Dec 30, 2010

err... I guess this would have been a hiatus?

     I kept telling myself I should write but the next thing I know is it has been six months.  Tad was gone and back and gone and back since then, having completed the Hong Kong trip and also having completed a semester.  I've missed at least three major holidays (Halloween, Thanksgiving and Christmas) and have read a good number of books and overfilling another bookshelf.  I've been using the Project Gutenberg library for access to some of the more well known texts and have added to my belt Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Hounds of the Baskervilles and working through A Thousand and One Nights slowly.  I may even join up with LibriVox and read some aloud.  We'll see.
     Over the Christmas hols I gave myself bronchitis and spent a good day reading the Seventies sci-fi To Your Scattered Bodies Go by Phillip Jose Farmer.  If you don't mind some trippy counter-culture meta stuff this is good.  It's the first of the Riverworld series and won a Hugo in 1972.  Aliens landed on Earth in 2002? and most all humans were killed in 2008 for defense reasons.  Everyone is resurrected in a "Riverworld" that stretches across the planet and is some sort of experiment/social melange.  Our protagonist is Sir Richard Francis Burton and although not a 'good' guy he is a man who is trying to get out of this bizarre place.  I suggest reading it if you don't mind Phillip K. Dick and the like.  I hope to get the second of the series soon.
     Speaking of Phillip K. Dick I tried to get an anthology for Tad for Christmas just to discover they have never made such a thing!  I mean, how dare they!  I have anthologies for Harlan Ellison and have read parts of Roger Zelazny's short story collections but this well known prolific author is a no show.  How sad. 

     501 books count: 54