It started out by accident. Finding myself with much more reading autonomy this semester, since I’m taking one class and thesis hours rather than three classes, I naturally gravitated toward books that I thought would be fun, funny, entertaining, or enjoyable. Since my reading for class is science fiction as well, I noticed a distinctive pattern in my taste recently.
And so it turns out that for the first two and a half weeks of February, I’ve read nothing but science fiction or fantasy (well, and one science book).
I began the month with two comforting rereads–Crown Duel by Sherwood Smith and First Among Sequels by Jasper Fforde. Then came the Great Ice Storm of ’11/Icemageddon/Snowpocalypse, and I buried myself in several hundred pages of Iain M. Banks’s Surface Detail. My first book purchase to celebrate getting out of the house became Men at Arms by Terry Pratchett, which I read in a day, and I followed it up with The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell, because I wanted to write about it in my thesis preface. During a weekend with friends, Philip and I finished reading Terry Pratchett’s Mort in the car, and I simultaneously read my month’s only nonfiction book, Packing for Mars by Mary Roach, and my most recent (and agonizingly chosen) acquisition, The Chronicles of Chrestomanci by Diana Wynne Jones.
And it’s been a book a day for the last three days: Herland by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, for class; The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins, kindly on loan to me; and The Last Colony by John Scalzi, because it fit easily in my bag to campus.
Now I’ve begun reading Aurorarama by Jean-Christophe Valtat, which I acquired courtesy of Amazon textbook trade-in gift card credits, because it’s Arctic steampunk. How awesome is that? Two chapters in: Pretty awesome!
My resolution is to finish out the month in the vein I began it. Up next is Connie Willis and perhaps more Sherwood Smith.
Mostly About Books 