November reads:
The first half of the month was scary-busy with Real Life stuff -- the run-up to, and aftermath of the election left me no time to power up the Nook or iPad for casual reading, so I only finished some audiobooks in the first 16 days of the month.
11/02/2012 Star Trek: Vulcan’s Soul I: Exodus (audiobook) by Josepha Sherman and Susan Shwartz
11/10/2012 Star Trek: Sarek (audiobook) by A.C. Crispin
11/16/2012 Star Trek: Vulcan’s Soul II: Exiles (audiobook) by Josepha Sherman and Susan Shwartz
11/17/2012 Space: 1999: Phoenix of Megaron (2nd Edition) by John Rankine
11/21/2012 Lord of the Trees by Philip José Farmer
11/22/2012 Opus: The Complete Library Sunday Comics 2003-2008 (gn) by Berkeley Breathed
11/24/2012 The Mad Goblin by Philip José Farmer
11/25/2012 The Adventures of Venus (gn) by Gilbert Hernandez
11/25/2012 The Other Log of Phileas Fogg by Philip José Farmer
11/27/2012 Star Trek: Vulcan’s Soul III: Epiphany (audiobook) by Josepha Sherman and Susan Shwartz
11/29/2012 The Coils of Time by A. Bertram Chandler
Let's talk about the "Vulcan's Soul" trilogy by Sherman and Shwartz. Good lord in heaven, are those ever L O N G! It's about as "decompressed" as the Star Wars prequels. That's not a compliment, by the way. There's about enough story for one thick book. The rest is kinda endless padding. Didn't care for them at all. If there were abridged versions of books 2 & 3, I'd recommend someone try those out. Way too much for an unabridged reading.
Had to stop after the first Vulcan's Soul audiobook (my copy of part II was damaged, and I had to find another copy) and slotted in an unabridged reading of A.C. Crispin's Sarek, another Star Trek novel. This is far from Crispin's best work, and feels so out of character compared to her other Trek titles that I wonder if it was ghost rewritten, like Margaret Wander Bonanno's Star Trek: Probe, which is from the same era.
Powys Media finally fixed the ordering snafus with Phoenix of Megaron, so I got a copy to read. This was very enjoyable. It's always fun to drop back into the Space: 1999 universe -- more fun than actual episodes of the series,
The final volume of the Berkeley Breathed "Complete Library" of Bloom County/Outland/Opus. This final volume was entirely new to me; I wasn't taking a newspaper in the years while these were running as a Sunday-only strip. Nowhere near as good as the Glory Years, but still enjoyable as Opus's last hurrah.
Blew through a few more Phil Farmer novels from the early '70's. Lord of the Trees/The Mad Goblin are the twin sequels to A Feast Unknown, which I read last month. They were originally published as both halves of an Ace Double. They were awesome fun, but considerably toned down, when compared with their predecessor. The Other Log... was something of a chore to get through. YMMV.
I've been a big fan of A. Bertram Chandler since reading the SFBC's first couple of omnibuses of John Grimes novels in 2002. Since I was unemployed for most of the spring, summer & fall of that year (from right after the Salt Lake Olympics until October) I had lots of time to research and collect Chandler's work. I even recognized an error in the placement of one of the novels in those first two omnibuses, so I started emailing SFBC editor Andrew Wheeler, and gave him suggested contents for the rest of the series -- which he followed. That's why I get a "Thank You" in the final three volumes of the series, John Grimes: Reserve Commodore, John Grimes: Rim Runner and John Grimes: Rim Commander.
Anyway, an e-book publisher has acquired reprint rights to some of Chandler's non-Grimes novels and published 8 of them (all titles I've never read) for Kindle, Nook, etc. in September or October. I have moldering old paperbacks of all these, but I find I really prefer reading e-texts over the tiny print in an old Ace Double, and as the prices were reasonable, I bought all 8. I started with The Coils of Time, from 1965. It's clearly a potboiler written in a few weeks, with all the pulpy plot holes one would expect. But Chandler's writing has a vividness that I find appealing, so it was a fun read. I'll be reading more of these in December.