Haven’t done a reading update in a while. But I’ve been reading. This weeks, reading update is very technologically involved. Keeping track of how much I’m reading is part of my New Years resolution (and reading more by-proxy) so this post falls into that vein.
I read John Scalzi’s Old Man’s War in ebook last week. I’m not typically a Scalzi fanboy, and I think I became fully aware of him for the first time in the last year, as a result of listening to something PNH said somewhere. Sorry for the vague details. I really enjoyed the book, in any case, and I’ll probably read the next few soon. I’ve always been sort of ambivalent about Scalzi’s online persona, not quite sure why; the fiction is pretty damn good.
I’ve also opened, but not really gotten into Tobias Buckell’s Crystal Rain, soon.
More interestingly, I think, I’ve been working through a backlog of Strange Horizon’s stories that I bookmarked a while ago on my iPod Touch (part of my recent computer upgrade) which is great for reading whilst eating or whatever. I really look forward to the next release of the software update in a few weeks, offline readers, better syncing and what not seems like a pretty good deal.
Anyway, I’m reading a series of short stories about fantastic cities by Benjamin Rosenbaum, whose work I’m quite fond of. These stories, are quite short–I’d be inclined to call them flash fiction–and they remind me of a more serious Alien’s You Will Meet. They’re both second person, they’re both short, they’re both cataloging an imaginary and an open-ended collection of objects. I’m on the fourth, I think, and I have to say that I really like the way that it melds the sort of alternate history/divided united states genre with a series of stories that at least appears to catalogue something that doesn’t exist–and thus explores a sense of wonder in the utterly banal. I had a roommate (Hi H.! I hope I described that well enough!) who was interested in something that, felt from where I was sitting pretty similar. And cool.
What are you reading?
tycho garen 20 June 2008