This was not a month for substantive reading.
Black Fire / Sonni Cooper Star Trek book. like ever Star Trek book i've read, no matter the author, it was slow to start, had a nice ending, and ended up being a quick read.
The Last Juror / John Grisham - This book is obstensiably about a rape and murder in Clanton, Mississippi (where A Time to Kill is set, so we see some of the same characters, 20 years younger) but it's really about the growth of the town and the growth of the main character through what a pretty tumultuos period of history in the South. i liked it. it was definitely one of my more satisfying Grisham reading experiences, and not at all fluff.
Little house in the big woods / Laura Ingalls Wilder - no, i'm not sure what brought this on, either. next.
Ice station / Matthew Reilly - this is totally just an action movie spewed onto the page. lots of fun to read. no substance at all. the author relies on italics and exclamation points quite a bit, but, well, when you're trying to describe what happens when several countries start battling it out over a UFO buried in Antartica...
Heavy weather / Bruce Sterling - during the later part of the first half of this century, we've so wrecked the ozone layer that heavy weather has set in. the main characters chase the tornadoes. this book had a lot to say about family relationships, particularly the ones between siblings, and a lot to say about living in and out of acceptable society, and i'm still sorting out what i thought of it and thought of the end.
Aunt Dimity digs in / Nancy Atherton - ye old standard harmless mystery novel set in England. sometimes i really like this genre and sometimes i don't, and in this particular case, i didn't much. at least it was short.
Angels & demons / Dan Brown - i liked some of things that Dan Brown had to say about faith, and hope, and organized religion, around the adventure, but i was bored silly by most of the book. which was disappointing, because i'd been told consistently that this one was better than The Da Vinci Code.
i'm currently reading The hound of the Baskervilles, Meeting faith : the forest journals of a black buddhist nun, and Prey to all (another proper English mystery that I'm enjoying much more) but those are going to be superseeded this week by Song of Susannah, which i finally got around to checking out.