Books, books, books

So far this 2007 I’ve been consuming bunches of books. Kind of continuing my trend from last year, though based what I’ve gone through in these first six weeks of the year, my year-end list might be much larger.

• Lisey’s Story, by Stephen King. His latest, pretty good but not the best he’s ever written. I had a pretty good hunch where the plot was going and I was mostly right. What makes it interesting is all the backstory which is where all the real stuff is happening.
• Manifold: Origin, by Stephen Baxter. Rounding out the Manifold series he wrote (the first two of which I read in the last months of 2006). Interesting concepts, all of them (he wrote them as possible solutions/scenarios to the Fermi paradox), but one thing Baxter generally isn’t good at is characterization. And Origin, plot-wise, is the weakest of the bunch; a lot of stuff happens that has nothing to do with the final reveal, or the overall point of the story.
• High Desert of Central Oregon and Bend in Central Oregon, both by Raymond Hatton, which I reviewed respectively on Hack Bend here and here.
• The God Delusion, by Richard Dawkins. Sure to be controversial. Oddly enough, it’s the first Dawkins book I’ve read, even though he’s been publishing since the ’70s. He’s been called “Darwin’s rottweiler,” and that’s pretty much in full force here.
• Mona Lisa Overdrive, by William Gibson. Pretty good read—it’s Gibson, after all—but I think my least favorite of his three “Sprawl” novels. Neuromancer set a pretty high bar.
• I’ve been going through all the trade paperbacks of the Fables comic series (available at the library, which is very cool). This is a really brilliant series. The premise: All those fairy tales and fables of lore are real, but they’ve all been driven out of their worlds by a mysterious Adversary, and live in New York City in their own private and secret community named Fabletown. King Cole is the mayor, Snow White the deputy mayor, like that. For mature readers. I’m through the first seven trades, at least three were this year.
• The Ghost Map, by Steven Johnson. Pretty good, about the cholera outbreak in Victorian London in 1854 and how that changed science and cities.
• I’m also finishing up Bend, Overall by Scott Cook, though that’s quite a bit shorter than most of the others. It’s a guidebook read.

Next book will be fiction again. I haven’t decided on one definitively yet; it’s between Idoru (William Gibson), Wolves of the Calla or Cell (Stephen King), Singularity Sky (Charles Stross), and A Deepness in the Sky (Vernor Vinge). Or, perhaps I’ll read several concurrently…