I've always been a voracious reader, and now that I am a librarian (a Readers' Advisory librarian, no less!), my literary intake has only increased. I use the wonderful website LibraryThing to keep track of my reading, and this year I started tagging books with "read in 2009," just out of curiosity to see how many books I read in the course of a year! It's not even half-way through 2009 yet, and I'm already up to 60 books tagged as "read in 2009!" And somehow, I'm still behind!
Here it is, the end of May, and I just added a couple more books to my LibraryThing, and decided to see how many books I'd read just in May alone. And it's a doozy of a number for just one month...thirteen! Some people read less than that in one year! And like I said, somehow, I'm still behind! Eeep!
Here's what I've read in May:
"Saffron and Brimstone: Strange Stories" by Elizabeth Hand. Short stories, mostly in the dark fantasy vein. Quite enjoyable.
"The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye" by A.S. Byatt. More short stories, these ones fairy tale inspired. Wonderfully written, especially the title story.
"Conspirator" by C.J. Cherryh. Science fiction. The 1oth and newest in a series I've been enjoying for some time. Very political and complex, but richly detailed and enthralling.
"In the Night Room" by Peter Straub. Horror, sort of. Ghosts and demons and a pissed-off angel and fictional characters coming to life. Interesting, but not my favorite thing ever.
"The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie" by Alan Bradley. A mystery in which the sleuth is a very precocious 11-year-old British girl trying to prove her father's innocence. Charming.
"Vanished Smile: The Theft of Mona Lisa" by R.A. Scotti. Non-fiction, about the theft of the Mona Lisa in 1911 and the two-year effort to recover the painting. Very interesting and compelling.
"Nobody Move" by Denis Johnson. Crime fiction. Not a mystery, per se. The story of a petty thief and a wronged woman getting mixed up in each other's business and taking revenge on the woman's former husband. Gritty and interesting, but not to my normal taste.
"Rides a Dread Legion" by Raymond Feist. Fantasy, the newest book by an author I've read much of. Pretty much just ok. His earlier stuff was better.
"Tempting the Gods" by Tanith Lee. Short stories. Dark fantasy. Very good!
"Mother of Winter" by Barbara Hambly. Fantasy; a stand-alone sequel to a series I read several years back. Quite good, and a nice change from the epic 300-page-a-book fantasy series ala Robert Jordan.
"Pride and Prejudice and Zombies" by Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith. Pride and Prejudice. And zombies. Exactly what it promises in the title! Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy are warriors in the battle against the scourge of undead. Awesome.
"Smoke and Mirrors" by Jane Lindskold. Science fiction. A telepath discovers that the human race is being infiltrated by telepathic symbiotic parasites and joins the fight against them. An early novel by an author whose books I've enjoyed before. Not a bad book, but she's definitely improved since.
"Mary Modern" by Camille DeAngelis. Science fiction....sort of. A bioresearcher who is unable to have children of her own clones her own grandmother, only to discover that the resultant person is not an infant but a 20-year-old woman with all of her grandmother's memory up to that age. Much more about Mary's reaction to the century in which she finds herself than it is about the science, however. Thought-provoking.
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