I’ve had books on the brain lately. KrisDi’s parents gave me a $25 gift certificate to Borders, and I found some list of the 100 greatest Sci-Fi books ever. Consequently, I put all the books on that list that I don’t own on a list of books I want (plus some other ones I want). And I also have a list of all the books I own. Obviously, I’ve put them both on the internet. It includes a lot of the books KrisDi has, too, since they’re all on the same shelves. I’m eventually going to add lists of CDs and movies, too.
So, right away, with the $25 gift certificate, I bought Childhood’s End by Arthur C. Clarke (incidentally, Fantastic Fiction is a great website for fiction fans). It’s #1 on the list for a damn good reason. It’s an awesome book. It was easy to forget the book was written 50+ years ago, and that’s damn impressive. Clarke’s creative as all hell! I highly recommend it. I just finished it yesterday or the day before.
Right before that, I read The Drawing of the Three, by Stephen King, the second book in the Dark Tower series. I think I’ve decided to stick it out through the series. Mom’ll hate me for it, but I’m generally more interested in stories than in writing styles and ability, and while she hate’s King, I like his stories. Mostly because I reading stories that don’t have happy endings, considering (fictional) problems that don’t have no-one-gets-hurt solutions. Like this one. Not too shabby. I wouldn’t recommend it to everyone, as the above book, but I like it.
I also read the last of the three books Monocular Ben lent me; Warp Speed by Travis S. Taylor. I gotta say I didn’t like it. The story was decent, but the characters weren’t, and the writing was terrible (and if I think so, it’s gotta be pretty damn bad). It was all first person, which is a style I find difficult to get into and therefore don’t like that much (yeah, I know I just said stories are more important than style, but this style was infuriating, it was actually upsetting me as I was reading it). I did like the moderately firm basis in physics (he used theories that actually exist [Alcubierre Drive, Casimir Effect]), but I really don’t need to know the gear the main character’s bike was in when he took a header. Or all the sordid details of the aforementioned header. *sigh* He tried so hard not to make his character a cliche that he made him two cliches. Oh well. I’ll shut up. I don’t recommend it.