Reading Into the Past: Week of 1/22

Every Sunday, I roll some dice and check out my reading notebook for a randomly chosen past year, to see what I was reading this week that year and to find out if I can remember anything of what I read.

This week, I rolled a 6, so we'll be looking at this week in 2000:

• David Weber, Ashes of Honor (1/16, read portions)
  I'm afraid I don't really get Weber; I've read a few of his books and I think I can detect the stuff his fans enjoy (and so decide which ones they'll like better), but it's not the kind of space opera that does much for me. I'm a post-modernist at heart, I guess, so deliberately old-fashioned adventure stuff in this day and age usually leaves me cold. I'm not even sure which book this is -- maybe the space-prison-break novel?
• Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs & Steel (1/18)
  Seeing this reminds me that I've wanted to read Diamond's new book Collapse for several months now, but it will probably take more than a week, which is a lot of time to devote to one book. I found this one as intriguing as just about everyone else who read it, and I mostly bought Diamond's arguments. (He struck me as being quite measured in his judgments, too -- he didn't seem to be claiming to have found the One Theory that will Explain Everything, but to have focused on a few factors that underlie a lot of cultural differences.) This is a book anyone who thinks seriously about Big Ideas needs to read.
• Thomas Mallon, A Book of One's Own (1/21)
  I was annoyed at Mallon for about a decade for a somewhat frivolous reason -- he was supposedly a professor at Vassar (where I went to college), but was never on campus and taught, I think, one class a year on a full professor's salary. So I never saw him, and, even as an English major, didn't know anyone who'd ever had a class with him, and he struck me as a monumental waste of resources that could have gone to actually serving the students -- like me, for example. I've still never read any of his novels, but I did eventually read this book. I think this one was the examination of various literary diaries through the years, but it hasn't remained in the memory (or on my shelf). The book of Mallon's I do remember (and did keep) is his excellent history of plagiarism, Stolen Words, which I'd recommend over this one any day.
• Larry Niven and Steven Barnes, Saturn's Race (1/22)
  Oh, this is the medium-future-on-Earth book with the genius killer shark with metal hands, right? (Apologies if that's a "spoiler.") If it's the book I'm thinking of, it was a perfectly adequate entertainment that seemed to make sense while reading, but fell apart a bit in retrospect.

Right before that, I read Paul Hoffman's The Man Who Loved Only Numbers (the biography of Paul Erdos) and right afterward I read the two Van Vogt "Weapon Makers" books. And, no, it really doesn't seem weird for me to jump back and forth in my reading like that. I often find after finishing one book that I want to read something as unlike it as possible.