Adding it to my Nashville Public Library ebook cart right now. Thanks, Jilli!

Summary of what I've read recently in case anybody wants to talk about any of them (also, I should probably update my Goodreads account...)

An Abundance of Katherines and Will Grayson, Will Grayson, both by John Green. Amazing.

Shadow of Night, after finally reading A Discovery of Witches all the way through on the third try.

Currently working on Major Pettigrew's Last Stand. Good! I like that I like and dislike parts of every single character (well, except one, but we see her through the eyes of the man in love with her, so that makes sense).

I'm reading Friday by Heinlein. I last read it when it came out, when I was 13. I remember really liking it; now it's on the margins of getting the "thrown across the room" tag.

What's kind of interesting, when I force myself to look past the writing style, word choice, gender issues, etc., is how many of what I think of as the basic SF tropes are in this one book.

Multinational corporations as more powerful nations? check. A restructured United States? Check. Post-oil/post environmental crises? Check. Overpopulation? Check. Designer organisms? Check. Professional sex training? Check.

The Internet exists in this story, in a pretty reasonable facsimile of what it was pre-WWW. Maybe that's why the Internet was so non-surprising to me. He even gets at Big Data analysis and online education options.

I'm still waiting for professional sex coaches though.

In fairness to Heinlein wasn't he suffering mini-strokes at the time he wrote this?

I was starting something about religion, then realized I was remembering "Job", not "Friday."

Arthur C. Clarke's The Fountains of Paradise (1979), not only talks about the Internet, he describes a crowd-sourced Wikipedia, complete with its accuracy issues.

Connie, religion's in here too, just not as central. The interesting-to-me part is that he seems happy and comfortable with Scientologists, but really viciously down on Christians.

wasn't he suffering mini-strokes at the time he wrote this?

this would explain so much about the plot, structure, and pacing.

Anyone looking for free nonfiction to read should check this out. Long pieces by Susan Orlean and Tom Wolfe.

Chris Ware's Building Stories arrived in the mail on Saturday. So amazing. Anyone else looked at it?

Interview with Steven Brust - [link] (xpost with gww)

An Abundance of Katherines and Will Grayson, Will Grayson, both by John Green. Amazing.

I don't know whether you saw that I loved The Fault in Our Stars and liked Looking for Alaska. I just started An Abundance of Katherines, and I love the narrative voice. I have no idea what to expect, but I think I'll like it more than Looking for Alaska.