It’s only been about 4 months since the last book queue post, but I’ve already knocked off about half that list (out of 10 posted, 5 books completed, one other started) and while that might not sound like a lot, keep in mind that at least a couple books were behemoths like Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, which is a long, dense, philosophical, mathematical text that has been sitting on my shelf unread for about 5 years. And naturally, I’ve read plenty of things that weren’t in the queue, because I’m fickle like that. So sue me.
The notion of only reading long epics is certainly not going to fly all year long, but I still plan on tackling a few massive tomes just to keep frosty. My Goodreads Reading Challenge is currently set at a reasonable 30 books for the year, but according to my stats, I should be just about equaling the number of pages I read last year (when I hit a 50 book goal). So anyways, here are the holdovers from the last list, and some new ones I’ll be tackling in this second half of the year.
Holdovers
The four remaining books from my last queue (note: I began Theodore Rex, but have not yet finished)
- Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln by Doris Kearns Goodwin (992 pages) – I have to admit, I probably won’t get to this one this year, unless I put on a lot of mileage in Theodore Rex (which I’m intentionally reading rather slowly), but I swears, this will be the next forbiddingly long history book I read.
- Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke (800 pages) – I’ll definitely be starting this one in the next couple months sometime (probably after some vacations in August), and I am very much looking forward to it.
- Ulysses by James Joyce (783 pages) – Go big or go home. This is one of those towering literary novels that’s supposed to be great but impossible to read. And long! Not sure if I’ll have the fortitude to pick this one up this year, but I do want to give it a shot at some point.
- Downbelow Station by C. J. Cherryh (528 pages) – I was not a huge fan of C. J. Cherryh’s Foreigner, but this one seems to be more my speed. I was thinking about doing this as an audio-book during an upcoming long drive, but the reviews of the reader are awful, so I guess that’s out. Definitely something I plan on reading this year though.
New Stuff
- Judas Unchained by Peter F. Hamilton – Hamilton’s book Pandora’s Star was on the last queue, but I didn’t realize that it was really just the first half of a longer story. It doesn’t even really end on a cliffhanger so much as it just sorta stops (that’s perhaps not too fair, but I was still disappointed), so now that I’m about a thousand pages in, I figure I should finish off the story (and this one is another thousand or so pages, jeeze).
- Paladin of Souls by Lois McMaster Bujold – Another book whose predecessor was in the last queue, but in this series, Bujold at least writes self-contained stories, so I can take my time getting to this one (which I will probably read in the near future).
- The Ship Who Sang by Anne McCaffrey – A short book I added to the list because I’m trying Worlds Without End’s 2013 Readers Challenge, which is to read 12 books – 1 each by 12 different female authors. I’m 5 books into that challenge, and am looking forward to expanding my horizons a bit more. McCaffrey is probably more famous for her fantasy novels, but this one is SF and sounds interesting enough.
- Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking by Susan Cain – Whenever I take those Myers Briggs tests, I always score off the charts as an Introvert (I’ve taken the test formally two times, scoring a 95 and 100 on the Introvert side respectively), and I’m always fascinated by that and what it means. I picked this up based on Jay’s review a while back, and am looking forward to digging in at some point.
- Warhorse by Timothy Zahn – A little while back, Amazon put up Kindle versions of a bunch of Zahn’s back catalog, much of which is out of print. Zahn has always been a favorite of mine, a workhorse I could always fall back on, so I’m happy to have more books available, and this one will probably make great vacation reading.
- Consider Phlebas by Iain M. Banks – The first in the Banks’ Culture series, which seems to be pretty well respected and beloved. Banks recently passed away, but seems to have made a big impact (apparently one of the folks that brought Space Opera back into vogue in the 80s and 90s).
Well, that should keep me busy for a while. I do want to make sure I work in some horror novels when we get to the Six Weeks of Halloween marathon, but I’ll need to look into that a bit. I’m a bit out of practice when it comes to horror literature (any suggestions?)