Back in March I wrote that “My goal for 2012 is 52 books, which I’m already behind on.”

It’s now June and I’m not doing so well.

I have re-read a bunch of books that don’t show up on that list:

The Way of Kings, by Brandon Sanderson
The Lost Gate, by Orson Scott Card
Ender’s Game, by Orson Scott Card
Speaker for the Dead, by Orson Scott Card
Xenocide, by Orson Scott Card
Children of the Mind, by Orson Scott Card
Ender’s Shadow, by Orson Scott Card
Shadow of the Hegemon, by Orson Scott Card

So if you count those I’m only be 2 books behind, but incrementing a book’s read-count on Goodreads doesn’t count toward the reading challenge.

Incomplete reads. Oh boy. I’ve got several books in the pipeline that I’m struggling to finish. Not necessarily because the books aren’t good, but for some reason I’m just having a harder time focusing on them.

Hyperion, by Dan Simmons
I stopped reading this one completely. I didn’t enjoy the narrative. There’s way too much foul language and ridiculous sex.

A Clash of Kings, by George R.R. Martin, book two of a Song of Fire and Ice
I tried, I really did. I listened to the audiobook of the first one, but the format makes it too difficult to skip the awful sex stuff. So for this one I tried reading it on on my Kindle, but it was giving me anxiety. I ended up reading how the book ended on Wikipedia and haven’t bothered picking it up since. I’ve also totally cheated and read the Wikipedia entries for the rest of the series. I’m on pins and needles waiting for the next book Wikipedia article.

Doomsday Book, by Connie Willis
I’m trying to like this book and I do enjoy aspects of it, but the narrator is bothering me and the story seems to be dragging on needlessly. I feel it could have been a smaller book and have the same, if not more, impact. It doesn’t help that the book was written in 1992 when user-friendly computers weren’t common. As a result, the computers that help/enable time travel in the book are supposedly only usable by trained technicians, which is a rather silly view of the future. Yeah yeah, sure, of course trained technicians should be the only ones doing time travel, but not being able to understand anything that’s going on unless you’ve been trained? Weird. It isn’t a reason to not read the book though. I just couldn’t leave it out because it goes so well with the next book:

The Inmates Are Running the Asylum: Why High Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity, by Alan Cooper
Thankfully, this book is a little outdated. The developer community as a whole—or at least the web and Apple developer communities—seem to have embraced usability and design-driven development to a much greater extent than they did when this book was written. As a result, it sometimes makes for a bit of a dry read. Yes, there’s still a long way to go until everything is designed to be user-friendly, but I still think the book deserves a refresh. That said, everyone making software should read it.

The Summer Tree (The Fionavar Tapestry, #1), by Guy Gavriel Kay
I like this book, but I’m doing a horrible job at reading it. Sometimes I’m just really horrible at reading actual books. Audiobooks are so much easier for me.

Finally, if you’ve looked at my Goodreads profile you may have noticed two programming books in my currently reading list: Programming in Objective-C and The C Programming Language. I’m hesitant to announce to the world that I’m getting into Mac/iOS development since I have so little time to work on it, but I am. Slowly.