More Books

I've been plowing through a veritable stack of literature lately. The summer and the fall seem to be prime reading time for me - when it gets to winter, with three practices a week and just barely dragging myself out of the house to run, I basically shut down for about 2 months like some sort of hairless and pale bear.

Here's what I've been devouring in the meantime.

Blackout, by Connie Willis
Connie Willis may be one of my favorite writers ever. I was introduced to her by a friend in high school, Matt - who I am sure right now (or maybe five hours ago was) is exuberantly clambering over some rocks in Arizona.
Blackout is another book set in a universe of hers where time travel is used ubiquitously by historians seeking accurate depictions of events. Blackout has several of them trapped in London during the Blitz, unable to return to their original time. It's a good book, but sadly only one part of two, the second of which is not out yet.

Chasm City, by Alistair Reynolds
Alistair Reynolds is an amazingly consistent hard sci-fi author, and I was actually re-reading this book. It's one of the best convoluted narratives I've ever read - there are three simultaneous storylines occurring at the same time which manage to converge in a way that I never expected when I initially read the book. I think it may have one of the best endings I've ever read. It would be hard to describe the exact plot, but it is more or less about a hired gun tracking down the man who killed his last employer and the woman he loved.

The Forever War, by Joe Haldeman
I suppose I read a lot of science fiction. I've read (and probably repeated quite a few times) that good science fiction stories exist independently of their fantastical setting, and that is usually what I look for in the books I read. The Forever War traces a foot soldier who survives (through special relativity) the opening battle of a war against an alien force through the entire centuries-long conflict. It's essentially a very well-written anti-war polemic - I do believe the author was a soldier during Vietnam.

I Curse the River of Time, by Per Petterson
I was pretty enthralled by the first book I read by Petterson - "Out Stealing Horses." He's a Norwegian author and he definitely writes in what I think of as a Scandinavian style - very full of descriptive imagery and slow portentous dialogue. This novel deals with the existential crisis of a middle-aged Norwegian whose mother has just been diagnosed with cancer - in 1989, during the fall of Communism. Petterson really has a way with interpersonal relationships, especially ones where there is just something inexplicably missing.

The Cat Who Walks Through Walls, by Robert Heinlein
Heinlein, while certainly one of the best science fiction authors to grace the genre, has a veritable stable of bizarre ideas. They include polygamy and the fact that incest is only wrong insofar as much as it can produce genetic freaks. This novel is part of his "Future History" series of stories, where the world as we know exists only through our own solipsism - and thus all our heroes and novels live out their lives somewhere in our universe. This story itself deals with a gentleman journalist and dandy who has the misfortune to have an unexpected guest die at his dinner table, and must flee both home and homeworld being hounded by forces he doesn't understand.

The Once and Future King, by T.H. White
I've been meaning to read this book for quite some time. There's an old magazine I have at home (InQuest, which is sadly now no longer being printed) that lists - above a picture of an angry Charlton Heston from The Ten Commandments - "100 Books Thou Shalt Read Before You Die!" It's actually a very good list. Cross one more off it.

The book itself is a weird mixture of humor and young-adult-ish style writing with more powerful concepts. I've always been attracted to the whole Arthurian mythos - and this book is more or less another take on the Arthur myth. It's just about as irreverent as the musical Camelot or "A Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur's Court," but just like the others - the inevitable fall of Arthur's Round Table is just as heartbreaking as the original Le Mort D'Arthur.

Makers, by Cory Doctorow
After hearing Doctorow's name thrown around a little bit after reading this book, it's easy to kind of see past the writing and the story and get at what he is trying to achieve at writing this book. It doesn't make it any easier to resist what he wants to make you feel, but at least now I know that I was intentionally being manipulated by the author.

The book itself is about a pair of nerdy engineer-fellows who are hired by the slowly toppling Eastman Kodak Company to just make random products and see if they can be produced and sold for any sort of meaningful profit. Their wild inventions do turn a profit, but thousands of imitation invention-shops spring up around the country and the glut of random gadgets causes a giant market boom followed by an equally large crash. The whole book revolves around concepts of copyright, ownership, and how corporations are evil, soul-sucking entities. I don't entirely disagree, but I don't think I'm as rabidly anti-corporation as Doctorow.