Since January, I've probably read a few dozen books. From what I can remember, here's a quick summary.

Medieval Fantasy Can't say as I've read any outstanding medieval fantasy books but here's a quick list.

'Fool's Fate' by Robin Hobb was the book I was most looking forward to this winter. It's the finale in the second trilogy about the bastard child of a king whose role in the functioning of the kingdom is essential, but whose very existence must be hidden from the populace at large. It's a very powerful series and this second trilogy ends in an unusual fashion with some loose ends left and our hero finding personal fufillment in a very non-traditonal way. I was little dissappointed with this ending, but it was still quite a few notches better than most everything else out there.

A few of the Terry Pratchett's 30 odd 'Discworld' books were pretty good. Discworld is a flat as a pancake world with the usual assortment of wizards, wizzards, knights, witches, powerful gods, trolls, and other such stuff. Pratchett stuffs his books full of bizarre jokes that had me laughing my ass off at times. Despite the absurdity of books, Pratchett still manages to make me love his characters. Sam Vimes, head of the city guard seems to be Pratchett's most realized character, and the Discworld books with Vimes stand out in my mind as being the best.

'Daughter of the Forest' by Juliet Marillier was decent. Set in historic Ireland around the time the British staged their first invasions, the story was based upon a real Irish myth, and even though it was very fantasy like, there was a ring of authenticity about it that I enjoyed. The other two books in the series are weaker, but the heroines in each book have very distinct personalities from each other that helped keep my interest.

'Transformation', 'Revelation', and 'Restoration' by Carol Berg make up a second rate fantasy series with a main character who is the biggest masochist I've ever seen as a hero. He keeps getting himself enslaved and tortured. But I read all three, so what can I tell you. Enough there to keep me interested.

Finished up 'The Assassins of Tamurin' by S.D. Tower a few days ago. Light stuff, but an enjoyable enough read. The story of an orphan who is trained as an assassin and is then assigned the task of seducing a king. Just enough to keep me interested on a weekend when I needed something to preoccupy me. I wizzed through the last 200 pages during lunch and breaks in one afternoon.

'The Deed of Parksenarrion' by Elizabeth Moon advertised itself as the 'The Best Fantasy trilogy since Tolkien, all in one place'. It got four and a half stars at Amazon and I figured it must have some merit with that claim and that rating. Wrong. Complete crap. I couldn't finish it. Very boring military fantasy, with no redeeming qualities that I could find whatsoever. It took me a week to get through the first 150 pages, and then I just could not read a page more.

I also read a few fantasies set in the modern day. In my mind, this is a slightly different category from medieval fantasy. Neil Gaiman and Sean Stewart are very good writers in this category. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to read anything new by either one of them.

'A Fistful of Sky' by Nina Kiriki Hoffman is a story about a woman who grows up in a modern day family of witches in Southern California. Not spectacular, but the dilemmas she faces as she comes to grips with her own particular brand of witchery are fun to watch.

'Dead Until Dark', 'Living Dead in Dallas', and 'Club Dead' by Charlaine Harris were all decent reads. The main character is a psychic waitress in Louisiana. Her love interest is a vampire named Bill who was a soldier in the Civil War. It's Vampire: The Masquerade'-like with a southern twist.

Another modern day witch story, 'Dime Store Magic' by Kelley Armstrong, had nothing going for it other than the very nice looking woman's leg on the front cover. I bought it for my plane ride to Kansas City and I could not finish it. Just plain stupid, with stereotyped characters and a transparently idiotic plot.

I find that science fiction requires more effort, but usually has a better payoff. Once again, nothing really great here.

The best science fiction book I read these last six months was 'The Psychohistorical Crisis' by Donald Kingsbury. It's supposed to be a sequel to Asimov's 'Foundation' trilogy, which I did not read and do not intend to. 'The Psychohistorical Crisis' was about an organization that ruled a galactic empire using imaginary science that could predict the future of human political trends. The main character is an unwitting pawn of an revolutionary group that is subtley nudging cultures to force the main group into a crisis of unpredictability. Even though the mathematics was imaginary, Kingsbury makes some interesting points about political stagnation and the value of chaos.

In the 'Orphans of Earth' series by Sean Williams and William Dix, an automated process sets up a ring around a planet being explored by an expedition from Earth. Inside the ring are a number of advanced technological gifts, including a faster than light drive and instantaneous interstellar communications. Shortly after the ring structure is discovered, a seemingly separate alien invasion force enters the solar system and completely obliterates the Earth and all traces of humanity, leaving only the expeditionary force to seek revenge. Decent, not really exceptional.

'Revelation Space' and 'Chasm City' by Alastair Reynolds. A slightly genetically modified humanity which has had colonies in other star systems for a few centuries explores the artifacts of a long dead alien race. Dark science fiction, with immoral main characters and not so happy endings. Very well thought out with good science, but I like happy endings and characters I can root for.

Walter Jon Williams came out with the second book in his 'Dread Empire's Fall' trilogy, a very well written space opera. As usual, Williams delivers an engaging plot and strong characters. That's all Williams wants to do here. No message, no technological wonders, just a good read.

'Red Thunder' was the best thing I've read by John Varley in while. In the late 70s, Varley was at the top of his game and wrote some truly innovative stuff. After that he sort of sputtered out, only rarely producing a lower quality novel This isn't on that level of 70s stuff, but like Walter Jon Williams, Varley is a proven craftsman who can engage you in a plot and make you like his characters, and he does so here. In this case, four teens from Cape Canaveral, a drunken burned out astronaut, and an idiot savant technical genius build a space ship out of railroad tank cars in order to beat the Chinese landing the first man on Mars. It is quite fun, and Varley has done his research so that the steps they go through to raise money and build the ship seem realistic, and he covers a lot of problems with space travel that many other authors tend to ignore. Well, the drive for the space ship is completely imaginary, but with everything else seeming so realistic, I was willing to let Varley get away with this one bit of fancy.

On the other hand, Scott MacKay did not try hard enough to make his novel 'The Meek' scientifically plausible. 'The Meek' are a race of superhuman mutants living on the asteroid Ceres. By ingesting a blue fungus they get psychic powers and the ability to survive in a very cold vacuum. Underneath the surface of Ceres they have built a Utopian paradise that seems like the surface of a planet, but they want to live on an actual planet. So they find a rogue planet wandering outside the solar system that happens to have an oxygen atmosphere, an ocean and a life (kept warm by geothermal energy that none-the-less doesn't seem to provide any excess volcanic activity), and then use atomic thrusters to manuever to send their asteroid to the planet. Coincidently, the flight plan for their asteroid happens to pass so extremely close to Earth that the humans mistakenly think they are attacking. I'm sorry, too many stupid stretches, didn't work, try again.

'The Wreck of the River of Stars' by Michael Flynn. The solar system has been colonized by ships with sixty mile wide sails that catch a photonic wind from the sun, the most famous of which was 'The River of Stars'. Those sails have been replaced by fusion drives though, and 'The River of Stars' has refitted with the new drives and works as a marginally profitable freight hauler. Then on a voyage to Jupiter, the vessel has its drives knocked out by a stray asteroid and things begin to deteriorate. In my case, 'The River of Stars' met its final end when I accidently put it in with my wash.

Mainstream fiction I don't read a lot of mainstream fiction. As I explained back in December, I usually figure a book isn't all great if they have to put 'a novel' in the title in case people can't figure out what they are reading, so there are only two books in this category. One I bought for a plane ride and the other was loaned to me by another attorney who told me I had to read it.


I read 'Life of Pi' by Yann Martel on my flight home from Kansas City. It is the story of an East Indian boy named Pi Patel, whose father is a zookeeper. As an adolescent, Pi becomes a follower of Islam, Christianity, and Hinduism at the same time, much to the chagrin of his parents and the local leaders of those religions. Following certain disturbing political events, the family decides to pack up and move to Canada, selling many of the zoo animals and transporting some with them for sale in Canada. Their ship sinks in the middle of the Pacific, leaving Pi and a few zoo animals as the sole surivors. Stuck on a lifeboat for several months, Pi learns to catch rain and kill sharks, as well as deal with other unexpected adventures. The book moves slowly until the boat capsizes, but afterwards it is very engaging. At the end, the narrator leaves us with following question: given two possible explanations for a certain event, one of which is improbable but wonderful and emotionally fulfilling, and another which is more probable but bleak and depressing, since we will never absolutely know which is true, shouldn't we pick the one that makes us more happy? My answer to the question is no. Take the more probable one, learn to expand your sense of wonder, and seek emotional fulfillment elsewhere. Anyway, decent read.

'The DaVinci Code' by Dan Brown. Another attorney in the office wanted me to read this very popular novel, and I had been curious for a while. The curator of the Louvre is murdered in the famous Paris museum, and clues he left at the scene lead police to believe that Harvard professor of medieval symbology is responsible. It turns out that the curator is part of an secret religious society, and he has left an encrypted message at the scene of his death that can only be deciphered by the Harvard professor and the curator's granddaughter. The professor and the granddaughter escape the French police, and travel in France and England seeking to decipher the message and find out who really commited the murder. Very fast paced, lots of interesting medieval and religious trivia. The sort of book that would make a great movie. Unfortunately, it would really, really, really piss a lot of Christians off. If they made this into a movie it would get banned in some countries, and would result in movie theaters being burned in others. It's a very good read.

I should say though that 'The DaVinci Code' is very similar to a book called 'Foucault's Pendulum' by Umberto Eco that I read over a decade ago. 'Foucault's Pendulum' also involves secret medieval religious societies, encrypted messages, and famous museums. In fact, 'Foucault's Pendulum' reads like a satire of 'The DaVinci Code' even though it was written fifteen years earlier. The secret societies and the codes are supposed to be a game. Two guys having fun, making as many obtuse connections between secretive organizations as they can. Then the connections take on a life of their own. 'Foucault's Pendulum' is a harder read. It's more intellectually dense and it doesn't have the engaging pacing of 'The DaVinci Code'. 'DaVinci Code' was a funner read, and really did have a lot interesting stuff in it. A lot of people have talked about the controversial material in 'DaVinci Code', but it is very clear that Brown must have read 'Foucault's Pendulum', and I think that his supposed connections are supposed to be just as fictional.

Non-fiction Just two books here as well. I've been so overwhelmed at work that I haven't been able to get myself to expend the effort to work through much non-fiction.

"Nature via Nuture" by Matt Ridley (2003) is a well-written, very enjoyable examination of how human behavior is guided by biology. Ridley believes we are not blank slates, but are instead guided by genetic switches that influence but do all aspects of behavior. I highly recommend this book for anyone interested in the nature/nuture debate. Ridley's research is very thorough, but his writing makes for a pleasurable read. I discuss this book more here.

'Songs of the Gorilla Nation: My Journey through Autism' by Dawn Prince-Hughes describes how the author's experience watching gorillas in a zoo caused her to understand herself as a social creature and inspired her to get a PhD. The author's description of her youth does seem very much in line with my understanding of Asperger's Syndrome. She had a number of obsessive behaviors and some very strange reactions to social situations. At the age of sixteen she left her family and wandered the country living as a homeless person until she ended up working as an exotic dancer in Seattle, experimenting with drugs and relationships with women. During the day, she would visit the Seattle zoo and eventually got a job there which lead her to college and her PhD. Not someone who would ever be able to function as a teacher, she now writes and does research for a living.

I wasn't all that taken with 'Songs of the Gorilla Nation'. It sort of jerks around through the author's life and doesn't give that clear a picture of where she was or what she was doing. It's a short book though; I plowed through the last half of it while doing my laundry this evening, and it does give some insights into the autistic mind.

Next up

I'm just starting 'The Science of Good and Evil' by Michael Shermer. I'm not expecting something as well written or well thought out as 'Nature via Nuture' but it seems to be an attempt to explain the broad outlines of human morality in biological terms. It'll probably go into planned follow up entries to the good deeds entries.

Science fiction-wise, I'm looking forward to the finale of Walter Jon William's 'Fall of the Dread Empire' series and Bruce Sterling's 'The Zenith Angle'. In medieval fantasy, I'm currently working my way through Gene Wolfe's 'Knight' and I'm hoping to enjoy George R.R. Martin's next offering in his excellent 'Song and Fire and Ice' series when it comes out soon. In the modern fantasy, Sean Stewart has finally come out with a new novel after a few years hiatus, and I will suck it down like soda as soon as I can get my grubby paws on it. At some point, I'll also try to wrestle down the first two books of Neal Stephenson's mainstream 'Baroque Cycle'.