True Notebooks by Mark Salzman, The Ersatz Elevator by Lemony Snicket, Nanotech (an anthology)

[maribou]

True Notebooks describes Salzman's experiences teaching a writing class to a bunch of high risk offenders in one of California's many prisons. I confess to a bias for this sort of book in the first place, but I thought this was a particularly good example of the 'ingenue discovers that child murderers are people too' genre. It further confirmed that Salzman writes books I like to read.
(30/200)

Not too much to say about The Ersatz Elevator, which is 6th in the series. If you liked the other 5, you should like this one. If you don't, you won't. The puns seemed particularly egregious in this one, but I remain unsure as to whether this is a positive or negative statement.
(31/200)

The editors of Nanotech are Jack Dann and Gardner Dozois. This was my gym book for a few weeks, which means I can't remember what parts I liked and what ones I was indifferent to. At least not as well as I normally would. The first story in the book was the short version of Greg Bear's Blood Music, which novel I love. The last story in the book, and another one called 'Remember'd Kisses', particularly stuck with me, and I think Kathleen Ann Goonan's story was also exceptionally good. But there wasn't anything in there I hated, and most of the stories were excellent.
(32/200)

Comments

[p7a77.livejournal.com]

How the hell are you reading all of these so quickly? Even if I didn't do anything else, I don't think I could read three in a day. Or are you reading a lot simultaneously, and they're all ending now? Or is this some sort of review of books you read at one point?

[maribou]

In that particular case, I was almost done of all three of them at once, and just happened to finish them all on the same day. I usually have at least 2-3 books on the go at one time.
I've read 34 books since the first of January though, so I suppose that is fairly fast... It tends to be clustered around Wednesday/Thursday because Thursday is my day off - so even if I finish a book on Tuesday, I might not get around to reviewing it until Wednesday night.
Most days I read for about 45 minutes through lunch and maybe 1/2 hour in the evening, but I go on 2-3 hour binges once or twice a week.