Books in September

I'm in no way finishing off this post as a way of procrastinating on cleaning my house. No way at all. Just so you know.

OK, I read six books that fall pretty nicely into three pairs.

The first pair is novel research, sort of. Having finished the first draft, I'm plowing through some books filled with information I'll never actually use. It's more about making sure I'm not getting anything subtle wrong rather than looking for more to include. At any rate, as a cluster of my characters are Hindus, and as most of what I've read on Hinduism I read nearly twenty years ago (I'm suddenly feeling very old...), I started with The Complete Idiot's Guide to Hinduism. I like this series of books, they are good places to start to get a general knowledge of something, and the list of further reading in the back offers lots of next steps. I'm not such a fan of the layout, with the sidebars and cartoon characters talking in boxes in the margins, or of the title. I'm not a complete idiot, thank you very much, and I don't need something broken up into teeny tiny bits to grasp the concepts. But I've read a few of these on some pretty diverse topics and they've all been exactly what I needed to get a general picture of some vast area of knowledge, so I guess they do the job. I followed that up with Hindu Scriptures, translated and edited by R.C. Zaehner, which condenses down the Vedas, Upanishads and Bhagavad-Gita into a reasonable size. Some of these I've read before, back in the day. I particularly liked this edition; Zaehner showed exactly where he made his edits and what was contained in the sections he removed. I liked that feature; most abridged texts don't bother to tell you what they took out. But when his notes would say "various mythological references removed" I was a bit bummed. I would have liked to have read those.

The second category of books: books by Robert Louis Stevenson. I had to read Kidnapped, as I've never read it before and Aidan is reading it for history. It's easier to correct his papers if I know the story. (This time instead of a book report summarizing the plot he wrote an essay exploring one of the book's themes, which he enjoyed. Not as much as playing Lego Game, of course; it's still school). After I read Kidnapped I decided to pick up Treasure Island. I remember starting this book many times as a kid but never getting through it. I'm not sure why, they read as fun adventure fiction to me now.

My last pair were new books read just for fun. Both are the latests installments in a series, but both work just fine as stand-alones. The first was Zoe’s Tale by John Scalzi. Zoe's Tale is a retelling of The Last Colony from the point of view of Zoe, the teenaged daughter of the two main characters in The Last Colony. Sort of like Rosencratz and Guildenstern are Dead. It's a cool premise (I've always wanted to read the Neville Longbottom version of the same seven years at Hogwarts...), and Zoe is a terrific character, a smart and sarcastic teenager who felt absolutely real. This makes a nice companion piece to TLC and I enjoyed it.

The second was Sly Mongoose by Tobias Buckell. I loved the settings, the floating cities of a Venus-like planet, the claustrophobic feel of being trapped on a spaceship where things are quickly going to hell; it was very cool. Pepper is the main character in this one, and Pepper is always a great bad-ass character. I also liked the new character of Timas, a teenaged boy who has being doing some pretty extreme and heartbreaking things for the sake of his family. Now on the subject of zombies, I'm pretty neutral. I don't go out of my way to see zombie movies or whatever, but I don't avoid them either. I only mention because if you are into zombies, you're going to love this book. Buckell has an interesting twist on zombies here which I found intellectually engaging, but I don't have that visceral response that hard-core zombie fans have. To be fair to zombies, I don't really get the over-the-top way vampire lovers love their vampires either. I've read Ann Rice's early books a couple of times each, and I enjoy them (particularly the language), but I don't love them the way many of her fans do. I think I digressed somewhere in there... OK, to wrap up, Sly Mongoose, well-crafted story of people hanging on by their fingernails even before the zombies show up.

OK, I really must clean up around here before I drive into work for a meeting. I could make a fourth cat out of all the hair floating around here...