flitting on fiction

… the book reviews that you should read today are over on a gather friend of mine’s blog, Quotidian Vicissitudes.

He writes very well, with a dry wit that is often humorous, and I very much enjoy his articles.

And this week, for you booklovers, he has reviewed four books that he’s been reading of late. They include:

Why not stop by and check them out? You won’t be disappointed!

Gather.com, for those of you who aren’t familiar with it, used to be a great place to meet and get to know other writers and wanna-be writers. More recently, it has reinvented itself as a social networking site, which is part of the reason so many of us Gatherers flitted over into blogging instead.

It is still up and running, and you can still earn points which can - if you are in the US - be converted into cash or other stuff … but even though a bunch of us still stop by there, it is no longer the site we loved. *sad*

Personally, I find Today.com a much better use of my time - they pay me for blogging even if I am not a US resident And it takes a lot less work to earn a buck here than it does over there.

A while back, Ross and I both really enjoyed a novel called ….uh .. human something or other… and I kept meaning to look for other books by the same author, but every time I was in a used book store, I could never remember the guy’s last name for some reason (practicing for absent minded professor role early - WAY early)

It’s hard to find books by some guy whose first name is …uh… Robert and his last name I think starts with an S - the book I read had humans in the title and it was set partly in Sudbury.

Uh yeah… not a lot to go on. Kept meaning to google and see if I could find it that way but we would talk about it while we were at the bookstore and then forget by the time we got home.

Anyway, today while I was on amazon.ca, amazon.com and chapters.ca - all three required in order to get all the books I needed for my Viral Contagion in Fiction course this semester within a reasonable time period - I remembered.

The book we read was Humans, by Robert Sawyer. And it was the second of two - Hominids was the first, that we haven’t yet read.

And in the process of my explorations re: figuring out who the forgotten author was, I found his blog too … and he, unlike some of the author blogs I have visited, actually writes on it…. and not just in order to push his own books :) 

did Santa bring you any books for Christmas?

Mine won’t … he thinks I have quite enough books. He keeps building more shelves for me, but there is never enough room for all of them anyway. It is my sister’s fault, honest!

She keeps me in books all year ’round :)  And I do give some away, but apparently not often enough to keep up. Or so he says… me, I say one can never have too many books…and I don’t mind being surrounded by them. I would much rather be surrounded by a pile of books than by things that make noise - the tv, radio etc… all of them drive me bonkers if they are on nonstop. Which, of course, they are, whenever he is home. It was the same way with my kids - any time they were away, the first thing I would do would be to turn everything that makes noise OFF!

ANYWAY… so what books did you get for Christmas?

OR what books would have you have liked to get, but didn’t? I hope there are not too many of those - I hope you all got everything you could wish for and more :) 

 Merry Christmas

So …I was planning to write about the latest book I am reading … started it this week and am really enjoying it…but am not finished it yet (darn essay!) and anyway … it has nothing at all to do with Christmas so it can wait…I will review it …well… one o’ these days.

But Christmas Eve just isn’t the time for murder mysteries, is it?

Christmas is for A Charlie Brown Christmas

and The Grinch and….

well …. come on, what are your favourite Christmas stories?

Have any of the newer Christmas stories earned a spot in your holiday traditions?

Or does your family prefer the older classics?

Wishing you and yours a very Merry Christmas (or whatever) …and all the best for the coming year.

So - Daniel Defoe’s The Journal of the Plague Year is one of the 2 texts I already have for one of the new courses I’ll be taking in the fall. It is just a ~tad~ dry … for now, it has taken up residence in my washroom reading pile - that’s where I keep the books that I have to get through - but don’t really want to. I’ll probably get through it shortly though - only because it wins by comparison to the other one that’s found it’s way in there… oy!

The other book is Michael Crichton’s Prey. I thought I had read a few Crichton books - but now that I’m looking through the list of his works, I think that while I have some of them around here somewhere, I have not necessarily actually read any of them. I will now though, as soon as I find them.

I thoroughly enjoyed Prey … it hooked me in the prologue and never let go … I’m a sucker for kids, which was part of it - by the time,  Jake, the hero is off at the lab dealing with the swarm that his wife and her idjit lover created, the kids were firmly planted in the background as the ones who - even though they were far, far away - needed to be protected. The science of the swarm incorporated computer programming and artificial intelligence,  biology, psychology … bits of everything all tied together to sound scarily credible. I thoroughly enjoyed reading it - a relatively rare experience with books that are on the syllabus :)