Reading Roundup

Well, besides my exhaustive and boring list of every hike I've undertaken this year, I'd also meant to be blogging about books and films. Hence, a quick roundup of recent reading:

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay -- a really novel about the early days of comic books, throwing in a bit of WWII adventure as well. This was an amazing page turner. About half-way through, I was hoping that it would also be a fairly serious novel, but by the end, I'm afraid it was just a really fun book, with some good insights.

Complicity -- this was the first regular novel I've read by Iain M. Banks (he publishes really great science fiction under the name of Iain Banks) and I was impressed. Again, this might have been a bit of a page turner -- it's about a Scottish journalist and a series of grisly, imaginative murders of thugs who might've been better off dead. There was a bit of depth to it, but not enough to put me off of it. :-)

Dangerous Summer -- this was a natural for our Spanish trip, a posthumously published Hemingway memoir about a summer spent following bullfights around Spain. It's the story of two competing matadors, both friends of Hemingway, and some of the sympathy (or lack of it) for the older matador coming back from retirement who just doesn't seem to have it foreshadow's EH's later surrender to despair and suicide.

Alas, although I'd hoped to read more once I was back from vacation, I've been spending all my time reading backpacking magazines and hiking and once more wasting time on the Internet. Hopefully I'll buckle down and make some progress of the huge stack of books I have sitting on my bedside table!