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War, short stories, craziness, more craziness, different war. Fiction, nonfiction. No particular theme this month, except maybe stress.

The Paladin (C. J. Cherryh): ( Cherryh does a martial arts movie. )

Dark Matter: A Century of Speculative Fiction from the African Diaspora (ed. Sheree R. Thomas): Mostly short stories, some excerpts from longer novels, a handful of essays at the end. ( Side notes on expanding reading; or, why I'm falling out of contemporary SF/F. )

I don't remember much about the actual stories, about a month later: I'm not a short fiction reader by native inclination, so the novel excerpts were often my favorite pieces. And after the recent brouhaha, I have no desire to go back and comment, because hey, crossfire. So I will say: look! Stuff people written by people not my color! And some of it I liked, and some of it was in loathsome phonetic dialect, and some of it was really forgettable, and the editor was way too proud of her "dark matter" pun. Also, I am not the target audience; this seems to have been an exercise in saying, "hey, there are more of us out here" and on that front likely succeeded.

Cyteen (C. J. Cherryh): The death and resurrection of Ari Emory.

There are two novels in this world which I have read, and reread, and consistently skip rereading large chunks of the novel: Bujold's Mirror Dance and Cyteen. In both cases, I skip the first, hideously stressful third and move right on to the major characters' deaths.

( Also, Darth Vader is Luke's father, and Tyler Durden is the narrator's alternate personality. Anything else I can spoil for you? )

Cyteen holds a special place in my heart. You can only be 17, doing a bad job of bridging the gap between middle-class teenage privilege and adult responsibility, and realizing your primary caretaker is failing to take care of her responsibilities, and lying to herself and everyone around her, while reading Cherryh, once. Possibly I identified with Justin more than is healthy. So I was all kinds of thrilled when I heard that Regenesis was getting published.

Regenesis (C. J. Cherryh): FINALLY. FINALLY, YAY. So I maybe approached this from a slightly less than objective perspective. And by "not objective" I mean capslock and emoticons. And Robbie Williams on the tribute mp3 mix. The fact I'm thinking in terms of mixes should tell you something about my wilingness to love this book. ( And I did! Except when I wanted to smack it! )

Generation Kill: Devil Dogs, Iceman, Captain America and The New Face of American War (Evan Wright): First of all, the subtitle is misleading. This isn't about the "new face", it's one guy in a Humvee with a Marine unit in Iraq. This is "about" highly trained, very aggressive Americans going to war. It's absolutely fascinating: there's no way in a million years I'd ever do anything like what Wright and Bravo Platoon are doing (plus, that whole "no women in combat" thing), but Wright brings out a lot of the emotion and reasons men might want to do that. It's brutal and not comfortable, and at certain points you stop, do the math, and realize no one's had a shower in more than a week (ew), in sweltering temperatures and poorly designed chemical warfare protective suits, but you're still reading. Because Wright makes you understand a little bit about why people are doing this, and the balance of protecting your people versus protecting civilians in a war zone, and the stupid things that happen because war is chaos squared, on a slow day.

It's also interesting to read the recent trade paperback edition, which has an additional "where are people and what have I been up to" afterword from Wright. The HBO actors' reactions to their living counterparts (you mean, when he's not hopped up on every upper known to man and Marine, Person doesn't constantly trash-talk Justin Timberlake?) are kind of hysterical.

So yeah, definite recommendation.

Numbers games: 5 total. 2 reread, 3 new; 4 fiction (1 short stories/essays), 1 nonfiction.