Read in April

This is the round-up of all of the book I finished this past month; there are a few other things I read (or, to be more honest, read pieces of) for the SFBC, but you don't need to know about them and I don't want to have public opinions on books based on pieces, anyway.

• Jennifer Roberson, Deepwood (4/1)
  The sequel to Karavans was another agreeable fantasy -- it's not quite "epic," but it's somewhere in that neighborhood. It does have an awful lot of viewpoint characters, though; Roberson handles the transitions well, but it does make for a bouncy start, trying to remember who they all are and what they were doing at the end of Karavans.
• Yoshihiro Tatsumi, The Push Man and Other Stories (4/2)
• David Koenig, Mouse Tales (4/3)
• Richard Stark, Lemons Never Lie (4/4)
• Walter Kirn, The Unbinding (4/5)
• Florence King, He: An Irreverent Look at the American Male (4/7)
• P.G. Wodehouse, Money in the Bank (4/10)
• Scott Kurtz, PvP, Vol. 2: Reloaded (4/10)
  Strip cartoons are one of the great media invented in America, and this is a good strip -- I seem to be blowing through it as quickly as I can find the books, and enjoying it all the way.
  
• John Kovalic, Dork Decade (4/13)
  A collection of Dork Tower and related strips from two gaming magazines over the past ten years; some of these were pretty familiar, which may mean I've seen them several times before. (I'm not clean on the subtle interplay of where Kovalic's strips appear -- some are on the web, some in magazines, and longer stories plus some reprint single-pagers are in the comic book.) Anyway, these are still amusing me, so I'll keep reading them.
• Barry N. Malzberg, Breakfast in the Ruins (4/14)
  The source of a good week's worth of blogging; I wish I could get that out of every book...
• Scott Lynch, Red Seas Under Red Skies (4/15)
  The sequel to The Lies of Locke Lamora and second in what I've recently learned is the ominously singular "Gentleman Bastard" series. I won't talk about plot, since we're well before publication, but this has all of the twisty con-man stuff of Locke Lamora, plus pirates. (And who can resist pirates?) It could have used a single unifying villain like Locke Lamora, and it feels a bit transitional (going from what could have been a standalone into a clearly multi-book sequence), but every bit of it was very entertaining, and now I have to wait a whole 'nother year for the next one.
• Kage Baker, Gods and Pawns (4/17)
• Scott Kurtz, PvP Vol. 3: Rides Again (4/18)
  See above as to "reading as fast as I can get my hands on them." Vol. 4 was out of stock at my comics shop last week, or I'd be mid-way through that one right now...
• John Scalzi, The Last Colony (4/19)
• Neil Gaiman & Michael Reaves, InterWorld (4/22)
  This has a complicated backstory, which I won't explain in detail for fear of getting it wrong (it was going to be a movie or TV show or something, but then it didn't, and now it will be a book). It's being published for younger readers, and it pretty clearly is for younger readers. It's not Coraline (it feels more Reaves than Gaiman), but it's a decent YA novel that I consider science fiction, and ghod knows we could use more of that.
• Grant Stoddard, Working Stiff (4/24)
• Jasper Fforde, Thursday Next: First Among Sequels (4/28)
  Fifth in the series: in 2002, Thursday is pushing fifty and the mother of three, SpecOps was disbanded/privatized a decade ago, and things seem pretty quiet. (Well, until the plot gets started, of course. Though this one is a bit more diffuse than the earlier books, and not driven strongly by a single villain.) First Among Sequels also feels like a transitional book -- even more so than Red Seas -- so it's hard to say much until other people have the chance to read it, and, maybe more importantly, until we see what it's transitioning to. Still, I put down a worthy but slow non-fiction book to read this, and zipped right through it in a day and a half. If Fforde could manage to turn himself into the mid-90s Terry Pratchett and start banging out these books at the rate of two or so a year, I would be extremely happy.
• Joe Haldeman, The Accidental Time Machine (4/29)
  Another zippy fun book, this time science fiction. It's one of those leapfrog time-travel books, in which every trip into the future goes farther and farther. Again, not publishing for a few months, so that's all I should say.
• Dashiell Hammett, Red Harvest (4/30)
  The Continental Op is much mushier than I remember: he only kills one person in this book, and he gets worried that the town ("Poisonville") is turning him into a killing machine. This novel is soaked in blood -- with something like two dozen on-page deaths before we're done, each one coming one at a time.

And that's the month that was. When I'm not deliberately reading a book every day, I seem to finish about two books every three days.