July 2013

Stuff I’ve Been Reading: July 2013

1. The False Prince by Nielsen, Jennifer A.
2. City at the End of Time by Bear, Greg
3. Inside Job by Willis, Connie
4. Lexicon by Barry, Max
5. Appointment with Death by Christie, Agatha*
6. The Brides of Rollrock Island by Lanagan, Margo
7. Death of a Red Heroine by Qiu Xiaolong
8. Gunpowder Empire by Turtledove, Harry
9. The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club by Sayers, Dorothy L.
10. Five Red Herrings by Sayers, Dorothy L.
11. 2312 by Robinson, Kim Stanley
12. Northanger Abbey by Austen, Jane*

Italics indicate library books; asterisks indicate audiobooks. I didn’t finish numbers 2, 6, or 8.

Mysteries. I read the first mystery by Qiu Xiaolong, and while it was enjoyable, I did not adopt it as my series-to-read-straight-through. That honor goes to Dorothy L. Sayers, although I haven’t been reading the Lord Peter Wimsey novels in publication order: I haven’t been able to find some titles and will have to wait on requesting them via interlibrary loan.

Hard SF. Although I didn’t care for (or understand) Greg Bear’s novel, I quite liked this year’s Nebula Award-winner by Kim Stanley Robinson. After an attack destroying the only city on Mercury, the eccentric, artistic Swan Er Hong travels the solar system to try to understand what happened and to carry on her grandmother’s political career.

Audiobooks. It would be hard to choose between such a classic Agatha Christie novel and Jane Austen’s first-written-posthumously-published Northanger Abbey, a Gothic-novel parody. Both narrators were excellent, and the stories had me laughing. I think I will attempt the 16-disc Fellowship of the Ring next.

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.

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.