Brainycat's Occaisonal Reviews

First, Bookaneer recommended "We Are All Completely Fine". I balked at the price, but read "Pandemonium" and was impressed with the writing skill while not too excited about the characters. Then Grimlock raved about WAACF, and I hadn't added but one book to my list this week, so I finally got a copy. Definitely looking forward to this; this looks like it's something to read on a long train ride.

The Cyberpunk anthology showed up on the "You might also like..." list at AZN. It looks like this came out last summer, but I'm not sure if this is a reissue of an older anthology. I couldn't find any record of me having previously read this anthology, though I know I've read at least a third of the stories and probably another 50% look familiar but I can't be sure until I actually open it up. I usually wouldn't buy an anthology with so many repeats, but I feel like I need to throw quids at anything labeled Cyberpunk to keep the genre vital. It has some truly great stories: Gibson's "Johnny Mnemonic" is so archetypical they based a movie on it, and Cadigan's "Rock On" illuminates the unglamorous and unseemly underbelly of the near dark future and is probably Cadigan's best short. It also has Cory Doctorow's "When Sysadmins Ruled The Earth" which, frankly, is the perfect example of why I don't like to read Mr. Doctorow's works. They can't all be winners, but I'm looking forward to rereading some classics and hopefully finding some new stories buried in here.

Somebody on here mentioned Jonathan Janz recently, and as I was looking at his canon I realized I already had a couple of books from him sitting in my TBR pile. I've included "Night Terrors" and "The Children" in this week's ereader sync to move them closer to the top of the TBR pile.

I'm very proud of myself for controlling my book appetites this week. I've got a couple thousand books on my reader, of which I've read a several hundred. I don't really need to collect books just for the sake of filling up my SDCard; as well as a constant influx of new fiction, I'm also buying nonfiction technical books regularly and I have half a dozen monthly magazine subscriptions I try to keep up to date. The fact is, having some files on disks doesn't entertain me or broaden my horizons so there's no reason I need to grab every new (to me) book that looks like it might entertain me. I'm still reading books I bought in the beginning of February (and years earlier...) so I'm in no danger of running out of material soon.

Also, with spring beginning to happen I'll be spending a lot more time on my photography which will cut into my reading time.