Category: books (Page 19 of 19)

This weekend I read a tough little cookie of a YA novel, Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother. Published earlier this year, the book is already nominated for next year’s Prometheus Award, and could indeed be a strong contender. I’m working on a review of the novel for Prometheus (unless any other brave souls out there would like to contribute a review…), but I’m already jokingly calling this the book that sent me to the ER.

The Young Adult fiction market these days is smokin’ hot. As a grown up reading some these books I can’t help but be irritated and impatient with the tendency toward a very simplistic style. I struggled to get going with Little Brother, and the ended certainly fizzled into a “Rock the Vote” solution that does nothing to advance individual liberty (a recent conversation with L. Neil Smith comes to mind, where he said that it’s easy to write dystopias, as we all can agree upon what we are against. But it’s damn tough to come up with better solutions. ) Still, the middle part of Doctorow’s novel is worth every penny, and is the part that most readers probably will remember.

I used to average reading 100-150 books a year. A middling amount, maybe, as some people never read a book and others read probably far more than this number of volumes. Though that number dipped for a while, I’ve probably ready between 1000 and 2000 books in the past two decades. Far from all are science fiction. Still, I’d be the first to admit there are far more sf books out there that I have NOT read, so I try to catch up on some of these every year.

Not sure if 1987 can be considered olden times, but 1965 predates me and so I say it qualifies.

I just finished reading David Brin’s The Uplift War, which is the third volume in his Uplift series. I read some other Brin novels in the 1980s, early 1990s, but none of the Uplift books. I do have the tendency to pick up new series in the middle or end, and then work my way backwards, so now I need to check if I have the first two books in the series and seek them out. There were times I skipped ahead, but overall I enjoyed the book.

I’m in the early stages of H. Beam Piper’s Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen, which is another book that’s been in my shelves for many, many years. I keep meaning to read it, but never get around to it. Already in the first 50 pages, hell, the first 10 pages, I can see that this book deeply influenced L. Neil Smith’s novel, The Probability Broach. Good stuff also so far, but of a different cut altogether from the Brin book.

Nice review over at Canada’s Globe and Mail by Spider Robinson, of fellow Canadian writer Cory Doctorow’s Prometheus Award nominated novel, Little Brother.