What are you reading in Feb 2011

[[deleted user]]

Finished The Broken Kingdoms this morning. Loved it.

Pondering starting in on this one book, but I'd forgotten the name of it. Something to do with tripping hyperspace? fell hype? Fall?

It'll come to me eventually.

[Aloha]

Hyperion and Fall of Hyperion, Ala. I'm glad to help you with your faulty memory.

[[deleted user]]

No, no. That's not it.

Hyper Falls?

Falling Hyper Fast?

Hype Fail?

:P

[Aloha]

Would hypernym cover everything?

[Phoenixfalls]

Finished The Last Unicorn, and it made me wish I remembered my Greek philosophers better, but I nonetheless did the best I could with my review.

[Aloha]

Finished Stingers.

Starting We Have Always Lived in the Castle. All I can say is "Wow!" from her very first words. This is what I consider literature, when an author is masterful with the usage of words to paint an atmosphere. This is a short book and I can see myself salivating for every word.

[Robert]

Minding Tomorrow

Really good so far.

[Julia]

Finished The Girl Who Fell From the Sky which was worth reading and T4: A Novel which I do not recommend.

Have just begun: Before I Fall.

[[deleted user]]

Just finished Generation Kill. I started watching the show on TV and enjoyed it but I couldn't understand what the actors were saying, so I jumped onto the book. Not a bad read.

Currently reading some essays on climate change and debating over which fiction to read now.

[Aloha]

Finished We Have Always Lived in the Castle. I really enjoyed her writing and I'm processing it. I like writing that makes me want to process it.

Starting The Painted Bird. I'm really looking forward to it. I might add finishing Cows to it. Normally, I can juggle books, but lately I've been wanting to focus on one book at a time.

[Karen]

Reading and re-reading The Hunger Games, Catching Fire and Mockingjay. I like the first best, with the second a close second, so to speak.

[Bill]

Finishing Strangers on a Train by Patricia Highsmith and about to start Outpost of Jupiter by Lester del Rey

[Stuart]

I am reading Fool Moon by Jim Butcher

[Julia]

I gave up on Before I Fall and am now reading and enjoying Discord's Apple.

[[deleted user]]

Last day of the month, and I'll be finishing Something from the Nightside. So far, it's pretty good.

It's not some great work of art or anything, but it's a fun little read.

[Snail in Danger (Sid)]

Things I read

One Bloody Thing After Another (Horror, liked it a lot despite being a wimp where this sort of thing is concerned.)

On Reading and From My Window (Both collecting the photography of André Kertész.)

Once on a Time, a fairy tale for grownups by A.A. Milne (Yes, the Pooh guy, but this isn't a Pooh thing. "A fairy tale for non-children" is roughly how Milne described it in the introduction.)

When We Were Very Young (Another book by A.A. Milne, this time of children's poetry. Not directly a Pooh thing, but does mention Christopher Robin in a few poems, as this was the name of Milne's son. A number are pedestrian - kids and non-kids will enjoy Dr. Seuss more. A small number are excellent. One poem in here is the source of my new GR nickname. Another appears to be the original use of the phrase "Whisper who dares," which is a character name in John M. Ford's The Last Hot Time), the name of three novels and at least two works on encryption technology, and the name of a song from the Live and Let Die score.)

The Name of the Wind (Better than I expected.)

Where the Action Was: Women War Correspondents in World War II and Toilets, Bathtubs, Sinks, and Sewers: A History of the Bathroom (Both children's non-fiction by Penny Colman. Both could have used more organization, but the second had this problem more than the first did.)

Fuzzies and Other People by H. Beam Piper (Wanted to read this before John Scalzi's take on the canon, Fuzzy Nation, is released. Liked the first two but was disappointed by this one.)

Across the Universe (YA SF. Older readers who are familiar with the tropes of SF and dystopic fiction will probably see most of the revelations coming.)

Things I re-read

The Tale of Genji (Sometimes called the first novel or the first psychological novel. I finished this some time ago but my brain is still processing, so I can't say much more than "It wasn't a waste of my time." Which is less damnation by way of faint praise than it may seem, since the edition I read was over 1000 densely printed pages.)

The Changeover: A Supernatural Romance (An interesting but somewhat problematic YA fantasy. Would probably be called paranormal romance, but the term didn't exist when this book was first published.)

Solution Three, an old-ish feminist SF book (I first read this for a college class. Shows its age a little, with the 60s/70s slang.)

A Scholar of Magics. I still don't think it was as strong as its prequel, A College of Magics, in the plot and general enjoyability departments. But it has an interesting thematic layer that I missed the first time. Stevermer said in an interview last year that she was working on a sequel, tentatively called Sevenfold; I very much hope that she finds a home for it.

All the Liavek books, except Spells of Binding (which is still in the mail due to the caprices of online book merchants). I finally read the Alan Moore story, Hypothetical Lizard, which is just creepy. I mostly got these books to have the stories that Pamela Dean and John M. Ford did about the Green faith in their full context. (For a sink-or-swim introduction, Masterpieces of Fantasy and Wonder has Ford's "Green is the Color." It is generally easy to find inexpensively on the secondhand market and can sometimes be found at libraries.)

Things I decided not to read

Converting Kate, Sapphique, The Price of the Stars, Temperance, Cold Magic, Feed (by M.T. Anderson, not to be confused with Mira Grant's Feed), Running the Books: The Adventures of an Accidental Prison Librarian

Things I decided not to read now but may get back to later

Christmas Ghosts, Third Class Superhero, Moondust, Under a Velvet Cloak, Miracle and Other Christmas Stories by Connie Willis, The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary, Pleasure of Ruins, Juniper, Gentian, and Rosemary

[[deleted user]]

That's a helluva lot of reading

[Snail in Danger (Sid)]

I'm a fast reader ... most of the books I read in a day or less. (Plus a lot of them were short or didn't have that much text, like the photography and poetry books. And of course the ones I decided not to read, I generally only read a few dozen pages or less as a sample.)

[Doug]

I just finished the The Hunger Games Trilogy Boxset by Suzanne Collins. I was amazed by the story, the pace, the characters, the honesty, and the relationships. A great series.