The Madman's Library / Seeker
The Madman's Library was a great Xmaholisolstizaah gift from Dr. Pookie. Subtitled The Stragest Books, Manuscripts and Other Literary Curiosities from History, the book is lavishly illustrated in color with all these oddities. Too many good things to even summarize. If you're into old books, moldy books, books bound in human skin, fake books, giant books, microscopic books, and so on, this is for you.
Seeker by Jack McDevitt has a great sort of historical/archeological spaceship mystery in it, and is not a bad page turner, but I don't see how it won Nebula for novel (although I guess I should look at the competition that year - I haven't read any of them). One beef I had is that it's set thousands of years in the future, at a time when not only is English not spoken, but Roman style characters are apparently unfamiliar. And yet most of the human names are basically English names. That's not the only detail that makes the far future setting seem unconvincing. Honestly, much of the writing feels like a noir tec story of the 1940s. Which is not a bad thing, but it doesn't feel far future.
Seeker by Jack McDevitt has a great sort of historical/archeological spaceship mystery in it, and is not a bad page turner, but I don't see how it won Nebula for novel (although I guess I should look at the competition that year - I haven't read any of them). One beef I had is that it's set thousands of years in the future, at a time when not only is English not spoken, but Roman style characters are apparently unfamiliar. And yet most of the human names are basically English names. That's not the only detail that makes the far future setting seem unconvincing. Honestly, much of the writing feels like a noir tec story of the 1940s. Which is not a bad thing, but it doesn't feel far future.