Read in July

The list makes this look like a lazy month -- and it was, actually, with long stretches where I tried to catch up on The New Yorker or the Internet rather than reading books like I'm supposed to -- but it also was a month when I read pieces of lots of Hugo-nominated things, which aren't recorded here.

(Back when I first kept a reading notebook, I was exhaustively complete -- listing magazines as well as the total page count read, by item, every week. But I decided that was too OCD even for me after about six months, and I've just kept a line-item list of actual books read all the way to the end since then.)

I'm also still reading some things on my iPad, which I'm not entirely satisfied with: it makes all books look exactly the same, which I don't like, for one thing. Also, it's far too easy for me to hit a button and do something else, which problem a real book doesn't have. (And, as you might have noticed, it doesn't take much for a book to annoy me -- twenty years in publishing can give anyone a hair-trigger for problems, and every book has something wrong with it.)

Anyway, here's what I did manage to read this month:

• N.K. Jemisin, The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms (7/2)
  
• Phil & Kaja Foglio, Girl Genius, Vol. 10: Agatha Heterodyne and the Guardian Muse (7/3)
  
• Mike Carey & Peter Gross, The Unwritten, Vol. 2: Inside Man (7/5)
  
• Howard Tayler & Travis Walton, Schlock Mercenary: Massively Parallel (7/7)
  
• George O'Connor, Hera: The Goddess and Her Glory (7/8)
  
• Stephan Pastis, Pearls Blows Up (7/8)
  
• Daniel Clowes, Mister Wonderful (7/11)
  
• Robert Mankoff, editor, The New Yorker: On the Money (7/16)
  
• Ian McDonald, The Dervish House (7/18)
  
• Mira Grant, Feed (7/23)

Even worse than the fact that I didn't read much is the added fact that I didn't enjoy most of it all that much -- though those two facts are not unrelated; when I'm reading things that aren't thrilling me (and I both don't want to quit and don't have a real deadline to finish), I find that I dawdle quite a lot. So my hope for August is to find a bunch of books that I really want to get to the end of quickly.