Books, books, books

It's been a while, hasn't it? I didn't intend not to post for over two months, but it happens. I was in a bit of a sci-fi hole for a while and had shifted focus to fantasy for a bit. But I've read two science fiction (though I'd sooner count one of them as speculative fiction) books this month and bought loads more before that. We'll start with the latter first. I hit the local Good Will last month and struck a surprisingly generous vein.

Fourteen books in all. Nine of them sci-fi and of those, eight were by David Weber because clearly I didn't have enough of his books already! A run down:

The Webers:

Worlds of Honor, Changer of Worlds, and More Than Honor (anthologies)
Dahak Trilogy: Mutineer’s Moon, Heirs of Empire, and The Armageddon Inheritance
Path of the Fury
The War God's Own

Everything else:

The Ecologic Secession and The Ecolitan Enigma - L. E. Modesitt, Jr.
The Thief’s Gamble - Juliet E. McKenna
The Wizard Lord - Lawrence Watt-Evans
The Phoenix Guards - Steven Brust
The Big Over Easy - Jasper Fforde

The two Modesitts apparently are no longer in print as individual books, but are available as part of omnibuses. Same deal with Path of the Fury which was reissued with a prequel as In Fury Born.

So yeah, I added greatly to my Weber collection and I'm planning on taking a picture of the whole mess at some point. I'm probably going to have to replace at least one of the Dahak books because it's starting to come apart at the spine.

But I didn't stop there and several days after buying that box of books, I made a trip to Barnes and Noble for still more books. I restricted myself to just sci-fi for this trip and made away with four tomes.

Archform was an impulse buy because I didn't even know the book was back in print. Honestly? The title has always intrigued me for some reason. I decided after reading Legion of the Damned that I wanted Andromeda's Fall. The First Casualty was another impulse buy and should tide me over until I can get the second Kris Longknife book. Great North Road caught my attention when it was first released years ago and I finally bought it after passing it over last year.

Moving on, I mentioned at the beginning of this post that I read two sci-fi/speculative fiction books this month - Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card and Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler. I'm going to write reviews for both, but I thought I would jabber about them a little. Ender's Game was my second read through of the classic and I'm glad that I did. For however controversial Card is, no one can deny that he's a damned fine writer and Ender's Game is one of the greatest works of science fiction of all time.

Parable of the Sower is an odd bird because while it has aspects of post-apocalyptic fiction, it doesn't quite fit within that genre because while society is without question collapsing in the story, it still largely exists. It's more like a prelude to the post-apocalypse. It also doesn't fit in the science fiction genre as a whole because there's nothing science fictional about it. Because of that, I feel like it's more speculative fiction. I generally liked it, but the Earthseed religion that the main character creates and develops throughout the novel was one of my least favorite and weakest aspects of the plot.

I also read The Veldt from Ray Bradbury's The Illustrated Man and I plan on reading more of his works next month. I've neglected the man and his stories for way too long.

So, see anything you like? Have you guys read any of these books before?