Saturday, January 15, 2005
On the bookshelf
China Mieville's Iron Council, reviewed here. I really like Mieville's writing, but it takes me a long time to get through his books. Another review here confirms my early suspicion, but I'm seeing it through to the end.
New York: An Illustrated History a book version of the film by Ric Burns. Now I want to see the film. My father left home when he was eighteen to make it in music in New York City. He returned home several months later to a career as a watchmaker and jeweler after some bad experiences. It was 1931, after all, and I can't imagine it was the ideal time for a young man hoping to make it big in a big city. I wondered if I'd see any photo of my dad ... a hope with barely a prayer, I know.
Elaine Cunningham's Shadows in the Darkness, which my local library shelved in New SF, but seemed to me to be 80% hard boiled private detective mystery. A nice change of pace, though the plot does turn on a predictable piece of fantasy. My wife would've guessed it by page 30. It took me a few more chapters. Caves of Steel by Asimov remains the ultimate SF/Mystery fusion tome to me.
At the library today, I picked up Tony Daniel's Metaplanetary, reviewed here. His new book, Superluminal was on the New SF shelf, and looked interesting, but I wanted to read the first few hundred pages of the story.
This month's spiritual reading is William Shannon's Seeds of Peace, found partway down the page here and here.
Now that I've practiced hyperlinking, I think I'm heading offline for a bit of reading before bed.
