I've been reading A Song of Ice and Fire a.k.a. the source material for HBO's Game of Thrones. It lives up to the hype both in terms of quality and character deaths.

Not really books but meta-books: I was recently introduced to Calibre, which was a revelation for me and which I now use to organize all of my books. Previously it had been very hard for me to keep track of what books I had and what books I was reading and that sort of thing. Courtesy of Calibre, here is a list of fiction books I've read recently:

• Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale. Has some interesting social criticism.

• Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age. I really like the idea of the Primer but the book also basically has as a theme that strong AI is impossible, which was less cool.

• Diane Duane's Young Wizards series #3 and #4. I read #1 and #2 as a kid and never got around to the rest of the series, so I wanted to fix that. They're shorter than I remember and Duane bandies around terms like entropy without really understanding them, which always annoys me in an author.

• Neil Gaiman's The Graveyard Book. This is probably one of the better children's books in existence, but it may not hold an adult's attention. If you haven't read any Gaiman before, American Gods is probably a better introduction.

• Jacqueline Carey's Kushiel's Legacy series #1, #2, and #3. I think I started reading these because Eliezer mentioned them here. I wasn't really expecting all the sex and religion but I ended up finding it quite interesting. These books were hard to put down. They're also quite long: I felt like in each book somewhere between two and three books' worth of stuff happens.

Neil Gaiman, The Ocean At The End Of The Lane. Read through it once yesterday (it's short), will do again today and tomorrow. It seems good. It's also very nice and very loving, but I expect that of Gaiman.

Despite authorial disclaimers, it's particularly interesting if you know something about how Scientology claims the world works. In that context, it comes across as a personal exorcism.

I don't read very much fiction, but recently I've read

• The Eternal Flame by Greg Egan - book two of his Orthogonal series, where he imagines life in a universe with different spacetime symmetries, where the velocity of light is a function of its wavelength. In this instalment, alien scientists on a generation ship try to discover the secrets of matter, and of their own biology, which will allow them to return home. There is a lot of focus on the scientific method and the character of physical law, and the treatment of the (made up) physics is much, much more rigorous and principled than earlier physics-centric Egan books like Schilds Ladder, Diaspora, or the dreadful Distress

• Neuropath by Scott Bakker - a disturbing psychological thriller that explores a radical reductionistic view of the mind and consciousness. If you still think that consciousness is a some sort of unique, special phenomenon, an inevitable byproduct of intelligence, than this book may be for you.

After years of looking, I finally found a copy of Day Watch and Twilight Watch that match the paperback edition of Night Watch that I got accidentally years and years ago.

In brief: Night Watch, Day Watch, and Twilight Watch are the first three of a currently-five-part series by Sergei Lukyanenko. He's -- more or less -- the greatest currently living Russian fantasy novelist. It's urban fantasy; I've been describing it as a much better version of Beautiful Creatures set in modern-day Moscow.

It follows the standard "Masquerade" style supernatural plot line: there are Others that live alongside humans, but never reveal themselves. Light Others tend to protect humans; Dark Others tend to manipulate them for their own purposes. To prevent all-out war, the two sides signed a treaty establishing the Night Watch (composed of Light Others who police the Dark) and the Day Watch (which does the opposite). The delicate nature of the balance inspires lots of political plotting and backstabbing of an order not seen in contemporary fantasy -- I'd say it's even better than A Song of Ice and Fire as far as political intrigue goes.

The series follows Anton, a middle-ranking magician of the Night Watch with some reservations about the group's motivations. Day Watch takes place in the aftermath of the climax of Night Watch and develops his romance with the great enchantress Svetlana, who is much more powerful than Anton. This causes a great deal of drama. Day Watch also introduces the mysterious Inquisition, who serve as the executive and judicial branches of the treaty.

Twlight Watch then follows Anton and Svetlana as they try to fulfill the destiny revealed at the end of Night Watch. It quickly spirals into a chase after a long-lost witch and her long-forgotten artifact that can potentially destroy the balance altogether.

Lukyanenko's style revolves around a densely written main plot -- he's not as big a fan of B-plots as most fantasy authors. He's written Anton as a character that likes to listen to music, and so many lyrics are lifted from Russian pop and rock, but because Anton is listening to them in the context of being in the Night Watch, he interprets them in non-standard ways. The books are also quintessentially Russian: characters use diminutive names frequently; vodka and kvass are both on the menu; and Anton has staunch opinions about Russian politics....

I'd regard Night Watch by itself as a 9/10 book, no question. Day Watch was even better, but not perfect. Twilight Watch was, in comparison, disappointing, but still somewhere above a 7/10. The first two books were turned into films (first Russian-made, but I think another version of Night Watch was made in the US), but I'm told that they diverge substantially from the plot and end up being pale imitators, in the way so many book-to-movie adaptations go.

I recently picked up the (presumably) final collection of Isaac Asimov's Black Widowers Tales, The Return of the Black Widowers. There are some great stories in here including:

• The Acquisitive Chuckle
• The Obvious Factor
• Northwestward
• The Haunted Cabin

In the latter (originally published in 1990) I was amused to find this section:

The five other Widowers at the table, rationalists all, scrambled to their feet and, the order for silence forgotten, yammer their indignation. DaRienzi kept his seat and smiled.

Avalon raised his hands and thundered, "Silence! I don't say I accepted the supernatural is an explanation. I merely say I was forced to consider it. I don't believe in supernatural influences, but even my own firmest beliefs cannot be accepted by myself as unshakable and invulnerable. Do you mind pursuing rationality thus far?"

I just blew through six or seven of Ted Chiang's short stories, and when I finished "Hell Is the Absence of God" I had to stop. I was physically shaking, my knees went weak and I was reduced to gasping and making inarticulate sounds for the next several minutes. I don't know if that was a fluke, but I would really like it if someone would point to similarly horrifying stories or books.