What is it, is it any good, are there any books which have particularly grabbed or disappointed you, and is there anything else you want to volunteer about your reading habits?

I had great fun catching up on three of John Scalzi's stand-alone science fiction novels. All of them have danger, villains, and suspense along with generous dollops of humor and compassion.

Fuzzy Nation is an adaptation of H. Beam Piper's Little Fuzzy, in which humans are deciding whether little critters found on a planet are sentient or not. I liked the original, but really like the way Scalzi updated it without destroying the essence of the story.

The Kaiju Preservation Society is an ultra-secret government group who has discovered a parallel earth in which everything is deadly to humans. We learn about the ecosystem and the monsters who inhabit it through a new recruit.

The Android's Dream deals with sheep, especially a breed that is very important to members of an alien race with which humans have diplomatic connections. The plot twists and turns as the government attempts to prevent a war by producing one of these sheep for a special ceremony. Meanwhile another group tries to thwart their attempts.

For a change of pace, I'm reading The Shrine, the newest mystery in Lesley Thomson's Detective's Daughter series. Stella, the practical crime-solving cleaner, is having trouble understanding her partner Jack's obsession with trying to contact his dead mother through a medium. They've had words about it, so Stella decides to give herself a holiday with her DI friend Toni. This is where I am after the first 50-some pages. I'm sure there will be at least one crime to solve, so I'll get further into it over the weekend.

In the meantime, I've continued to cull books to donate to friends or Goodwill, and I've spent the past few days shifting my collection around to accommodate a bunch of new ones I couldn't resist. I've been eyeing a new bookcase I like but am resisting the temptation until I see if those I have will be enough. I have to remind myself that it's not hoarding if it's books, unless they start falling on my head!

Hah! I just had a whole office built specifically to hold more books and the shelves are already full! I'm now trying to work out where I can put another bookcase.

We are trying hard to declutter on all fronts with limited success, but we do now read almost exclusively on kindle, and we have just treated ourselves to non-resident membership of the Salt Lake City library to expand our horizons.

That said, one of my daughters recently gave me Do You Dream Of Terra Two? by Temi Oh which I am enjoying more than I expected.

Otherwise currently I am bingeing on Robert Jackson Bennett, but a return to Scalzi will be my next stop and I like the sound of the Shrine, Lady K.

Still on the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.

It's substantial amount of history, Fogfighter! I hope you're still enjoying it.

Lex,
I found I lost the plot a couple of times in The Shrine, mainly because of a bunch of unplanned real life interruptions. After going back and reading a couple of chapters, everything fell into place, so it wasn't Thomson's fault but my own lack of concentration that led to confusion.

While waiting for the arrival of Bennett's new Ana and Din mystery, I'm reading The Artist and the Feast by Lucy Steeds. In the first page and a third of this novel a woman is standing in front of a painting in a museum. In that short amount of time, the author provides a massive hook regarding the past that this reader couldn't resist. I will continue reading, not just because the writing is good, but because I want to know why.