I've posted two new reviews over to the right, and these are two books that probably couldn't be any more different from each other.  One won the Hugo while the other was nominated for about every award in the business, though it didn't win anything.  I'm jumping around quite a bit in my nominations, and really I just got tired of talking about such old books.  There are a lot of interesting ideas to be had from sci-fi written in the early years but you have to jump around if you want to keep it interesting.  

In my review for 'The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms' by N.K. Jemisin I talk a lot about fantasy in general, but I'm probably not as well read in fantasy as I should be to make the sort of blanket statements I make.  But, the reason I don't read as much fantasy as I probably should is that I feel the genre as a whole is kind of stuck in a loop, if you read one book with orcs and elves in it you really don't need to read more, do you?  I really like Kingdoms because it left the last fifty years of fantasy behind and struck off in a new direction.  Rather than a riff on past performance Jemisin leaves all the mythology of western culture behind and tries for something new.  I really recommend this book to anyone with an interest in fantasy.

I also reviewed 'The Wanderer' by Fritz Leiber.  This book is tough, and considered by many to be one of the worst books to ever win a Hugo award.  I try to treat the book with the amount of respect it deserves, but there's a lot that's wrong with this novel, and plenty of other people have trashed on the novel all across the internet.  I included links in my review to two other ones on the internet, one good and one bad, so anyone with a real curiosity about the novel can get multiple opinions.  

It was a nice change of pace to review a novel more recently published, and I think I'll stick with it.  For my next review I'm thinking about 'Blood Music' by Greg Bear or 'The Doomsday Book' by Connie Willis, both very good authors who have won several awards. I'm also moving closer to finishing 'A Canticle for Leibowitz' and I'll post a review for that when I'm finished, so far it's not too bad.