AT THE moment I´m reading
Here Comes Civilization: The Complete Science Fiction of William Tenn Volume II. It's a collection of short stories of the kind you'd have read in the pulpy Sci-Fi magazines of yesteryear if you'd been alive in those decades: Archeological expeditions in the ruins of an extinct Martian civilization, colonists trying to make a living in the swamps of Venus, scientific problem solving while tryig to stay alive in a space ship that has had some kind of accident and it even has a couple of BEM's (Bug-Eyed Monsters) selling 'glass beads' to us hapless Earthlings and a sentient house... And, of course, a lot of 'atomics' in the stories from the late fourties and early fifties.
Also reading (I rarely have only one book 'open' at any one time): Samuel R. Delany's
Aye, and Gomorrah and have just started reading his
The Mad Man and Mick Hume's
Trigger Warning: Is the Fear of Being Offensive Killing Free Speech?, John Preston's
Mr. Benson, Jerome K. Jerome's
Three Men in a Boat, B. R. Burg's
Sodomy and the Pirate Tradition: English Sea Rovers in the Seventeenth-Century Carribean.
After having read only the first couple of pages in an earlier attempt, I read -and throughly enjoyed- Charles Stross'
Saturn's Children which takes place in a post human civilization of sentient robots left to fend for themselves after our own extinction. Both funny and inventive!
I've also recently read Dan Simmons'
Hyperion. (Didn't like it very much, so it took me a couple of weeks to read it... but at least I now know what it's all about).
I'd reccomend to stay away from the comicalization, and instead just pick up Alfred Besters
The Stars My Destination -Which is also a recent read of mine.
Rogue Moon by Algis Budrys, is a brilliant, dark old-school Sci-fi with with a secret moon base, a teleportation devise of sorts, an ancient alien artefact on the Moon and the value of human life. Kinda liked it
Thinking I should try to read them instead of just watching countless filmic interpretations, I began a voyage through Sherlock Holmes... but, erhm, so far I've only read
A Study in Scarlet. I surely will read some more, but it's not on top of my list.
I've also finished Frederik Pohls
Eschaton-trilogy.
For Sci-Fi from the nineties it has a strange old-school-feel about it; even the characters read as if they were written in the fourties or fifties
I had had my fill of it after the fouth novel, but at least I
did read the first four of James P. Hogan's
Giants novels.
M. John Harrison's 'anti-space opera',
The Centauri Device, turned out to not be so 'anti' that it wasn't readable... I think I picked it up after reading an interview with Iain M. Banks.
I really liked the Reeves-Steven's
Search: A Novel of Forbidden History.
Tau Zero by Paul Anderson, was also one of those books it took me a pause to come past the first chapter of, but once I learned to skip the 'who's sleeping with whom'-parts it actually was a 'can't put it down till I'm finished'-read.
Stephen Fry's
The Hippopotamus was, of course -that man has humour, hilarious.
Stephen Baxter's sequel to H. G. Wells
The Time Machine, The Time Ships, I found to be a typical Baxter-yarn; quite enjoyable but a few hundred pages too long.
I really should frequent this thread a little more often...
As to the challenge:
a book published this year
a book you can finish in a day
a book you've been meaning to read
a book recommended by your local librarian or bookseller
a book you should have read in school
a book chosen for you by your spouse, partner, sibling, child, or BFF
a book published before you were born
a book that was banned at some point
a book you previously abandoned
a book you own but have never read
a book that intimidates you
a book you've already read at least once
Sounds like a pretty normal year to me.
Only, I don't have a librarian and Amazon usually recommends stuff I have already read or would never pick up (and I haven't been to a bookseller since I got my e-reader, which I purchased because my local booksellers never had the books I wanted and only could order them home as whatsitcalled? 'print on demand'.
I'm a bit unsure what 'should have read in school' means, I read all I had to and a lot more... but I could probably find something that would have been nice to have read at that time.
Books don't intimidate me -so I'm also a bit unsure about that part.
