I think I have to give in on this one; it's simply too tedious and offensive to finish. I've managed about sixty pages and have yet to find anything that makes me think there will be anything in the rest that makes it worthwhile ploughing through the mind-numbing text and revolting sexism. I cannot imagine recommending this book to anyone for any ( Read more... )

32) 44 Scotland Street (Alexander McCall Smith). I actually read this way back at about the same time as the Myth books (22-24); you can tell how much of an impression it made by the fact that I'd forgotten about it until now. In the words of shimgray, "people who like this sort of thing will find it the sort of thing they like", but while this had all ( Read more... )

(Also, I read the last couple of stories in (21) somewhere during this lot ( Read more... )

19) A Dark Travelling (Roger Zelazny). One of Zelazny's more off-the-wall science-and-fantasy mixtures: a werewolf, a ninja and a witch set out to rescue the wolfboy's missing scientist father. Not demanding or particularly enlightening, but certainly fun ( Read more... )

14) A Fate Worse than Debt (Susan George). Being the other counterpart, in a sense, of book (13). That described the work put into persuading corrupt third-world leaders to bankrupt their countries building pointless vanity projects (and into encouraging corrupt leadership where it didn't previously exist). This describes the deteriorating ( Read more... )

10) Y: The Descent of Men (Steve Jones). An interesting and well-written book on the genetic problems of maleness - a chromosome that never gets the chance to recombine suffers all sorts of degeneration, beyond having mutations that can't be swapped out. (ETA: the book does cover a fair bit of other gender- and reproduction-related genetic ground ( Read more... )

6) The Mammoth Book of Extreme Science Fiction. Which serves as quite a good reminder of why you should never buy anything with "edited by Mike Ashley" on the cover. But it was only 20p, and there were several stories in it that I didn't otherwise own copies of. There is, however, nothing 'extreme' about it, except for the opinions the editor ( Read more... )

This cold hasn't done much for my attention span over the last week or so, so I've been consuming various collections of short stories. There are a couple of others part-read at present that should make it through the finishing line soon. Since these three were, in effect, read concurrently, depending on what I was in the mood for at the time, ( Read more... )

Both borrowed from my mother, which rather defeats the original purpose of the exercise, but hey ( Read more... )

I now have an entire bookcase full of things that I've bought and not read yet (mostly, but not exclusively, fiction). Most of them have come from charity shops or other cheap sources, but since I presumably did want to read them at the time of the acquisition.... The problem is that last year I spent a great deal of time re-reading books I was ( Read more... )