Third quarter book report (2009)

Summertime, and the reading is easy, right? Well, let's see if I managed to squeeze in any reading among all the sunshine and camping and writing about incredibly boring companies.

Key: C: Children's; F: Fantasy; H: Historical; Hr: Horror; M: Mystery; MG: Middle Grade (ages 8-12); NF: Nonfiction; P: Poetry; SF: Science Fiction; SS: Short Stories; YA: Young Adult (age 13+); *not in the last ten years at least; ^for work.

07/04/09: Dante Aligheri, The Inferno (P, 1)
07/06/09: Scott Westerfeld, The Secret Hour (YA, SF, 1)
07/09/09: Lois McMaster Bujold, Shards of Honor (SF, 10? 15?)
07/11/09: Bujold, Barrayar (SF, 10+)
07/12/09: Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince (C, F, 1)
07/14/09: Westerfeld, Touching Darkness (YA, SF, 1)
07/18/09: Westerfeld, Blue Noon (YA, SF, 1)
07/26/09: Goethe, Faust, Part One (classic, 1)
07/29/09: Max Brooks, World War Z (Hr, 3)
08/01/09: John Green, Paper Towns (YA, 1)
08/02/09: Bujold, The Warrior's Apprentice (SF, 10+)
08/03/09: Bujold, The Vor Game (SF, 10+)
08/04/09: Bujold, Brothers in Arms (SF, 10+)
08/06/09: Neil Gaiman, Sandman Vol. 4: Season of Mists (F, graphic novel, 1)
08/07/09: Richard Preston, The Demon in the Freezer (NF, 2)
08/08/09: Bujold, Mirror Dance (SF, 10+)
08/09/09: Bujold, Memory (SF, 10+)
08/09/09: Bujold, Komarr (SF, 10+)
08/11/09: Bujold, A Civil Campaign (SF, 10)
08/13/09: Bujold, Cetaganda (SF, 10+)
08/14/09: Goethe, Faust, Part Two (classic, 1)
08/15/09: Bujold, Diplomatic Immunity (SF, 8)
09/04/09: ^Hillary Rodham Clinton, Living History (NF, 1)
09/11/09: ^Carl Bernstein, A Woman in Charge (NF, 1)
09/21/09: Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina (classic, 1)
09/24/09: John Green, An Abundance of Katherines (YA, 1)

I didn't include the medical thriller by a nameless best-selling author that I quit halfway through because the characters kept getting more and more cardboard, the dialogue kept getting more and more didactic, and the plot had been given away by the prologue, so why keep on? In any case, you probably notice the major speed bump I hit in late August, called Anna Karenina. While normally I could plow through a novel of 800+ pages in ten days, I got swamped by assignments and didn't have as much free time for reading. It took me four weeks to finish Anna, which I read in bits between scanning biographies for work.

So I only read 26 books this quarter, and the number would have been really really small if I hadn't had my annual indulgence into Lois McMcMaster Bujold's Vorkosigan series, my favorite books in the whole wide world. (And a new volume to come in 2010!) Now that school (and rehearsals and chauffeuring and rehearsals and teaching) has started up again, I fear my reading time will decrease again. But since I'm done with "remedial reading," for the year, maybe I'll get more out of my reading time. Check back in three months to see.