I finished, at last, The Left Hand of Darkness, the canonical novel by Urusla K. LeGuin.
Even though I'm not in school any more and thus don't have that as an excuse, I'm still a tragically slow reader, this is one thing among many which I hope to get much better at.
Anyway, the book. I loved it. Both because the story was good, and because the gender thing was clever and neat (at least for 300 pages), and probably most importantly because it is such a clever example of ethnography. I like the way that it is able to evoke that genre and style so effectively.
So what's next on the reading list?
Melissa Scott's The Jazz.
I've often thought about (sometimes even here on tychoish) about cyberpunk, and sort of the next thing in this "intellectual tradition," and I think about people like Cory Doctorow, or what William Gibson has done in the last ten years, and I'm underwhelmed. The wonder, the adventure (which is often exchanged for 'thril[ler]'), and the way that the genre initially dealt with class are all gone.
And then I read the first 25 pages of The Jazz, and I realized that cyberpunk is in fact, not dead. Not impossible in the post 2001 world.
And I am happy.