World of Ice and Fire

The World of Ice and Fire is a companion to the Song of Ice and Fire series that began with A Game of Thrones. It's pure nerd-candy - a history of the world created for that series. It's written as though compiled by one of the maesters of Oldtown, so the reader is presented with the world from a Westerosi viewpoint and the biases that entails. It's very enjoyable, if you're a serious fan of the series - it details the history of each of the kingdoms that comprise the Seven Kingdoms of Westeros, as well as the Free Cities and other areas of Essos. There is a lot of detail in here not covered in the main series, and a few details that would reveal secrets in the main plot are coyly sidestepped (including one "we won't go into details here, because everyone knows this"). The illustrations are nicely done, and it adds a lot of depth to what is already a fantastically detailed world.

Old Man's War

I'm not normally a fan of Mil-SF, but John Scalzi's Old Man's War was very well written, and a very thoughtful look at interstellar, inter-species war. It owes a lot to Starship Troopers and other sci-fi, but with a more modern take on the technologies that will be available to the troops of the fascist interstellar governments of the future. The core of the novel is very much the personal journey of the main character, John Perry, from aging man on earth to space soldier defending Earth and its colonies from a range of alien species. Very much worth reading, and I'll be reading the sequels.

Jagannath

Karen Tidbeck's Jagannath was the second book of the five I bought in a Weird Fiction bundle from storybundle.com. It was also sad and lonesome and strange and magical, and tells stories of a reality quite unlike our own. A man who falls in love with an airship; a woman dealing with the death of her father and the strange disappearance of her mother many years earlier; a the people of strange holiday village in the wilderness of Sweden are some of the short stories in this collection. It is very Scandinavian, and it full of mythical creatures from folklore. It reminded me in some ways of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's short stories - the underlying desolation covered by a magical weirdness that permeates the world. Well worth a read.

The Apocalypse Codex

The Apocalypse Codex is the fourth novel in the Laundry series, Charles Stross' delightful exploration of a world in which secret spy organizations battle eldritch Lovecraftian horrors. Bob Howard, the IT professional who was forcibly recruited into the British government's secret organization dedicated to fighting the coming apocalyptic end of the world, is pitted against an American evangelical preacher who it trying to bring about the second coming of Christ. As with the rest of the Laundry Files series, it's a rollicking good read, with lots of exciting action, sufficiently monstrous aliens gods and villainous plots to destroy the world, and an ongoing sense of profound nerdiness. Lots of fun, and well worth a read - particularly if you know how computers work and have a decent level of familiarity with the Cthulhu mythos.

Tainaron

I picked up Tainaron as part of a "weird fiction" ebook sale, not having heard of it before. By Finnish author Leena Krohn, it is written as a series of letters from an unnamed person staying in the city of Tainaron. Tainaron is a city populated by insects, and it is implied that the writer is human. The letters are to a lover or friend back in the writer's home city, and a lot is left unexplained. It's a fascinating novel, and hard to understand exactly what is going on, as a lot of things are hinted at or implied. It's never made clear exactly what the writer is doing in Tainaron - why they're there, or how long they plan to be there. The letters are soaked in the melancholy of homesickness and the strangeness of living in a foreign city, made more explicit by the nonhuman nature of the city's inhabitants.

Heart of Darkness

I can't say much about this that hasn't been said in a million high school book reviews over the years, but it was a weird read. Not much happens, the characters are all unlikable, and there's all kinds of unreliable narrating going on, but the main thing going for Conrad's Heart of Darkness is the ethereal, lyrical prose that creates a sense of dreamy otherworldiness. For such a short book, it took an awfully long time to read, due to the density of language it uses.

Mission of Gravity

I rarely delve into older science fiction, and I'm often rather unimpressed when I do - while there are often some interesting ideas in there, the characters and plots tend towards the flakey and unbelievable (well, more so than modern scifi). Mission of Gravity, written by Hal Clements in 1954, was a refreshing change. It deals with some interesting ideas (mostly, aliens that are basically intelligent centipedes, and a planet with huge gravity that is rotating very quickly which has lots of interesting physical effects), but the characters are also quite reasonable and not ridiculous. The plot wanders a bit (it was written to be serialised in magazines, so it's rather episodic), but retains a vague overall arc and comes together surprisingly well at the end. Overall, it was quite an enjoyable read, even though parts of it read a bit like a high school science lesson.