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I already listed the books that did something to my head a while back. By my calculations we have about a thousand books but we're getting rid of them bit by bit because we can never find what we want anyway and we end up going to the library, googling, or buying another copy anyway.
Just finished: The Dubious Hills by Pamela Dean which goes on the "best books ever" list. I read it before but at Baycon I found a copy to buy and I brought it home and loved it and told everybody to read it. If you want somebody to write you a story about gifted children, Pamela Dean's the person to do it. She gets that thing -- where the kids are thinking these precocious thoughts, and struggling with these huge ideas, but they do it like children, not like adults in children's bodies. Distinct both from adults and from other kinds of children.
Oscar and Lucinda and Five Quarters of the Orange which were at Jim and Gloria's house and are the kind of literary novel that makes science fiction fans feel superior. Humiliation, squalor, death, misery, and no lessons learned. Exquisitely written, though.
Full House by Steven Jay Gould, which is about how statistics, evolution, variation, change, etc., actually work. It has a more in depth reworking of the baseball stuff he did whilke he was sick, but I could have done without one or the other version.
Currently reading: Beasts of the Field still: it's huge and I'll be reading at it the rest of my life. But it's wonderful, so I'm kind of glad I'll never finish it. I mostly read it when I'm working at Bingo, between the rushes. Iron Sunrise which is in the car, I forget why, also bought at Baycon: and on the couch, The Hallowed Hunt which I think is less engaging than the other books in this universe but that's saying it's still four times as engaging as your average fantasy. And at Jim and Gloria's, Nicholas Nickleby.
Just finished: The Dubious Hills by Pamela Dean which goes on the "best books ever" list. I read it before but at Baycon I found a copy to buy and I brought it home and loved it and told everybody to read it. If you want somebody to write you a story about gifted children, Pamela Dean's the person to do it. She gets that thing -- where the kids are thinking these precocious thoughts, and struggling with these huge ideas, but they do it like children, not like adults in children's bodies. Distinct both from adults and from other kinds of children.
Oscar and Lucinda and Five Quarters of the Orange which were at Jim and Gloria's house and are the kind of literary novel that makes science fiction fans feel superior. Humiliation, squalor, death, misery, and no lessons learned. Exquisitely written, though.
Full House by Steven Jay Gould, which is about how statistics, evolution, variation, change, etc., actually work. It has a more in depth reworking of the baseball stuff he did whilke he was sick, but I could have done without one or the other version.
Currently reading: Beasts of the Field still: it's huge and I'll be reading at it the rest of my life. But it's wonderful, so I'm kind of glad I'll never finish it. I mostly read it when I'm working at Bingo, between the rushes. Iron Sunrise which is in the car, I forget why, also bought at Baycon: and on the couch, The Hallowed Hunt which I think is less engaging than the other books in this universe but that's saying it's still four times as engaging as your average fantasy. And at Jim and Gloria's, Nicholas Nickleby.
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