New Reviews: Iain M. Banks's Feersum Endjinn, China Mieville's The Scar, Dan Simmons's Summer of Night
June 28, 2003 (12:31 AM) ( link )

ADDED reviews of Iain M Banks's Feersum Endjinn, China Mieville's The Scar, and Dan Simmons's Summer of Night.

I'm not sure what the deal is now with my reviews: while they've never been high literature, I seem to have a harder time writing these things, and I think their quality has gone considerably down from even their former fairly amateurish nature. I guess I'm working too much out of a formula, going through a checklist in my mind of what I think should be said about a book, and I should start taking a looser approach to evaluating what I read. Oh well--it's not as if I make any money off of this project.

This weekend, come hell or high water, I'm finding a bookstore with Harry Potter 5 and then reading the book in the store, or borrowing it from a friend. I'm not buying the Harry Potter books now, not because I don't think they're worth it, but because I'm holding out for the inevitable deluxe/collector's editions of the entire series, which I will snap up in an instant to keep for forever (or until my as-yet-nonexistent children destroy them). At any rate, I figure I should have Harry Potter read soon...very soon.

Currently on the agenda: Excession is on hold while I read Greg Bear's Darwin's Radio, which won the Nebula Award, I believe. Greg Bear is one of the science-fiction greats that, like Poul Anderson, I have never felt any inclination to read: writers with so much output tend to have only a few real gems among them, and I'm past the age where I am willing to devour an author's entire body of work (as I nearly did with Asimov's science-fiction collection) without any care for the quality of what I read. Nevertheless, Darwin's Radio has come highly recommended enough that I'll risk reading one of Bear's books. In some ways it's quite plodding and workmanlike already, and about 70 pages in it hasn't yet caught my attention, but that will hopefully change.