The Risen Empire, Westerfeld. Yes. Better story than writing, in the space opera tradition. Very sloppy editing and/or proofing, almost certainly due to Tor (fine spelling bee word, so-so publisher of sometimes-excellent work). Separate from that, a number of technical details are again mis-stated (sorry, I did not keep careful track this time), which I find troubling insofar as I find it difficult to reconcile that sort of ignorance or carelessness with good writing. And yet I have almost nothing bad to say about the writing.

Midnighters, Vol. 3: Blue Noon, Westerfeld. Yes. A fitting conclusion to the Midnighters series, very exciting in spots. If you’ve read it, we can compare notes on whether you, too, were reminded of a thing at a spot in the book.

The Complete Stories, O’Connor. Yes. This took me quite a while to get through. The writing was just good enough to keep me going despite my inability to enjoy the stories themselves very much. On reflection, though, perhaps I should have enjoyed them more, as they were very Seinfeld-like: Awful things happened to awful and non-awful alike, and there was no hugging and certainly no learning.

Midnighters, Vol. 2: Touching Darkness, Westerfeld. Yes. Given the amount of research that Westerfeld apparently did for Peeps, I’m disappointed that he didn’t bother to check what the GPS constellation looks like. It’s not entirely clear he knows what the mailbox flag means, either, though maybe the character merely phrased something oddly. There’s mention made of the Scrabble® dictionary, but what he describes sounds more like the wordlist, except that he would have to be talking about the long word list, and he gets that wrong, too. Also, fingerprints, anybody? And finally, there’s an issue that I’m not willing to go back and look at The Secret Hour to verify, but it’s a fairly serious flaw, or cheat, whichever way he handled it (or didn’t) in that book. He hangs a bit of a lantern on it in this volume, which doesn’t soothe my somewhat ripped-off feelings much. Withal, though, the book kept me turning pages. I like what he’s done with the world and the characters, and only wish he had bothered to deal better with a few things.
Update: per his words elsewhere, he got the mailbox flag wrong (“finds bill for [name]”).

The Zombie Survival Guide: Complete Protection from the Living Dead, Brooks. Non-fiction. Again, billed as humor. I mean, sure, it’s ironic and po-mo and all, but I still didn’t find it a laugher. I was interested that it creeped me out in a way no fiction has in a long time. I think this was mostly because so much of the survival advice is applicable to a wide variety of unpleasant-to-contemplate situations. I wonder if broader exposure to the zombie and survival genres would have enhanced my enjoyment. Brooks seems like a pretty nice guy in his Suicide Girls interview. I’m somewhat relieved to see this exchange in his World War Z interview:

[SG]: Survival Guide wasn’t exactly humorous and World War Z is definitely not that humorous.
Max: Anyone who thinks this World War Z is funny has severe emotional problems.

But maybe they’re being ironic.

Midnighters Vol. 1: The Secret Hour, Westerfeld. Yes. Written for a younger audience than Peeps and The Last Days, but I found it no less compelling. I was disappointed in the mathematical error made by the master trigonometrician, and I imagine I should be troubled by the implication that there’s something magical about Greenwich, if only on principle, but these defects did not diminish my pleasure in any serious way.

The Campfire Collection: Thrilling, Chilling Tales of Alien Encounters, ed. Hyams. Yes. The final section disappoints (other than the Tiptree story, of course, which I optimistically fancy to be dated), but the rest of the stories are solid—in many cases classic—SF. I do need to check the credits to They Live, or Google for lawsuits.
Update: The acknowledgment is right there in They Live‘s credits.

Dzur, Brust. Yes. Brust uses a couple devices in this installment near the limits of what they’ll tolerate, aggravated by my belief that the parallel construction (device one) seems to exist only to help justify the weak tie of the action to the title (device two). That (minor, really) distraction aside, this is a Vlad Taltos novel, in more of the classic mold than we’ve seen in several books. As cranky as I’ve become of late, I still enjoy Brust’s writing.
I remembered his ties to the so-called "Pre-Joycean Fellowship" and dug around to find out what that’s about (when I last considered the question, rec.arts.sf (pre-split) was my sole source of info; things have changed somewhat). Finding this old post of Brust’s has yet again brought home the realization that I’m not looking for straight-forward storytelling so much as I am looking for writing in service of the story and the characters. If your story needs trickery (and you’re good enough to pull it off), you must get tricky. Zelazny is, after all, a hero of mine, too.

Ask the Dust, Fante. Yes. Another Dan Bern suggestion, and another well-written work. I deferred the Charles Bukowski introduction until I had finished the book, as so many introductions say too much about what follows. If an author wants to spill what’s going on in an introduction to his own work, that’s one thing, but nobody else ought to presume. Turns out Bukowski did a very good job of talking about why he loved Fante without saying anything damagingly revealing about the book itself. Both Fante and Ring Lardner write very well about—well, people—and that so frequently means that there’s an undertone (or sometimes fundamental tone) of despair that reminds me why I can’t read too much Theodore Sturgeon at a time. It also means, sometimes, that my attention span isn’t long enough, so I every so often long for something to happen, already. I will pretend this is the same thing a colleague of mine means when he says he prefers books with a "big idea". Y’know, like Zombies.

World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War, Brooks. Yes. The various editing (and, I hope, proofing) problems (some typos, two unrelated occurrences of "a millenia", on ne passé pas for on ne passe pas (again, at least twice)) and occasional lapses into preaching were not enough to discourage me from deeply enjoying this book. I was surprised that Brooks (the son of Mel) was not more hampered by the structure he chose in weaving a coherent and compelling narrative. Some of the jargon struck me as unlikely, but predicting slang is fraught with peril.
I was perplexed to find that the Cataloging-in-Publishing puts the book in "War—Humor": the absurdity of its premise notwithstanding, WWZ is straight drama. Not to say there is no humor—I daresay humor is a vital component of any drama—but the book is not, and does not want to be, a laff riot.