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.