Truth by Terry Pratchett

I picked this up because (when I started) things were going kind of crappy and Discworld is funny and not entirely depressing.

Pages: 368

The Merchants' War by Charles Stross

I wish I had realized that this was the fourth book in the series. All the same, it is very well written. There were enough clues about the main magic of this universe for me to figure things out reasonably, and the explaining parts were talking tactics for upcoming battles, so  I think it would have been fine even if I had read the books before. I am interested in the characters. I am sort of unhappy that this is a tightly linked series because I don't have time to read the following two books (or go back for the first three) until May or June. But they are high on my list.
Pages: 336

The Knight by Gene Wolfe

Annoying main character. Cliffhanger ending to make sure you read the next book. Wolfe made an error with that, because I am not going to pick up the next one even though it is at my normal library.
Pages: 430

Elegy for a Young Elk by Hannu Rajaniemi

More trying to figure out what to nominate.
http://subterraneanpress.com/index.php/magazine/spring-2010/fiction-elegy-for-a-young-elk-by-hannu-rajaniemi/

This one was okay, but not anything I'd want to win a Hugo. 

Halting State by Charles Stross

This one was kind of neat. A combination of tech and spies and nerds. It was lacking something, though I'm not sure what. I just wasn't as pulled along as I should have been.

Pages: 336

The Lifecycle of Software Objects by Ted Chiang

I'm trying to figure out what to nominate for the 2011 Hugo Awards, and I found this on some random person's list of neat things.

This story was fairly long--enough so that I read it over the course of two days instead of a couple hours in one night. That detracted some. But I did not particularly like that the story did not have any clear climax and that the ending sort of petered out instead of ending more normally.

I do not think this one is worth a Hugo. The last time Chiang won a Hugo, it was definitely worth it. Not this time.

http://subterraneanpress.com/index.php/magazine/fall-2010/fiction-the-lifecycle-of-software-objects-by-ted-chiang/

Path of the Fury by David Weber

Why didn't I start reading David Weber earlier? I know why I have not read him since December or so--the book covers for his main series have too many women and too many women who are there for sex appeal. I don't want stories driven by interactions between a man and a woman as such, I want explosions. David Weber just doesn't put the explosions on the cover of his book, he hides them inside.

Weber has a very neat way of taking something from mythology/folktales and mixing it in with space opera--with enough cybernetic stuff to make it feel sort of on the edge of things even though those ideas have been around for a long time. The cybernetic things reminded me of the Culture novels. At any rate, in this book the old idea that Weber borrowed was the Furies from Greek mythology, hence the title of the book.

There are a lot of explosions, some very fast ships, and a mostly satisfying ending. Oh, and there are more books in this series.

Pages: 512

Saturn's Children by Charles Stross

One of the first blurbs inside the cover stated that this book "oozed sex on every page" or something similar. It doesn't, though the cover makes it something I wouldn't read at work*. There is some graphic description in here, but not much.

And after saying all that, I'd like to point out that I read it because I'm on a Stross kick right now, not because it looked like a sci-fi "romance" novel. There were interesting ideas in here, mainly dealing with a weird robot civilization that was largely weird because humanity had died out and thoroughly killed every biosphere capable of supporting it at the same time. I think this book should have had less sex in it because even though the fact that the main character was built in a factory to be a concubine and it was a big part of the unfolding of the story, it felt unneeded. Of course, the dedication was to Asimov and Heinlein--robots for Asimov, gratuitous sex for Heinlein.
Pages: 321