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Since I didn't finish these I am plausibly interrogating the text from the wrong perspective.

Shambling Towards Hiroshima by James Morrow:

I'm pretty sure this is a fantastic example of it's type, but it's type doesn't really interest me. I got to page 60 then skipped to the end (page 200ish) and didn't feel like I'd missed much.

In the 1980s an old hollywood scifi writer/actor tells the story of being recruited by the US government for stuff I will not spoil. It's a quite clever and effective pastiche of writer memoir (it reminded me a lot of "Adventures in the Screen Trade" by William Goldman) with monster movie nostalgia and old school anti-war satire sf, but stuff satirising the 1950s war machine needs to be at least one of very funny, very insightful, or very accurate to interest me and this didn't quite make the grade on any of those counts. I think I'd rather read an actual old school anti-war satire written in the 70s etc than this oddly retro one.

Palimpset by Charles Stross:

A guy joins a time travelling organisation which keeps an eye on history and humanity.

I got to page 8 then skipped to the end (page 47). I don't know why this didn't grab me, I love time travel and the premise was pretty cool, maybe because I didn't care about the main character at all or feel like waiting around for his inevitable realisation that All Was Not As It Seemed.

These are all series I was already familiar with, which speeds up the reading process.

"Girl Genius, Volume 9 Agatha Heterodyne and the Heirs of the Storm": Made. Of. Awesome. Steampunk about mad geniuses in pseudo-Europe. It's slowed down a bit recently but this particular storyline is still great.

"Schlock Mercenary: The Longshoreman of the Apocalypse": I mostly like Schlock Mercenary, it's fun clever space opera despite it's flaws (though they do grate a bit), and this plot was ok.

"FABLES: THE DARK AGES": Reading Fables (about fairy tale characters living in the modern day) always gives me a bad taste in my mouth and I'm not sure why. The premise and characters are interesting, and it's well written and very nicely illustrated but...I just don't like it. I read the first pdf to make sure I disliked this as much as the previous volumes I've read and I did.

This is a pretty good film. I wasn't entranced the whole way but it was entertaining and interesting and made me cry in a good way, certainly one of Pixar's good films if not one of their best.

I'm not going to complain too much about the Bechdel fail since there weren't many characters and the one (one!) female character with more than like one line was pretty cool. But the minor characters were way more male-only than was necessary or even made any sense, and it annoyed me that it was strongly implied that ALL child+camping mentor relationships are male-only.

There was a bit of a "If you REALLY need to you can overcome your physical limitations" thing but I guess that's the way action scenes tend to work, and it was nice having a main character with mobility problems.

Carl TOTALLY reminded me of my Grandad, with the grumpiness and the obsession with faraway places and holding things together with straps and tape. He even looks kind of like him and has a North American accent (Canadian though, so he might not like the comparison :)) Which, since Grandma died last year and Grandad's increasingly senile made me extra weepy :( But it was very sweet.

I have reserved a bunch of Hugo nominees at the library and today the first two came in. In most cases I know pretty much nothing about them that isn't evident from the title and author.

"What ever happened to the caped crusader" by Neil Gaiman: The Wake, but for Batman. Not bad, but had no overarching plot nor any very interesting message I could fathom, and felt rather generically Gaimanish. I probably would have enjoyed what is basically a love letter to Batman more if I loved Batman rather than just liked the series and character a bit sometimes.

"Wake" by Robert J Sawyer: So, I knew NOTHING about this going in. In the first scene the main character, a disabled young woman who loves maths, updates her livejournal. This was so close to what I'd just been doing I shut the book and felt a little weirded out. But I am definitely intrigued :)
And also on the way home I popped into the second hand bookstore and got a copy of "More than Human" by Theodore Sturgeon, huzzah.

EDIT: Oh dear. Her username is Calculass, and her best friend's is BrownGirl4 aka "Girl who likes maths and her nonwhite/POC best friend"(*). Overall it feels like the author read an article about how teenage girls use livejournal and skimmed some entries but doesn't entirely get it.

(*)I realise there are people who have usernames like that, but for example looking at my friends list there's a few that are relatively informative like leecetheartist or strangedave but the only one that sounds like the sorts of unambigously descriptive yet vague username you get in fiction is goth_grrl...and that's a fictional username from a parody of an IRC channel :)