2002 Books? But I Haven't Read All the Books Published Before 2002 Yet!

I've just been looking at Locus' 2002 Recommended Reading List, and it highlights for me the mildly depressing fact that I cannot, by any stretch of the imagination, consider myself as keeping current in the science fiction and fantasy fields. I'm generally inclined to wait for paperbacks or book club editions of newer works, since my book-buying budget is astronomically high as it is, and then, once I do get my hands on something recently published, my backlog of unread books is so huge that they tend to sit around for years before I finally get around to reading them. Thus, of this rather long list, I've read exactly two books. The first is David Brin's Kiln People, which I do recommend. It's got a nifty central idea whose social implications are well explored, plus it's one of those mixed-genre works I tend to be so fond of (in this case, science fiction mixed with a hard-boiled detective novel). It gets a little weird at the end, and I can't escape the niggling feeling that it could have been an even better book than it was, but I definitely enjoyed it. The other is Terry Pratchett's Night Watch. I adore Pratchett, and am deeply impressed by how consistently high the quality of his Discworld series has been. Few writers could keep a series this fresh for this long, though I suppose it helps that the Discworld books tend to be only fairly loosely connected to each other.

Several more of them are currently sitting on my To-Read Piles, though. Namely, the following:

Schild's Ladder by Greg Egan: It may be a while before I get around to this one, as I've kind of gone off Egan lately. I thought Quarantine, Permutation City, and the short story collection Axiomatic were brilliant. Distress and Diaspora were flawed, but extremely interesting, nonetheless. But Teranesia was extremely disappointing, so I'm really not sensing a good trend here.

The Years of Rice and Salt by Kim Stanley Robinson: I don't think I've read any of Robinson's books, but I've heard good things about this one.

A Wizard Alone by Diane Duane. It may take me a while to get around to this one, too, as I still haven't read the previous book in the series, The Wizard's Dilemma. I've really enjoyed this series, but I'm a bit wary about continuing on with it, as I just recently read To Visit the Queen, which was set in the same universe, and found it boring and difficult to finish. I'm a bit afraid that Duane, unlike Pratchett, may be running out of steam.

Coraline by Neil Gaiman. I'm really looking forward to this one. I think the only reason I haven't read it yet is because I'd really like to find time to read it uninterrupted in something close to one sitting. Gaiman's writing simply deserves that kind of attention.

If anybody has any other recommendations... Well, actually, you'd probably better keep them to yourself, as I've got more than enough to read as it is! Not that that ever seems to stop anybody, of course...