2666 by Roberto Bolano – DNF
Pandora’s Star by Stephen Hamilton – DNF
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
Book Thief by Marcus Zusak
There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried To Kill Her Neighbor’s Baby by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya
Murder on the Orient Express by Agatha Christie
House of Suns by Alastair Reynolds
The Once and Future King by T.H. White (in progress)

Boy, I tell ya’.

Nothing throws off reading like hitting two books in a row that you just can’t finish. Alas, for me those books kept me off my reading game for nearly four weeks. In my case, those books were Roberto Bolano’s 2666, and Stephen Hamilton’s Pandora’s Star.

And this is bad: because they were both really, really good. Bolano apparently wrote 2666 as five separate books, but after his death, his estate and agent decided to publish it as one. Maybe I should look into reading it as five separate books — a section at a time. Because I really loved the first part, and my understanding is that there’s a lot of violence in the latter parts.

Hamilton’s Pandora’s Star … you know, I have a really hard time figuring out what I couldn’t get into this. He’s a very good writer, and he reminds me a lot of Jack McDevitt and Alastair Reynolds, two other sci-fi authors I enjoy.

In any case, once I accepted to myself that I was clearly making no progress (in fact, my lack of progress with these books is why there was no February round up), I put them aside and moved on to other things. I actually picked up a copy of Brave New World the same day I bought 1984, and I enjoyed this book more than the other. In the future, humans are bred out of machines, and programmed to obedience. They all also have sex with, well, everyone. At the drop of a hat. Into this world comes a savage, a boy raised among “wilds”, who, as an agent of change, enacts, y’know, change. Pretty good book, although I don’t know it deserves the hype it gets.

Now, talk about deserving its press: The Book Thief, wow. It’s categorized in the U.S. as “Young Adult”, but don’t let that stop you, that’s just a marketing decision — everywhere else, it’s marketed to adults. It’s an amazing book — you won’t be able to put it down, about a young woman growing up in Nazi Germany, whose family is hiding a Jew in their basement, and who rebels against authority by stealing books. Absolutely incredible. Go read it.

And then we get to Ludmilla Petrushevskaya’s absolutely bizarre collection of horror stories and fairy tales, There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried To Kill Her Neighbor’s Baby, and all I can really say is “Weird.” It’s like nothing I’ve ever read before, but that’s not a compliment or a criticism, just a statement. If I had to read it over again? I don’t think I would.

This was my second attempt at an Agatha Christie, and all I’m going to say is that her books are clearly priced on the strength of the author’s name, and not the quantity of time it will take you to read — she’s like the 1930s James Patterson: big books, lots of page, not so much actual writing. I finished Murder on the Orient Express during my commute over a day and a half (and I do not have a long commute). I can appreciate her contributions to the genre while still backing away from reading her again. I need substance, and I just didn’t feel it with this.

Alastair Reynolds is one of my favorite sci-fi authors: he’s published a book a year since 2000, and most of them have been amazing (yes, there’ve been clunkers). House of Suns actually came out last June, so this had been sitting on my shelves for a while before I finally got to it: and once I did, wow! It’s a story of ships that come quite close to the Speed of Light, and lines of clones that live for millions of years, sleeping as their ships span the galaxy; and it’s a story of a genocidal plot to obscure a past horror. It was really, really, amazingly great, and I’m very excited for his next book, Terminal World, which I believe hits stores in June.

I’m only about 180 pages into T.H. White’s story of King Arthur, The Once and Future King, a collection of what had at one point been several independent books. So far, it’s not at all what I’d hoped for when I picked it up, as the first book seems overwhelmingly Disneyish. In fact, it wasn’t until I did a Wikipedia search did I learn that, yes, in fact, Disney’s Sword in the Stone was based on White’s novel, Sword in the Stone (which forms the first part of this book).

So, what are you reading?