Thursday, December 28, 2006

Milestones and future lists

That last post, though I didn't realize it at the time, was my fiftieth, and this one is likely to be the last of 2006. I hope the folks reading this have found it useful or interesting, and stick with it in 2007!

As a result of many generous friends and family over Christmas, I now have a big stack of books to read, so I thought I'd share the list. The first three were actually rescued from Tower Books before they went out of business, the rest are new additions to my stack. I can't wait to get to them!

Fudoki - Kij Johnson
I loved "The Fox Woman," Johnson's first novel, and this one is set in the same semi-mythical Japanese universe. The clerk at Tower told me when I bought it, "This is really good!"

Get Shorty
- Elmore Leonard
Loved the movie, kept hearing about his writing, have never experienced it. Can't wait.

Time and Again - Jack Finney
An old writing friend of mine loved the Jack Finney "Time" books, but I never managed to make time to read any, until now.

The Hunt Ball - Rita Mae Brown
Okay, just because it has foxes in it. And it's a mystery. I'm always a sucker for a good mystery. Or even a mediocre mystery.

The Bartimaeus Trilogy - Jonathan Stroud
Relatively new books that people keep telling me about. I'm all excited to read these.

American Movie Critics: An Anthology From the Silents Until Now
This one looks really good. Lots of movie reviews collected from this past century.

The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
Another one that's pretty new but looks really cool!

Jane Goodall: The Woman Who Redefined Man - Dale Peterson
I met Dale Peterson while he was researching one of his books. He's written a few with Jane, and now he's written one about her. Curiously, I found a positive review on this one just a few days before I got it, and had been thinking I should check it out. Bonus!

So that's just a taste of the reviews you should be seeing in 2007. I'll also be immersed in numerous writing projects, so there'll be writing posts as well.

Happy New Year, everyone!

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

The movie review book:
One summer I was trying to read 5 books a week. I ended up hitting a couple of collected review books like that one-- contemporary reviews of Broadway plays in my case. It was oddly informative for being so light-weight. Still, I feel it has its best incarnation as a "browse" book, not a cover-to-cover thing.
I am book-light, as it were... I have a Truman Capote short collection to read and I had that "Water for Elephants" book-- which, to my surprise, is NOT a sequeal (typo? or a new word meaning a book in a series you are so happy to see that you shriek?) to Like Water for Chocolate. It was good, and I loved reading it, but realized I couldn't recall the ending. So now I am going to read it again, or for the first time and without self-deception.

Tim Susman said...

Currently the book occupying that "light browsing" niche for me is the "Paraspheres" anthology. I hope to submit a story to them this month and maybe sell the book at Wondercon, so it seems polite to read through it.

I think you're right about the reviews, but then again, my reading time these days is mostly made up of scattered moments: on trains, before bed, a half hour here and there. So I do appreciate the small, episodic works.

Tim Susman said...

As another aside: really enjoying Fudoki, but I keep singing the title to the tune of "Shaboopie" from "The Music Man," as in, "He's her fudoki. Fudoki! Fudoki!" It's right on the border between amusing and annoying, and now none of you will be able to look at the title without thinking that, either. Ha.