A lot of what I read is Science Fiction. And if you believe Sturgeon’s Law, “90% of science Fiction is crap” (because 90% of everything is crap), so it can be hard to separate the wheat from the chaff. But I’ve got some rules of thumb that have served me pretty well:

1. If you’ve read something from the author before and liked it, you’ll probably like other things from the author.
2. Pick something from the Hugo Award for Best Novel list.

   Unlike the Nebula Award which is voted on by science fiction authors, the Hugo is voted on my science fiction fans. Since it is awarded based on a popular vote, the books that get nominated (and win) tend to be of the more “readable” variety (as opposed to being “literary”). Following my logic, these tend to be books that I enjoy reading (and I have empirical evidence to support this claim).

   If you take a look at the picture of Hugo Award winning Novels (and short stories), I own about 1/4 of the books pictured there. And some of the ones I’ve read from that stack I picked purely because they won a Hugo.

   Sometimes my two rules come together. I recently got “Rainbows End” by Vernor Vinge for Christmas (thanks Bill!). I had asked for it because of my adoration of the two other Vernor Vinge novels I read (see my last post). Tonight I was checking to see what book won the 2007 Hugo, and to my delightful surprise it was the same book I had just gotten. Lucky me!

   As an aside, I also seem to be reading a lot of Young Adult’s Novels lately. When it was just Harry Potter, it was very acceptable as everyone else in the world was reading it as well. I’m not so sure how acceptable it is to be listening to the Artemis Fowl series of books on tape, or reading His Dark Materials. But regardless of how acceptable it is, I enjoy reading them and don’t plan on stopping. As a matter of fact, I’m thinking about trying out the Inkheart series of books as well, as the movie that is coming out for it looks pretty good.

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If you’re read my wife’s blog, you’ll already be familiar with our “Summer Reading Project”. If you’re not, the quick summary is that we can’t buy anymore new books until we’re done reading the ones we already own. As a sidebar, we also want to talk about the books from this project.

I’m going to kick off the discussion with two more traditional “summer” books that I’ve already finished.

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I started reading Clive Cussler novels after watching (and really enjoying!) the movie Sahara. Raise the Titanic is one of his earlier novels and even though a little period in both technology and women, the rest of the story really holds up well. The basic gist of the story is that NUMA (and therefor Dirk Pitt) has been hired to find and raise the Titanic in a huge salvage operation. The only problem: The Soviets want to salvage her as well (Cold War anyone?).

As can be expected from this kind of novel, you don’t need to do a lot of thinking. Just read along and try to keep up. I had a hard time putting this book down!

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Margaret and I started reading Vince Flynn’s novels after someone left his first one at the airport. We picked it up and got hooked. I like to describe him as Tom Clancy, before he got totally long-winded and more concerned with political machinations than with the people in his novels (some may argue that he was always this way). Unlike Jack Ryan, Mitch Rapp is much more than just an analyst. He is a trained assassin who knows that sometimes you need force to keep the world safe. Even having to skip over the conservative lectures were not able to get me to put this book down.

My only problem with the book is that the conclusion feels like a letdown. All the action up until the very end is extremely engrossing, trying to figure out how Mitch is going to save the world this time. And then how he saves it at the end seems like more of an afterthought. It got worse when I read the epilogue and Vince let me know that the whole reason for writing this book is to give a logical setup to his next book. Vince, don’t spend 500 pages to cover what could have been covered in a handful of pages in your next novel.

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I picked up my copy of the new Harry Potter book at Walmart yesterday when they opened at 7:00 AM. I’m only 150 pages into it (I had things to do, so I unfortunately couldn’t dedicate the day to reading it…), but I had some initial thoughts about it.

One thing that I have really liked so far about the new book is how JK Rowling has brought the post 9/11 feel into her books. Her description of Diagon Alley and also the security measures recommended by the Ministry of Magic happen to reflect the real world. Even though the possibility of a Death Eater grabbing you on the street in the middle of the day is about as likely as Malfoy complimenting Harry, the “gang” couldn’t go out alone and had to make sure that Mr. Weasley went with them. I also loved the protection against Polyjuice Potion (Agree on questions to ask people to prove that they are who they look like. ie. What is your favorite jam?). That so captures the (mostly) insane security measures recommend to people following 9/11. Thankfully over time in our world, calmer heads prevailed and most of those nonsense security measures have gone away.

I also love the way that JK Rowling separated the world into two generations: Kids and Adults. And with her later books, she has been able to link the situations that the Kids face to actions and things that happened to their parents. It is not like we are living in an isolated world where these kids are having brand new adventures. Rather, it is a rich world where the actions of our fathers have a direct effect on our lives.

But all these changes has me wondering a little bit: Is this still a kids book? While the writing uses simple words and sentence structures that very much suit a kids reading level, the issues dealt with aren’t always kid friendly. But maybe reading about how Harry handles issues like Death is a good introduction for a kid to start thinking about it. I don’t know, but I would probably let my kids read it (my parents let me read anything I could get my hands on when I was a kid and I didn’t turn out that bad).

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1. Farscape - The Peacekeeper Wars (DVD) on January 18, 2005
2. Serenity (Movie) in Theaters on September 30, 2005
3. The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy (Movie) in Theaters on May 6, 2005
4. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (Book) on July 16, 2005

And I guess I’m also looking forward to Episode 3 (Movie) in Theaters on May 19, 2005.

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