Books in June

So it seems like my pattern with Niven is an alterating one between like it/hate it. This month Lucifer's Hammer fell in the "hate it" category. For me, the character I found the most interesting and sympathetic was the comet that smashed into the Earth. Poor comet. The people I mostly didn't care about one way or the other. Tim Hamner and Eileen had an interesting dyamic between them, but there wasn't enough of them to carry me through this too-long novel. (And I could gripe about the women, or the assertion that women's lib ended five minutes after the comet hit, but given that the majority of the black people who survived formed a pseudo-religious cannabilistic group leads me to believe the women got off easy).

Oath of Fealty I really liked, though. The idea of a self-contained city as one giant building is an interesting one, although I wished it had been explored more. I can see the appeal of living in a community where every one is carefully chosen and there is no riff-raff, but what happens in a few generations when some of the descendants become the riff-raff themselves? Will they be booted over the objections of their relatives? Perhaps someday we'll have a sequel to this one; that could be a good read.

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I read a few books for research (not even for a novel, just a short story; I've yet to sell enough short stories to earn back what I've spent researching them). Both are books by Pandit Rajmani Tugunait, who has a very readable style and an east-meets-west mentality that suits my purposes exactly. Sakti: The Power In Tantra is really a scholarly look at other texts; texts which I haven't read, as it happens, so I imagine a second, more informed read later in life will be more fruitful for me. More helpful was Tantra Unveiled, a nice overview of a topic much misunderstood in the west.

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Rounding off with one more work of fiction: The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins grabbed me at word one and didn't let me go (even at the very cliffhangery end; luckily there's a sequel). This is set in future US where teenagers are chosen by lottery to compete in a Survivor-type game. I don't generally like first person, or present tense. The present tense didn't bother me much here, although I still find it too quirky for the most part. I do wonder if the suspense could have been upped with a multiple POV. When the book is in the first person, and the plot centers on a game where only the victor is still living at the end, you pretty much know who's going to win, present tense or not. Still, it's not the ending so much as how she reaches it that provides the suspense, and this novel had suspense in spades. Highly recommend this one.

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And now I'm off to storm the Bastille...