downtime between books

no surprise, i'm a reader. and now that i'm not working, i'm reading more.

so last night i finished up nathan singer's 'chasing the wolf', a time-travel based SF that looked interesting enough to take off the new books shelf at the library. it was a short read, under 200 pages, and it was engaging. reminds me a bit of cory doctorow's style.

prior to that, i read magnus mill's 'explorers of the new century', which was also fairly short. i want to do some research and find literary criticism of this, because in his sly and sarcastic way i think mills is bring up a huuuuge issue but oh so quietly. i had read mill's 'the scheme for full employment' a couple of years ago and was delighted to see that the local library system has kept up with his work - the system i worked for did not. he writes socioeconomic satire, a modern jonathan swift.

i have a novel by samrat upadhyay checked out, which i requested after reading his new short story collection 'the royal ghosts'. i'm a sucker for anything (well-written) set in southeast asia, and upadhyay sets his work in nepal. the short stories all dealt in tangental or direct ways to the recent antimonarchist violence in nepal.

so this is my question - i finished 'chasing the wolf' last night, and since it's set in modern NYC/1930s mississippi/1960s california, i'm not quite ready to start the upadhyay novel yet. i need a couple of evenings of downtime. usually i do suduko puzzles for a while before bed, or (since my due date has been moved up almost 2 weeks) i should hop-to on my knitting project, a maternity cardigan. i have an issue of tikkun magazine to get through as well, although it's admittedly dry reading (i'm going to try again on tikkun founder michael lerner's 'the left hand of god', though....) anyone else need downtime between books?