(no subject)
Yesterday, I played cricket. I admittedly wasn't playing with great players, but it seemed a lot easier to hit the ball (and make it go somewhere useful) than in baseball/softball. At least, when I was batting against anyone who had bowled before; against Americans, I couldn't do much of anything except fail to get out of the way of wild balls. Fortunately we were using a tennis ball instead of a real cricket ball.
My reading year ended a month ago, with 36 books read. I'd been informally aiming for 40, but I'm fine with missing that. I'm less pleased that I only reviewed 16 of them. A quick rundown of the rest:
17. The Invisible Man and 18. The War of the Worlds, H.G. Wells. I was amazed how little I actually knew of Invisible Man, considering Wells is one of the most plagiarizedinfluential writers in science fiction. Also a bit surprising how much time the title character spends running around England in winter, in the nude. Apart from that, though, it's refreshing to go back and see early works where the writers could pretend their readers were up-to-date on the latest scientific discoveries.
19-24 and 32: Harry Potter. If you're reading this, you presumably already know and love these books, or aren't going to have your mind changed by anything I could say. Not quite as much fun the third(fifth?) time through as the first, but close enough, and still a good way to get through that nasty stretch in February and March when it feels like proper spring may never come.
25: Time Enough For Love, Robert Heinlein. I wasn't really on a Heinlein kick this year, but a former coworker was working a publisher's table at MidSouthCon, and I felt like I should buy something; this was the only thing on the table that looked interesting and I hadn't yet read. It's one of Heinlein's major titles for a reason, and even though the last hundred pages had a lot going on that I've hated when other people did it, it sort of seemed right for the final adventure of Lazarus Long.
26: 2007 Civic Hybrid Owner's Manual. Yes, this counts; it's 200 pages long. Not exactly a compelling read though, and the main thing I wanted to learn from it (how often should I change my oil?) wasn't answered definitively. The closest it came was "the car will tell you", and at 5300 miles, the car's saying "a few thousand miles from now".
27: Lords and Ladies, Terry Pratchett. Seemed like a good idea to reread one of the books he signed. I think I'd already started burning out on Pratchett when I read this the first time, because I enjoyed it a lot more this time. Still not at all a place I'd start reading him, though.
28-31: Tourist Season, Skin Tight, Stormy Weather, and Basket Case, Carl Hiaasen. These are not a series, but I read all four of them in a week and a half (starting when I was in Colorado, ending just after I got home from Toronto), so they'd have all blurred together a bit even if I hadn't waited almost four months to talk about them. An author has a lot to live up to when my father and Pratchett both recommend him, but Hiaasen manages it. Imagine if Dave Barry took his subject matter seriously between the jokes, and you're in the general area.
33: Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, Charles McKay, Ll.D. This one is all benma's fault; he handed it to me when I was running out of last fall's set of material, and this would be book 5 or 6 if I counted by when I started a book instead of when I finished it. There are around 100 really interesting pages here; alas, the Great Editors' Strike of Old London Town was at its height when he submitted the manuscript (c. 1840), so it comes to us as an 800-page monster, with a ridiculous chunk devoted to the lives of every moderately noteworthy alchemist of the late middle ages.
34: Short Stories, Mark Twain. Twain's work remains interesting, but I'd call most of this collection poignant rather than humorous.
35: Enchantment, Orson Scott Card. It was odd to see Card setting a story among Russian Jews. Apart from that, I thought this was one of his better efforts.
36: The Book of General Ignorance, John Lloyd and John Mitchinson. This was a birthday present. Interesting material about common misconceptions. Lloyd was a producer on Blackadder; some of that sensibility comes through, which makes the book very readable but leaves you at the end of many articles wondering how much of it was factual, and how much was only there for the sake of a joke.
I'm not sure whether I should keep my year starting in September or move it to January, since I'm theoretically not tuning out the world for weeks at the end of August anymore and I've never celebrated Rosh Hashanah.
My reading year ended a month ago, with 36 books read. I'd been informally aiming for 40, but I'm fine with missing that. I'm less pleased that I only reviewed 16 of them. A quick rundown of the rest:
17. The Invisible Man and 18. The War of the Worlds, H.G. Wells. I was amazed how little I actually knew of Invisible Man, considering Wells is one of the most plagiarizedinfluential writers in science fiction. Also a bit surprising how much time the title character spends running around England in winter, in the nude. Apart from that, though, it's refreshing to go back and see early works where the writers could pretend their readers were up-to-date on the latest scientific discoveries.
19-24 and 32: Harry Potter. If you're reading this, you presumably already know and love these books, or aren't going to have your mind changed by anything I could say. Not quite as much fun the third(fifth?) time through as the first, but close enough, and still a good way to get through that nasty stretch in February and March when it feels like proper spring may never come.
25: Time Enough For Love, Robert Heinlein. I wasn't really on a Heinlein kick this year, but a former coworker was working a publisher's table at MidSouthCon, and I felt like I should buy something; this was the only thing on the table that looked interesting and I hadn't yet read. It's one of Heinlein's major titles for a reason, and even though the last hundred pages had a lot going on that I've hated when other people did it, it sort of seemed right for the final adventure of Lazarus Long.
26: 2007 Civic Hybrid Owner's Manual. Yes, this counts; it's 200 pages long. Not exactly a compelling read though, and the main thing I wanted to learn from it (how often should I change my oil?) wasn't answered definitively. The closest it came was "the car will tell you", and at 5300 miles, the car's saying "a few thousand miles from now".
27: Lords and Ladies, Terry Pratchett. Seemed like a good idea to reread one of the books he signed. I think I'd already started burning out on Pratchett when I read this the first time, because I enjoyed it a lot more this time. Still not at all a place I'd start reading him, though.
28-31: Tourist Season, Skin Tight, Stormy Weather, and Basket Case, Carl Hiaasen. These are not a series, but I read all four of them in a week and a half (starting when I was in Colorado, ending just after I got home from Toronto), so they'd have all blurred together a bit even if I hadn't waited almost four months to talk about them. An author has a lot to live up to when my father and Pratchett both recommend him, but Hiaasen manages it. Imagine if Dave Barry took his subject matter seriously between the jokes, and you're in the general area.
33: Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, Charles McKay, Ll.D. This one is all benma's fault; he handed it to me when I was running out of last fall's set of material, and this would be book 5 or 6 if I counted by when I started a book instead of when I finished it. There are around 100 really interesting pages here; alas, the Great Editors' Strike of Old London Town was at its height when he submitted the manuscript (c. 1840), so it comes to us as an 800-page monster, with a ridiculous chunk devoted to the lives of every moderately noteworthy alchemist of the late middle ages.
34: Short Stories, Mark Twain. Twain's work remains interesting, but I'd call most of this collection poignant rather than humorous.
35: Enchantment, Orson Scott Card. It was odd to see Card setting a story among Russian Jews. Apart from that, I thought this was one of his better efforts.
36: The Book of General Ignorance, John Lloyd and John Mitchinson. This was a birthday present. Interesting material about common misconceptions. Lloyd was a producer on Blackadder; some of that sensibility comes through, which makes the book very readable but leaves you at the end of many articles wondering how much of it was factual, and how much was only there for the sake of a joke.
I'm not sure whether I should keep my year starting in September or move it to January, since I'm theoretically not tuning out the world for weeks at the end of August anymore and I've never celebrated Rosh Hashanah.