the Recent Works of SF and F reading in the genre books list

Storm Front,  Jim Butcher
Spin,   Robert Charles Wilson
Feeling Very Strange:  The Slipstream Anthology,  ed. James Patrick Kelly and John Kessel
Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom,   Cory Doctorow (free in ibooks)
The Eyre Affair,  Jasper Fforde
Boneshaker,  Cherie Priest
Blindsight, Peter Watts

I've read Storm Front, but that was, like, eleven books ago and it'll be nice to read it again. I wanted to read Boneshaker anyway, and I've read another of Fforde's books and liked it. So overall, I think this is a good list!

Let's see what Kindle has for me... Kindle has all of them! All at roughly 10$, so a total of roughly 70$, which is 30$ cheaper than this term's RitG. I'll see what I can do about getting them through other / cheaper means, too, but this is pretty manageable as far as school books go, and I already have the All Read book for the res.

Sweet.

migration by james p hogan

This book started out like a medieval fantasy and ended like a space opera, and in between, it skipped eleven years and often read like a treatise on the way people could build a better society. Even so, though, it was an interesting read, and I come out with only two complaints, and they aren't even that bad: one, I wish that it's transformation from classic scifi mode to modern scifi mode had been more complete and it had kept going, and two, I wish the situation of robot religiosity had been handled in a less definitively anthropocentric way, but even that, with all it's big words, isn't really a problem in the context of the book-- it's really the only way things could have gone.

JP Hogan died recently, and it's sad that it means there probably won't be more of these stories of these people and their trip to another world for the first time in human history, but it's a pretty optimistic way to leave the fans, I think. We really can make things better.

Dragongirl by Todd mccaffrey

I didn't want to hate this one, but I came very close. It was so hard to read. So very very hard. It took me longer to get through than almost any other book I've read-- I think the only thing I can remember suffering through with such a grim stubbornness was, like, Sphere, which I did wind up hating by the end. That one took me nine months to read. This one only took about three, and I read about four other books in the meantime, trying to escape it.

See, I gre up on the Pern books. They were the first adult books I read, after a ha dful of Victoria Holt novels that I quickly lost interest in, and I've followed the series since. When I turned sixteen, my dad gifted me with the whole series up to that point, and it's one of my favorite memories of that timeframe. All Anne McCaffrey's books affected me the same way-- they aren't the most literary scifi, or the most rigorously scientific, and they're often just thinly veiled romances, but they were interesting and complex and open minded and adult, and they always got me emotionally involved in the characters.

This one though, one of Todd's solo ones... It was like beating myself In the face with bad fanfic a lot of the time, and it was like a bad idea of making it into kid lit, but still letting polyamory be okay. It happens at a time in Pern history when we know things are going to end up pretty desolate, too. And worse of all, it sort of steals Lessa's thunder by making her less rare, and preempting some of the daring things she has done / will do. It makes her seem woefully undereducated. Which makes me very sad.

And then it suddenly gets pointed, the characters suddenly differentiate, the writing clarifies and makes morse sense, and it feels like a Pern book, not a poorly-made imitation of one. That's how it should have been all along. It was so refreshing and life affirming to get through that whole mess and find a good and stirring ending, but it was too little, too late... But it piqued my curiosity about the next book, which has no excuse not to be good after 300- odd pages of set up from this book.

Digital domains edited by Ellen datlowl

This is exactly what an anthology is for: a taste of what's out there, and a good sampling of different styles and takes on a variety of topics. There's fifteen stories in here, and all of them are amazing. I sobbed lIke a baby during The Monkey King's Daughter, I felt like I was dreaming during Pansolapia, I was sucked in to each and every story. And there's one from Kelly Link and one from Andy Duncan, and both are excellent writers. Best of all, there's a feeling that the stories, thought all very different, all lean toward the same ending feeling, that they all want to change around the furniture inside your head. It's exactly why I love anthologies, and it's exactly why I love Datlow anthologies.