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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Richards" data-source="post: 9730615" data-attributes="member: 508">This past week was another week-long business trip, so I had plenty of time for reading.  I finished Chuck Grossart's The Gemini Effect which was really well-written (and you could tell the author had a military background by how well the military parts read), and had a point not quite at the end where everything was coming together to a head, and then he threw the reader a really interesting curveball.  It was easy to see why this, his first novel, won so many awards.Then, I took advantage of the fact that Monday was a travel day and my hotel was across the street from a bookstore and picked up a graphic novel, Swamp Thing: Green Hell, that takes place in a possible future where mankind has pretty much ruined the Earth, what's left of humanity lives on one of the few mountaintops still above water, and the Green (AKA: the Parliament of Trees), as well as the Red (the sentient animal life force of Earth) and the Gray (the sentient fungal life force of Earth) decide to just wipe the slate clean, destroy mankind, and start life over on Earth.  This, naturally, does not sit well with Alec Holland (Swamp Thing), and it goes on for three issues of a comic book miniseries bound together in hardback.  I'm normally more of a Marvel guy than a DC guy, but I loved Alan Moore's run on Saga of the Swamp Thing and this one played on a lot of the events he put into his stories.  Plus, there were some interesting cameos for a series set far enough in the future that presumably Superman and most of the standard DC heroes are already long gone.After that, I read (in two days) another book I picked up at the bookstore: Eruption, a new novel by Michael Crichton and James Patterson, which I thought was quite the feat considering Crichton died in 2008.  (Apparently he had the unfinished novel and a bunch of notes on his computer and his widow convinced Patterson to finish it.)  It's a science thriller involving a major eruption of a volcano in Hawai'i, and a military secret that makes it much more deadly than a normal volcanic eruption would be.And then today, at the airport and on the plane home, I started and got 250 pages into The Raven Scholar by Antonia Hodgson, which I can already pretty confidently state will have been the best novel I've read thus far this year.  Excellent world-building, fascinating characters, interesting premises, and some great one-liners.  I have another business trip next week, Tuesday through Friday, and I can already tell the remaining 400 pages or so won't hold me to the end of that trip.Johnathan</blockquote>

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