Books in January

Well, I didn't quite crack 100 books read last year. That's a goal I've had since forever but I've never quite pulled it off. My other goal, to bring my To Be Read pile down to a more respectable 20 or so is still far off; I'm at 231 at the moment. I tried to keep my Christmas and birthday book hauls smallish (and I see some sort of ebook in my near future; I'm running out of space for books here). In defense of my massive TBR stack: there are a lot of Sanskrit plays, Tacitus and Herodotus, and the like in there. It takes a special mood for me to tackle those. But this should probably be the year I take on Larry Niven.

In the meantime, I'm still reading Sufi things for research. One of my characters is named Rabi'a, so it seemed about time I read an entire book just about her: Doorkeeper of the Heart: Versions of Rabi’a by Charles Upton, a collection of poetry that is attributed to her. Short but sweet. I also picked up The Alchemy of Happiness by al-Ghazzali, which I found more dogmatic and not particularly sufi. But the Conference of the Birds by Darid Ud-Din Attar was sublime. Still not sure how I'll use any of this in the novel, but it gives me some context for Omesh's father and by extension Omesh himself. Living in Space by G. Harry Stine is probably the last book on this subject I'll be tackling just now, mostly because it covered everything I've been searching for answers on (and also engagingly written; I recommend it if you're interested in that sort of thing).

I alternated reading all that with reading Hellboy; he makes a nice antidote to Too Much Research. With Strange Places, The Troll Witch and Others, and Darkness Calls, I'm pretty sure I'm all caught up on Hellboy in comics. But there are various spin-offs I can plunge into next.

And as one last non-genre read before I plunge into all that Niven I read two novels by Mark Bastable. I went to considerable effort to get these; they are out of print and I don't think were ever available in North America in the first place; I had them shipped from used book sellers in the UK. But they arrived just before I started all the Heinlein novels and got (criminally) set aside. The first, Icebox, was an engaging read, but Mischief just blew me away. There are a number of scenes that are written in just such a way that you believe one thing that turns out later not to be true. There were several points that I was certain something else had definitely happened and furiously whipped back through the pages to re-read a scene, only to find that it actually hadn't definitely happened at all. And it's not like these scenes felt in any way oblique on the first read; there was no clue that the narrator was being less than honest. (My husband found the process of me reading this book quite amusing; there was a lot of this paging back, always capped with a gleeful "oh, you bastard!" when I realized I had made another erroneous assumption).

Yep, those two novels were well worth the effort of acquiring them.