I only was given one book for Christmas (Ex Libris by Anne Fadiman) but now have a Barnes & Noble gift certificate from my parents, and an amazon.com gift certificate from my aunt and uncle. I'm not sure yet what I'll end up getting, but shopping will be fun.

I finished Pat Cadigan's Synners before I left town. I've read better cyberpunk, but it was ok.

On the way to Denver I started Robert Kaplan's An Empire Wilderness. It was much like his other books except that he was travelling the US, rather than Afghanistan or other third world countries. I ended up leaving it there for my dad to read.

Malcolm Gladwell's Blink was a quick read about how people make decisions unconsciously. I've got his earlier book, The Tipping Point sitting here to read at some point too.

After getting home today I finished Wallace Stegner's Angle of Repose. I needed to read it sometime in the next month anyhow for the class I'll be taking with Nancy Pearl so I decided to go ahead and read it over Christmas break. I quite liked most of it, but was let down by the ending.
posted by kristin at 11:55 PM

I was in Barnes and Noble yesterday buying a bunch of Pratchett novels for my dad for Christmas (hopefully he won't read this, at least before Christmas) and got accosted by the SF bookseller there trying to recommend more books with elves to me. I did finally take one of his suggestions and bought M. John Harrison's Viriconium for myself (no elves, I don't think) but it took awhile to get away from him.

As for the Pratchett novels, should I wrap them all individually so there's more for him to open, or package them all together somehow so he won't know they're all books?
posted by kristin at 11:43 AM

Six books to post about. I've been reading while finishing up final projects for the quarter (last one turned in yesterday!) but haven't been getting around to posting about them.

Lois McMaster Bujold's Brothers in Arms is just what I expected it to be. A quick, fun read. I'd actually read the series a bit out of order, so I knew a bit of the outcome of this one already, but had fun getting to the end. Her series is still basically the only military science fiction I've ever enjoyed.

Kurt Vonnegut's A Man without a Country is a book of light essays, many on his opinion of the current state of America. He's got a few great quotes in there on libraries and librarians.

Tim Powers' Forsake the Sky is one of his early books, and wasn't horrible, but definitely wasn't great. If you haven't read him, try The Anubis Gates instead.

I picked up Eric Wagners' An Insider's Guide to Robert Anton Wilson when I was working on the paper on the history of the Principia Discordia and finally got around to doing more than skimming it. Parts were good, parts were mediocre. The writing quality was a bit inconsistant. Unless you've read all of RAW's stuff, I probably wouldn't bother.

Bruce Sterling's The Zenith Angle was far more of a thriller than SF. Some nifty ideas, but the main character gave me the creeps in a way, which made it occasionally painful to read.

Alexa Albert's Brothel takes place primarily in a legal brothel in Nevada. The author went there to conduct a public health survey on the prostitutes' condom usage and STDs but ended up returning again and again to study the place on more of a sociological/cultural level. It's a fascinating read.
posted by kristin at 11:35 AM

Saturday night I took my parents to see Nancy Pearl speak at Third Place Books. Their only familiarity with her was from having me mention her repeatedly, but they liked it, bought both of her books and got them signed. I didn't write down all of the books she recommended, but fortunately Molly did from her talk at the UW bookstore so I can provide a link to her post about it.
posted by kristin at 9:58 AM

Thursday night I stayed up way too late reading. I finished off Stephen King's Dark Tower series by finishing the last (7th?) book in the series. I'm not sure I would have started the series these days, but since I'd started it something like 15 years ago I needed to finish it. At least the gaps between publication of the later books wasn't nearly as long as some that happened earlier. I did enjoy the series overall, but given how long it is, I'm hesitant to recommend it to others. I found it rather amusing that there was one plot device in this last book that requires some knowledge of Harry Potter to understand.

If that was all of the reading I'd done that night, I'd have gotten a fair bit of sleep. Instead I also stayed up and read Lois McMaster Bujold's Brothers in Arms in its entirety. Oops. I seem to keep reading her novels out of order, but fortunately that hasn't been as promblematic as some series would be.

I'm currently working on Shelby Steele's The Content of Our Character and Tim Powers' Forsake the Sky.
posted by kristin at 9:51 AM