La Matrice Ombra - Marion Zimmer Bradley
original title: The Shadow Matrix

The re-reading of Darkover continues, fascinating as always.
This is a strange book. Seriously, it's like two books in one.
The whole first part, where Mikhail is in Elhalyn, is totally useless for the second part set in the past.
However.
It's a nice book, even if it's not one of the best of Darkover (probably also because it's written with Adrienne Martine Barnes, and you can tell it's not pure Marion). Mikhail gets a little more depth, but he will never be one of my favourite characters. Regis in this novel reaches peaks of unpleasantness that I would have preferred never to read. And as usual it's full of inconsistencies on telepathy and matrices, but I fear it's an inevitable problem when there's a second writer...

Attacco a Darkover - Marion Zimmer Bradley
original title: Traitor's Sun

Probably this is the less darkovan Darkover book that I've ever read. Besides the wide part about the Terrestrial Empire (sorry: Terrestrial Confederation, as it has been called in the latest books. I never quite understood why they changed its name...), it's like we saw Darkover from the outside, and it's not pleasant. The presence of Herm Aldaran's Rennian wife changes the point of view, and it's like every particular but nice thing on Darkover is not nice anymore. I don't know, it's something really weird.
And the departure of the Empire... books over books saying " the terrans will not disappear just cause we want it" and then suddenly the terrans are going away because the lease of the ground of the spaceport is expired? I don't know, it's kinda absurd. But of course, this an Adrienne Martin Barnes book (even if the cover says something else), and it's obvious that she's not Marion Zimmer Bradley, unfortunately ;___;


Stardust - Neil Gaiman 
original title: Stardust

Probably I was expecting too much.
Also because actually I've known Gaiman just since this summer, but I believe I'm more than a little in love with him.
But this book disappointed me a little. It was difficult for me to enter its world, and I kept thinking about others things while I was reading.
BUT.
I probably read it at the wrong time, when I actually had something on my mind that wanted to distract me.
And there are many interesting things in this modern fairytale.
And then I discovered that a) it is born almost as a comic b) there is an illustrated edition as a book c) the version I read was cut in some parts so they could sell it as a children book -.-


Starplex - Robert J. Sawyer
original title: Starplex

If I don't remember wrong, it's one of the first books Sawyer wrote.
And well, there are many others better book in Robert's production. Yet, I've read it once years ago, and I had a terrible memory, while this time it surely fascinated me. The idea of giant creature made of dark matter, and the alien species are original and well characterized as usual, and the complexity of the idea of timetraveling and immortality... there are interesting things, and actually now that I think about it the problem is the main character XD who, let's say it, is not the best Sawyer's character that I ever read about!


Year's Best Fantasy 2 - cured by David G. Hartwell

And after 5 years, I finally end this book XD
Okay, five years ago I dropped it when I was half through the first story, so it doesn't count. But it still took MONTHS since when I re-started it, and that sounds like a judgement to me.
Like every short story collection, there are beautiful and terrible, slow and fluent, fascinating and boring, original and trite stories... problem is, in this anthology the terrible stories are much more than the beautiful.
And, well, it's not easy reading a book like this.




La strada del Destino - Larry Niven
original title: Destiny's Road

This book is one of the Urania (famous series of paperback science fiction novels) that I read when I was 12/13 taking them at the library, and then they disappeared XD
So now I wander through bookstalls looking for them XD
However, we were talking about Niven.
I had a really faint memory of this book (that I always confuse with John Crowley's Engine Summer, because in both of them there was The Road - but they're actually two different things with the same name) and in fact it was like reading it for the first time, the only thing that I actually remembered were speckles (that for some reasons in italian are called stelline, that means little stars -.-).
It's a strange book; it's quite interesting and nice, but it's not really focused on something. And then there is a time jump of like thirty years, and it always kinda weird when it happens.
Anyway, it's a colonization scifi book (anyone can tell me if this thread really exist? XD or if it has another name maybe...), that is one of my favourites subgenre.