What I’ve been reading lately: September 2012

Well, I’ve definitely been reading a lot. As I think I’ve mentioned, all the waiting in lines I did for Fan Expo and Dragon*Con helped – it’s easy to pull out a Kindle (or a smartphone or PDA) and read while you’re waiting for that Q&A session or autograph, and I read several of the Buffy season 7 comics on the plane when they don’t allow you to have electronic devices turned on.

But I can’t blame all my reading progress on conventions. I recently finished the last ‘Harry Potter’ book, (which was a great read, I was so excited as I was getting near the end, with the Battle of Hogwarts and the final confrontation between Harry and You-Know-Who, not to mention the stuff with Severus in it,) and the Fourth Harry Dresden book, Summer Knight, which was enormous fun in a completely different way.

I don’t think I’ve enjoyed reading anything quite so much recently as the moment where Dresden gets the Maguffin back from the bad’un at the height of the climactic Faerie battle scene. Before running away with it, he imitates Road Runner and yells “Meep-meep!” 😀 Not many authors could make a moment like that work, but Jim Butcher gets away with it because it’s consistent with what we’ve learned about Harry in the books leading up to it.

And ‘Summer Knight’ is #49 on my 52 books in 2012 list, which suggests that I’m well ahead of schedule! I wonder if I can make it up to 70 books in the year.

Other titles I’ve finished recently:

• The Martian Chronicles, by Ray Bradbury
• All Together Dead, by Charlaine Harris
• Vampire Diaries: The Struggle, by LJ Smith
• Castle Kidnapped, by John de Chancie
• Buffy Season 8: #3-5
• Star Trek New Frontier: Dark Allies, by Peter David
• Dragon’s Kin, by Todd McCaffrey

I’m currently reading “The Glamour Chase”, a fun Doctor Who novel I picked up at a convention years ago, and “Star Trek: Behind Enemy Lines”, which involves some of the characters from TNG in the Dominion War plotlines from Deep Space Nine.

By the way, Happy Programmer’s day to any fellow coders out there. I saw something about this earlier on twitter, but it wasn’t until I was doing a bit of math to see how well I was doing on the reading that I remembered the reasoning for Programmer’s day – it’s day 256 of the year. 😉

And if you’re a Nano-er and haven’t seen this yet, go vote for Nanowrimo at Chase Community Giving. They could get a donation of $50-250 thousand dollars!

What I’ve read this fall

September issue August issue

Okay, it’s been nearly three months since I shared my readings here n the blog, so I’ve got lots to tell you about!

Please note: I will be discussing a plot spoiler for “Childhood’s End”, by Arthur C. Clarke further down in this post. If you don’t want to get spoiled on this fine book, then don’t read past the paragraph on “Castle for Rent.”

“The Gripping Hand,” by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle. I finally finished this in early October. I loved the main thrust of the action within the Mote system, with the Empire expedition running into a new civilization of space-born Moties this time and getting caught in the middle of a war between them. Frankly, the novel could probably have done with less build-up to the point of “OMG a new jump point to Mote system could open up any day now!” and it would have been at least as strong, in my opinion. But I loved reading the build-up anyway.

“Gateway,” by Frederik Pohl. Overall, I really liked this – I liked the concept of humanity discovering strange and temperamental alien ships and heading out to prospect the galaxy in them. I want to read more of the Heechee series by Pohl, and I like a lot of his secondary characters. On the other hand, Robinette Broadhead just pissed me off a lot of the time, and as fun as Sigfrid von Shrink was, I didn’t really feel impressed with the therapy plot thread or Rob’s enormous survivor’s guilt for trying to do the right thing, to sacrifice himself to save his teammates, and getting the timing wrong.

I also had problems with the physics at the end – if you’ve got ships that can somehow circumvent the speed of light, then the event horizon of a black hole isn’t an impassable barrier anymore. I think that the Heechee ships must already cross an event horizon with every trip, so why can’t they get out of the black hole – or if the development of the black hole threw off their targeting, then how could Rob get back home once he passes the event horizon by another means?