multipurposegoddess

I think I've read all the Hugo Nominees I'm going to. I'd already read Cryoburn, the first chapter of The Dervish House reminded  me that I don't like Ian MacDonald very much, and the first two chapters of Feed were enough to convince me that I am still not in the mood for zombies. I did read the rest of the novels, and all the novellas, novelettes, short stories, and graphic stories, and saw all the dramatic presentations, short form. I even checked out what was included in the packet for the Campbell Award. The rest of the categories I probably wouldn't have an opinion on even if I knew everything about them. OK, I could probably have an opinion about Dramatic Presentation, Long Form, but I'm not going to try to watch 5 movies before the end of July. So I guess I'm ready to vote.

I decided to become a supporting member or whatever it's called and check out the nominees because I felt really out of the SF loop. I picked up a random issue of Analog a few months ago and was terribly disappointed - the Hugo nominees were a much better experience! Which makes sense, I suppose. And it reminded me how much I do like short stories (and novellas and novelettes, for that matter). I need to find a way to have good ones to read. Magazines are so hit or miss (I'm not sure I'm going to re-up Ellery Queen when it runs out. Not that it's full of bad stories, but I have come to realize that I don't like Noir, on the whole, and that makes up kind of a lot of EQ. Maybe an electronic subscription...)

Anyway, now I am free to finish re-reading as much of A Song of Ice and FIre as I can before Dance of Dragons arrives.

Swiped from libkitty. 106 books most marked as unread on Library Thing. Bold=read, Italics=have and unread, Underline=partially read

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell (149)
Anna Karenina (132)
Crime and punishment (121)
Catch-22 (117)
One hundred years of solitude (115)
Wuthering Heights (110)
The Silmarillion (104)
Life of Pi : a novel (94)
The name of the rose (91)
Don Quixote (91)
Moby Dick (86)
Ulysses (84)
Madame Bovary (83)
The Odyssey (83)
Pride and Prejudice (83)
Jane Eyre (80)
A tale of two cities (80)
The Brothers Karamazov (80)
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies (79)
War and Peace (78)
Vanity fair (74)
The time traveler's wife (73)
The Iliad (73)
Emma (73)
The Blind Assassin (73)
The kite runner (71)
Mrs. Dalloway (70)
Great Expectations (70)
American Gods (68)
A heartbreaking work of staggering genius (67)
Atlas shrugged (67)
Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books (66)
Memoirs of a Geisha (66)
Middlesex (66)
Quicksilver (66)
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West (65)
The Canterbury tales (64)
The historian : a novel (63)
A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man (63)
Love In the Time of Cholera (62)
Brave New World (61)
The Fountainhead (61)
Foucault's pendulum (61)
Middlemarch (61)
Frankenstein (59)
The Count of Monte Cristo (59)
Dracula (59)
A clockwork orange (59)
Anansi boys (58)
The Once and Future King (57)
The grapes of wrath (57)
The poisonwood Bible : a novel (57)
1984 (57)
Angels & demons (56) - every time I see this title I think i's Angels & Insects. It's not.
The Inferno (56)
The Satanic Verses (55)
Sense and Sensibility (55)
The picture of Dorian Gray (55)
Mansfield Park (55)
One flew over the cuckoo's nest (54)
To the lighthouse (54)
Tess of the D'Urbervilles (54)
Oliver Twist (54)
Gulliver's travels (53)
Les misérables (53)
The corrections (53)
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (52)
The curious incident of the dog in the night-time (52)
Dune (51)
The prince (51)
The Sound and the Fury (51)
Angela's ashes : a memoir (51)
The god of small things (51)
A people's history of the United States : 1492-present (51)
Cryptonomicon (50)
Neverwhere (50)
A confederacy of dunces (50)
A short history of nearly everything (50)
Dubliners (50)
The Unbearable Lightness of Being (49)
Beloved (49)
Slaughterhouse-Five (49)
The Scarlet Letter (48)
Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation (48)
The Mists of Avalon (47)
Oryx and Crake : a novel (47)
Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed (47)
Cloud Atlas (47)
The Confusion (46)
Lolita (46)
Persuasion (46)
Northanger Abbey (46)
The Catcher in the Rye (46)
On the road (46)
The hunchback of Notre Dame (45)
Freakonomics : a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything (45)
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values (45)  One of few books a stopped reading because I disliked it
The Aeneid (45)
Watership Down (44)
Gravity's Rainbow (44)
The Hobbit (44)
In cold blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences (44)
White Teeth (44)
Treasure Island (44)
David Copperfield (44)
The three musketeers (44)

I fee like I should draw some conclusion from that, but damned if I know what it is.

I know I won't be able to document every book I read this year, I've already missed too many and am too scatterbrained to simply remember what I've read, but I'm inspired to jot down an insight now and then.

My mom and I noticed a long time ago that mysteries often have really detailed descriptions of every meal the detective/narrator/hero eats, or sees eaten, or cooks, or thinks about. We figured the authors probably got hungry while they wrote. Anyway, once we noticed it, we couldn't stop noticing it - I really think a scholarly work on Food in the Popular Mystery Novel would have a lot of raw material.

The book I'm reading right now, Shooting Gallery, by Hailey Lind, does lovingly describe every meal and every beverage that artist/amateur sleuth encounters. What is striking me thus far in the read is how detailed her driving is.  It's set in San Francisco and Oakland, and part of the fun of the locally set novel is, of course, recognizing the settings. this narrator doesn't stop there, but mentions every turn she takes, where she hits traffic and when she pays tolls. It might be more detail than I really want, I'm not sure.

That said, it's a decent amateur sleuth mystery so far; I'll have to finish it before I can fully evaluate it. The resolution is so important to how I feel about a mystery.