garran | January novel-reading

Here they are, dripping silence, enigmatic and question-tempting.

(Okay, not much silence.) I debated for a little bit about whether to count the books I'm assigned for English class, since they seemed like an edge-case with textbooks, which I generally don't count; I eventually decided that I should. It is slowly becoming clear to me that my main criterion for inclusion is that the book should feel like it falls along the novel 'track'. If I were reading Ender's Game*, for instance, and in the interval between reading I read through a volume of Scott Pilgrim, I wouldn't feel like I was interrupting myself, but rather like I was just doing something else in the time I wasn't reading my book; but if I picked up The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, it would feel like an interruption, because I had taken up a novel, again, and it was a different one.

Steven Brust, Taltos
Steven Brust, Phoenix
Mordecai Richler, The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz
Mary Gentle, Golden Witchbreed
Steven Brust, Athyra
Christopher Priest, The Prestige
Sean Stewart, Night Watch
Mark Haddon, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time

(* Possibly not the best example, because when I read that book I tend to read it in a concentrated burst over the course of a single day.)