WWW Wed Jul 24

What are you currently reading?

2312 by Kim Stanley Robinson.

What did you recently finish reading?

Five Red Herrings by Dorothy L. Sayers.

What do you think you’ll read next?

I don’t know, how should I know, stop asking me questions, I can’t think–or, for that matter, breathe through my nose. I have a cold and am deeply unhappy about this status quo. I cannot take on any more liquids without sinking, and I cannot pronounce the letter M. Now everyone go away while I pop some more drowsy medicine and crawl back into bed.

WWW Wed Jul 17

What are you currently reading?

The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club by Dorothy L. Sayers. Yesterday I found four Lord Peter Wimsey mysteries at Half Price Books for $2 each, so I picked them up. I have been somewhat ambivalent about Whose Body?, which I’ve read twice, but I am really liking Unpleasantness. I will probably undertake to read the whole set.

What did you recently finish reading?

I’ve read eight books this month so far but discarded three, which seems a high number: City at the End of Time by Greg Bear, The Brides of Rollrock Island by Margo Lanagan, and Gunpowder Empire by Harry Turtledove, a young adult alternate history science fiction novel thinly disguising how much Turtledove knows about daily life in ancient Rome. When nothing–at all–had happened in the first quarter of the short novel except walking through town and observing cultural differences, I decided to put it down.

On the other hand, I recently finished Death of a Red Heroine by Qiu Xiaolong, set in Shanghai in the early 1990s. Chief Inspector Chen Cao was an English major at a foreign language institute, but because one of his uncles was politically suspect, he got assigned to the police department instead of to a professorship. In this his first mystery, he questions whether his police work is as meaningful as his poetry, and then whether his poetry is as meaningful as his police work. An interesting character study and fascinating setting.

What do you think you’ll read next?

Nights at the Circus by Angela Carter, from the library, or the next Dorothy L. Sayers book. 2312 by Kim Stanley Robinson is still staring at me from the shelf, but after having just been burned by the hard sf of Greg Bear, I am not yet bold enough to give another new-to-me author a try.

This Year So Far in Books

74 Books So Far

The results are in. Here is how many of what I’ve read so far from January to June. If I continue reading at this pace, I’m not likely to read 200 books in a year (a goal I probably will not make until retirement, or unless I switch to early grade chapter books), but it is interesting to see how evenly my tastes in genre spread out.

I’ve done something a bit different from previous years: I have cataloged the genres of all the books I’ve begun (including audiobooks) instead of tagging them “unfinished.” I have kept track of my unfinished books separately and have also kept a list of which books I got from the library–so that in the future when I swear I’ve read something but don’t see it on my shelf, I will know why.

BY GENRE

• Audiobook – 13 (17%)
• Fantasy – 16 (22%)
• Literary – 15 (20%)
• Mystery – 11 (15%)
• Nonfiction – 3 (4%)
• Science Fiction – 16 (22%)

Interesting, no? The five major sections (excluding nonfiction) are all roughly equal in amount. It wasn’t even planned.

Of the above books in various categories, I left unfinished thirteen books, which calculates to 17%, a fairly high rate of rejection. However, of these, all but two came from the library, so there wasn’t much monetary loss. And if I read less than a fifth of a book, I didn’t put it on my list at all. The unfinished books I do put on my list are a) representations of all the reading I do that isn’t logged, like newspapers, magazines, and blogs, and b) reminders that I didn’t like it and won’t try to read it again in five years.

But–drum roll please–out of the 74 books, 43 came from the library.

That’s 58%, people!

Please be impressed. I own hundreds of books and usually read more than 150 books a year. I never buy a book at full price, but even so, my passion can add up. Therefore, after a soul-searching decision last June to spend less money, I began using the public library pretty heavily. Last year, about a third of my titles came from the library. This year, more than half.

So, I’m still reading the same kinds of books I love to read (namely, SF and fantasy), but I’m reading exponentially more cost-effectively.

Win.

WWW Wednesday Jul 3

What are you currently reading? The City at the End of Time by Greg Bear. I’m about a third of the way into this hard SF novel, and I’m still not entirely sure what it’s about. Three people living in something like today’s present have access to sum-runners, which are stones that allow them to dream the extremely distant future, where Chaos is about to overtake the city of Kalpa. And a couple of beings in Kalpa, who are connected to some of the present-day humans, are about to go exploring the chaos. I think.

What did you recently finish reading? The False Prince by Jennifer Nielsen. Sage is an orphan who is in training to pretend to be the long-lost Prince Jaron, except he actually is the long-lost Prince Jaron and doesn’t end up having to pretend at all. Yes, I know, I gave it away. This book would have been awesome if I were eleven.

What do you think you will read next? Lexicon by Max Barry or Inside Job by Connie Willis, both on reserve for me at the library. Unfortunately, due to tomorrow happening to be the day the Declaration of Independence was adopted 237 years ago, the library is closed. Grumble. I will have to forestall the decision at least until Friday.

June 2013

Stuff I’ve Been Reading: June 2013

1. Wool by Howey, Hugh
2. The Age of Miracles by Walker, Karen Thompson
3. The Return of Captain John Emmett by Speller, Elizabeth
4. Sense and Sensibility by Austen, Jane*
5. The Strange Fate of Kitty Easton by Speller, Elizabeth
6. The Odyssey by Homer
7. The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Gaiman, Neil
8. The Long War by Pratchett, Terry and Stephen Baxter
9. Emperor Mollusk Versus the Sinister Brain by Martinez, A. Lee
10. Code Name Verity by Wein, Elizabeth

Italics indicate library books, asterisks indicate audiobooks, and I didn’t finish reading numbers 8 or 9.

Best Read: Wool by Hugh Howey. All of humanity lives in an underground silo. But when the Sheriff chooses death to go outside, he sets in motion a chain of events that just might lead to a revolution and the uncovering of a vast conspiracy.

Next Best Read(s): The Laurence Bertram novels by Elizabeth Speller. I like mysteries, and I like this post-WWI England setting, and I like this introverted, observant narrator. One is a suicide under mysterious circumstances, and the other is a cold case concerning a missing child.

Books Not Finished: Emperor Mollusk was too earnest to be a genuine parody and too silly to be a genuine satire; The Long War ought to have been named The Long Wait, considering that no war was even on the horizon by page 150.

Books Finished, By Golly: The Odyssey may have taken me all month to wade through, but I did read it cover to cover. A favorite sentiment from a book about hospitality–Welcome the arriving and speed the departing guest.