Interspersing that amongst studying Carnegie's classic "How to win friends...", which I'm doing a weekly lunch or breakfast chapter by chapter tear through with a friend in law enforcement, so while the usual application of the book is business or family/friends we've instead been focusing on local crime and rehabilitation, or discouraging acts.

Doyle always makes for a good read. I just completed a reread of some of Anne McCaffrey's Pern series, and have been working on and off on Alistair Reynold's new Blue Remembered Earth books but they're not really wowing me whereas he's probably my favorite hard SF writer. There's a focus on transhumanism, AI, cloning, etc and I feel he's kind of mined that out, plus even though I really enjoyed his more upbeat House of Suns and this one is more cheerful too, his Lovecraft flavor of his other books really is his strong point and that's missing. Oh and I finally got around to reading some Lovecraft, including a nice BBC production of In the Mountains of Madness.

Upcoming new books I'll be reading: Jim Butcher's Dresden Files #15, Skin Game, due out mid-January. I'm hoping to get the time to read Baxter's new "Proxima". Nothing else really on the radar.