Reading Update #4

I was going to add a fifth category to this list this week, but I didn't get quite as much reading done like this as I'd hoped. Maybe next week.

In the bedroom: Despite the fact that I have a ton of books at home that I want to read (see the note below), the last time I went to the library to drop off a dozen books on science fair ideas (for my daughter, not me), I looked in the science fiction section and came home with Ragamuffin by Tobias Buckell. This is the sequel to Crystal Rain, which I just finished a few days ago.

In the downstairs bathroom: Here I'm splitting my reading between the collection of short stories about my favorite comic duo so I can prime the pump and start on Story Idea #1. Which I've really been skimming more than reading as I'm looking for certain scenes. At some point when I'm really ready to write I will buckle down and read nothing but this, everywhere, for a week or so. The other book I'm reading is Financial Peace by Dave Ramsey. My wife and I are taking his class and so I get my assigned reading for the week done with him first before getting back to J (oops I almost said it).

At the office: Monday I started Wetware by Rudy Rucker. Wow, imagine Philip K. Dick crossed with, I don't know, Carl Sagan or Stephen Hawking. Serious hardcore science crossed with really mind bending ideas.

In the car: Judaism, Christianity and Islam: The Monotheists. This dry sounding title is in the fantastic Modern Scholar series of audio books. I'm on lecture 8 of 14. I've made some notes but I haven't really found anything likely to spur me onto write the religious story I talked about in the Story Idea #2 blog.

The Note Below. I did some work organizing my library over the last couple of days. This consisted of shifting one or two books from shelf one to shelf two in order to make room for books I had bought over the last several months. Of course shelf two was already full so I had to shift a couple of books from it to shelf three to make room, plus one or two more for the new books that need to go on number two. All this just to keep them in alphabetical order by author. This continued across the wall and by the time I got to the 16th shelf (and keep in mind this is just my non-Farmer science fiction paperbacks), I had 28 books added to the last shelf. If this sounds like a complaint it isn't. I actually can't think of a much more fun way to spend an evening.

But, the interesting thing is how many books I came across that I bought with the intention of reading "next" or at least "really soon." These are the books that are now back near the top of my "reading next" list: The Long Loud Silence by Wilson Tucker, Earthman Go Home by Harlan Ellison, three books by Stanislaw Lem, a half dozen non-Calahan novels and short story collections by Spider Robinson, the last few Elric novels and several other books by Michael Moorcock, nearly a dozen books by Somtow Sucharitkul but I refuse to read any of them until I find the next two Aquilia books and all five Road to Science Fiction anthologies edited by James Gunn. And I just know I've left some items off this list.

The good news is that I will never run out of things to read...