2001, Consider Phlebas done, still at 156

2001: A Space Odyssey took me to places that I had not anticipated. I have seen (and been mystified) by the movie. This book lays out the story behind the visual and audio power of the movie. The movie wouldn't be nearly as powerful without this very solid story behind it. The book does more than merely provide a strong skeleton to some classic cinema. The scale of the Universe defies our understanding (just as much as what happens down at the electron level), but this book gives us a little peak into the vastness of creation. It's compelling and wondrous and awe inspiring. Definitely a book worth reading.

I'm much more lukewarm on Consider Phlebas. The entire book is a series of unfortunate events for the Changer. The different sections of the book are solid in their own way, but the effort to string them together into some kind of cohesive whole was not convincing. The book would have been better as a collection of loosely connected short stories (which it kind of is in its own way) than a single novel. It's the first book in the Culture Series. We'll see if Banks got better at this kind of writing by the time he really got going with this style of writing.

These two books bring me up to 6 books for the year. I'm happy with this pace. I'm still at 156 books to read as these were both library books, but they were also both entries on the NPR Top 100 Sci Fi list. That brings me up to 36 of those titles completed. That's only 5 fewer than the 41 books of the Modern Library Top 100. I'm currently reading a book from each list (I, Robot and A House for Mr Biswas) so there will be progress on both of those lists very soon. I'm borrowing I, Robot from the library (as an ebook, which is just way too convenient) so that does nothing for Bookshelf Zero, but A House for Mr Biswas is a book that I've had for a long time. It's old enough that it has a Border's tag on the back!

I haven't had a particularly strong urge to buy anything. Well, it's more accurate to say that the desire to get my to read number down is stronger than my desire to acquire a new book. The library ebooks are helping with the urge to buy. I can acquire the books and get through them quickly. This pattern may hold until I finish Mr Biswas.