Recent Books -- Gone-Away World, Half-Made World, InterWorld, Underworld, The Word for the World is Forest

WIth hundreds of paper and ebooks in my reading queue, I need themes to decide what to read next. Why not books with “world” in the title? Presumably they all have some reasonable degree of ambition.

* “The Gone-Away World”:amazon by Nick Harkaway. Post-apocalyptic story of a world fantastically scrambled by some kind of quantum/entropy bomb. Engaging. 4 stars on Amazon, 4.14 on “goodreads”:http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3007704-the-gone-away-world, it is a solid 4. * “The Half-Made World”:amazon by Felix Gilman. A strange world of western expansion and industrial development gone awry. The archetypes of the Wild West and the Industrial Revolution walk the earth, driven by demons, fighting for dominance, against a never-ending western frontier. Even more engaging. 3/78 on “goodreads”:http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/8198773-the-half-made-world, 4 stars on Amazon, also a 4 here. * “InterWorld”:amazon by Neil Gaiman and Michael Reaves. Nice YA science fiction title with all the classic memes. Reminds me of the titles I got hooked on – early asimov, heinlein, etc. 3.46 on “goodreads”:http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/47701.Interworld, 4 stars on Amazon, I’ll give it 3.5. * “Underworld”:amazon by Don DeLillo. A more literary book than these others, written in a purposefully disjointed style that probably reflects true stream-of-consciousness of people. But I didn’t care about the characters and the plot didn’t advance well. Gave up 25% of way through. Amazon says 3.5 stars, “goodreads”:http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11761.Underworld 3.9, i can’t give it more than 2 stars. * “The Word for the World is Forest”:amazon by Ursula K. Le Guin. The story of Avatar, but subtler, more understated. and written some 30 years before Avatar. “Goodreads”:http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7672380-the-word-for-world-is-forest says 3.75 stars, amazon says 4.5 stars. It is a solid 3.5 but the author has of course written much better since then.