What I’ve been reading – early May edition

Well, it’s been nearly four months since I checked in on my ’52 books in a year’ and other reader details, so guess what I’m blogging about today? My 52-books count currently stands at 19 since I finished ‘Equal Rites’, by Terry Pratchett, which sounds pretty good to me… though now that I’m doing the math it looks like I’m not ahead of the game like I thought I was. But the important thing is, I’m loving every word of it! A few highlights:

• Trading in Danger, by Elizabeth Moon. A nice little science fiction piece, alternately fun and gritty. I’ve never read anything written by Moon alone, though I loved ‘Sassinak’ which she co-wrote with Anne McCaffrey – apparently a lot of the detail in Sassinak about space ships and what it was like to fight in one, and live in one while the environmental systems are limping along, were Elizabeth’s, because she visits the same kind of territory to great effect with this book. Soon after I wrote it, I found some of the themes popping up in the next short story I wrote – ‘The Shuttle.’
• Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. Another great installment in the series, with things going from bad to worse for Harry and his friends at Hogwarts. The school is taken over by a noxious Inquisitor from the Ministry of Magic, and Harry finds out the secret that connects him to the Dark Wizard Voldemort!
• Mort, by Terry Pratchett. This is one of the first Discworld books that I’ve read, but I really loved the humor and the sense of detail that Pratchett gives to his characters and the wacky world they find themselves in. This book did remind me a lot of Piers Anthony’s ‘On a Pale Horse’, as they both look at the Grim Reaper as a character with an uncomfortable job, and examine the possibilities of the job passing from one Death to another, but Terry Pratchett makes the premise his own as he takes it to the Discworld. (Disclaimer, I have no idea if Pratchett knew about ‘On a Pale Horse’ when he was writing this book – since Piers’ book was published four years earlier, it seems just about possible.)
• Power of Three, by Diana Wynne Jones. A great little stand-alone fantasy tale, with a fun twist that comes in just about half-way through. I won’t say anything more for fear of spoilers.

I also read a few of the ‘Star Trek: New Frontier” series, and enjoyed “Inheritance” and “The Puppet Masters” as audiobooks. Right now, I’m a little over three quarters of the way through “A Game of Thrones”, right in the middle of the war of the heirs, and hoping that Ned Stark will be free by the end!

What have you enjoyed reading lately?