Reading for December

Got through some fun stuff, but not as much as I'd hoped. The audiobooks have been making my increasing number of workout hours far less intolerable.

12/03/2011    Parable of the Talents (audiobook) by Octavia E. Butler
12/06/2011    Life, the Universe and Everything (audiobook) by Douglas Adams
12/09/2011    BFI Classics: 2001: A Space Odyssey by Peter Kramer
12/10/2011    So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish (audiobook) by Douglas Adams
12/11/2011    Warrior Woman by Marion Zimmer Bradley
12/12/2011    Young Zaphod Plays it Safe (ss) by Douglas Adams
12/13/2011    Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency (audiobook) by Douglas Adams
12/16/2011    The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul (audiobook) by Douglas Adams
12/17/2011    Steed and Mrs. Peel (gn) by Grant Morrison, Anne Caulfield & Ian Gibson
12/18/2011    The Other by Matthew Hughes
12/19/2011    Mostly Harmless (audiobook) by Douglas Adams
12/22/2011    Douglas Adams’s Starship Titanic (audiobook) by Terry Jones
12/23/2011    The Dance at the Gym (ss) by Marion Zimmer Bradley & Elisabeth Waters
12/23/2011    A Feminist Creation Myth (ss) by Marion Zimmer Bradley
12/25/2011    Space: 1999: Android Planet by John Rankine
12/26/2011    The Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time (audiobook) by Douglas Adams
12/30/2011    The Dying Earth (audiobook) by Jack Vance

I'm currently reading The Survivors by Bradley & Zimmer, and trying to get into The Heirs of Hammerfell, the last Darkover book Marion wrote. Reading both feels like work, unfortunately. I don't think Marion had much input into The Survivors; the text doesn't read much like anything Marion would've written. I suspect her name on the cover was there for commercial reasons. It did provide her brother Paul with a toehold into becoming a published writer, which was, I suspect, its purpose.

Currently listening to The Eyes of the Overworld, by Jack Vance, with the last two Dying Earth titles (Cugel's Saga and Rhiallto the Marvellous) to follow. I'm finding Jack Vance less satisfactory in audio form. So much of the pleasure in reading Vance lies in lingering over the delectable prose and really experiencing the shapes of the words and sentences. The audiobooks' reader is doing an admirable job, but I keep wanting to go back and listen again to passages -- which is kind of hard to do when I'm on the treadmill or lying under some exercise machine. I don't think I"ll be spending a lot of time listening to Vance's works; I'd rather read them!

I do have some of the "Trillium" books on audio. I think I'll listen to them after the Dying Earth books.

I have several fun things planned for 2012, including reading E.C. Tubb's Dumarest of Terra series -- all 33 volumes. They're quite short, so it;s not like reading 33 of the kind of novels that get published these days. It's more like reading 4 Neal Stephenson tomes.

I'm not going to even try and get current on Star Trek novels, but I am planning on reading the rest of the Star Trek: Vanguard series, which is ending with the eighth volume in a few months. I got to about page 40 of the third volume before I ground to a halt, so I have a bit of catch-up to do. I'm also going to read the last couple Star Trek: Voyager books, which are far better than the series ever was, even if (perhaps because...?) Janeway is Still.Dead.

I'm looking forward to new novels by Tim Powers, Matthew Hughes and Samuel R. Delany in the first few months of 2012, three of my all-time favorite writers.

7 Skies H3

Spent most of the weekend listening to The Flaming Lips' 24-hour "song," 7 Skies H3. Or, to be more accurate, I had it playing while doing other things (reading, surfing, etc.)

Some sections I really like. some sections I really dislike. Has anyone else listened to it? Any thoughts?