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New Review: China Mieville's Perdido Street Station
June 23, 2002 (7:06 PM) ( link ) ADDED a review of China Mieville's Perdido Street Station. Whoo! What a book. It was definitely a relief reading something so fun after Mists of Avalon, which is still a bad taste in my mouth. Use of Weapons was good too, of course, but it wasn't quite meaty enough to really satisfy my reading appetite.
Speaking of meaty books, I'm still progressing slowly through Vikram Seth's A Suitable Boy, which is really freaking slow. I sure hope somebody dies soon, since the leisurely plot is getting somewhat annoying. But, as a counterpart to this book, I will be concurrently reading Guy Gavriel Kay's The Fionavar Tapestry, a trilogy that is the first fantasy series Kay published. Afterward he wrote his much more famous Tigana and The Lions of Al-Rassan, among others--both of them books I will proceed to if The Fionavar Tapestry is any good.
Perdido Street Station
June 21, 2002 (3:21 PM) ( link ) A Suitable Boy is ok, but Perdido Street Station is the best...book...ever. My God. Mieville has simply the most wild imagination of anybody, and the tension keeps building up in this book. Of course, some of the characters are less than savory--Isaac in particular bothers me for his complete disregard for animal feelings (consider the scene where he casually wrings the neck of a pigeon he is examining), but the world in which Mieville's characters live is so rich, so complex, and so wonderfully evocative that I find myself stunned at the end of every chapter. Plus there is very little so far that seems to come out of the blue--something that is especially difficult to accomplish in novels of worlds so different from (and yet so similar to) our own.
I've heard the ending is a downer, which will suck, but I'm only a little more than halfway through so that's a lot of reading pleasure left. Seriously, this is a great book--read it if you have half an eye left in your head.
Book-reading heaven
June 15, 2002 (7:15 PM) ( link ) At last: after a month of mostly terrible books, I am now enjoying two of the better books that I've read this year. Vikram Seth's A Suitable Boy has a mostly mundane plot, but it's still a joy to read because of Seth's deft handling of prose style, characters, and dialogue. I'm now 200 pages into it, and though it's hardly gripping reading, it's pleasant to flip through it, and pages pass seemingly without any effort. Even the huge cast of characters, with their confusing Indian names, are slowly coalescing in my mind.
The other book I'm reading, to play off of Seth's tome, is China Mieville's Perdido Street Station. Like Darwinia, Mieville's book is also bursting with imagination--it takes place in a steampunk universe with fantasy creatures, weird alien-human hybrids, a bizarre alternate history, a different set of physical laws, etc. etc. It seems that every page introduces another concept that seems completely natural within the scope of the book and yet still astonishes me. Plus the plot's not half bad--already the two main characters seem to have encountered major obstacles, to palm-sweating effect. I can't tell where this book is headed, but so far Perdido Street Station looks like a winner.
Ah, this is what summer should be about: good books, and lots of free time. And sunshine, of course.
New Review: Iain M. Banks's Use of Weapons
June 13, 2002 (6:17 PM) ( link ) ADDED a review of Iain M Banks's Use of Weapons. A good book--I'm going to read more of Banks's works, since he's so far been a reliably good author.
I went to the San Marino Public Library today and checked out four books I'm planning to read soon. The first should be no surprise: Vikram Seth's A Suitable Boy, which I swear I will read by the end of this month. The second is Jonathan Franzen's much-talked-about The Corrections; the third, Norman McLean's A River Runs Through It; and the fourth, Tim Powers's Last Call. That's the order I'm going to read them too, although I will likely interject some fun science-fiction and fantasy fare in between all of this stuff (especially after Seth's tome, yeesh).
I also have to do some reading for my parents' tutoring business: namely, Tom Sawyer, Call of the Wild, To Kill a Mockingbird, and Fahrenheit 451 (since when did that book begin to be considered a classic book? I mean, it's fun, but not particularly deep). I doubt I'll post reviews of these, since I enjoyed them immensely when I was younger and I doubt it'll be any different now. Tom Sawyer in particular is always a joy; for some reason the longer I don't read it the lower my opinion of it goes, but it only takes a lazy afternoon for me to be re-converted to the greatness of Mark Twain's talent for humor and pathos.
New Review: Marion Zimmer Bradley's The Mists of Avalon
June 10, 2002 (2:49 AM) ( link ) ADDED a review of Marion Zimmer Bradley's The Mists of Avalon. A waste of time, I thought--though your opinion may differ.
Now what? Vikram Seth has failed me again--I had to return his book before I had a chance to finish A Suitable Boy but it looks like I'll be able to check it out now and have done with it. Until then, I think I will preoccupy myself with Iain M. Banks's The Use of Weapons and Guy Gavriel Kay's The Fionavar Tapestry trilogy. I feel the need for a really fun, good book to read, otherwise I think I'll go crazy.
Nine-month anniversary
June 1, 2002 (8:06 PM) ( link ) This is the ninth month of the book review page. This has been a slow month--only one graphic novel read, and no new books. Why? I don't know--a combination of finals, as well as the fact that I'm reading two huge books that I'm slowly trying to finish. Hopefully this next month will give me much to read, since it's the beginning of summer.
Also, the number of visiters almost halved, probably because I barely did anything here. Oh well.
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