My Reading List


 


I'm a voracious reader, and an awful lot of things interest me. (Not everything: sports are a dead issue with me, as are celebrity biographies. (The impulse is always to say "everything interests me' and then, when challenged, say 'everything important" Nah: I've got prejudices, that's all.)
I've put my reading list on another page of this site , but it's rare that I start so many new books more or less at the same time: a loony left-wing paranoid book, a Reagan-era Baen Books space opera, a boys' book from the Twenties, and two fantasy novels. (I usually have about seven going at once.) So I thought I'd comment on them.
(Randomness plays an important part in my reading. I realized long ago that I couldn't read systematically in everything that interested me, so rather than specialize, I've decided to randomize my choice of books. This sparks things up, and as long as my pool is sufficiently varied, I have a time full of surprises.)

Book 1, AIDS Inc. by Jon Rapoport, is a book with a history. A while back, I had a beautiful woman as an extended-stay houseguest who, it turned out, was pretty much insane. Specifically, she was a manic-depressive who had fallen into the worst New Age trap imaginable: "All doctors are phonies and you can medicate yourself better with these herbs." She left a ton of stuff in my basement, a large number of little boxes of herbs, some of the worst herbal tea it's been my pleasure to taste, and a bunch of books, of which this is one.
So I'll probably regret it, but I'm also fascinated about just what sort of wild-eyed tract this is. I'll soon know.

Again, I don't know much about Lords Temporal, or its author, Joseph H. Delaney, except that Mr. Delaney won the Analog Award in 1984, and that Baen Books espoused a sort of tough-minded, vaguely engineer-conservative type of hard science fiction, and it's really fun to read those kinds of books from about the time of the Soviet Union's collapse. The dawning awareness that we might not have Commies in the 21st century made things interesting.
Jim Baen also made sure his books had strong and efficiently told stories. And from the first few chapters, it moves right along..

In very non-random fashion, I'm plowing through this pile of Tom Swift Sr. books I picked up at a book sale, the latest being Tom Swift and his Undersea Search. They're lightweight but enjoyable, and except for a comic-relief gentleman of color, Eradicate Sampson, who got phased out as time went by, I'm enjoying them.

The two fantasy novels, Being a Green Mother by Piers Anthony and Gardens of the Moon by Steven Erikson are both, well, bad, but in almost diametrically opposed ways. They're worth a separate post.

Posted: Sunday - January 09, 2005 at 10:08 PM        

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