Czerneda - In the Company of Others

Another science fiction devoured. (Why review books?)

http://www.czerneda.com/novels.htm

The book:

Smart savvy herione (Earther Gail Smith) played off against a street smart heroes Pardell and Malley from the Thromberg station. The solar system and earth are quarantined against the vague Quill (what is it? the book leads off pointing out that humans are clearly the only intelligent life in the universe). Gail is from once side of the Quarantine, Malley and Pardell from the other. It all weaves nicely together. 

The experience:

Let's talk about Sunborn by Jeffrey Carver, because I picked up in the Company of Others after tossing aside Sunborn. Sunborn reminds me of a poorly written mockery of science fiction that one might see on a mediocre Saturday Morning cartoon trying to make fun of sci fi. Stilted characters. The author seeks to create a "rich" world by injecting new bizarre traits or situations every other page. He doesn't have the creativity to pull it off. The pages read like they were rolled off an assemlby line of the bizarre where the workers were having a bad day. Page one. Let's stamp something bizarre. OK, here's a telepathic link. Page two ... low on the bizarre. How about an intelligent sun? Page three ... oh pick a random page of P K Dick. An so on.

My reading of In the Company of Other's benefited greatly from the relief of coherence and quality it provided. I devoured it overnight, and had an unpleasantly tired Tuesday as a consequence. To add to the amusement of this book, at around 2AM I looked through the front window to see the (unabashed) neighbor boy sneak out with a gaggle of friends. Not large enough to be a posse and they look unaltered by sensibility reducing substances -- so it looked like good clean mischief. I just smiled with fond memories of those summer's of freedom that precede financial independence.

I suspected, as I read it, that I've read the sequel. The story tempo and characters seemed extremely familiar. I can't find a sequel, so it's entirely possible that I swallowed it whole before and forgot most of it. Overall, a perfect pulp sci fi experience.

My Books to Read page: May 2009

Why?

Books to read for fun

Ursula Leguin

Ursula LeGuin makes me proud to spend most of my free time with nose in sci-fi speculative fiction books. Looks like she finally produced a new book!

* Lavina

Kage Baker

Where can I find the Children of Company novels, in order? Is there an order?

Patrick Rothfuss

Name of the Wind hooked me. Where is the next one? Wake me up when it's done.

David Gerrold

Maybe Rothfuss will finish his books before David Gerrold finishes the war of the Chtorr. I think I grew out of that series, and then grew up enough that I could read it anyway. Damn artistes.

Serious Reading

Trigonometry for dummies (in progress)

Backlog of serious reading

• Either "7 Habits of Highly Effective People" or "Getting Things Done: The art of stress-free productivity".
• Mathematical Methods in the Physical Sciences: Need to keep the math fresh.
• NHibernate in action. (In progress.) NHibernate only seems necessary to me because other people think it's necessary. I've never had a problem it purports to solve. The unit of work and caching in it is decent, but too tied into other crap to be be useful. Is there any ROI? Have to learn a clunkly framework that will be legacy in a few years.
• I'll probably find a good ASP.NET MVC book and read it before I force myself to dig into NHibernate.

Read and digesting

• Domain Driven Design, Eric Evans: This is the classic
• Applying Domain-Driven Design and Patterns, Nilson: A good folks read, which just enough to disagree with.

Books on my Safari account - used for occasional skimming

• Clean Code (great)
• IronPython in Action: Just started
• C# 3.0 in a nutshell: Perhaps Worth buying?
• Deploying .NET applications: Disappointing.

Applying Domain-Driven Design and Patterns, Nillson (read ... drafting review)

Serious reading, looking for

• Books on running and exercise that are not lame.
• Books on finance.
• Behavior Driven Design.
• Content management, collaboration, OpenID

The problems of excessive literacy

Many other avid readers probably share my problem: It's 5PM on Friday, the library closes in 1 hour. I have two kids in tow with the puzzles of SPL children's section on the top of their agenda. How do you remember what books you've read, and what was the 4th Kage Baker company novel, anyway?

So many books to read, so little time. Book time is precious and to be wasted carefully. I do want to get my fiber books read (Economics?) while I "accidentally" pick up total pulp science fiction every now and then. The balance requires a little thought about the books I read - even if that thought was, "What delightful pap that was!"

To keep track of

• Fun reading: Where am I in an epic sci fi?
• Fun reading: I catch an excellent short story by a new author, and want more ... oops, i forgot the authors name.
• Serious reading: There was a topic I needed to read.
• Serious reading: Inspires lots of thoughts that I leave half baked.

I've experimented some with online services such as google books and worldcat and they are quite useful, but don't really hit the spot. They support my book lust well, but are far too structured for me to use effectively.  Same with facebook and linked in pages. That I will try now, is to use the blog like an online whiteboard.  Here is my book list.

Tenzing on Trike

He may seem like the rough type, but he's got a soft spot for flowers.