Byzantium's Shores: chronicling the misadventures of an overalls-clad hippie

BBOOOIIIINNNNGGGGG!!!!

That's my reaction to Robert Heinlein's The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress. I got about 120 pages in, and I couldn't get any farther. I was totally, utterly, uninterested in the story as it was proceeding. I'll try it again sometime, as I've found more often that bouncing off a book is more indicative of my actual reading mood at the time than the quality of the book itself. For now, I've shifted gears entirely and am sinking my teeth into a Ken Follett thriller (Jackdaws). (I am of course disappointed that my first attempt at digging into the classic works of SF that I haven't yet read should have met with failure, but I shall plug on undaunted.)

In other book news, last week I finished Julie Czerneda's A Thousand Words For Stranger, which I enjoyed even though I found the goings-on in the book very hazy and hard-to-follow. It's a space-opera-slash-romance about a woman named Sira who finds herself in the middle of a spaceport on some dingy planet, with no memory of who she is, and her adventures as she pursues her own memories and is herself pursued by...well, pursuers. She meets up with the captain of a space-freighter, Jason Morgan, and ends up joining him first as something of a refugee, then as a member of his crew (the only member, it turns out -- he's got a small ship) and finally they fall in love. Complications abound when it turns out that Sira is a member of The Clan, a race of beings who look just like humans but have telepathic powers and who can tap into and travel through something called the M'hir. The Clan is after Sira for some reason (it is explained late in the book), as is a group of Enforcers from the Trade Pact (I'm still fuzzy on just what the Trade Pact is -- I think it's a federation of star systems, organized around trade). In fact, everyone is after Sira, but she does not know at all who she is or why they might be after her. So, she and Captain Morgan (yes, I kept thinking of spiced rum every time I encountered his name) evade the pursuers all the while trying to unlock her past. It was a fun novel, and I plan to read the sequels (collectively called "The Trade Pact Universe"), but I found that A Thousand Words For Stranger was lacking in the exposition. Too much of the backstory is revealed very late in the book, so much of the story ends up being harder to follow than it really needs to be -- characters' motivations are kept shrouded in mystery, and Sira's own motives are obviously a total mystery, so the effect ended up being that much of the time I was simply wondering, "Why on earth are all of these characters doing these things?" There were a couple of times that I nearly stopped reading, but the strength of Czerneda's characterizations kept me going. I hope that the next books in the series are more fleshed-out, though.