Reading Into the Past: Week of 12/25

A slightly different methodology this week -- since my reading notebook picks up in December of 1990, I have fifteen years of history I could write about. But my old randomization (two dice) only generated numbers from 2 to 12. Since I think higher numbers will be more fun -- I'll be more likely to forget what the books even were, for one thing -- I'm going to three dice this week (and probably going forward), but I'll re-roll if I get anything above 15. (Did I ever mention I'm geeky? Just in case you didn't notice yet: I'm geeky.)

After all that, this week we only get a 5, sending me back to the books I was reading this week in 2000:

• Sean Williams and Shane Dix, Evergence: A Dark Imbalance (12/18)
  
• Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises (12/20)
  Whiplash? Who, me?
  
• Roger Highfield, The Physics of Christmas (12/21, quit unfinished)
  
• Jean David Morvan & Philippe Buchet, Wake 1: Fire & Ash (12/22)
  
• Marini and Smolderen, Gipsy: The Gipsy Star (12/23)
  
• R.A. Salvatore, Ascendence (12/24)
  
• Jane and Howard Frank, The Frank Collection (12/25)

What I was mostly reading that week (fairly slowly) was Alastair Reynolds's Revelation Space. But the other thing I was doing (and one reason why I was reading so slowly) was Thing 2, who was due 12/25/00, and eventually delivered as a scheduled C-section two days later. (One of our stops, that Christmas day five years ago, in between visiting one family and the other, was at my wife's hospital for her every-other-day checkup and final preparations for the C-section two days later; I read Revelation Space in the car with the sleeping two-year-old Thing 1 while she went in.)

Dark Imbalance was the third of the "Evergence" books, which I read back-to-back. I remember they were fun space operas with some superhuman something-or-others, but that's about it.

Sun Also Rises is the one with the dickless ambulance driver, right?

Physics of Christmas just didn't grab me, so I never went back to it.

Then there were two European comics, which weren't meant to remain in memory in the first place, and didn't.

I don't remember which one Ascendence was, but I enjoyed that Salvatore series (the middle book and the second trilogy; I never read the first one) much more than I expected to. The middle book in particular was a very good what-happens-after-the-world-gets-saved book, but my impression is that Salvatore fans didn't take to that series as much, and non-Salvatore fans said "Ew, he writes game tie-ins; I won't bother to read anything he writes." (I just went and looked it up, and the book I mean is Mortalis; give it a try someday, since it stands on its own quite well.)

And I greatly covet the Franks' art collection. The house, too, but I'd settle for the art.

And that'll do. Happy Christmas, everyone.