Wednesday Reading Meme
What I Just Finished Reading
John M. Ford, The Final Reflection (Star Trek, #16): I misplaced my paper copy of this, so I ended up rebuying it for the Kindle. It is under $5, which is a great deal when you consider how awesome it is. I spent a large portion of my adolescence reading Star Trek tie-in novels, and they fall for the most part into two categories: (a) "you needed to pay your rent, didn't you?" and the much smaller category (b) "it is deeply unfair that tie-in novels never get nominated for Hugos and Nebulas, because everyone needs to read this right now." This is one of the latter books. You don't even need to be a Trek fan or up on Trek canon -- they're all original characters (okay, Spock shows up once), it's set before TOS, and it's from the point of view of a Klingon. An awesome, awesome Klingon. Ford does an excellent job making the Klingons come to life as believable characters while at the same time making you aware of the fact that they are not us. But then you end up thinking like them and understanding them anyway. Like all of Ford's plots, there's so much going on under the surface that I am still not really sure I get all of it, even after all the rereads, but I really like what I get. And for those of you who really like fiction about playing games -- well, there's a lot of that going on here, and even more if you count all the Federation diplomacy.
Ben Aaronovitch, Broken Homes: For all that I enjoy this series, I think it's beginning to have severe pacing problems. Seriously, nothing happened in this book until the last quarter of it. I still really enjoy the characters, though -- they're great. I just wish they had more to do. But, hey, there are a lot of excellent lines. Very short book, though.
Marcus Valerius Martialis (tr. Garry Wills), Martial's Epigrams: A Selection: If you are ever looking to read an English translation of Martial, don't read this one. It's hideous. I went on at great length on Goodreads about my specific complaints. Probably I should just read Martial in Latin.
Barbara Hambly, Search the Seven Hills: The Quirinal Affair: I'm a big fan of Hambly's fantasy, so you can imagine how happy I was when I found out she'd also written an Ancient Rome mystery. But, sadly, this one was... kind of meh. So many of the details are wrong (the names! all the names! the vomitoria!) that it's like it's taking place in Bizarre Alternate Universe Rome, and I probably could have ignored that if I'd come to care at all about the main character. But I didn't. It's an interesting setup, though: Main character's girlfriend is captured by those dastardly Christians! Everyone knows they're going to sacrifice her! We have to find her! Shame the book didn't hold up.
David S. Cohen, Pacific Rim: Man, Machines, and Monsters: The Pacific Rim artbook. It is really really shiny, you guys. So many pictures of mecha and monsters! Also it has lots of neat little things enclosed on separate sheets, like Mako and Raleigh's ID cards, Jaeger blueprints, reproduction pages from del Toro's sketchbook, stickers with the Jaeger logos, kaiju drawings, and a packet of posters tucked in the back. Recommended if you're into the fandom.
What I'm Reading Now
Neal Stephenson, Cryptonomicon: Technically this is a reread, as I read it when it came out, but apparently that was 1999? So the internet says. I was in high school, anyway. It's been a while. I remember very little about it. It's got Alan Turing! Secret codes! The internet! Also it is way easier to read as an e-book than as a hefty pile of paper. Still, this might take a few days.
What I'm Reading Next
I never know the answer to this. I was considering rereading the Middle Kingdoms books, but who knows?
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John M. Ford, The Final Reflection (Star Trek, #16): I misplaced my paper copy of this, so I ended up rebuying it for the Kindle. It is under $5, which is a great deal when you consider how awesome it is. I spent a large portion of my adolescence reading Star Trek tie-in novels, and they fall for the most part into two categories: (a) "you needed to pay your rent, didn't you?" and the much smaller category (b) "it is deeply unfair that tie-in novels never get nominated for Hugos and Nebulas, because everyone needs to read this right now." This is one of the latter books. You don't even need to be a Trek fan or up on Trek canon -- they're all original characters (okay, Spock shows up once), it's set before TOS, and it's from the point of view of a Klingon. An awesome, awesome Klingon. Ford does an excellent job making the Klingons come to life as believable characters while at the same time making you aware of the fact that they are not us. But then you end up thinking like them and understanding them anyway. Like all of Ford's plots, there's so much going on under the surface that I am still not really sure I get all of it, even after all the rereads, but I really like what I get. And for those of you who really like fiction about playing games -- well, there's a lot of that going on here, and even more if you count all the Federation diplomacy.
Ben Aaronovitch, Broken Homes: For all that I enjoy this series, I think it's beginning to have severe pacing problems. Seriously, nothing happened in this book until the last quarter of it. I still really enjoy the characters, though -- they're great. I just wish they had more to do. But, hey, there are a lot of excellent lines. Very short book, though.
Marcus Valerius Martialis (tr. Garry Wills), Martial's Epigrams: A Selection: If you are ever looking to read an English translation of Martial, don't read this one. It's hideous. I went on at great length on Goodreads about my specific complaints. Probably I should just read Martial in Latin.
Barbara Hambly, Search the Seven Hills: The Quirinal Affair: I'm a big fan of Hambly's fantasy, so you can imagine how happy I was when I found out she'd also written an Ancient Rome mystery. But, sadly, this one was... kind of meh. So many of the details are wrong (the names! all the names! the vomitoria!) that it's like it's taking place in Bizarre Alternate Universe Rome, and I probably could have ignored that if I'd come to care at all about the main character. But I didn't. It's an interesting setup, though: Main character's girlfriend is captured by those dastardly Christians! Everyone knows they're going to sacrifice her! We have to find her! Shame the book didn't hold up.
David S. Cohen, Pacific Rim: Man, Machines, and Monsters: The Pacific Rim artbook. It is really really shiny, you guys. So many pictures of mecha and monsters! Also it has lots of neat little things enclosed on separate sheets, like Mako and Raleigh's ID cards, Jaeger blueprints, reproduction pages from del Toro's sketchbook, stickers with the Jaeger logos, kaiju drawings, and a packet of posters tucked in the back. Recommended if you're into the fandom.
What I'm Reading Now
Neal Stephenson, Cryptonomicon: Technically this is a reread, as I read it when it came out, but apparently that was 1999? So the internet says. I was in high school, anyway. It's been a while. I remember very little about it. It's got Alan Turing! Secret codes! The internet! Also it is way easier to read as an e-book than as a hefty pile of paper. Still, this might take a few days.
What I'm Reading Next
I never know the answer to this. I was considering rereading the Middle Kingdoms books, but who knows?
Read this entry on Dreamwidth ||
comments