Category: books

Another good reading month is coming to a close. In September I read four science fiction novels, and with a day left I am about 40% through #5. I suspect that that fifth will have to wait until October to get fished, but I have a good start!

Can’t remember if I mentioned this, but I sent a fan email to Alan Dean Foster and he sent me back a two line reply. I was geeking out. It was cool.

Anyway, I started with the next two standalone by Alan Dean Foster, set in his Humanx Commonwealth universe. Both were good. Then I read Robert Silverberg’s To Open the Sky, which is kind of classic Silverberg stuff and quite enjoyable. Finished the month with #20 in the Dumarest of Terra saga, by British SF author E.C. Tubb.

I am now reading Blood Music, the 1985 novel by Greg Bear. This is the first SF novel I’ve read in a while that isn’t space-oriented. I’m about 40% into it, and it’s good.

The reading is mostly being accomplished in the evenings from 8pm-10pm. There have been a couple of nights where I read my minimum-allowable-amount of 5%. As I continue this practice I’m finding that

Finished reading my 15th novel of the year today at lunch.

I know I keep harping on this, but it feels good. It feels like an accomplishment. While I do have a 20-book goal for the year, I’m not just trying to race through these novels. There is no point in that. I’m reading at an enjoyable, casual speed and really immersing myself in them. It is the consistency of ready at least 5% of a novel every day this is creating the success because it is becoming 1) something I look forward to and 2) a habit.

Tonight I’m starting a novel by SF author Robert Silverberg. I’ve read a number of his novels and they have been enjoyable. While I knew of him already, a few years ago I read his short story The Iron Star in this anthology of space opera and military SF. I was kinda blown away by the emotional and ethical impact of this story and it made me a fan. Silverberg, like many of his generation of authors, really started writing in the SF magazines and went through a formative period in which he wrote a hell of a lot of stuff. The material I’ve read is from his “mature author” era. His work from this period can be a bit more cerebral than some of the adventure space opera stuff I’ve been reading a lot of lately. It will be a good shift for me.

As I have told a few friends, I’ve been spending time reading every day that I suppose was previously devoted to farting around aimlessly on the internet. I started this in April, and since then I’ve read 11 science fiction novels.

If you read 5% of a novel every day you will finish that novel in 20 days. I know that books vary in page counts (obviously) but that means for a 300 page novel, 15 pages a day will get you through that novel in 20 days. That’s pretty good.

So even if I only have 20 or 30 minutes to read it is worth the effort. Usually I get started and end up reading 10 or 15 percent, at least. Having the Kindle charged and ready and in my backpack during the workday is key.

Anyway I’m making a project of this, with the very modest goal of reading 20 SF novels this year. Tracking them on my Goodreads account.

Well, not really unthinkable. I’ve thought if it many times, and done it many times.

I am getting rid of most of my books. In fact, I just did it. Over the weekend I boxed up 90% of my books, and today at work I donated them to the library, which will sell them either in the book sale or via a vendor who sells our nonfiction donations for a good price and splits the money with the Friends of the library (so it eventually benefits the library, just like the in-building book sale does).

I had a lot of books sitting there, taking up space in my office, doing nothing. I kept a few books about skateboarding. I’m a skateboarder. They are inspiring to me and to some extent represent who I am. I’m not the other things.

It feels good to be rid of them.

It’s been a rough couple of weeks for reading. Sometimes life is like that. Things going on. Stressful things, and I am just so beat I can’t concentrate on a book. Still, gonna plan to knock out the short novel I’m currently reading this weekend and start another.

A while back I downloaded the audiobook of The Three-Body Problem, by Liu Cixin. I listened to the first 30 minutes of this acclaimed novel and found it to be just unlistenable. Now, this is weird because a lot of people whose opinions I respect really love this novel and the series. I am aware of what it is about. Yes, I’ve watched a lot of videos on Quinn’s Ideas about it. Yet still I found it pretty horrible.

Over the last few nights I’ve given it another try.  I’m doing better with it.

I don’t know if I have ever read a novel translated from Mandarin before. I feel like there might be some translation issues I’m running into. Let’s face it, literary translation is a very hard discipline. I am friends with one of the foremost translators of Mexican literature into English, and we’ve talked about it, and it is as much an art as writing the novel in the first place.

The other possibility is that the novel, even in its original language, reads like a technical manual.

At any rate, I’m listening because while it “listens” kind of soulless, the ideas are huge and interesting and I like them.

Another thing: because the last “big series” I read was Hyperion and the Fall of Hyperion, the bar may be set pretty high. They were some of the best SF I’ve ever read, and wonderfully written.