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?