| Date | Author | Title | Comments | Owner | |||||||||
| 7/1/1998 | C. J. Cherryh | Cyteen | Long, but well-written. "Azi" deeply disturbing. Not great ending. | me | |||||||||
| 7/5/1998 | Charles Sheffield | Godspeed | Fun. "Treasure Island" in space. | me | |||||||||
| 7/12/1998 | Spider Robinson | Callahan's Crosstime Saloon | Great start, but declined as weirdness became commonplace, a la X-files. | cyn | |||||||||
| 7/14/1998 | Eric Lannak | None | The true (?) story of the Rocket Car Legend. Incredibly credible! | web | |||||||||
| 7/14/1998 | Isaac Asimov | I, Robot | Re-read. Ideas now seem unoriginal, writing hackneyed. But Isaac did it first! | me | |||||||||
| 7/26/1998 | David Brin | Heaven's Reach | Last of Uplift War trilogy. Faster-paced, more eventful than #2. | Denis | |||||||||
| 8/25/1998 | Schmidt & Zubrin, ed. | Islands in the Sky | "Bold new ideas for colonizing space". Fabulous! Covers everything! | me | |||||||||
| 9/1998 | David Brin | Antarctica | A beautiful description of the wilderness and society of Antarctica today and tomorrow. | me | |||||||||
| 9/1998 | C. J. Cherryh | Finity's End | Station kid gets dragged onto starship. Great book, good climax, but no resolution. Arrgh. | me | |||||||||
| 9/20/1998 | David Weber | In Enemy Hands | Honor Harrington gets captured and sentenced to death. But not for long... | me | |||||||||
| 9/23/1998 | David Weber | Echoes of Honor | In this corner, at 65 kg, Honor Harrington. In the other, at 10 24 kg, Planet Hades. | me | |||||||||
| 9/28/1998 | Stephen R. Donaldson | Forbidden Knowledge | Book 2 of the "Gap" series. 450 pages of abuse, torture, and revenge. | me | |||||||||
| 10/8/1998 | David Weber | On Basilisk Station | (reread) -- Honor Harrington's first adventure. Great book. | me | |||||||||
| 10/12/1998 | Joe Haldeman | Forever Peace | A cure for war? Unlikely premises, but he does great things with them. | me | |||||||||
| 10/15/1998 | Connie Willis | Fire Watch | Short story collection. "Fire Watch" is particularly good. | me | |||||||||
| 10/20/1998 | Connie Willis | Bellwether | Fad sociologist meets chaos theorist, studies sheep. Funny, insigntful, illuminating. | me | |||||||||
| 10/25/1998 | Stephen R. Donaldson | A Dark and Hungry God Arises | Torture, revenge, and abuse, volume 3. Why do I read this? | me | |||||||||
| 11/??/1998 | Jennifer Roberson | Sword Dancer | I generally dislike tetralogies, but this one's great. | cyn | |||||||||
| 11/??/1998 | Jennifer Roberson | Sword Singer | cyn | ||||||||||
| 11/??/1998 | Jennifer Roberson | Sword Maker | cyn | ||||||||||
| 11/??/1998 | Jennifer Roberson | Sword Breaker | cyn | ||||||||||
| 12/2/1998 | J.M. Barrie | The Admirable Crichton | Extremely whimsical and Gilbert-and-Sullivaney play. | libe | |||||||||
| 12/8/1998 | Connie Willis | To Say Nothing of the Dog | (reread) Go buy this book. Right now. It's fabulous! | me | |||||||||
| 12/9/1998 | Connie Willis | Uncharted Territory | Not the best Connie Willis ever wrote, but lots of fun. | me | |||||||||
| Oy, I'm way behind in typing these in. I may have forgotten a few in here. | |||||||||||||
| 12/1998 | David Weber (ed.) | More than Honor | Honor Harrington short stories by various writers. | Ken? | |||||||||
| 1/1998 | Katherine Kurtz |
|
Don't bother reading the first three books. You can probably skip the second three as well. Start with the Camber series (which takes place first, chronologically). It took several books for Kurtz to learn how to write. | cyn | |||||||||
| 3/1/1999 | Gardner Dozois (ed.) | Year's Best SF 1997 | Ow, my back hurts from carrying this around. Authors to read more of: Greg Egan, Robert Reed, Stephen Baxter, Alistair Reynolds, Gregory Benford. | ||||||||||
| 3/10/1999 | David Weber (ed.) | Worlds of Honor | Another collection of Honor Harrington stories. | Ken | |||||||||
| 3/15/1999 | John Wyndham | Day of the Triffids | No, not the movie. A very good and philosophical disaster novel. | Ken | |||||||||
| 3/25/1999 | Guy Gavriel Kay | Sailing to Sarantium | A beautiful book, but it drags a little in the middle. This could have been a single volume rather than the first of a diad. | me | |||||||||
| 4/5/1999 | Tad Williams | Otherland: City of Golden Shadow | Good. As Becca said, "cyberpunk without the punk". But long. Really, really long. | ||||||||||
| 4/1999 | Jerome K. Jerome | Three Men in a Boat | Recommended in Connie Willis's To Say Nothing of the Dog. Funny, but Willis quoted the good bits. | ||||||||||
| 5/1999 | The Onion | Our Dumb Century | "Earthquake Marks Least Gay Day in San Francisco History"..."Anthropomorphic Pitcher Among Dead in Jonestown Cult Suicide"... | ||||||||||
| 5/1999 | Joe Haldeman | The Forever War | A very good space war novel with no relation to Forever Peace except for the same unlikely plot-hook ending. | me | |||||||||
| 6/1999 | Iain M. Banks | Inversions | A well-written fantasy novel with two parallel stories. Not Banks's most original work, but quite good | me | |||||||||
| 6/1999 | Katherine Kurtz | The Adept
The Lodge of the Lynx The Templar Treasure |
Shrug. Not bad. If you're looking for modern-day magic, you'd have more fun playing Mage than reading these. | me | |||||||||
| 7/1999 | Gaiman & Pratchett | Good Omens | Really really funny. I think I'm the last of my friends to read this book. | me | |||||||||
| 7/1999 | Dan Simmons | Hyperion | An amazing book. Scary and horrific, intelligent, and full of ideas. The "Canterbury Tales" connection is brilliant! | me | |||||||||
| 7/1999 | Dan Simmons | Fall of Hyperion | Pales by comparison. Similar in style to Hyperion, but that makes it unoriginal. | me | |||||||||
| 8/1999 | William Goldman | The Princess Bride | Curtis read this aloud to me and friends once, but he skipped over some parts... which is how it should be. | cyn | |||||||||
| 8/1999 | Robert J. Sawyer | Factoring Humanity | A somewhat unbelievable premise, but a great story about forgiveness and understanding one another. | me | |||||||||
| 9/1999 | Tad Williams | Otherland: River of Blue Fire | God, this is long. If something doesn't happen soon, I'm quitting. | me | |||||||||
| 9/1999 | Sheri S. Tepper | Grass | A very detailed set of cultures with detail-free characters. Interesting but disturbing social engineering | me | |||||||||
| 9/1999 | Fred Saberhagen | Empire of the East | A postapocalyptic Earth turned fantasy realm, with old tech cropping up. Interesting. | me | |||||||||
| 10/1999 | Sheri S. Tepper | The Gate to Women's Country | Good Lord! Does Tepper truly believe that all men are evil, and should be eugenicized? I'm appalled, but I'm not sure at whom. | me | |||||||||
| 10/1999 | Harry Turtledove | How Few Remain | "A novel of the second war between the states". Very interesting, and thought-provoking, but I'm not sure whom to root for. | me | |||||||||
| 11/1999 | James Morrow | This is the Way the World Ends | Gotta love Morrow. As always, he's funny, surreal, irreverent, and thought-provoking. | me | |||||||||
| 11/1999 | C. J. Cherryh | Fortress in the Eye of Time | Cherry's books have the common theme: "Young Man Out of His Element". This is a very well-built fantasy; the Young Man is created out of raw magic for a wizard's ineffable purposes. | me | |||||||||
| 12/1999 | J. K. Rowling | Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone
Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban |
Everybody's reading these. You should too: they're fun. | me | |||||||||
| 12/1999 | Kim Stanley Robinson | Remaking History and other stories | Short story collection. Some sci-fi, some not, all very interesting. | me | |||||||||
| 1/2000 | Catherine Asaro | Primary Inversion | Not too bad. But the psionics was inconsistent and annoying. | me | |||||||||
| 1/2000 | Matthys Levy & Mario Salvatore | Why Buildings Fall Down | "When Architects Attack!" Really interesting. | me | |||||||||
| 2/2000 | Harry Turtledove | The Great War: American Front | The U.S.A. and the Confederate States enter World War I on opposite sides. Frighteningly vivid alternate history. | me | |||||||||
| 2/2000 | David Weber | Apocalypse Troll | The whole Planet Earth versus one alien, and it's a fair fight. A bit too Tom Clancy for my taste. | me | |||||||||
| ?/2000 | Georges Lefebvre | The French Revolution | The French Revolution from an (overly) Socialist viewpoint. | me | |||||||||
| ?/2000 | Francois Furet | Revolutionary France 1770-1880 | More balanced than Lefebvre, but too condensed | me | |||||||||
| 3/2000 | Harry Turtledove | Into the Darkness | World War II retold as a fantasy novel. | me | |||||||||
| 3/2000 | Andrew Chaikin | A Man on the Moon | A great history of the Apollo missions. | me | |||||||||
| 3/2000 | Stephen Baxter | Voyage | A mission to Mars in 1986. The hardware, the characters, and the plot are all stolen from the Apollo missions. Unoriginal. | me | |||||||||
| 5/2000 | Phillip Jergens | The Biota Risk | I bought this because I was sure it would suck. It was worse than I expected. | me | |||||||||
| ?/2000 | Guy Gavriel Kay | Lord of Emperors | Follow-up to Sailing to Sarantium. Very good, but I was disappointed in the ending. | me | |||||||||
| ?/2000 | John Barnes | Orbital Resonance | Girl growing up on a spaceship. So-so. | me | |||||||||
| 6/2000 | Neal Stephenson | Cryptonomicon | Wow! Great book! About cryptography in World War II and today. | me | |||||||||
| 6/2000 | Daniel Keys Moran | Emerald Eyes
The Long Run The Last Dancer |
A great series, lent to me by Avon. I didn't like the "Continuing Time" mythology / backplot, but the main stories (especially The Long Run) are great. | avon | |||||||||
| 7/2000 | J. K. Rowling | Harry Potter and the Globlet of Fire | Still as good as ever. | me | |||||||||
| 7/2000 | Iain M. Banks | Use of Weapons | A Culture novel. I won't say any more, except that it's great. | dmm | |||||||||
| unfinished | Robert Forward | Saturn Rukh | me | ||||||||||
| unfinished | Charles Sheffield | Convergent Series | me | ||||||||||
| unfinished | Leo Tolstoy | Anna Karenina | me | ||||||||||
| abandoned | Brian Jacques | Redwall | Like Watership Down, but stupid and cloying. Go read W.D. instead. | me | |||||||||
| Jason Goodman (Goodmanj@mit.edu) | Back to Jason Goodman's home page |