Thursday, May 10, 2007

Especially observant visitors may have noticed that I've changed the "what I'm reading" list down the side of the page. However, I am not actually finished reading Stephen Baxter's Emperor, but am taking a quick break from it. Again.

It's not that I'm not enjoying the book. I am. Well, I'm enjoying the story anyway. The book itself is a little dry in tone. It's definitely an engineer's view of Roman history (or alternate history). Baxter's insane amount of techincal detail suits his hard SF stories better. But I do want to see where this multi-volume epic will eventually lead. Just in bits a pieces right now. It doesn't help that I find myself easily distracted by the novelty of my still-relatively-new PeeEssPee. As for the out and out break...


...that's due to a new Kage Baker book. It's been out for a few months now; how did I miss that?! I love this woman's writing, especially her Company series. With her words, she is able to make you burst out loud laughing one page, and feel you heart well and truly wrenched on the next. Gods and Pawns is a collection of short stories in her Company universe and I couldn't be happier that something has come along to fill the gap between novels.

For those of you who don't know the series. it's all about the immortal, time-travelling cyborgs who have lived among us since the dawn of time in order to make money for the Dr. Zeus company a few centuries in our future. I kid you not. And these characters are wonderfully human. Again, I kid you not. I find myself automatically empathising with Lewis, a Literature Preserver. He's the nice guy who will, for example, let Mendoza (a Botanist on whom he has a sizeable secret crush) take the remaining tent after the flash flood almost completely destroys their camp. I love the guy.

I've also changed the book that Lynn and I are reading together. We've finished Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal, the funniest (and surprisingly touching) retelling of the New Testament (including the missing bits) you've ever read. Next up is Mr. Thundermug, the tale of a talking baboon.

In other catch up news, I should mention that Lynn has started her own blog, Everything I Eat. It was inspired by the surprisingly addictive book Everything I Ate: A Year in the Life of My Mouth, in which the author, Tucker Shaw, took a picture of everything he ate for an entire year. And, unlike me, she actually updates her blog regularly! Every day even!

5 comments:

Lynn said...

You forgot the part about how my blog, unlike Tucker's book is really repetitious (tuna salad, tuna salad, chicken salad)and boring. xox

Doug A Scott said...

I figure you're just lulling readers into a false sense of security, then, WHAM!, restaurant visit.

Alisa said...

I'm not sure if it's cute or disturbing that you two are talking to each other via the internet and not via, you know, actually speaking words out loud.

Hmm. Were I to start a food blog, the last 10 minutes would be a whole lot of oddly flavoured mini-kitkats.

Doug A Scott said...

Our messages were written while each of us was at work and, therefore, unable to actually speak to each other. So not as disturbing as it might seem at first. :-)

Alisa said...

That's a relief. I had this image of you two hunkered down at opposite ends of the living room, typing away on your separate computers.