By a quirk of timing, I finished two books yesterday. It would have been a good day for my TBR had I not also bought 3.
I had started
Spin by Robert Charles Wilson about two weeks ago, and it was going quite slowly, so I decided to start
A Cold Day for Murder by Dana Stabenow as a change of pace a couple of days ago. It just worked out that Spin picked up speed towards the end, and the Stabenow was fairly short, so I ended up finishing both of them yesterday.
Spin was the 2006 Hugo winner, and is a "proper" SF novel, exploring a big idea. Essentially, Earth is encapsulated in some kind of bubble by an unknown outside agency, and the book follows the reactions of the population and the attempts to find out what's happening. I liked it a lot. It didn't change my life, or anything like that, but it is a good solid piece of SF with believable characters and decent writing. I understand it's the first in a trilogy, but I don't know if the sequels were bolted on after the fact or if it was always conceived that way. It seems self-contained enough.
It has just belatedly occurred to me that it has a similar structure to
Oryx and Crake, which I read a couple of months ago.
I have just two more Hugo winners left to read to complete the set:
Lord of Light by Roger Zelazny and
Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang by Kate Wilhelm. I'm looking forward to both, but need to read something else next.
A Cold Day for Murder is the first Kate Shugak mystery from Dana Stabenow. It's perfectly readable and enjoyable, and an interesting insight into the Alaskan way of life. I associate Stabenow very much with ebooks - probably because I got three of her books for free on the kindle store - so I did do a bit of a mental double-take when I found out one of the characters was wounded in Vietnam. It was originally published in 1992, which makes the ages work out a bit more sensibly. I'd be happy to read more, although my TBR is seriously overcrowded.
I haven't actually decided what to read next, but I really need to give my new Nook a run out.