Reading Update: Late April 2014

I thought that I should give an update on my reading progress this month: 

• A Song of Ice and Fire:  Well, I don't think that I'm going to finish A Feast for Crows by the end of the week, especially since I've got such a busy weekend coming up, but I'm so close to the end that I'm pretty sure that I'll finish it sometime next week.  Then, I'll start on A Dance with Dragons.  
• Shadowrun Core Rulebook (5th edition):  I've barely scratched the surface of this mighty tome, but it's thankfully a reference book, so I don't really have to read it cover-to-cover or anything.  
• The Great Webcomic Catch-Up:  This has completely stagnated this month, but I'm going to give it the old college try, as they used to say, starting next weekend. 

That's all for now.  

Reading List: April 2014

Well, April's almost upon us, so I thought that I'd post a list of stuff that I'm hoping/planning to read in the fairly immediate future: 

• Shadowrun 5th Edition - I get to play this at conventions, so I'd at least like to not have to constantly ask about both rules and lore. 
• Becoming - I've actually started it, but I want to read the rest of it.  
• A Feast for Crows - I put this down to play Pokémon X, but now that I've finished it, I should get back to finishing this.  (I'm about 2/3 through.)  
• A Dance with Dragons - I'd only start this, and it would really depend on how persistent I was on my lunch breaks with reading A Feast for Crows instead of playing Pokémon X.  
• miscellaneous RPG book - I've got half a shelf full of unread RPG books, so I should read at least one of them.  

Obviously, I plan to read a lot more eventually, but  that's the list of immediate reads, for the near future. 

Recent and Near-Future Reading (and Writing)

As you might know from my most recent post, I just finished A Storm of Swords.  This puts me at least a whole season ahead of HBO's Game of Thrones, which should help me to avoid spoilers.  Now, I can get back to the business at hand:  reading planetary romance, starting with the John Carter of Mars books.
... except that my plans have changed.
You see, I set out to read planetary romance as a form of research in preparation for NaNoWriMo, but my thoughts on the novel that I was to write have transformed it from throw-away adventure into magnum opus. It feels as weird as it sounds.  Anyway, that means that I'm shelving it until I get more practice at this whole novel thing.  So, what do I do now?
Thanks to cthulhuchick on twitter, I've discovered that one John Maddox Roberts wrote a series of mystery novels that take place in ancient Rome.  Throw-away comment about vampires in ancient Rome?  You're becoming a throw-away novel about vampires in ancient Rome.
New problem:  I know nothing about ancient Rome, and it's about the end of August.  This is not enough time to learn about ancient Rome and fully outline a novel!  What do I do?
I'm basically looking at two options now:
1.  I re-attempt last year's novel.
2.  I skip NaNoWriMo this year.
Unless I get a story idea about a subject with which I'm already familiar, these are my two options, and they're both looking about equal right now.

So, my reading schedule, at the moment, is some SPQR, some Barsoom, and some H.P. Lovecraft.

Regarding A Clash of Kings

[Significant spoilers for A Clash of Kings by George R.R. Martin follow.]
Recently, I finished A Clash of Kings, and I've moved on to A Storm of Swords.  As much as I'm enjoying the series, I'm going to have to take a break from A Song of Ice and Fire after that, since I'll finally be ahead of the HBO series that's been prompting so many spoilers around the web.  I've got, like, a bajillion other things to read.  I'll get back to it, don't worry.  I do have the next two books, after all.
A Clash of Kings is what it says on the can.  We start out with the four kings that we had at the end of the last book.  Then one is assassinated by magic - hooray for more magic - and then another one pops up on the other side of the continent.  Though, now that I think about it, Greyjoy sure is taking his dear sweet time about conquering things, especially given that the iron men are pretty much straight up viking/klingon/those-bad-guys-from-The-Chronicles-of-Riddick analogues:  Kill people and take their stuff.
The main impression that I have from A Clash of Kings comes from a few chapters during which I felt rather upset not only that Bran and Rickon had been killed off - especially before Bran got to really utilize his psychic mystic powers - but also that we didn't even get to see how Theon managed to find them and get past the direwolves.  So, basically, I was relieved when that turned out to be just a fake-out.
Oh, also, I was frustrated to no end with Arya's incompetence regarding her three kills.  I kind of wanted to see that chaos that would be wrought if she'd spent one on Tywin Lannister.  Furthermore, I was just plain surprised that she didn't use one on Gregore Clegane:  He was responsible for the deaths of several of her fellows, her own capture, and that of her fellow survivors, and he's nearly unkillable.
I was also glad to get some progress on that stuff beyond The Wall.  (It seems to be paying off quite well in A Storm of Swords, too.)

Current Reading

Since I blogged about something that I read recently, I thought that I might blog about what I'm planning to read in the near future.  So, here we go.

• A Clash of Kings - I've been wanting to start into A Song of Ice and Fire for a while now.  Now that I've read A Game of Thrones, I want to see what happens next.  This will also help give me a better buffer against spoilers, which only really became an issue with that HBO series; I don't know whether it will press into the territory of the later books, but I'd rather be safe about it.  
• A Princess of Mars - This is mostly because I've recently acquired an interest in the planetary romance genre.  Most references to that genre seem to relate the Barsoom series as among its defining works, so I thought that I'd give it a whirl.  
• Dune - I saw this classified as planetary romance, as well, and I've been meaning to read it for a long time, anyway.  
• a collection of brothers Grimm fairy tales - At one point, I picked up three books of fairy tales.  I've finished two of them, but I still need to read this one.  Of course, original fairy tales from the brothers Grimm are also of interest to me, anyway.  
• the complete works of H.P. Lovecraft - This has been on my long-term to-read list for quite a while.  Discovering The H.P. Lovecraft Literary Podcast gave me a new motivation, and also an order (chronologically by date written), though I've fallen behind.  

There are a great many things that I mean to read that did not make this list, of course.  Off the top of my head, there's The Colour of Magic, a Calvin & Hobbes collection that I picked up, Sandman, the first few Wheel of Time books, re-reads of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, and those are just books that I own.  These, though, are my short-term items.