WHAT have you finished reading recently? “Shadowlands“, a play about CS Lewis, Joy Davidman, and suffering. I’m also fairly close to finishing The Horse and His Boy, I think. I say “I think” because I am listening to the audiobook, and it’s been so long since I last read Horse that I’ve forgotten the story — but Shasta has escaped and met Aslan and I’m fairly certain Rabadash’s hopes for stealing Susan and forcing her to be his wife, as well as conquering Narnia, are about to be dashed. I’m really enjoying the narrator, but I’ve forgotten his name and Audible’s entry doesn’t list the narrators by association with their book, only as a lump. After youtubing the narrators, though, I think Alex Jennings is the Horse narrator. I’d wondered why he sounded so familiar yet not quite known, and it’s because I first heard Jennings in The Lady in the Van where he does a very different vocal affect. He sounds a bit like Hagrid when he’s doing a dwarf voice here. “Yer a Narnian, Shasta!“

WHAT are you reading now? Well, I’m 70% through The Life of Billy Yank, a social history of Union soldiery; I’m a quarter through Man of Iron, a biography of Grover Cleveland; I’m halfway through Double Star by Robert Heinlein; and then I’ve nibbled bits from Tarkin, From a Certain Point of View, and Firewall, the last three being Star Wars and Star Trek novels. I’ve also started a history of the Book of Common Prayer. Since I schedule these posts beforehand, I may have finished Billy by the time it goes live.

WHAT are you reading next? See above entry, unless I get distracted by something else.

Today’s prompt from Long and Short Reviews is A Genre We Wish Were More Popular. I will say….near-future SF. It’s probably my favorite kind of SF to read, and its best writers that I know of Daniel Suarez and Blake Crouch. I like near future SF because I often learn about tech that’s already at work now, but in experimental or limited ways: in these stories, we see what effects it’s having on society after exploding in use. Exploding is the right word, too: I am amazed by how tech has changed in my lifetime. When unmanned aerial vehicles started being used in the mideast wars, I scoffed when people referred to them as drones. Drones were those things in Star Trek Insurrection that moved around on their own, following and shooting people. UAVs were nothing like that! Now drone warfare is commonplace.