Book Meme

[dxmachina]

Snagged from snurri...

The book I am currently reading: A Talent for War by Jack McDevitt, the first of his novels about Alex Benedict. So far I'm liking it better than his Priscilla Hutchins books, which annoy the crap out of me.

The book I am currently writing: I've been revising the first scene of a book about the Sang Sacre City Watch for the last couple of years or so.

The book I love most: Hard to say for certain. There are lots of books I like a lot. One is Roger Zelazny's Lord of Light.

The last book I received as a gift: Fail Nation, a compilation from failblog.org.

The last book I gave as a gift: I gave my mother a copy of How to Teach Quantum Physics to Your Dog by Chad Orzel for Christmas. One of these days I need to post a review, because it's a terrific book.

The nearest book on my desk: Not on my desk, which today is oddly book free, but the shelf right next to my desk is where I keep a bunch of cookbooks.

Comments

[gingerk.livejournal.com]

I'll be interested in what you think about A Talent for War. It's one of my favorite books ever and all of his other books have suffered from not being A Talent for War.

[dxmachina.livejournal.com]

I liked it a lot. There's so much depth to the back story, although there appears to be a huge plot hole, i.e., why did the government leave such an incredible technological artifact in place and unguarded where talented amateurs could find it.

This was the first of his Alex Benedict books that I've read. What I like about McDevitt is that he thinks big and comes up with some amazing ideas (a lot like Niven in that respect). What I don't like about him is that most of the characters in the Priscilla Hutchins' books are too stupid to live (including Hutchins), which then requires that half the book be made up of hair-raising escape sequences to cope with the stupidity. There's some of that here, too, but not so much that it takes over the book.