Oh no, more books

[fivemack]

I think all I can deduce from my recent reading is that I like picaresques; the books I've enjoyed most included

• Pandora's Star by Peter Hamilton (baroque space opera, half a duet though you can't really tell until ten pages from the end)
• March to the Stars by David Weber and John Ringo (the Imperial Marines have crash-landed with the Prince at A. The nearest space craft is in a highly-guarded hostile spaceport at B, antipodal to A, on a planet full of jungle riddled with high-energy predators, and civilisations of aggressive nine-foot horned bipeds. Plot ensues; this is the third volume of the result)
• Niccolo Rising by Dorothy Dunnett (wonderfully complicated character interactions across the length and breadth of 1460s Europe; all I know about that period is the War of the Roses, from a year of history lessons at school, and the War of the Roses is dim background noise in the bits of the series I've read so far)
• Ilium, Dan Simmons. Hugo nominee. Post-Singularity, robot characters in an empty solar system rage against the gods who are occupying themselves by re-staging the Battle of Troy at the foot of Olympus Mons. Humans as pampered toys, of wanton gods or no gods at all. Again the first half of a duet.

27 others in the last three months - full-time employment does cut into even a well-developed book-reading habit.

Any recommendations for recent books? I'm impatiently awaiting The Last Light of the Sun by GGKay, I read Newton's Wake by Ken Macleod and found it rather too much like everything else he's written recently, I read The Confusion by Neal Stephenson and was confused.