Reading Into the Past: Week of 10/8

This week, I rolled a nine on my dice, and these are the books I read this equivalent week in 1997:

• John M. Ford, The Dragon Waiting (10/1)
  I'm sorry to say that I didn't love this; I thought it was more than a bit opaque, and seemed to wander aimlessly for much of its length. I know it's supposed to be a major modern classic of fantasy, and Ford has just died (much too young), but it just didn't thrill me.
• Scott Adams, Dilbert: Seven Years of Highly Defective People (10/6)
  A big fat Dilbert collection, on the occasion of the all-important seventh anniversary. Of course, anything Dilbert was like coining money in 1997, so you can't blame them.
• John Mortimer, Rumpole for the Defense (10/8)
  The fourth book of Rumpole stories, which are all pretty much the same (although the last couple of books are getting more tendentious and political as Mortimer gets older and more crotchety). If you haven't read Rumpole, you probably shouldn't start here -- though you could start with any random Rumpole book, since they're all collections of independent stories.

I read the next two Rumpole books, ...and the Golden Thread and Last Case, the next two days. I'm not sure why I was reading so slowly that week; the next thing that turns up for work is Kathleen Ann Goonan's Mississippi Blues on the 21st, which I have marked as "quit unfinished." (Maybe I bogged down in it.) Or maybe this is when I dug my old Nintendo out of storage and discovered that it still worked -- I did that once or twice, and lost quite a bit of reading time whenever that happened.

And, once again, it's taken more than a week to remember to get back to this. Since it's mostly for my personal amusement, that's just fine.