Three books finished, reviews pending
February 11, 2003 (1:24 PM) ( link )

Despite my overwhelming class schedule I've somehow managed to finish three novels recently, all of them fairly far afield from my usual fare of speculative fiction: Michael Crichton's The Great Train Robbery, Robertson Davies's The Fifth Business (the first book in his Deptford Trilogy), and Robert Cormier's very bizarre I Am the Cheese. All of them were quite good; I'll be posting reviews of them soon, I hope, once my class schedule settles down and I can figure out how much time I have to devote to this hobby.

Because the New Haven Public Library's speculative fiction offerings are slim, and poorly organized (their science fiction and fantasy section mostly contains pulp novels, while the real stuff is hidden in the fiction stacks), I'm focusing more on ordinary fiction nowadays. Because I was impressed by The Fifth Business, I'm proceeding to the second book in the trilogy, The Manticore. I haven't even opened it yet, but I'm curious about the connections between the two books since the first book follows almost the entire life of a single protagonist, and it would be boring indeed for the next two books to be about that protagonist's increasingly sedentary elderly life. The other book I'm reading, on the basis of a great discussion on reading that I had a few weeks ago, is Tracy Chevalier's The Girl with the Pearl Earring. It's a very slight book--less than 250 pages, I think--so it shouldn't detain me for long.

Waiting in the wings (or, more accurately, piled on my couch) are Richard Powers's The Gold Bug Variations (as recommended by a friend in mostly rapturous love with Powers's books), Nick Hornby's About a Boy (though I may try High Fidelity first), and Chang-Rae Lee's Native Speaker.