Month 5 of 260 (1.92 percent)
Size of list: 79,786 pages (2.6 percent greater than starting size)
Pages read: 2,532 (3.17 percent)
H-list: 736/22,219 (3.31 percent)
N-list: 970/35,009 (2.77 percent)
O-list: 826/22,558 (3.66 percent)
Finished: Sanctuary, Foundation
Reading: Startide Rising, The City Stained Red, The Dream Cycle of H.P. Lovecraft (no progress this month)
Added: Ancillary Sword
This month was quite the contrast.
Foundation is one of those books, like The Lord of the Rings, that my friends read in middle school and I didn't, and now I love it. Sure, it helps that Asimov's psychohistory is awfully like econometrics. But it's also the economy of every scene. Rarely are more than two or three characters on stage, and I say stage because the book could totally be done as a stage play. Every scene is dialogue, not action; in fact, every scene, every chapter, is a negotiation.
Coming back to Sanctuary felt like a letdown. It's no insult to say Lackey doesn't write as well as Asimov, but the fact that there was so much narrative exposition after a book with practically none was jarring. Sanctuary isn't as good as the previous books in the series, and often some of the setting feels like a metaphor for the Bush administration (during which it was written). The ending was a major change, so I am curious to see what happens in book four.
Overall, it has me thinking about a difference in types of literature, which I think aligns mainly with the line between science fiction and fantasy. Books like The Demolished Man, Ancillary Justice and Foundation introduce and play with new concepts and new worlds; books like Lord of the Rings and The Wheel of Time and The Dragon Jousters (of which Sanctuary was book three) focus more on events that happen to characters and how they react, in worlds that, for all their dragons and magic, aren't really that different than ours. I'm waiting to see if other fantasy can blow my mind like science fiction does; maybe it's just a matter of which fantasy I read. But it's just a preliminary theory I've been kicking around in my head.
