What are you reading? — Page 21

I’ve been thinking about giving War and Peace a shot. I finally got through Anna Karenina last year and loved it, but W&P is almost twice as long.

Madeleine E. by Gabriel Blackwell. It’s almost beyond simple description, but it’s essentially a collection of disjointed quotations from existing essays and stories mixed with snippets of original fiction all revolving around Hitchcock’s Vertigo, and an elusive sort of narrative eventually emerges from all of these fragments. I cannot put the thing down. If you’re into Hitchcock, or metafiction, or Nabokovian parodies of academia, I can’t stress enough how much you should seek this one out.

It’s gotta be better than Insomnia, right?

Right?

*wolves howl*

Haven’t read any straight up science fiction in a while, so I picked up a few paperbacks earlier in the week. Right now I’m halfway through Jupiter by Ben Bova, which I selected after becoming intrigued by the cover of Leviathans of Jupiter and subsequently learning that it was a sequel. It’s all right. Some of the characterization is a little iffy, but it’s very readable and there’s a lot of interesting classically sci-fi stuff. I’m not all jazzed up to read the rest of the series, but I can see Bova’s twenty-something other Grand Tour books becoming the things I reach for when I want to burn through something really quickly for a palate cleanse.

Next up is The Mote in God’s Eye by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle. It turns up on just about every sci-fi recommendation list I’ve seen, and I’ve heard it described as being like a particularly heady episode of Star Trek, so I’m looking forward to it. I was really surprised to see that the chronology before the prologue has the Cold War ending in 1990 since the book was published in 1974. I’m pretty sure I’ve read things from the late 80s that weren’t that accurate.

After that, I’m thinking I’ll finally get around to Ender’s Game. I almost never actually end up sticking to a book itinerary for that long, though.

I’ve been reading The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring on-and-off for the past couple months, and I’ve finally reached the end of the first half of the novel. I think I’m gonna take a break from it for a while and read two or three other smaller books before returning to it.

Since I’ve bought a whole bunch of Star Trek books over the last year which I haven’t touched yet, I’ll read one of those next. I’ve chosen to go with Star Trek: The New Voyages.

Slogging my way through Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone. It’s very good, but it’s not a quick read. I’ve been reaching for Lovecraft short stories whenever I get too bogged down.

Earl said:

Started reading the EU novel Darksaber

LOL

Do I even have to say what the right choice was?

I’ve never heard of hate reading before. I would have to imagine that it’s a lot less rewarding than hate watching something.

STAR TREK: THE NEW VOYAGES

Knowing this was basically a collection of fan fiction previously published in a fanzine, I didn’t really know what type of stories to expect from this. Luckily for me, none of the stories were godawful; there were a few which would’ve made pretty good episodes.

Here are the stories I found the best:

• “The Face on the Barroom Floor” by Eleanor Arnason & Ruth Berman
• “The Winged Dreamers” by Jennifer Guttridge (The implied homosexual attraction between Kirk & Spock was fan-ficky crap, though, and it took me right out of the story; good thing it was only brought up towards the end.)
• “Mind-Sifter” by Shirley S. Maiewski

ALICE’S ADVENTURES IN WONDERLAND AND THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS by LEWIS CARROLL

I first tried reading through these stories two years ago, but I found the writing style insufferable at the time and so I put them aside only three chapters into Wonderland. I decided to return to them this past week, and I was astonished at how easy it was to get through them this time 'round. Perhaps being able to read it at my leisure instead of intermittently on a noisy, crowded bus had something to do with it.

Anyway, I liked both tales, though I enjoyed Through the Looking Glass the most. It’s undertones were decidedly creepier than the ones in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland; I just loved the air of burgeoning madness it lent to the narrative.

I am currently reading Mindset by Dr. Carol S. Dweck.

http://mindsetonline.com/thebook/buythebook/index.html