My June Book Report

Many, many things slid to the wayside last week during my failed attempt to finish the WIP. For instance, Aidan was delighted to find that his assignment sheet for school this week was completely empty. That means he doesn't have to do anything! (Uh, no. It means mom flaked and didn't do her prep work last week for this three week school period. It was a long morning).

So today is all about getting non-WIP things done so I can plunge back into it tomorrow with a clear conscience. Ergo, this book report which is now 9 days overdue.

First off: the book I didn't finish. The Difference Engine by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling. Now I remember why I stopped reading Gibson (although I never stopped buying him; the books just kept stacking up waiting for me to finish this). It's official: I give up. I want to like it; it has a lot of cool ideas in it. I think what it needs from me is a quiet afternoon with me, this book, and maybe a cat or two. When my youngest goes to college and I have quiet afternoons like that again, I'll take it back down. In the meantime, I'm moving on to books more amenable to my 10 minutes at a time reading style.

Namely, the sequels to Mona Lisa Overdrive: Idoru and All Tomorrow's Parties. These I liked immensely. Gibson writes teenage girls who have no close friends very well (and I should know), and I particularly like the character of Rydell, who carries over from MLO. At the end of May, my favorite Gibson novel was MLO, but that changed to Idoru, and then to ATP, and in the end wound up being Pattern Recognition. PR doesn't tie in to any of his previous efforts. It is, however, dead brilliant. If you're cynical at all about the forces behind marketing, you'll want to check this one out. It also touches on 09/11, something I've been avoiding in fiction be it books or TV or movies. I know it's been nearly six years now, but I'm still not in a place where fiction about 09/11 doesn't really upset me. Gibson only touches on it, he doesn't try to explain it, there's no "this is what it's all about" moment. From a writing stand point, I think he handled it very well. It did, however, bring my nightmares back for a brief encore.

(And for those who make fun of me for shedding tears for characters who die in Harry Potter; yes, it is much worse when it happens to real people. This is why I don't watch the news).

I'm officially out of Gibson until next month, but I have Spook Country on preorder.

At that point I decided to take a break from sci-fi and read the latest Johanna Lindsey. Feel free to mock. It's like potato chips; I know it's not real food but I can't help myself. Plus, it only takes a day to read one of these. It's sort of the anti-Difference Engine.

Then I read The Ice Dragon by George R. R. Martin. Technically a children's book; it's very, very short. I liked the story, being a sucker for all things ice and snow related. No replacement for the long-awaited Dance with Dragons, though, and it sounds like that one is still more than a year off.
I read a bit of nonfiction this month, Parenting Beyond Belief, a collection of essays on raising children in nonreligious households. More of a "you're not alone" than a how-to, but being a secular homeschooler, I can never hear "you're not alone" enough, frankly. The homeschooling community is a lonely place for an evolutionist to be, I can tell you that. It has essays from Penn Jillette, Richard Dawkins, Michael Shermer, and Julia Sweeney. (Actually, that's kind of a litmus test for whether you'll like the book. Have no idea who Dawkins or Shermer is? Not for you).

I finished off the month with two new releases. The first was Ragamuffin by Tobias Buckell. I quite enjoyed Crystal Rain, and this is a sort of sequel (although it introduces all new characters and only picks up the old ones when the story is well underway, a structure I quite liked). Ragamuffin is even better than Crystal Rain. There are lots of cool ideas in it, the story is fast-paced, and the character of Nashara is very well done, especially when you find out who she is. As you can tell from the cover, she kicks ass, but she goes deeper than that too. You know, I've often been bugged by the scene in the movie The Matrix when Neo and Trinity blow away all the security guards in the lobby before going up to save Morpheus. These are security guards, not agents, so they're human beings who are stuck in the Matrix and have no idea of what's really going on. Do Neo and Trinity have to kill them to get to Morpheus in time? Almost certainly yes. But does it really have to be such a rah-rah moment? Or am I the only one thinking, you know those are really innocent victims if you think about it. No one is offering them the pills. Which is all to say a similar situation faces Nashara at one point, and she sees it like it I would. She does what she has to, but there is no rah-rah about it. Of course that moment is sort of a footnote to a scene that just happened to stand out in my mind. The whole book is both cool and fun (you know, there's just not enough fun around these days. The fun quotient is really what divides the two Stars Wars trilogies in my mind. I like to go to dark places as much as the next person, but having fun has real value too), and I would recommend this book just for the names the ragamuffins give their ships. And like with Crystal Rain, Buckell put the first third of the novel up on his website so you can read it for free.

The last thing I read in June was the little number I mentioned buying because I loved the cover: Mainspring by Jay Lake. Another fast, fun, cool read. (You know, I think I needed these two books to come back from the movie Pan's Labyrinth, which was marvelously well done, and I adore Guillermo Del Toro, but that movie left me seriously bummed out for days) Lake takes the idea of a clockwork universe with God as the ultimate clockmaker and really runs with it. If we're all very, very good, maybe Hayao Miyazaki will make a movie of it.

(You know, I'm tempted to call both of these last two perfect beach reads, but "beach read" calls to mind books with pictures of some woman's feet on the cover. Have you walked down the book aisle in Target lately? They carry nothing but books with close-ups of women's feet, bare or in flip-flops. What could these books possibly be about? I couldn't tell you, the feet are such a turn-off I don't pick them up to read the back copy. But books with airships and gigantic gears or burly women in free fall with big-ass machine guns? That's what I want to read at the beach!)