Recent Reading

[stoutfellow]

One of the things the break supplied was time to finish Reamde; I'll probably do at least a mini-review later this week. I then went on to Steven Utley's The 400 Million Year Itch; it's a collection of short stories, based on the idea of a space-time anomaly giving limited access to a point near the boundary between the Silurian and the Devonian. Life was just beginning to spread onto the land at that point; land plants reached only a short distance - measurable in feet - from the ocean, and didn't even have roots yet. Utley's focus is on people: what kind of people would have their lives affected by this discovery, and how? It's far closer to mainstream fiction than to SF, but for that one big maguffin. I enjoyed it; I understand that there's a second volume in the same timeline, which I'll probably look for.

I've run out of unread F/SF for the moment, so I'm diving into Joseph Conrad's Nostromo now. I approach Conrad a little warily these days, ever since I saw Chinua Achebe dissect a scene from Heart of Darkness as seen through African eyes. Still, he's undeniably a great writer, and I look forward to the read.

I'm not making much progress with Les Miz as yet; I'm still bogged down in the early going, about the bishop who was later to be Valjean's benefactor. I hope to go faster when summer comes, since I won't be teaching.