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A nine to five job, a completely unpopular review column and various other
projects doesn't leave as much time reading as I'd like. So this year I've taken
on a new task- The 52 Book Challenge. This year I will attempt- and maybe even
succeed- at reading 52 books in one year. I must warn the reader here. While
a lot of the books I plan to read this year will be Sci-Fi or fantasy related,
some are not. So over the course of the year while you'll be getting plenty of
Star Trek, the occasional Terry Pratchett and Jasper Fforde but I'll be just as
likely to pick up some Aldous Huxley, Charles Dickens and my personal favorite
Samuel L. Clemens. My point is you never know who will show up to the party.
So to start things off-
- Star Trek: A Time to Harvest by Ward and Dillmore: The fourth book of the
'A Time To' set does something the third book did not do. It had stuff
happen. The first half of the story set up a lot of interesting subplots some
of which other writers will probably play with later but moved like a
constipated turtle. Here, after the first thirty pages everything happens
really quickly. It reminds me of the Star Trek books of old where everything
actually finished up in one book. Not like now where the multibook epics are
the norm and not a once a year gimmick. Like most Star Trek books, it is not
great literature. For long time Star Trek: The Next Generation fans like
myself, it is a lot of fun but it is by no means Huck Finn. Still it kept me
entertained- even though I was hacking my lungs out for the last two days.
- Something Rotten by Jasper Fforde: The world of Thursday Next is a
delightful mix of noir, time travel, alternate history and a mish mash of
literature both real and imagined. Fforde creates a world that while remarkably
similar to our own also seems completely alien. It always seems very lived
in. All of the Thursday Next books have a weird, wonderful sense of plotting
to them. Most of it is so absurd that you shouldn't buy into it however
Fforde's sense of humor is such that try as you might, you get sucked right
in. The book is so zany and whimsical at times that he makes Terry Pratchett
look like Edgar Alan Poe.
- Star Trek: A Time to Love by Robert Greenberger: This book is fast read
considering I generally only read novels on the bus or metro. I started it
Saturday afternoon on the way to visit a friend and finished Thursday morning
with no electricity no blizzard. If it hadn't been for the blizzard I'm not
sure I could have finished Chapter Six or Chapter Seven in four days. I
generally read about 30-40 pages a day and each of those chapters was roughly 50
pages each. It's not like there weren't things happening. There was a lot of
good character development and a lot of action. There were really easy places
to break chapters other than the way the story was set up it was just not what I
was used to, even from the heyday of Star Trek novels. This novel is set up
almost like an actual episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation. Most the 'A
Time To' books so far in the series have tried this only here the split in the
books seems natural. You could almost see the screen go black, the blue block
lettered 'To Be Continued...' and the air filling with the dunt-dunt
dunt-dunt-dwah. I wish I had been at home when I finished it rather than being
stuck at my sister's because this one made me want to immediately go grab 'A
Time to Hate' from my box of unread books.
I know this doesn't seem like the most auspicious of beginnings three books, but
the year is still young. I think without trade paper backs and a box of
Twilight Zone DVDs slowing me down things should start moving a little bit
faster.
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