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.