Wednesday Reading Meme
I wish to thank everyone for their lovely comments on my last post; I got to talk to my dad again today and he sounded a lot better.
Right. Uh. This week I read some books.
What I Just Finished Reading
Nancy Kress, Yesterday's Kin: Hard SF (well, it is Nancy Kress) about aliens who are really long-lost humans coming to visit us and everyone curing space diseases. I liked the virus plot but the actual characters were awfully flat, which is not a problem I remember the author having in, say, the Sleepless books. (If you like SF at all, you at least need to read the first Sleepless book.) Also this was really, really short, and could easily have been a third again as long. And been better.
Joe Haldeman, All My Sins Remembered: I guess I was feeling like revisiting more new-to-me SF by authors I once really liked. Everything I have read by Haldeman (well, okay, this and The Forever War) has pretty much been on the theme of "the Vietnam War was hell: space version," and while, yes, I am sure that the Vietnam War was hell, that makes it all pretty sad reading. Forever War was the one about the guy who signs up to fight in space and through the magic of near-relativistic travel, gets back to an Earth centuries later where no one really understands what it was like, and yeah, I think you can see what the author is getting at. This one... well. This one's about a Buddhist who signs up for a not-entirely-military space organization because he just wants to go see exciting places and then he ends up getting turned into a brainwashed spy where they give him plastic surgery and personality transfers to make him go be new people and investigate corruption (this involves a lot of shooting people). And then there are really upsetting debriefing scenes where he is alternately listing all the people he's killed and being horrified at what he's done, and I was hoping for an ending where he was at least going to be able to heal, but, uh no.
R. A. Thorn, Untethered: WW2 m/m romance between a pilot and his crew chief. Very sweet, and all the history was very well done, and overall I just really enjoyed it. So you should definitely read this one if you think it might be your sort of thing.
What I'm Reading Now
Nothing yet, and nothing much in the way of comics (I think Spider-Woman was the only thing I read today; it's good.) Mostly I am sitting and watching Tumblr fandom as Jonathan Hickman continues to compare Steve and Tony to a married couple.
What I'm Reading Next
Not sure yet. Books.
Read this entry on Dreamwidth ||
comments
Right. Uh. This week I read some books.
What I Just Finished Reading
Nancy Kress, Yesterday's Kin: Hard SF (well, it is Nancy Kress) about aliens who are really long-lost humans coming to visit us and everyone curing space diseases. I liked the virus plot but the actual characters were awfully flat, which is not a problem I remember the author having in, say, the Sleepless books. (If you like SF at all, you at least need to read the first Sleepless book.) Also this was really, really short, and could easily have been a third again as long. And been better.
Joe Haldeman, All My Sins Remembered: I guess I was feeling like revisiting more new-to-me SF by authors I once really liked. Everything I have read by Haldeman (well, okay, this and The Forever War) has pretty much been on the theme of "the Vietnam War was hell: space version," and while, yes, I am sure that the Vietnam War was hell, that makes it all pretty sad reading. Forever War was the one about the guy who signs up to fight in space and through the magic of near-relativistic travel, gets back to an Earth centuries later where no one really understands what it was like, and yeah, I think you can see what the author is getting at. This one... well. This one's about a Buddhist who signs up for a not-entirely-military space organization because he just wants to go see exciting places and then he ends up getting turned into a brainwashed spy where they give him plastic surgery and personality transfers to make him go be new people and investigate corruption (this involves a lot of shooting people). And then there are really upsetting debriefing scenes where he is alternately listing all the people he's killed and being horrified at what he's done, and I was hoping for an ending where he was at least going to be able to heal, but, uh no.
R. A. Thorn, Untethered: WW2 m/m romance between a pilot and his crew chief. Very sweet, and all the history was very well done, and overall I just really enjoyed it. So you should definitely read this one if you think it might be your sort of thing.
What I'm Reading Now
Nothing yet, and nothing much in the way of comics (I think Spider-Woman was the only thing I read today; it's good.) Mostly I am sitting and watching Tumblr fandom as Jonathan Hickman continues to compare Steve and Tony to a married couple.
What I'm Reading Next
Not sure yet. Books.
Read this entry on Dreamwidth ||
