3) Second Part of the Ingenious Knight Don Quixote de la Mancha, by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

Well, I finally managed it: the second half of Don Quixote, having read the first part three years ago. It hangs together rather better than the first part - much less episodic, one senses that unlike his characters the author knew which way things were going. There is some nasty business with a Duke and Duchess who set our heroes up for a series of practical jokes; but Sancho Panza acquits himself very well from it all. In the end, Quixote's neighbours get him to just give it a rest, and the world is obviously a poorer place as a result. (Also he then dies, to reinforce the point.)

One recurrent theme of Volume II is that Quixote and Panza keep on bumping into people who know them not only from Volume I (published ten years before) but also from the seventeenth-century equivalent of fan fiction; in an early chapter, Panza is prevailed upon to explain a couple of continuity glitches from the previous volume, and there's a repeated complaint that the fanfic writers have got the leading characters completely wrong. (Tat Wood makes an obvious parallel in About Time Volume 6, which I have also been reading this weekend.)

Anyway, that's another off my list of classic literature and 2008 reading resolutions. It didn't blow me away, to be honest, in the same way that Proust has been doing; but it is one of those books everyone should try and get through.

Well, after my disappointment with Again, Dangerous Visions, I'm glad that at least one classic sf anthology I've read this year has lived up to its reputation. I'm not a wild-eyed enthusiast for cyberpunk (and William Gibson's story here, "The Gernsback Continuum", which rather lacks an ending, reminded me why not) but I'm always ready to be convinced by a good story, and there are loads of them in here. I think the only one I'd read before was Sterling and Gibson's "Red Star, Winter Orbit" which is actually rather moving and nostalgic, qualities one doesn't really associate with cyberpunk (though perhaps it qualifies because of the note of libertarian triumphalism on which it ends). I was particularly gripped by James Patrick Kelly's "Solstice", which mixes Stonehenge with sex, drugs, rock'n'roll, and father-daughter cloning. But apart from my doubts about the first story, there isn't a dud in the book.

3) I Am Legend, by Richard Matheson

A brilliant short novel: what would things be like if the vampires actually won? The horror of the situation, of the loneliness of the last remaining human, his desperation, his bitter disappointments, superbly well portrayed. I saw someone on my f-list recommend this a couple of weeks ago; I heartily endorse that recommendation.

2) Rogue Moon, by Algis Budrys

One of the classic works of sf I resolved to read at the start of the year. It would actually be good material for a study of gender politics in the late 1950s (published in 1960, when the author was 29). The sfnal part of the story - our heroes' attempts to find a way through a mysterious alien artifact on the Moon, I guess foreshadowing both Clarke/Kubrick's 2001 and the Strugatskys' Roadside Picnic - plays second fiddle to the sexual tension among the alpha males of the research group, with the James Bond figure, the Scientist and the Manager; and the two woman characters are pretty obviously the Virgin and the Whore. At the same time as the men are fighting over the sexual pecking order, they have to confront the fact that the lunar exploration project is essentially a suicide mission many times over; sex and death are pretty closely linked here. A rather fascinating book, though not really an enjoyable one.