New Review: Robin Hobb's Ship of Destiny
October 31, 2002 (4:05 PM) ( link )

ADDED a review of Robin Hobb's Ship of Destiny. An excellent ending to a phenomenal series: I think I ended up liking it less than I liked The Farseer Trilogy (mostly because the conclusion of the older trilogy is so mindblowingly good), but nobody who likes fantasy should pass up on The Liveship Traders Trilogy. Now, all I have to do is wait for Hobb to finish her third trilogy, and I'll be picking that up too. My brother Frank has started to purchase all of Hobb's books in paperback; I expect to eventually round off the collection in hardcover, especially if all three trilogies end up being subtly connected to form an epic nine-part cycle.

In other news, I was browsing the web when I came across this article in Wired about near-death experiences, entitled Dead But Awake. This, of course, is the subject of Connie Willis's decently interesting Passage; and, indeed, I could easily see Joanna Lander as one of the two scientists in this study (except that they're British, and she's not). Reading this article made me realize just how impressively educational Willis's book is--I felt like an expert as I suddenly recalled all of Joanna's pessimistic theories about near-death experiences, and the methodological perils surrounding their study. Say what you want about Willis, but nobody can deny that she pours PhD levels of research into her work.

Right now I'm putting most of my energy into finishing Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman's Dragon Wing; I expect to finish that pretty soon (by this weekend at the very latest), but a review may be somewhat slower since in order to post one I'll have to integrate co-authors into my publishing script. (This is a good thing, though, since I'm also planning to read The Talisman by Stephen King and Peter Straub.)

Also on my currently reading list: Christopher Priest's The Inverted World, which has one of the weirdest settings I have ever read. I still haven't figured it out entirely yet, and I've been scrupulously careful about avoiding spoilers on the Internet or elsewhere (such as the back cover). The reason I got into The Inverted World was that I very much enjoyed The Prestige, one of his later books. The other reason I started on this book is that it's short--I've only read it for maybe an hour or an hour-and-a-half, and I'm already about a fifth of the way through. (A welcome change from The Liveship Traders Trilogy, where I could read for an entire day and still not finish a volume.)

Finally, I've revised the layout of my Books I Plan to Read page, eliminating the useless and self-serving "explanations" and retaining only the titles and authors in a categorized format. It may seem curious at first that my "Fiction, General" section is the longest, given my reading preferences--until you realize that the only reason it's that long is that I almost never reduce it.

No more! I am getting tired of fantasy already, and soon I will get tired of science fiction. There's no doubt in my mind that I'll be broadening my reading as much as I can soon.