Reading Into the Past: Week of 4/23

This week I'm looking back at the books I read in the equivalent week of 2000, which were:

• Harry Turtledove, The Great War: Breakthroughs (4/16)
  If I weren't reading these books professionally, I think I'd like them quite a bit -- I enjoy the sideways look at history, and generally enjoy the characters (though Turtledove relies a bit too heavily on the historical parallels for my taste). But I usually am reading them professionally, so the fact that they're huge bricks that rotate through a massive cast often sends up a groan. I still mostly enjoy reading them, but I do sometimes wish they weren't so damn long. This one, as I recall, was the middle book in the WWI series and thus third in the overall series (which gets up to book ten this summer).
  
• Artist Archives: Swimsuit Sweeties (4/17)
  At the SFBC, we sell art books fairly regularly. One of the perennial art-book subjects, which has sold in the club since before I was even a member, are paintings of women who are not wearing as many clothes as perhaps might be practical in their situations. And so we get in piles of similar books irregularly, and I'm generally the one who looks them over to see if they could work for us. This, as I recall, wasn't: it was a collection of pin-up art of the '40s, featuring Betty Grable types in bathing costumes.
  
• Slavomir Rawicz, The Long Walk (4/18)
  This is a great book: Rawicz was a Pole who ended up in a Soviet labor camp (during WW II, I believe) and broke out with a few other prisoners. They escaped by walking straight south to India, and this is their story.
  
• Harlan Coben, The Final Detail (4/19, quit unfinished)
  He spoke entertainingly at a company function a few years before this, and he lives not too far away from me in North Jersey, and he seems to be a swell guy, and the Mystery Guild folks keep telling me his books are good. But I couldn't get into this one.
  
• Paco Underhill, Why We Buy (4/20)
  The Wife is fascinated with retail, and some of that has rubbed off on me. (Also, she's not much of a reader, so sometimes I read these books for her, and then I tell her what they're about.) Underhill is a consultant who runs a company called Envirosell, and this book is one part manifesto and one part history of the company.
  
• Harry Harrison, The Stainless Steel Rat (4/21)
  I re-read it to see if it still held up. It felt a lot creakier than when I'd first read it, with the kind of generic big-office-building future that now feels so '50s to me, but it was still breezy and fun.
  
• Brian Herbert & Kevin J. Anderson, Dune: House Harkonnen (4/22)
  It's amazing how much like clockwork my reading schedule runs. This weekend I was reading Hunters of Dune, the new Herbert/Anderson book. This one here was the middle of the first prequel trilogy, and I remember thinking it wasn't as good as House Atreides.
  
• Matt Wagner, Mage: The Hero Defined, Vol. 1 (4/23)
  
• Matt Wagner, Mage: The Hero Defined, Vol. 2 (4/23)
  I've talked about this series at least once in this blog already, but these were the slim trade paperback reprints that came out a few years before the big hardcover.
  

Only two days late this week, which I guess is pretty good. I wasn't reading particularly exciting or wonderful things back in 2000 -- except, maybe, for The Long Walk, which has lived in the memory.