Sep. 3rd, 2006
(no subject)
Sep. 3rd, 2006 10:16 pmWriting these down now before I forget (again), because I've already had to go stare at my bookshelf to try and figure out which book it was that ought to go on here but I couldn't remember.
- Kushiel's Scion, Jacqueline Cary. First book in a new trilogy set in the same world as the previous three. Phèdre and Joscelin appear in this book, but the main character is their adopted son Imriel, son of Melisande. If you liked the others, you'll probably like this as well; it's not exactly more of the same, but it's certainly more of the similar. ;)
- The Stuffed Owl: An Anthology of Bad Verse, D.B. Wyndham Lewis and Charles Lee. Truth in advertisting! There is much bad verse here, although as the editors point out, it's "good Bad Verse" rather than bad Bad Verse. Frequently more entertaining than the selections published here are the editorial introductions for the authors and the index, where you can look up such topics as "Goats, Welsh, their agility envied by the botanist" (page 82) or "German place names, the poet does his best with" (54) or "Fire, wetness not an attribute of" (28).
- Don't Tell Me the Truth About Love, Dan Rhodes.
- The Dead Yard, Adrian McKinty. Sequel to Dead I Well May Be, which, frankly, I enjoyed more. Michael Forsythe's on vacation on Tenerife when he's caught up in the aftermath of a soccer riot; in order to avoid a jail term and extradition back to Mexico, he's forced by a British intelligence agent to infiltrate an Irish terrorist cell based outside Boston. I like the charactera lot, but I don't think this book was quite as engrossing to me as his original appearance.
- The Glass Books of the Dream Eaters, Gordon Dahlquist. One of the reviews labelled it "a mishmash of Sherlock Holmes, Jane Eyre and Eyes Wide Shut", which I suppose I can see (although one could wish the reviewer had gotten a character's name right in the review). At least 100 pages too long, I think. The action picks up considerably in the last part of the book, but what with all the characters to keep up with and the same events recounted from the points of view of each of Miss Temple, Doctor Svenson and Chang (until everything converges again for the final scenes), I found myself wondering "wait, what just happened here?" more than I'd have liked. Alchemy, science, romance, sex, politics, murder, sh*t gettin' blowed up (although not as much of that as of the others, in all honesty)...all in all, not a bad way to spend four or five evenings. There's an excerpt posted at Powell's for the curious.