Things I’m in the middle of:

Foren­sics for Dum­mies, Dou­glas P. Lyle — What it says on the tin. Sim­plis­tic but it does the trick as all I’m look­ing for a smat­ter­ing of back­ground and some vocab­u­lary lessons. The inter­est­ing stuff will come later. 

29th Years Best Sci­ence Fic­tion, Dozios — Dip­ping in and out. This will take weeks.

For the Love of a Dog, Patri­cia B. McConnell — Do dogs have emo­tion­al lives? 

Poems (pub­lished in 1820), John Keats — because I’m lis­ten­ing to Dan Sim­mons’ Hype­r­i­on. Mak­ing my brain mushy. 

Catch­ing up on some old issues of Clarkesworld, Azi­mov’s, Ana­log, etc. I’ll owe you all a post on a cou­ple of short sto­ries that you should look up.

Things I finished:

Mechanique: A Tale of the Cir­cus Tre­saulti, Genevieve Valen­tine — A rust, and brown, and dark­ly stained cir­cus of half humans and half mon­sters (or are they?) trav­el­ing through an equal­ly stained world. There are love sto­ries, and war sto­ries, and a bit of a caper. But most­ly there is an odd, eerie, strange­ly hope­ful mag­ic. It’s creepy; I loved it. 

Dev­il Said Bang (Sand­man Slim), Richard Kadrey — Fourth in the series that shows clear signs of hav­ing orig­i­nal­ly been intend­ed to be a tril­o­gy but now extend­ed to at least six. Stark, who is now Lucifer, escapes too eas­i­ly from Hell to L.A. Too eas­i­ly con­sid­er­ing the so much was made of the impos­si­bly of said return in the pre­vi­ous book. Also a lot of jokes about Hel­l’s bureau­cra­cy. Rote appear­ances by cast mem­bers from the pre­vi­ous books — just so you remem­ber them and the oblig­a­tory roman­tic com­pli­ca­tion that has all the heat of my break­fast. Weak enough that I may not both­er with the remain­der of the series. Not weak enough that I’ll pass on any­thing else Mr. Kadrey writes out of hand. Butch­er Bird which was, by his own admis­sion, con­sid­er­ably less com­mer­cial, remains one my favorites. BTW — there are some excerpts from a Locus inter­view with Kardey posted. 

Up next:

I also spent a lot of time sam­pling mate­r­i­al and adding to the “Read Next” pile. Most of the sam­ple are of books about foren­sics, some pop­u­lar some tech­ni­cal, that I’m look­ing over while I con­tem­plate how to divvy up foren­sics capa­bil­i­ties in a mixed tech world. I’ve also come to the con­clu­sion that one of my dream library jobs exists, that it’s local, and that I’d have to com­mit mur­der to get it. (There’s an incum­bent and mur­der­ing a ref­er­ence librar­i­an who man­ages a foren­sics library has got to be one of the stu­pid­est ideas ever. But it might make a good sto­ry plot. Hmmmm…)

Going onto the Read Next — Fic­tion pile are the newest from C. Valente The Girl Who Fell Beneath Fairy­land and Led the Rev­els There. Also Han­nu Rajanie­mi brings back Jean de Flam­beur (Quan­tum Thief) in The Frac­tal Prince.

Also seek­ing rec­om­men­da­tions from any­one who has read Stew­art O’Nan. Best book to start with? 

Facebooktwitterlinkedinmail