The Queue
Irradiated by LabRat
Wednesday afternoon punt, because there’s some chance SOMEone might find it interesting and it’s meme-shaped.
As do most adults that have more things they want to read than time they have to do it in (not to mention a terrible Amazon.com problem that gets more severe the better they make their recommendation software), I have a backlog of books in progress and on the shelves. Here is the current queue.
Reading now:
On my desk: Fergus Henderson, The Whole Beast: Nose To Tail Eating
On the coffee table: Brian Boyd, On The Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cognition, and Fiction
On the nightstand: H.W. Crocker III, Don’t Tread On Me: A 400-year History of America At War (As a side note, this reads exactly as you’d expect a history by someone named “H.W. Crocker III” who has decided to dispense with hiding his biases would.)
Neil Gaiman, Fragile Things (Reread. Gneil writes my kind of bedtime stories.)
On shelves and coffee table, in rough order of intent to read:
Larry Correia, Monster Hunter Vendetta (Obligatory, and Stingray devoured it so thoroughly I’m debating skipping this one up and doing the same before I finish either of my current doorstoppers.)
Dale Guthrie, The Nature of Paleolithic Art
Peter Watts, Blindsight
Sean B. Carroll, Endless Forms Most Beautiful: The New Science of Evo Devo
Stephen King, Under The Dome (Little dubious about this one. My willingness to stick with King past a thousand pages has gone down along with my supply of free time. On the other hand it will probably still go faster than On The Origin of Stories just because of relative density.)
William Stoltzenburg, Where The Wild Things Were: Life, Death, and Ecological Wreckage in a Land of Vanishing Predators
Kim Stanely Robinson, Red Mars
Donald Wilson and Richard Stevenson, Learning To Smell: Olfactory Perception from Neurobiology to Behavior
Chandler Burr, The Emperor of Scent: A True Story of Perfume and Obsession
October 20th, 2010 at 5:50 pm
I loved “Emperor of Scent” Burr writes about Turin’s ideas and uniquely descriptive sense of scent much better than Turin does.
I thought that the ideas in “Learning to Smell” were fascinating. Wilson and Stevenson draw analogies between smelling and reading and bring in some other interesting ideas.
Read Burr first to whet your interest in scent, then dive into the dense and meaty filling that W&S provide.
October 20th, 2010 at 6:16 pm
I hope you like Red Mars better than I did. Struck me as exaggerated soap-opera conflict of unreasonable personalities, without enough hard science to carry it along past the irritating story. By contrast, Ben Bova’s Mars squeaked by with just enough.
I have a low tolerance for stories where the drama comes from backstabbing politics; some people enjoy that though.
October 20th, 2010 at 8:28 pm
Quite a list
And a wide variety so there will not be any boredom!
October 20th, 2010 at 10:48 pm
I gave this a kick over on my blog. It turns out that my nightstand backlog extends to at least 2006, maybe further.
October 21st, 2010 at 3:21 am
I had not heard of Neil Gaiman before, until I decided to see what all the fuss was regarding this “Terry Pratchett” guy. I ended up with a collaboration of theirs called “Good Omens”, a sort of droll take on the Biblical apocalypse.
Clever and amusing, but it now has a bookmark in it.
Monster Hunter Vendetta is absolutely a priority read; you can get back to the other stuff in a day or so. Larry has outdone himself on this one.
October 21st, 2010 at 6:37 am
I can recommend Fergus and Guthrie especially- also like Carroll and Stolzenburg (especially interesting on ocean stuff). John Derbyshire has recommended Burr; let me know what you think. And I assume the new Monster Hunter will be fun and that you’ll read it in a day!
October 21st, 2010 at 9:21 am
Robinson’s Mars trilogy gets a bit long and slow, but Red Mars is the best of them. Nose to Tail is very interesting and his recipe for marinated (beef) heart is very good. MHV was fun. Fast read, but enough pages to last a good while. It’d be a great airport/airplane book.
October 21st, 2010 at 11:23 am
Think about what you’re suggesting, Mike. Do you really think it’s a good idea for me, or anyone sensible for that matter, to be reading a book about killing monsters for fun and profit in any sort of proximity to TSA employees?
October 21st, 2010 at 12:11 pm
I hope you’ve read the original book, Monster Hunters International; Larry Correia’s vanity published book that went high enough at Amazon to attract Baen Books’ attention.
As for Kim Stanley Robinson … he’s a good writer, but his politics are strictly Progressive-ecofreak. I watched him shout down AGW skeptics at a panel at Aussiecon 4. His arguments consisted of “The Science is settled, so STFU, you conspiracy loons/Oil Company Shills/Jesus Freaks.”
I was not impressed.
October 21st, 2010 at 1:34 pm
Oh, we have the original vanity published edition of MHI, typos and all.
I tend to ignore the politics of science fiction authors unless they shove it obnoxiously into their books. Otherwise I’d lose a lot of good reads.
October 21st, 2010 at 9:38 pm
Robinson gets on his progressive hobbyhorse during the last part of the third book. The series is OK as a whole.
October 22nd, 2010 at 10:30 am
If you don’t like having your face rubbed in an author’s prejudices, definitely skip “Under The Dome” by Mr. King.
It goes off the rails early and keeps on going. A ballsy editor could have fixed most of what’s wrong with it, but jeez.
October 24th, 2010 at 12:18 pm
Stingray-
Well, MHV might not be the best thing for your air travel state of mind. Perhaps Hobbes’ “Leviathan”?