean slaves and confronts a tribe of vampires.
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.
My reading list this month is dominated by books demands spawned by the two book clubs I've joined: the Secret Lair Book Club and my gaming group's own graphic novel book club. The first two books are Market Forces, a Car Wars meets Wall Street novel by Richard K. Morgan and The Sky People, a tale of Venus as a pulp-style jungle world colonized by Americans and a Sino-Russian alliance by S.M. Sterling, The last is Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind, a manga graphic novel and Japanese fairy tale by Hayao Miyazaki.
The end of the summer saw me pick up a bunch of new books, including Hyperion and its sequel, The Fall of Hyperion and autumn actually gave me enough time to read one of them!
As we moved into December, the movie release of Phillip Pullman's The Golden Compass – and the religious controversy that surrounded it – led me to pick up the book, and the subject of gods and religion inspired me to return to this summer's audio book listening project, Neil Gaiman's American Gods.
The summer reading list is going well. Since I finalized the list in Radio Active #51, I've finished Rainbow's End by Vernor Vinge, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by J.K. Rowling, and Pushing Ice by Alistair Reynolds.
The fiction pile is growing surprisingly short, with only Jim Butcher's Storm Front and John Scalzi's The Last Colony remaining.
With vacation looming large in August, I find myself in need of a few more books for the road.