Over the last four days I've had some kind of mini-flu. Temperature in the 100.5 range and a complete inability to feel either warm enough or cool enough for more than about an hour. Not important as such, and it seems to be gone now, but it did lead to my spending quite a bit of time reading. This has included samples from the most recent "New Yorker", CACM, and IEEE Computer, but relatively little online stuff (sitting up was just too tiring).
Most of the reading was science fiction/fantasy and not overly demanding (the kind of density that works well for airline travel and mild flu). I would note that I don't usually read anything like this much paper in most four day periods.
The City and the City by China Miéville. Miéville is a fascinating writer. I've read his three books set in Bas-Lag, a very strange world but one that hangs together nicely. These are : Perdido Street Station, The Scar, and The Iron Council and are often characterized as the "new weird" but while they are certainly weird enough in setting, the stories and themes are very human. His newest The City and the City is a murder mystery and in many ways fits the conventions of that genre pretty nicely. Except that instead of being set in somewhere that we might know, it is set in two twin but separate cities Bezel (there is an accent over the "z" that I don't know how to generate) and Ul Qoma. What makes this interesting is that the cities overlap in some undefined way, and residents learn to "unsee" things in the other city that may be occurring across the street (or closer). This prompted me (I hesitate to say "the reader") to contemplate just this kind of overlap that occurs for other reasons - perhaps Jerusalem or some city in Europe where the Jews were forced to live apart (not necessarily in ghettos - just "apart") or even a city in the US where classes may intermix without intermixing. Think of the oft mentioned example of a black man failing to get a cab in New York where a white man just down the block succeeds.
I have not yet read Un Lun Dun by Miéville but look forward to it. I also added more than a few books to my (far too large and unlikely ever to even begin to empty significantly) Amazon wishlist after reading a list of book suggestions by him.
Candle by John Barnes. Just as I was ready to put this down thinking I'd figured it all out, he twists things just enough, and then it happens again. I'm not sure it is worth a re-read, but it was a good read-once.
Against a Dark Backround by Iain M. Banks. I've read a couple of his "Culture" novels and liked them well enough. This was a good read, but in a kind of unrelenting sameness sort of way. Lots of imaginative touches, but tossed in almost at random. I must also admit that books and movies where everyone gets killed off (one by one by one) to be less than rewarding in general. There are exceptions, but there needs to be pretty substantial other rewards.
Killing Time by Caleb Carr. I've enjoyed Carr's 19th century mysteries, but not enough to seek out any more. This one fell into my hands (as did several of the others I read in the last couple days) at a yard sale where someone who had a serious interest in science fiction was selling things off. I wanted to like it, but it just didn't work.
I finished Before and After by Rosellen Brown. This was made into a movie a while back. The book is pretty good and well worth reading. The narration from the viewpoint of several characters reads a bit false though as only one of the characters writes in the first person - is this narrator also the writer of the other viewpoints? Certainly a possibility, but not one that seemed to me to add much to the story.
I also read Slant by Greg Bear and Beowulf's Children by Niven, Pournelle and Barnes - on which I will not comment, and started A Distant Mirror by Barbara Tuchman and Snowqueen by Joan Vinge.
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