Happily I will never run out of reading matter. There are five books waiting in the ever-replenishing to-be-read pile. Currently I am finishing up Glen Cook’s The Dragon Never Sleeps. This is an epic, sweeping, galaxy crossing space opera of improbably massive space ships clashing, power dynamics, and the pursuit of quasi-immortality. At over 400 pages it is meaty. But this is Cook, which means that what is communicated in 400 hundred pages by Glen Cook would require 700 or 800 for most any other writer. Cook is of the Ernest Hemingway school; lean, efficient. All excess description is mercilessly trimmed. His focus is on the story. Given the complexity, machinations, scheming, politics, space-spanning military campaigns, and alien species philosophies, I am gratified that he simplified the work. Otherwise I’d need a score book and an index to keep track.
Most of my Glen Cook reading has been his fantasies. But he is also masterful with science-fiction. I’ve previously read his Run Silent Run Deep-esque Passage at Arms as well as Shadowline, the first of his Wagnerian Starfishes space opera series. All good stuff, each written with a distinct voice, though that voice is clearly Cook’s.
On audio book, for the return leg of my shuttling the HA to fourth grade and for daily grind at the gym, I am listening to a collection of Larry Correia short stories, Target Rich Environment vol. 1. These are good, visceral, and occasionally quite funny. (For the drive in to the HA’s school we are listening to P.L. Traver’s Mary Poppins. I don’t think profanity, ballistic trajectories, and the size and shape of exit wounds are appropriate for the HA just yet.)
Of course I am still writing. But I will sit on the status of various projects for now. But if you are interested in reading something actually completed and published, may I suggest the Semi-Autos and Sorcery series?