prog likes books! Do you like books too?

Some time ago I bought The System of the World, the third and final volume in Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle. What little I've read of it is enjoyable, but also very dense and hard to get into -- moreso than the last volume -- and thus most of my leisure-reading time has been invested in working through my paperback backlog instead.

• The Dragon's Egg by Robert Forward. Part of the SF canon, I'd argue. I don't know how long I've owned this, but finally read it after running into reference after reference to it over the years. It's supah-hardcore SF that imagines a very alien civilization developing from scratch on the surface of a neutron star, and how it crosses paths with humanity. Really weak characterization (I wrote critiques in the margins about this, it bothered me so much) but I suppose people forgive this because that's not the point. Once we get past the awkward opening chapters on Earth and (in a distant but parallel narrative thread) the "cheela" manage to evolve sentience, things get eminently more readable.
  
  Question: WTF does the word "cheela" come from? The aliens don't communicate through human-audible sounds, so the implication that this is the one "native" word that Forward doesn't translate for us doesn't really work. Shrug.


• The Guns of Avalon by Roger Zelazny. Book two of the Amber series. I bought it three years ago and didn't want to read it then, for some reason, but I ate it up in a couple of sittings last week. Court intrigue mixed with wacky superheroics and a twencen-smartass POV. (Corwyn totally needs a D&D alignment, but as usual it's a tough call with an established character. Maybe lawful neutral? He's selfishly ambitious, but genuinely believes that he can save the kingdom if he can get the throne, and anyway is too much of a softie to be evil.)
  
  It's "funny" when things appear in the book that I recognize from Zangband.


• 3001: The Final Odyssey by Arthur C. Clarke. Written in 1997, thus amazingly predicting Futurama by over a year! The story opens with astronauts in the titular year recovering the flyin' corpsicle of Frank Poole, the astronaut from 2001 that HAL offs in one my favorite cinematic shot sequences evah. Using sufficiently advanced technology they revive him, allowing him to wander about, gaping at things. I'm less than halfway through it, and am liking it OK.
  
  Amusing I: The Frank Poole in 2001 was actually from the late 1960s as far as his cultural references went, but the one in this book is from the late 1990s. In his internal monologues, he makes reference to his "boyhood memories" which include meeting Patrick Stewart and enjoying the Jurassic Park movies, and often compares what he sees to an accurate recall of real-life circa-2000 technology. And he slyly avoids making reference to things like commercial spaceflight or the survival of the USSR, both of which the first two movies and books placed in 2000. (There is reference to the plot of 2010, but the Leonov and crew are described as Russian, not Soviet.)
  
  Amusing II: often when I read fiction, I visualize appropriate real-life actors playing the main characters. It's a strange treat to have a legitimate reason to do so with this book. (I guess I wouldn't feel this way if I read more fanfiction or Star Trek novels or whatever, but I don't.)