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New Reviews: Iain M. Banks's Feersum Endjinn, China Mieville's The Scar, Dan Simmons's Summer of Night
June 28, 2003 (12:31 AM) ( link ) ADDED reviews of Iain M Banks's Feersum Endjinn, China Mieville's The Scar, and Dan Simmons's Summer of Night.
I'm not sure what the deal is now with my reviews: while they've never been high literature, I seem to have a harder time writing these things, and I think their quality has gone considerably down from even their former fairly amateurish nature. I guess I'm working too much out of a formula, going through a checklist in my mind of what I think should be said about a book, and I should start taking a looser approach to evaluating what I read. Oh well--it's not as if I make any money off of this project.
This weekend, come hell or high water, I'm finding a bookstore with Harry Potter 5 and then reading the book in the store, or borrowing it from a friend. I'm not buying the Harry Potter books now, not because I don't think they're worth it, but because I'm holding out for the inevitable deluxe/collector's editions of the entire series, which I will snap up in an instant to keep for forever (or until my as-yet-nonexistent children destroy them). At any rate, I figure I should have Harry Potter read soon...very soon.
Currently on the agenda: Excession is on hold while I read Greg Bear's Darwin's Radio, which won the Nebula Award, I believe. Greg Bear is one of the science-fiction greats that, like Poul Anderson, I have never felt any inclination to read: writers with so much output tend to have only a few real gems among them, and I'm past the age where I am willing to devour an author's entire body of work (as I nearly did with Asimov's science-fiction collection) without any care for the quality of what I read. Nevertheless, Darwin's Radio has come highly recommended enough that I'll risk reading one of Bear's books. In some ways it's quite plodding and workmanlike already, and about 70 pages in it hasn't yet caught my attention, but that will hopefully change.
New Reviews: Several of them
June 19, 2003 (10:18 PM) ( link ) ADDED reviews of Robert Cormier's I Am the Cheese, Norman Mailer's The Executioner's Song, Dan Rhodes Anthropology, Michael Marshall Smith's Spares, and Sheri Tepper's Grass. (Note, several of the reviews are missing the final paragraph: I'll fix things up with my scripts by tomorrow at the latest.)
Sorry for the long absence: I've been reading, intermittently, but the huge backlog of books I haven't yet reviewed has been scaring me away from this website for a while.
Nevertheless, here's a mix of old and new reviews: Cormier's and Tepper's books are from way back, while Mailer's and Smith's books are from much more recently.
Last week I discovered the D.C. Public Library. It's a great place: very large, with an impressive graphic novel collection (though it skimps on the tights-and-flights genre); its only problem is that many of the fiction sections are terribly organized, with the Si's before the Sa's and the Ta's after the Tu's. Also, when I went there, the air conditioning was down; not pleasant in a muggy D.C. afternoon.
That being said, there are plenty of good books on the horizon. I've actually already finished China Mieville's The Scar, his sequel to the excellent Perdido Street Station; that review should be popping up here over the weekend. I have sitting before me Michael Marshall Smith's second book, One of Us, as well as Greg Bear's Nebula-winning Darwin's Radio and Dan Simmons's Summer of Night, which is pretty creepy but also sort of cliched. Finally, I'm starting on Iain M. Banks's next Culture novel, Excession, which has a pretty cool initial concept. Before I sign off, here's a taste: Two and a half millennia ago, the artifact appeared in a remote corner of space, beside a trillion- year old dying sun from a different universe. It was a perfect black body sphere and it did nothing. Then it disappeared. Now it is back. Sounds like fun.
There'll be more later, I promise: after all, the summer is (and always has been) all about reading!
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