As I mentioned in an earlier entry, I've been doing a lot of reading lately. Thought I'd post a few comments on the highlights:

Redshift, edited by Al Sarrantonio. As many reviewers have noted, this anthology oversells itself in its introductory matter, billing itself as a Dangerous Visions for the 21st century. Having read it, I don't think it's as ground-breaking as that. Still, it's a solid anthology. There were a couple of duds, but they were mostly short pieces. I'm not sure how many of the authors were really responding to Sarrantonio's challenge, as he states it in the introduction, to write stories that would change the course of SF for the next 25 years. The offerings by Wolfe, LeGuin, and Haldeman, for example, were solid stories, but not up to the best I've seen by those authors, who have almost certainly already influenced the course of SF over the next 25 years. And many of the best stories in the book weren't the most "original" or "taboo-breaking". Still, the book was well worth a read.

Issola by Steven Brust. Wheeeee! That's my one-word take on this book. The great thing about Issola is the sense of reading an author who's totally comfortable with his characters, and completely in command of his narrator's voice. He gets the whole gang that we've come to know and love in the Taltos series together, winds them up, and they're off, with Vlad wise-cracking all the way. It's not my favorite of the series, but it's definitely a worthy entry. I read it in a single sitting.

I'm tempted to splurge and buy The Paths of the Dead in hardcover. (For those following along at home, The Paths of the Dead is part one of The Viscount of Adrilankha, which is the sequel to The Phoenix Guards and Five Hundred Years After, which are set in the same universe as the Taltos series, but at an earlier point in time. And, as Vlad Taltos would say, I'm sure that answers all your questions.)

The Damnation Game by Clive Barker. I don't really think of myself as a horror reader. If I read enough Clive Barker, I may change my mind, although I'm not sure if Clive Barker still thinks of himself as a horror writer. I discovered Barker when I picked up Imajica (which just to confuse matters is not a horror novel at all, but very definitely a fantasy novel) at the local library. I enjoyed it enough that I've been slowly working my way through the rest of Barker's works, in no particular chronological or thematic order. The Damnation Game was pretty good: it has a cool villain, and some very effective Barkerian imagery. Still, I think it's my least favorite Barker I've read so far. But it was Barker's first novel, so it would really be kind of depressing if it were better than the others. Writers should get better as they age.

Agent of Change by Sharon Lee and Steve Miller. People kept recommending this Liaden Universe series to me, and I kept thinking, "Well, okay, but this really doesn't look like my sort of thing." I finally broke down and read one, and it was more my sort of thing than I'd thought. They're fun SF-adventure-romance, but the characters and the cultures they come from and the universe around them are convincingly portrayed; I didn't get that icky sense that I was just reading the authors' favorite wish-fulfillment fantasy. This would make a killer SF TV series. I'm not quite hooked yet, but I'll probably read the next book in the series one of these days.

There are a couple of other books that I've read in the last couple of weeks that are worth commenting on, but I think this entry contains enough literary meanderings for now.