@dd:  If you want to improve your stats fast look for the books with a high number of award nominations and list inclusions (red and black numbers on the covers).  You can bump up several stats at a time if you pick something like American Gods which has 7 noms and is on 4 best lists or Rendezvous with Rama with 5 and 7 respectively.  The WWEnd Top Nominated Books list is a good source for the big stats books.

By the way, if you don't like looking at your reading stats, DO NOT, under any circumstances, look at Englebrecht's stats.  I said DON'T look!

I've had a rocky start to July, what with my disliking all the books I've read so far:

Kiln People (2002) by David Brin was disappointing.  The premise that you could make specialized copies of yourself in order to do such things as study, scut work, extreme sports, casual sex, etc., to return 24 hours later to deliver memories before decaying was promising, but the book was a long flabby mess.  Featuring a detective using multiple copies of himself to solve a set of interlocking crimes, the book veered back and forth between noir and comic excess before finally degenerating into a farrago of mystical pseudo-science.

The Hunger Games (Hunger Games 1) (2008) by Suzanne Collins.  Perhaps the best thing to say here was that the prose wasn't actively grating and that, by and large, the pace of the book moved along.  I realize that this is a YA, but both the world building and the science were over-the-top ridiculous.  Other than that, it was a reasonably engaging ripoff of Battle Royale.

Catching Fire (Hunger Games 2) (2009) by Suzanne Collins.  I'm really the wrong audience for these books.  After I read "I really can't think about kissing when I've got a rebellion to incite" early in the book, it took a supreme effort of will to keep reading...  Everything was worse than in the previous book, even setting aside the female protagonist's endless angst over which boy she liked better.

Mockingjay (Hunger Games 3) (2010) by Suzanne Collins.  This is the book in which both the protagonist and the reader fully realize that the protagonist has practically no redeeming qualities as a human being.  Histrionic throughout, we eventually and painfully reach what is largely a non-ending.  It'll be a loooong time before I inflict another one of these teen romance books upon myself!

Fortunately, July is looking up!  I'm currently enjoying a Calvino, and have a reread of Pelevin's Omon Ra to look forward to.  Also, I think I'm going to start accelerating my Grand Master challenge reading.  I'm halfway along (6 read), but I think that I want to read books by most, or perhaps all of the Grand Masters this year.  I'm also got some books on the Cawthorne & Moorcock best fantasy list that I want to get to this month.  It sounds like everyone has great stuff in the pipeline!

@Rhonda:  Hrolf Kraki's Saga is wonderful!!  If you really like that one, you would probably like Anderson's The Broken Sword as well.  I've always been curious about eddas - what are you reading, and how are you enjoying them?  A few years ago, I read an Icelandic saga novelization, Styrbiorn the Strong by E.R. Eddison (author of the great The Worm Ouroboros) and liked it, but not as well as his other fiction.  Do you ever go to the IAFA conventions in Florida?

@dustydigger:     I've read the obligatory smattering of crime fiction:  Sherlock Holmes, some Agatha Christie, In Cold Blood, The Talented Mr. Ripley, but not too much else.  Sadly, I've never read Chandler.   I think you mentioned Ernest Bramah's detective Max Carrados elsewhere, how do you like those stories?  BTW, The Lovers holds up poorly - I read it a few years ago for the first time and thought it was weak, even considering the era it was written in.

@Scott:  I haven't read Harness' The Paradox Men, but I have read and loved his Cybele, With Bluebonnets, published in 2002, almost fifty years after The Paradox Men.  It's a great novel, beautifully and delicately written.  I'm tempted to read The Paradox Men, but it sounds like it wouldn't compare to the writing of a mature Harness.

@Engelbrecht, Hi, I was just trolling through this thread (to see what I said I was going to read in July) and saw that I missed your long post from July 6. I look a Viking Literature class in college and try to teach a saga or two whenever I can. During the Viking Lit class we read the Elder Edda, which I enjoyed very much, but I love Norse mythology and have since I was a kid.

 The class I'm teaching in the fall is a special topics course: Gender and Sexuality in the Medieval Lit. I'm teaching the Laxdaela Saga and the Saga of Ref the Sly. There's lots there about constructions of masculinity and femininity and men and women who challenge their prescribed gender roles, plus a lot of old-fashioned homophobia and misogyny--all in all, lots to work with

I've only read the first section of Hrolf Kraki's Saga, but so far, I think Anderson is doing a great job working with the source saga. His premise is to put the tale in the mouth of a Scandinavian wife of an English soldier living in England around the year 1000 (I know it is pre-Norman invasion). This allows him to fill out the gaps that are in the saga and explain a bit more about how the characters lived, how the religion worked, etc.

 I've never heard of the IAFA, but I just looked it up. It looks like an interesting organization that I need to explore more.

 Thanks.

 By the way, your review of Kiln People was spot on. it had oo much potential in the beginning--a great noir voice and then Pfft!

@Rhonda!  No worries!  I've always loved the Norse myths the best as well - sounds like it was a fun class.  Sounds like this fall will be good times as well! 

Glad you liked the review!  I have, I think, eight more books read to report on - I seem to read them faster than I can comment on them!  Ah well, maybe next week when I return from a weekend in the Sierra mountains.

Scott,

Thanks for this. I read Walton’s Mabinogion long before I knew anything about Welsh social history. Now it seems like I need to reread Walton!

Be warned: I wrote my dissertation on English portrayals of the Irish and the Welsh in the Middle Ages. What you are referring to about gender sounds very plausible in Welsh culture. The Normans tried very hard to bring their brand of Catholicism to the Welsh, whose Catholicism was much more reflective their pagan roots. Therefore, issues of consanguinity and primogeniture were foremost in the Normans’ minds—not so much the Welshs’. They did not care so much if uncles married nieces, especially if it were her second marriage. Also, a man often married his brother’s widow as a matter of course. The Normans were against this practice. The Welsh had trial marriages, meaning that a man and woman could go through an informal ceremony and then live together for one year. If the wife was not pregnant by the end of the year (or had not had a child), then either party could leave the relationship and seek another one. Finally, inheritance did go through the sister (from the mother’s side if multiple marriages) in both Welsh and Irish cultures. The reasoning was this: a man and his sister might have different fathers, but they are pretty sure they are from the same womb. Likewise, the sister might not be faithful to her husband, but the brother is sure that her son is kin to him no matter who the father is. All of this points to a culture in which women held some power and sexual freedom. Of course, Marion Zimmer Bradley is famous for doing the same in The Mists of Avalon. These women are so different than the women you see in Anglo-Norman and French works.

If you are interested reading another modernization of The Mabinogion, you should read a trilogy by Tom Dietz: Soulsmith, Dreambuilder and Wordwright. (They are in the database.) These stories take place in Welch County, Georgia and incorporate Welsh and Irish myths into stories of a modern family dynasty. They are lots of fun.

@Dusty, I'm sorry to hear about your eye troubles, but the operation sounds like good news.  Hopefully you'll be down to a single whiskey or less in a few days!

Back to Raymond Chandler, didn't he write some science fiction?

Yep, I'm pretty sure that I'm confusing Raymond with Bertram.  I did a quick search and found that ISFDB lists a few SF things by him - I wonder what they're like?  Another thing  I turned up was a letter containing a terrifically funny one paragraph SF parody he did (letter #6):

Did you ever read what they call Science Fiction? It’s a scream. It’s written like this: “I checked out with K19 on Abadabaran III, and stepped out through the crummaliote hatch on my 22 Model Sirus Hardtop. I cocked the timejector in secondary and waded through the bright blue manda grass. My breath froze into pink pretzels. I flicked on the heat bars and the Bryllis ran swiftly on five legs using their other two to send out crylon vibrations. The pressure was almost unbearable, but I caught the range on my wrist computer through the transparent cysicites. I pressed the trigger. The thin violet glow was icecold against the rust-colored mountains. The Bryllis shrank to half an inch long and I worked fast stepping on them with the poltex. But it wasn’t enough. The sudden brightness swung me around and the Fourth Moon had already risen. I had exactly four seconds to hot up the disintegrator and Google had told me it wasn’t enough. He was right.”

They pay brisk money for this crap?

 Interestingly, the date of the letter is later than some of his SF pieces...