December Book List

And here we go:
Paul Hazel, The Wealdwive's Tale (lovely, strange, & I read it once before, a long time ago)
Simon Green, Guards of Haven (I like him. I know it's junk, but it's good junk.)
James Lee Burke, Sunset Limited (is it really that noir in New Orleans?)
Sean Russell, The One Kingdom (Okay, haven't finished this. Better things came along.)
Steven Brust, To Reign in Hell (awesome, awesome, awesome. Although it's kind of a copout to name a minor angel as actually being the bad guy, while Satan, Lucifer and Mephistopheles get off scot free)
Sara Paretsky, Blacklist (nice to see VI Warshawski again, it's been a while. The ending was a bummer; it's a detective novel, not Great Lit with Angst. Put the bad guys in jail!)
Peter David, Sir Apropos of Nothing (Cute. Instantly forgettable. I look forward to rereading it - except I'll have that uneasy feeling that I've read it before.)
Martha Grimes, The Blue Last (What is it with her and her creepy fixation on orphaned children? Also, her characters were never particularly believable, now they're caricatures of caricatures.)
Carl Hiaasen, Basket Case (I love him. Same damn book every time, but totally satisfying.)
Pat Murphy, There and Back Again (very nice. I don't usually like sci fi that's that hard, but I'll make an exception for this one. It was sweet.)
End of December now and what haven't I read?
Reread my way through William Gibson:
Virtual Light
Idoru
All Tomorrow's Parties : layers on layers on layers of genius - if somebody doesn't, please god, come back and recognize Gibson as the closest goddamn thing my generation (or the previous one, okay, he's a bit older than me) has to Hemingway then Lord, there is something so very wrong with the world.
Steven Brust & Emma Bull, Freedom or Necessity, totally marvelous, I ordinarily wouldn't touch a novel in letters but they did it and it worked, oh damn, it worked so well that I feel like those characters are my family and friends.
Patricia McKillip, Shadow in Ombria (title isn't right) I have nothing to say about Patricia McKillip. I can't say anything - she's it, she writes the way I wish I could, she speaks my dreams, my thoughts - I - there is nothing I can say. The worst book McKillip could write (and this isn't it, by a country mile) would still be so goddamn much better than the best book almost any other F/SF writer could ever do - that the distance itself is instructive. Like reading LeGuin - the distance is so fucking staggering.

And there are at least 5 or 10 books that I'm completely forgetting, which isn't fair, because some of them were wonderful, I'm just spacing. Right now I'm reading Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, and what I really want to know is why? Why does this book get big billing in the New Yorker, and the NYT, and the other places where people who read books look? Why does this book get put into Fiction - when Cryptonomicon, which is much much much more Fiction than F/SF get put immediately into that ghetto? I'm not dissing the book - the book is not bad - but neither is it all that far off the fucking beaten track - and the F/SF ghetto gets me down, and I'm not sure how this book escaped it, when clearly, utterly clearly, that is where it belongs. I should ask my brother - but in the meantime, I am busy being angry for the real writers who's books languish in the ghetto: Stephenson, Gibson, Sterling, Gaiman, Delany, Hand, Crowley, LeGuin - these are people who can WRITE, really WRITE - and keeping them in one little eepy place in the bookstore pisses me off when others suddenly get called "Literature".