Yong (8/26): Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card

Revisiting Ender's world made me want to reread the original. Finishing Exile while down under and needing reading for the last couple days of the trip sealed the deal. My third time through this book.

Yong (7/26): Ender In Exile by Orson Scott Card

Started out feeling surprisingly unsophisticated. It had me wondering whether Card had lost his touch and was just shamelessly cashing in on the sequel bandwagon, or I'd really outgrown this world by that much. But once he got warmed up, it turned out to fit the bill perfectly: an easy read to keep me entertained while read in spurts and with interruptions on planes and while otherwise travelling to and through Australia.

Yong (6/26): Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry

With my summer reading window rapidly drawing to a close, I checked this massive book out from the library in a last minute act of foolishness, feebly denying to myself that it wasn't entirely, laughably unsuitable for my need for light travel reading for the long flight to Australia next week. As one act of foolishness often begets another, here I sit having just finished all eight hundred fifty pages before ever having set foot on the plane.

Former Texas Rangers tire of the quiet ranching life and hatch a City Slickers-esque mid-life crisis plan to drive a herd of cattle an unheard of 3000 miles to the unsettled wilds of Montana. Is it any good? Pulitzer aside, after plodding through my last two (real) books, I devoured this one's 858 pages in three days.

What's it about? The harshness of life in general, and life on the frontier in particular; the wantonness of death; the beauty of the land, Texas, Nebraska, Wyoming, Montana, and its hardness, too; but above all else, the human heart. For even cowboys get lonesome, too.

Yong (5/26): A War Of Gifts by Orson Scott Card

This is a tiny book. A novella, really. Except I guess ol' Orson S. decided to cash in and publish it as a separate book. I didn't even know about it except that my friend Audrey tipped me off that a couple new Ender books had been published since last I'd looked.

Well, for something that seemed like it was strictly a revenue-generating ploy...it's pretty good. The man hasn't lost his touch. And it's made me want to take another stroll--okay, it was more like a mad maniacal dash the first time--through Ender's Game before tackling Ender in Exile.

Yong (4/26): Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace

I'm calling this half a book because I didn't finish it. I know, I know, "If I counted all my half-finished books, then I'd be..." Well, ain't no way I'm even coming close to 26 books, and it lets me get rid of the awkward ".5" I've been carrying over. And I did read over 225 pages of it. Problem is the book is a thousand pages long. Plus another hundred pages of footnotes.

Got pointed in DFW's direction by our hostess with the mostest and a former student, not to mention the thousands of mentions in the media following his offing himself this year. I thought his graduation speech was amazing. This book may well be also, but I don't have the combination of stamina and patience and time--not to mention stubborn determination and additional library renewals--to wade through the chaff and glean the rewards dispersed among the thirty-odd intersecting storylines about tennis academies and substance abuse and Canadian separatism and filmmaking and Phoenix Cardinals punters and MIT radio shows and...

One thing that totally caught me unawares: this is science fiction. It's funny how science fiction has (mostly justifiably) a stigma associated with it, such that works that gain credibility in the realm of broader literature quickly move to disassociate themselves from the label. The Time Machine and 1984 are simply "literature". Despite receiving the Arthur C. Clarke award, Margaret Atwood insisted The Handmaid's Tale wasn't science fiction but speculative fiction. And so it is that I had never heard Infinite Jest referred to as anything except DFW's opus.

Well, it's scifi. And for now, it's partially read scifi.