Books

It's been nearly a week, I think, since I finished Hilldiggers, a stand-alone novel by Neal Asher, set in his Polity universe. I think it might be my new favorite Neal Asher novel. Typically, Asher's stories are extremely violent and gory. (and I'm not saying that as a criticism, just a statement of fact) Hilldiggers certainly has its share of violence but it seems less over-the-top than most of his novels so it feels more like a classic space opera. It's also a very political story with several entities, mis-trustful of each other, about to start an interplanetary war.

After that I immediately started reading Dark Intelligence, another Asher novel and I have its sequel War Factory so I guess you could say that I'm bingeing on Asher right now. I guess you could say that fictional violence is cathartic and we need that with the real world in the situation it's in right now, but aside from the violence and gore these stories are extremely interesting. Asher's take on the AIs-take-over-the-universe scenario is the opposite of what we usually see. The AIs are the good guys and most humans feel that they do a better job of running things than humans do. The AIs are not perfect though. They are, in fact, not completely different from humans in their behavior and can even go insane.

A few days ago I saw an ad somewhere for Binti. It looked intriguing and the Kindle version is only $2.99 so I downloaded that and I'm looking forward to reading it. I haven't yet downloaded Bleak House. It's free and it'll be there when I'm ready for it. I am ready for it and for Binti and for the next Neal Asher novel and more. The reader's dilemma: so many books!

One of my Christmas gifts was Football for Dummies. I did half jokingly say that I wanted it. I've been reading it off and on a little bit at a time. It's very dry, like a particularly dull textbook, and it really is for complete football dummies. I have read very little in it that I hadn't already figured out just from watching football. I'm not even halfway through it though so I'm still hopeful that it will contain some information that I don't know.