I have, officially, too many books-in-progress. (Reading, not writing.) I usually have two or three going at the same time–different ones for different moods, or different locations–but this has just gotten out of hand.
The current list of books I’m partway through reading, plus the reason why I haven’t finished them yet:
- Africa: A Biography of a Continent by John Reader. I’m really enjoying this book, enough so that I’ve been taking it on the bus with me even though it’s a big heavy book. (I usually try to keep my bus-commute reading lightweight and more portable.) I love this book at least in part because it’s so information-dense, but that also means that it doesn’t quite fit every reading mood, so it’s been a little bit of slow going.
- The Best and the Brightest by David Halberstam. Another one that I’m really enjoying. This one got sidetracked for a stupid reason–it was one of two books that I took along on our recent Boston trip, and at some point I asked Matt to carry it for me, and then we both forgot about it. I plan on getting back to it soon. (Maybe on my next trip?)
- John Henry Days by Colson Whitehead. My first encounter with Colson Whitehead was The Intuitionist, which may be one of my favorite books ever. The Intuitionist was brilliant and spooky and clever and stylish and got right up under my skin in disturbing subtle ways. John Henry Days? Not so much. I still love his use of language, but the story is clumsy and self-conscious in all of the ways that The Intutitionist was elegant. I’m still trying to finish it, because it’s not -that- bad, but I don’t have a lot of enthusiasm, so it languishes on my desk. Every few days I read a little bit of it, and at this point I should just sit down and finish it or officially give up on it.
- Uniform Justice by Donna Leon. I’ve been working my way through Donna Leon’s Guido Brunetti mysteries–I’ve lost track of who recommended them, but whoever it was, thank you! They’re lovely. I only started this one two or three days ago, and I’ve been keeping it around for reading before I go to bed, or in the bath, just as pure pleasure reading.
- The Wicked Day by Mary Stewart. This is part of a whole series of Arthur retellings, and I’m enjoying reading them, I guess, except that the whole enterprise feels a little hollow. She’s a great writer, the whole thing is kind of neat, but I may just be burnt out on retellings of myths and fairy tales and whatnot. What’s the point, really? Why do so many writers (and so many readers) get so much enjoyment from rehashings of familiar stories? And yet, here I am halfway through the fourth book in the series.
- Quarantine by Greg Egan. This is the most recent addition to the books-in-progress stack, and the one that I think has finally put me over the edge, into territory where I really just need to finish reading some of these before I start anything new. I might finish it tonight, though, which would help.
I lost a good ten minutes of my life the other day, looking for my copy of Quarantine. David and I have been talking a little bit about Greg Egan, and it got me wondering if I would still like the books and stories that originally made me an Egan fan, and I wanted Quarantine to be my test case.
In case it’s entertaining to any of you, my interior monologue while wandering the apartment looking at bookshelves went something like this: “The title’s in pink on the spine, and it’s got to be here somewhere … no, that’s Nina Hoffman, wrong pink spine … I own a copy of Diaspora? Have I read this? … is David going to want his copy of Blindsight back? … I do still own this, right? I didn’t somehow purge all of my Greg Egan books in a fit of pique after Teranesia? … I own a copy of Schild’s Ladder? Have I read this? … This is probably why people alphabetize their bookshelves, to avoid this exact situation.” I found the book eventually, and it’s holding up pretty well against my memory of it. There’s a lot of highlighting of brand names that’s jarring at first, and I imagine that the neuro-mod stuff was way cooler when the book first came out (fifteen years ago!). The book also has the standard Greg Egan flaws–the characters aren’t characters so much as vehicles for plot motion, for instance. But it’s not trying to be a character book, it’s an ideas book, and it’s still a really good one.
Posted Monday, April 21st, 2008 at 7:34 pm. Filed under: personal > science fiction.
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Can you say more about why you didn’t like Teranesia?
It’s been a long time, but I’m pretty sure that my reaction is based entirely on the vicious caricatures of science studies. My memory of the cool-science quantum-evolution stuff is entirely colored by how angry and sad the “bad academics” subplot left me.
Ah, okay. I liked the quantum evolution stuff, too, but I know some people didn’t, which is why I was wondering.
Before you can alphabetize your bookshelves, you have to actually *have* enough bookshelves to hold your books.
Sounds like you’re ahead of the game.
You can alphabetize the stacks on the floor? The ones that are holding up the board of plywood which servers as your table?
[...] critical mass.John Henry Days by Colson Whitehead. My first encounter with Colson Whitehead was The Intuitionist, which may be one of my favorite books ever. The Intuitionist was brilliant and spooky and clever and stylish and got right up under my …Susan Marie Groppi - http://www.susangroppi.com [...]
We actually passed the “enough bookshelves for our books” point a while ago! There are stacks of books all over the house. I can generally guess whether a book is on the shelves or in a stack somewhere, though–books that I haven’t read in a long time are almost certainly on the shelves.
We need a bigger apartment, really.