What I'm (Re)reading Now

I mentioned that my library isn't buying enough new books lately, or at least not enough books that I actually want to read. I keep forgetting that I can download books from my library's e-book collection and also from such sites as Gutenberg. Clearly I need to start looking into those options. Meanwhile, what am I re-reading?

Georgette Heyer, Frederica, The Grand Sophia, Arabella, Friday's Child

These are books my library has LARGE PRINT versions of. Large print helps me at night when my eyes are tired but my insomnia won't let me sleep. These are two of my favorite Heyers. I also re-read A Civil Contract, which they only have in regular print. Heyer changed my mind about romance novels. If you like Jane Austen, you'll probably like Heyer. I do not like her mysteries, but you might!

Frederica is about a young woman who must marry well to provide for her siblings; A Civil Contract is about a young man who marries a rich but not noble woman to provide for his family. The Grand Sophia is about a young woman raised abroad by her father during the Napoleonic wars who must marry so that her father is free to marry. No novelty in the plotlines, but Heyer's characters are charming, and she writes very compelling prose. TW for classicism and anti-Semiticism.

Anne McCaffery, Dragonsinger

This was the first McCaffery I ever read, back when I was like 14, and my library had a LARGE PRINT, so I re-read it. So light it is almost vaporous, but I read the whole thing. This is set on Pern, which is a world in which dragons exist because of genetics and magic, and have to defend the planet from "threads," which is to say a toxic lifeform that leaps from one planet to the next, devouring everything it touches. But this novel focuses not on the threads but on Harper Hall, a guild of musicians responsible for carrying culture and news over the planet, and on Melony, who is a musician on a world in which women are definitely second-class citizens -- indeed, barely human. Very much a novel of its times (the 1970s).

M.R. Carey, The Book of Koli

Not large print, but I never finished reading it the first time, so I re-read it. Carey wrote a novel I recently read to review it, Infinity Gate, and I liked it a lot. This one was just okay. Set in a future England, after civilization collapses, maybe because humanity destroyed themselves by getting hubristic when it came to technology. There's a hint that genetic engineering might have been one of the causes, but there's also a lot of left-over policing robots and drones. Koli is a kid in a village which is slowly dying out due to inbreeding, as are most villages, because it is too dangerous to travel from place to place, so the genetic pool is whatever six or seven hundred people your town happens to have available; and that's not enough, obviously.

I like what this one is doing with genetics, which is also what I am doing with genetics, sort of, in my novels, so I bought the next two book via Thriftbooks. (The library does not have them.) We'll see how they hold up.

Joe Haldeman, Infinite Dreams

Not large print, but my library had it, and I hadn't read it for about 30 years. Science fiction short stories, not that good. Everyone is male, and they have science-related adventures. Unless you're a Haldeman fan, you can skip this one.