mostly harmless books

[Part 1]
[Part 2]

Nancy Kress - Inertia. Beggars in Spain (the short story) was one of my first SF reads and; this year, when I read Beggars and Choosers, I wasn’t expecting much, but I loved it. Inertia… not so much. I’ve seen reviewers name this as their favorite and I can see why: original idea, moral dilemmas… But something was missing for me, I can’t put my finger on it. I didn’t care about the characters or their fate, and the dilemma wasn’t interesting enough to make up for it.

Elizabeth Bear - And the Deep Blue Sea. “Reminiscent - without being derivative - of Roger Zelazny’s Damnation Alley“ would have been enough to convince me to read it. (more…)

What do you do if you have to spend 27 hours on a train. Stare out the window; talk to people; read; listen to music. Staring gets boring after a while, I liked the sound of the train better than any music, and the woman in my compartment was nice, but only knew Russian and a couple of words in Romanian and English. So I read.

I had been looking forward to Wastelands: Stories of the Apocalypse for about a year, so I had really high hopes. Too high, apparently. No, it’s not a bad anthology by all means, but it didn’t blow me away either.
(more…)

My trip to Ukraine was awesome (saw a very good friend again, made new friends, saw cool places), but I didn’t spend all the time socializing. Long train journey + lots of downtime meant I also got to read a lot, four books to be exact:

• John Joseph Adams (ed.) - Wastelands: Stories of the Apocalypse
• Charles de Lint - The Ivory and the Horn
• Tim LaHaye & Jerry Jenkins - Left Behind
• Charles de Lint - Memory and Dream

Three of them were mine, the other borrowed from the lovely Peace Corps lounge. I was this close to also reading Richard Adams’ Shardik (solely for the Dark Tower connection, I admit), but then I saw that the “small” book I had borrowed also had really tiny fonts, so it was impossible to read in a couple of days.

Anyway, thoughts on the books forthcoming.

Thanks to my friend Cristi who dragged these all the way from New York to Bucharest, I have new books! I’ve been drooling over Wastelands for about a year now, so I am excited.

I’m going to save them, however, for the trip. 27 hours by train from Bucharest to Kiev is a lot… And since I want to re-read Vellum, Ink is scheduled for after I get back home.