I’ve got The Power on my list for this month too. Interested to hear your thoughts next month when we both have finished!

I missed January’s What are You Reading, so here is the catch-up from my vacation reading, including:

Damn. I only started reading her about four or five years ago, even though I am a fairly prolific sci-fi/fantasy reader, and she quickly became one of my favorite authors. Have no idea why it took me so long.

She is simply a tremendous writer and you have hours of wonderful work ahead of you. My favorites are the Earthsea books and The Dispossessed. If there was one book I could make everyone in the world read it would be the first Earthsea, just a wonderful story, beautifully written. 

Election with my father. From the very first line of the movie, I knew it was going to be rough.

I’ve read all but the last two books of the Temeraire series and liked all of them. In general, each book spends time in a different area of the world exploring how the different dragon cultures work, and Novik definitely seems to enjoy writing sea voyages, there are a lot of them. It can become repetitive, there is…

Finished Player of Games by Iain Banks. It is the first Banks that I’ve read, and I really enjoyed it. Quite a few interesting ideas and one really incredibly written sequence that reminded me of Yossarian wandering around Rome in Catch-22. I’ll definitely be reading another Banks soon.

How did I miss that David Mitchell wrote another book?! I had no idea there was a follow up to Bone Clocks. Thank you!

I’m glad this feature still exists, even if the discussion is likely to not be as lively. Also this is my very first post in Kinja, we’ll see how it goes.

Get it even if you don't have kids! Avatar and Korra are fantastic no matter what age you are, says the 39 year old woman who loves the shit out of both series.

I agree. Mrs. Potts age seemed really off, and where the heck is Mr. Potts? It makes more sense for Chip to be her grandson than her son. Maybe she adopted him after the Beast went wild one night and broke a china cabinet that contained Chips mother and father. Chip was just a wee baby cup, so he took to calling her…

This happened to me when reading in landscape mode on my iPad. As soon as I turned to portrait mode, it fixed the issue. I think Chrome just had a big update, so it might be a Chrome issue reading the style sheet. Haven't had any problems on a regular computer, yet.

Oryx and Crake is spot on. I find it eerie how very possible that future might be. We are even right now creating hybrid human-pigs, and ceding science and technology advancement to the for-profit sector whose focus is not always the greater good. Scary.

Finished a re-read of Watership Down, which gave me some hope about society and the world, even though the humans in it kind of suck. The democratic Hazel and his rag-tag group winning over the authoritarian General Woundwort, through teamwork, independent thinking, and sacrifice just helps me remember that we aren't…

Brokeback Mountain and WALL-E for me. I watched them for the first time a couple of days apart, and was surprised to find that a movie about gay cowboys, and another one about robots, ended up affecting me emotionally more than any other "romantic" movie I had ever seen.

Heck, I'd remove the animated qualifier, WALL-E is one of the most romantic movies I've ever seen regardless of genre.

I would like to admit Marlon Brando as exhibit A for an actor who was a beautiful specimen in his prime, but let themselves go as they got older. Granted it was a different time, and he was Marlon Brando, so he got away with a lot of things other actors couldn't.

Ugh Michael Bay. I hate Armageddon with a fiery passion. It is one of two movies that makes me irrationally angry anytime I watch even short clips of it. The other one is Legends of the Fall.

I just mentioned this in a reply to a comment above. It was almost unbelievable how much worse that second episode was. I don't know if the show got any better, because I immediately stopped watching. The pilot is still something special.

I watched this Pilot on streaming, thought it was incredible. Really one of the best TV episodes, and definitely the best pilot, I had ever seen. Immediately started the second episode and the drop in quality was so stark: stereotypical characters, terrible dialog, uninteresting drama, that I never watched another…