Five-month Anniversary
February 2, 2002 (12:05 PM) ( link )

Today marks this site's official five-month anniversary. I have updated the statistics page to reflect this. In the month of January, I read 8 novels and 4 graphic novels, adding 12 reviews for a total of 64. Since the beginning of the year, I've read 33 novels and 10 graphic novels and added 64 reviews.

Also, since the site redesign, I've seen 46 visitors on this site—most of them not from Harvard, which is a little unusual (how do they find this page anyway?).

And the reading doesn't stop. I've been reading Glen Cook's The Black Company; after the silly and light-hearted tale of Moving Pictures, The Black Company is a dark and disturbing read. In the few pages that I've read, Cook aptly conveys the claustrophobia, fear, and unpleasantness of the town of Beryl. Dread and the harsh realities of life underlie every moment of the Black Company—I think that over 200 of them die in the first few sections alone, and Cook has no qualms about killing off characters who I thought had the potential to be permanent ones. The fantasy world that Cook constructs is fascinating: there are hints of all sorts of weirdness, without anything explicit being said (except about the foklava, which hurts the effect of their introduction). Finally, Cook completely eschews the "noble hero" mentality that a lot of other fantasy follows. Even more so than George RR Martin (who has his own noble, if flawed, characters), Cook's characters are mean, vicious bastards. This could be due to the type of men that the Black Company tends to attract: I still haven't read up to the part that explains who joins the Company, although I think it has something to do with starting a new life after being convicted of some terrible crime. But the men aren't gratuitously nasty: for the most part, they're just trying to look after their own interests—and the interests of the limited few they care about—in an amoral world where dark magic, evil creatures, and an almost unfathomably oppressive sense of history serve to destroy those who attempt to act out of a benevolence.

Overall, then, I'm intrigued by Cook's book, and I'm looking forward to finishing the first one. If this series is really as good as the beginning seems to imply, and if Cook starts tying in some larger plot threads (so far the Company doesn't seem to have anything on its plate after their first, extremely tense "adventure" with the foklava), then this could be a series worth reading—all 10 books worth. It might be a good idea, though, for me to eventually alternate Cook's darker novels with Pratchett's lighter ones, just so I don't go crazy.