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.