But wait, there's more!

[perlmonger]

Bringing myself up-to-date, here are my first two books of 2010:

1. Vortex: New Soviet Science Fiction - C G Bearne (editor)
   I needed a Slim Volume to take to the surgery (to wait) for my introductory interview this morning (Švejk, whom I'm working through in the few odd moments I have ATM for reading, is sadly disintegrating through its badgerdom and wouldn't have survived my pocket). I haven't read this for decades; I'll be interested to see how it fares now, after all the changes over the years in me, and in what was the Soviet Union.
   
   ---
   
   a re-read after over thirty years, still a fine collection headed by an excellent, and still pertinent, essay on sf from Ariadne Gromova. Considering the collection was published just two years after the Prague Spring and its consequences, there are virtually no echoes of the Cold War or ideological necessities, the exception being the first story, the Abramov brothers' "The Time Scale", which sports the wonderful:
   
   "'There are still the socialist states,' I said.
   "'Why would they want to reconstruct the future? They're building it themselves on the rational premises of reality.'"
   
   which I can only imagine being written with ironic intent.
   
   Best of the bunch is probably the Strugatskii brothers' "The Second Martian Invasion", which takes up pretty much half the book with its unique perspective of rural smalltown reaction to an invasion no more alien or distant than the previous state mechanisms it supplants.
   
   Biggest frustration is the two items from Artur Mirer's "Artificial Jam" cycle: I want to read the rest of it, damnit, and can find no references to it other than this collection in my feeble English-only Google-fu. I don't suppose any of the rest has even been translated.
   


2. Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency - Douglas Adams
   I've decided to maintain my Eastern European reading sequence, if only obliquely and peripherally with Svlad Cjelli.
   
   ---
   
   it's been a long time since I read this, and it held up better than I expected: there's approximately a coherent novel in there somewhere which, considering what the thing is about and that it's written by DNA, is actually quite an achievement.
   
   And there *is* altogether more JS Bach than one human being could reasonably ever have written in a single lifetime.

I'm onto The Long, Dark Tea-time of the Soul now, and having been vaguely maintaining some sort of connection between each books I've read since the end of last year - Švejk and these two - the obvious next step is American Gods. But having just read the bit about whales' songs being silenced by propeller noise, I'm pondering Superluminal. We'll see.