January Books
Jan. 31st, 2005 09:38 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ellarienI haven't been reading quite as much this month. Maybe I've been spending too much time on LJ? Also, the plot-noodling on the bus cuts into reading time a bit. Anyway, here's the list, with my thoughts. There may be spoilers behind the links and cuts.
Pratchett Going Postal
Wolfe The Knight
Powers Expiration Date
I meant to post about this one at more length, but the Great Outage happened. It has the usual Powers thing of outrageous fantasy fitted so cunningly into a realistic background that the tentacles hardly show. The setting is a grungy, frightening Los Angeles, full of ghosts that are, among other things, a trafficable, addictive drug. I liked Anubis Gates and Declare better, I think. One thing that left me with an uneasy feeling was the idea of the demented homeless as less than human, mere accretions of garbage animated by lost ghosts. Even as a fictional device, that seems an ugly way of dehumanizing people who are already debased enough. Also, something that looks like a huge world-building hole hit me about a week after I read it, retrospectively unsuspending my disbelief. I could have missed something, but surely an opaque container is an opaque container even if there's glass inside it?
Wolfe The Wizard
I finished this one last night, after a hiatus caused by the Phoenix and Stanford trips. It's rather different from The Knight, though recognizably part of the same whole. Able is older and better informed about the nature of the world, and prone to infodump about it; in fact, he spends a lot of the second half of the book striving for a chance to deliver a message that turns out to be basically an infodump. The theme of hierarchy, implicit in the nature of the world as well as in class structures, becomes more explicit. There are plenty of monsters and battles, and the talking cat is as charming as ever. There is a typical Wolfean incident where the POV character goes off-stage in the middle of a battle and never explicitly tells us what he was up to, though the results seem to have been satisfactory. A lot of things lurk around the edges of the plot, evident more by what isn't said than by what is, rather like the hero's mostly-invisible companion ogre.
Brust Issola
Not much to say about this one. Some interesting bits of experimental writing, attempting to convey the experience of interdimensional travel in stretched, fractured prose. Vlad's story doesn't appear to be over, but he does seem to have come to the end of an arc. I could do with re-reading the whole series, but my Book of Jhereg is on the wrong side of the Atlantic at present.
Hetley The Winter Oak Well written, very dark and gritty in places. The cats are nice, and the dragon POV is interesting.
Kirstein The Language of Power.
I'm still working on Spin State, by Chris Moriarty.
Pratchett Going Postal
Wolfe The Knight
Powers Expiration Date
I meant to post about this one at more length, but the Great Outage happened. It has the usual Powers thing of outrageous fantasy fitted so cunningly into a realistic background that the tentacles hardly show. The setting is a grungy, frightening Los Angeles, full of ghosts that are, among other things, a trafficable, addictive drug. I liked Anubis Gates and Declare better, I think. One thing that left me with an uneasy feeling was the idea of the demented homeless as less than human, mere accretions of garbage animated by lost ghosts. Even as a fictional device, that seems an ugly way of dehumanizing people who are already debased enough. Also, something that looks like a huge world-building hole hit me about a week after I read it, retrospectively unsuspending my disbelief. I could have missed something, but surely an opaque container is an opaque container even if there's glass inside it?
Wolfe The Wizard
I finished this one last night, after a hiatus caused by the Phoenix and Stanford trips. It's rather different from The Knight, though recognizably part of the same whole. Able is older and better informed about the nature of the world, and prone to infodump about it; in fact, he spends a lot of the second half of the book striving for a chance to deliver a message that turns out to be basically an infodump. The theme of hierarchy, implicit in the nature of the world as well as in class structures, becomes more explicit. There are plenty of monsters and battles, and the talking cat is as charming as ever. There is a typical Wolfean incident where the POV character goes off-stage in the middle of a battle and never explicitly tells us what he was up to, though the results seem to have been satisfactory. A lot of things lurk around the edges of the plot, evident more by what isn't said than by what is, rather like the hero's mostly-invisible companion ogre.
Brust Issola
Not much to say about this one. Some interesting bits of experimental writing, attempting to convey the experience of interdimensional travel in stretched, fractured prose. Vlad's story doesn't appear to be over, but he does seem to have come to the end of an arc. I could do with re-reading the whole series, but my Book of Jhereg is on the wrong side of the Atlantic at present.
Hetley The Winter Oak Well written, very dark and gritty in places. The cats are nice, and the dragon POV is interesting.
Kirstein The Language of Power.
I'm still working on Spin State, by Chris Moriarty.