Books, Books and More Books

The books keep on rolling in (mostly SF), faster than I can keep up with reading them. I sometimes wonder if I\’ll ever get to read even half of them (I\’ll be lucky) before I die of old age. But it won\’t be for lack of trying on my part.

Lessee – over the past two or three weeks I\’ve amassed somewhere in the region of 50-60 new books. A few of those have been computer and web design books. Some have been science books – I started hunting down every Stephen J Gould and Robert Zubrin book that I could find – and several have been history books.

However, at least 70% of the books have been SF, split fairly evenly between novels and collections or anthologies of short fiction. I\’ve bought a whole bunch of more recent Alastair Reynolds novels, a stack of Dan Simmons – Hyperion/Fall of Hyperion, Endymion/Rise of Endymion and Ilium/Olympos, several Mike Resnick novels – Santiago, The Return of Santiago and Dark Lady, and a list of others too long for me to bother typing up.

But, as I\’m a huge fan of short fiction, I get most excited by the collections and anthologies of short stories. Some of the best of my recent haul are:

• The Year\’s Best Science Fiction 23rd Annual Collection, edited by Gardner Dozois
• The Best of the Best Volume 2, edited by Gardner Dozois
• One Million A.D. edited by Gardner Dozois
• The New Space Opera, edited by Gardner Dozois and Jonathan Strahan
• Cities, edited by Peter Crowther
• Starlight Volumes 1, 2 and 3, edited by Patrick Nielsen Hayden
• Galactic North (collection) by Alastair Reynolds

There\’s a whole bunch of other stuff, but these gems alone will keep me going for ages. I know I\’m a book addict, but maybe I\’m going a little overboard, eh? Talk about a junkie needing a fix…