Reading, August 2012

• "The Mirage" by Matt Ruff. WOW. An excellent, gripping backwords-world novel with the premise that, in November 2001, Christian fundamentalist terrorists crashed hijacked planes into twin towers in Baghdad. I need to track down "Fatherland" by Robert Harris now.

• "Bad Monkeys" by Matt Ruff. Meh. I finished it, but more out of determined curiosity than anything else. It twisted, it turned, but I just couldn't get into it.

• "Planetary Astronomy: From Ancient Times to the Third Millenium", by Ronald A. Schorn. Absolutely fascinating overview of the growth of our knowledge of planets, from someone who was involved in planetary astronomy's rebirth in the 60s. Published in 1998; I'd pay good money to see an update that would go over the Mars rovers, Cassini, and the explosion of exoplanet research.