Orson Scott Card, Seventh Son

Orson Scott Card, Seventh Son. In a north American frontier where superstition and magic work and persist, an unimaginably powerful young boy only survives because more powerful forces are protecting him than trying to kill him. Eh. The first of Card's I've read and probably the last. It was fine, but not great in any way.

John Updike, Toward the End of Time

John Updike, Toward the End of Time. All right, John, here's the deal. I love you, but I can't keep doing this anymore. I don't know why I keep reading your often mediocre and sometimes horrible novels. This book was generally muddled and and sort of limping along, but it was the combination of lazy interpretations of cosmology and particle physics and the absolutely florid and often astoundingly gross descriptions (you deserved this award, and let's leave it at that) that forced me to this. Your lovely language and gift for recognizable and heartbreaking description (and let's face it, when you're good, you're really really good) just aren't worth it right now. I'm not reading anything of yours for a year. Not even that nice volume of short stories I found. A year from now, I'll pretend like this never happened and start over again with your Rabbit books.

Neal Stephenson, Anathem

Neal Stephenson, Anathem. If you want a better introduction than I can give, Neal Stephenson reads from Anathem here: http://www.longnow.org/anathem/. I had more fun reading this book than was good for me. I hope that my future patients don't suffer too much from the effects of me reading it instead of studying (I did delay posting to study, at least). Every effort I've made to describe the story to friends has been a failure like this: "OK, so there is this society of math monks, kind of like the Pythagoreans, and it's another universe, and they live in maths which are like monasteries but cooler, and there is this awesome clock, and they garden, and learn stuff all the time and chant, and and and..."(here is where I drool on myself and am forced to stop torturing my friends). While I agreed with this criticism early on, I stopped noticing once I got into the story, and by the time I finished, I read all of the appendices, the glossary, and all the online acknowledgments. Maybe the Baroque Cycle was more fun, but I need to read Anathem again to decide.