TOS: The Rift (2254 chapters) This one was okay. Peter Davids writing is... Interesting.TOS: Conflicting Natures After reading I wasn't sure if I liked this short story or not... I just felt really weird and stopped reading anything for a few hours. After two days of consideration I have decided that I don't like this story and will stay as far away from it as possible. I haven't decided if I'll read Where Sea Meets Sky. While I didn't like this short story I did like the other two of Oltion's TOS works, Twilight's End and Mudd in Your Eye, so I might give Where Sea Meets Sky a shot.TOS: The Kobayashi Maru (Kirk's chapter) This chapter wasn't particularly great, nor was it bad. It wasn't full of unecpected twists or interesting new information about an established characters past (which is not suprising) but its writing was solid and generally the chapter's okay.The rest of Early Voyages Holy Pama, after slowly losing faith in the Pike era with The Rift and Conflicting Natures this was a revelation. I loved every issue, the time travle arc was by far my favorite and it is horrible that the series was discontinued. Apart from reinforcing my believe that Christopher Pike is the best Enterprise Captain it also gave me a reason to care about Trek comics. The writing was great, the story interesting and the art was good.TOS: Shadows on the Sun (Book 2: Ssana) This already started interesting with a debate about different cultures' customs between McCoy and a new character. It only gets better from there and the final chapter was... Saddening. I'm now starting with TOS: Child of Two Worlds. I'm only three chapters in, but so far it looks interesting. Non-Trek wise I read Nova #3 which I liked slighly less than #2 but so far they were all good. Batman Rebirth Vol. 1: I am Gotham started slow but got exponentially better towards the end. Due to school I was forced to read Faust, which I found extremely terribly in every possible aspect. Apart from the fact that it's main character is a 50+ year old who wants to have sex with a teenager (That is the plot of what according to wikipedia is considered by many as "the greatest work of German literature"....) the language is absolutely incomprehensible. Seeing as it was released in 1808 that was to be expected, but the previous drama we read (Intrigue and Love) was published 1784 and was a lot clearer in its language. *sigh*
Harlan Ellison, The City on the Edge of Forever original teleplay -- with a very cranky introduction, heh.
I'm about half way done with New Worlds, New Civilizations, a Trek comic history. Lots of interesting tidbits I didn't know. I learned quite a bit about the coloring books and other "toy based" comics from the 1970s.
Kathy Griffin's Celebrity Run-ins - with a break to read the very enjoyable Star Trek: TNG novel Headlong Flight. Wonderful story @Dayton Ward !!
Just finished the Daedalus duology, which I very much enjoyed. Now I'm getting into Surak's Soul, and might dip into Taking Wing at the same time.
After an extended break from reading, I'm about 70 or so pages into Asimov's Foundation. Really interesting so far. Trantor sure seems like the progenitor to Coruscant in some regards.
Will be reading @Christopher's Watching the Clock sometime. Also have Mike Nappa's Annabel Lee and The Raven (named after the Poe poems) to read. Finished Dee Henderson's Traces of Guilt recently.
Finished ZOMBIES ON FILM. A nice survey with lots of gorgeous old movie posters and photos. I was pleased that the book acknowledged that Richard Matheson helped inspire the entire zombie-apocalypse sub-genre, although I was disappointed that Hammer's PLAGUE OF THE ZOMBIES only rated one sentence.
Finished reading the Legacies Series with "Best Defense" (Book 2) by David Mack and "Purgatory's Key" (Book 3) by Dayton Ward & Kevin Dilmore and of course reading "Captain to Captain" (Book 1) by Greg Cox -- together these make a very nice series. Perhaps I read them just a bit too quickly.
I finished the last novel in the Crucible miniseries. I'm now reading No Cats allowed by Miranda James.
My recent read: Reza Aslan's No god But God, his history of Islam. I found it frustrating, though part of that may be that I went into the book with the wrong expectations. I thought it would be something like Diarmid MacCulloch's Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years, an absolutely monstrous tome that was a delight to read. MacCulloch wanders down all the big moments and the odd little heresies and shows how they related to what was happening in the wider world, and the result was a rather engrossing history. No god But God wasn't really like that at all. The history it tells is rather cursory at best, as Aslan is most interested in what Arabic civilization was like in the 6th century CE, the milieu in which Mohammad arose, and the society he created. Islam's explosion out of Arabia, which took it across north Africa and the Straits of Gibralter to the west and to the frontiers of China and India in the east, doesn't interest him at all. Aslan's thesis is that Islam needs a Reformation that takes it back to first principles, and it's the Shi'a (the minority sect) and the Sufi (the mystics) who are closest in thought to what Mohammad's Islam was like. I kept thinking of a John Lennon quote: "Jesus was alright, but the apostles were thick and ordinary." Aslan would probably rewrite that, "Mohammad was alright, but his companions were thick and ordinary." The book was well-written, but it didn't go to the places I hoped it would go. And then, yesterday, I read through some of Malibu's Deep Space Nine comics, which I hadn't looked at in years. I was as interested in the ads as much as I was interested in the stories; page after page of ads for the Ultraverse (both pre- and post-Marvel's acquisition), which I never got into at the time but now feel like I might have missed something. The special written by Marc Lenard was something that I wish someone, somewhere, would have followed up on. It focuses on two characters -- a Romulan ambassador, who happens to be the son of the Romulan Commander from "Balance of Terror," who has been sent to Bajor to open diplomatic relations between the Empire and Bajor, and Ensign Jamie Samantha Kirk, a recent Academy grad assigned to DS9 who is descended from James Tiberius Kirk in some fashion. The story's not bad (it's typical early DS9 -- a visitor, in this case Romulan Ambassador Jannek, arrives at the station, and a mystery follows in his wake that the DS9 characters have to unravel), but the dialogue is sometimes clunky and lacks subtlety. It's the kind of thing you read now, think about where DS9 went, and go, "I really wonder what happened to those characters and what role they might have played in the unfolding galactic crisis."
I finished Grimm: The Chopping Block by John Passarella. I'm currently reading Star Trek: SCE: No Surrender by Jeff Mariotte.