Recent reading

My reading habits have changed in the past year.  There are two major changes:

1. I started going to the public library.  Libraries are awesome!  The books are free and I don't need to keep them afterwards.  I really don't care about keeping books on my shelf to show off; they just feel like dead weight.  Anyways, now I have goodreads to keep track of what books I read.
   
2. I have a boyfriend.  I would brag about him more, only this would break my general rule of not talking about my boring life on my blog.  Anyway, I regularly take train trips to see him, which means I have more time to read.  I used to only get reading done during summer vacation, but this is no longer the case.

This past year, I read Hyperion and Fall of Hyperion.  Hyperion is hard to describe.  It is about seven pilgrims traveling to the planet Hyperion to see the Shrike, a thorny monster from the future who places its victims on a giant Tree of Pain.  Each pilgrim tells a story (like The Canterbury Tales) of their relationship to Hyperion.  It is a good book.

I also read Fiasco, by Stanislaw Lem.  It is about humans trying to make first contact with an alien planet, and failing (as the title suggests) due to anthropomorphism gone horribly wrong.  A lot of the book is taken up by the humans' fantastic theoretical models, all of which tell us more about the humans than the aliens.  I like the concept but sometimes the execution was tedious.

And I read two books by Ursula K. Le Guin: The Dispossessed and The Left Hand of Darkness.  The Dispossessed is about a physicist who tries to enact social change!  That's cool, but I think now I want to read some books where the characters and plot actually matter.  In both of these books, the plots were just excuses to talk about the societies where they take place.

I think I am reading too much sci-fi.  It's not so much I'm a sci-fi fan, but that I usually only read books on recommendations, and I tend to get recommendations from sci-fi fans.  Speaking of which, what books have you read lately?  Any recommendations?

Next on my reading list is Gravity's Rainbow.  Yes, it is ambitious. The narrative style is stream of consciousness, which means that there are many sentences with indecipherable sentence structure, and others with hardly any structure at all.  My wishful thinking is that after reading this, physics papers will seem easy.  But I'm not saying the book is bad so far.  It's kind of engrossing actually.