I’m kind of fried this morning– it’s been a long week full of after-work events associated with the end of the year– so I’m not up to doing weighty posts about physics, so here’s a lighter discussion topic:
What’s the last non-Internet thing you read for fun?
Blogging and work have cut into my pleasure reading recently, but the most recent thing I read just for amusement was Vol. 7 of Bill Willingham’s Fables comic book series, titled Wolves. The last regular book I read was Kenneth Oppel’s Skybreaker, a sequel to Airborn, his YA novel about a quasi-Victorian world full of giant world-circling airships.
Brief comments about them below the fold:
Wolves wasn’t all that great. I wan’t really blown away by the first few volumes, of course, but Kate enjoyed them more than I did, and has continued getting them out of the library. Each volume takes about twnety minutes to read, so I’ve kept up.
This particular volume had a sort of tying-up-loose-ends quality to it, even though it’s not really the end of the story. That would’ve kept it from being great, even if there hadn’t been a somewhat unpleasant intrusion of real-world politics into the story. With that, it was, well, not all that much fun to read.
Skybreaker, on the other hand, was just about exactly as entertaining as the previous book. The overall setting continues to not make much sense, but there’s enough swashbuckling fun (what is a swash, anyway, and why does one buckle it?) to overlook that. The plot centers on a bold expedition to reach a legendary lost airship, and has a little bit of everything from piracy in the upper atmosphere to good old-fashioned Mad Science.
There’s maybe one reversal of fortune too many in the ending, but other than that, it’s a good, entertaining read.
So what’s the last book you read just for entertainment? It doesn’t have to be fiction, mind.