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Books read in October
William Gibson, Spook Country. Beautifully styled novel with a half-nostalgic, half-McGuffin feel to it; the characters are all doing things towards goals they don't know without knowledge of one another, and it all proceeds to a calm lack-of-conclusion. Lots of style, lots of carefully-described luxury, and a magnetically-levitated bed.
Thomas Pynchon, Mason & Dixon. This is clearly the most renowned of the class of whimsical novels substantially set in colonial America, like James Morrow's The Last Witchfinder and Stephenson's Baroque trilogy, but I found it enormous effort to read, and not repaying the effort at all; the whimsy doesn't have the focus of Stephenson or the brisk amusement of Morrow, things like the Duck struck me as incongruous and silly rather than funny.
Joe Abercrombie, The Blade Itself. This is a quick and easy read, the multiple narrators all have heads that it's interesting to be in, the environment is Locke Lamora a couple of hundred years earlier, and there's a wizard of phenomenal power and calm demeanor. First of a trilogy, I'll pick up the sequel in paperback.
David Durham, Acacia. First big book in a promised trilogy, this has a lot of the extruded-fantasy flaws - there is a map, and everywhere on the map is visited. It has scale and scope, mighty battles, giant pig-monsters, ancient sorcerors, treachery, a daring terrorist attack by the protagonists, the death of an empire sustained by an evil secret, four children scattered to the corners of the world, a goddess in the form of a sea-eagle, more treachery, assassination, and in general a hefty spoonful from each spice-bottle on the fantasy writer's shelf mixed together into cough-inducing chaos. I don't think I'll be getting the sequel.
Carl Hiaasen, Nature Girl. This one's dreadful; Hiaasen seems to have reached the stage of writing the same book again and again, the villainy is all too petty and the characters all too plastic, and to write at novel length that the Everglades are over-exploited by tourists and telemarketers prone to be irritating is something of a waste of trees. A pity; I very much liked his early, good stuff.
Sergei Lukyanenko, Night Watch, borrowed from![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
despotliz. This one's fantastic. You'll probably have seen the film; this is better than the film, because the writing's drier and the characters and the environment come across more - it's Moscow from the point of view of someone to whom Moscow is just the place they happen to live. Three interlinked novellas, some of the same shape of bureaucracy as Stross's Laundry novels but with the zaniness turned down to a much more bearable level. I am prepared to give moderately solemn vows and undergo indignities of the fifth or sixth level to read the sequels.
Thomas Pynchon, Mason & Dixon. This is clearly the most renowned of the class of whimsical novels substantially set in colonial America, like James Morrow's The Last Witchfinder and Stephenson's Baroque trilogy, but I found it enormous effort to read, and not repaying the effort at all; the whimsy doesn't have the focus of Stephenson or the brisk amusement of Morrow, things like the Duck struck me as incongruous and silly rather than funny.
Joe Abercrombie, The Blade Itself. This is a quick and easy read, the multiple narrators all have heads that it's interesting to be in, the environment is Locke Lamora a couple of hundred years earlier, and there's a wizard of phenomenal power and calm demeanor. First of a trilogy, I'll pick up the sequel in paperback.
David Durham, Acacia. First big book in a promised trilogy, this has a lot of the extruded-fantasy flaws - there is a map, and everywhere on the map is visited. It has scale and scope, mighty battles, giant pig-monsters, ancient sorcerors, treachery, a daring terrorist attack by the protagonists, the death of an empire sustained by an evil secret, four children scattered to the corners of the world, a goddess in the form of a sea-eagle, more treachery, assassination, and in general a hefty spoonful from each spice-bottle on the fantasy writer's shelf mixed together into cough-inducing chaos. I don't think I'll be getting the sequel.
Carl Hiaasen, Nature Girl. This one's dreadful; Hiaasen seems to have reached the stage of writing the same book again and again, the villainy is all too petty and the characters all too plastic, and to write at novel length that the Everglades are over-exploited by tourists and telemarketers prone to be irritating is something of a waste of trees. A pity; I very much liked his early, good stuff.
Sergei Lukyanenko, Night Watch, borrowed from
despotliz. This one's fantastic. You'll probably have seen the film; this is better than the film, because the writing's drier and the characters and the environment come across more - it's Moscow from the point of view of someone to whom Moscow is just the place they happen to live. Three interlinked novellas, some of the same shape of bureaucracy as Stross's Laundry novels but with the zaniness turned down to a much more bearable level. I am prepared to give moderately solemn vows and undergo indignities of the fifth or sixth level to read the sequels.
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I think the film made some reasonable choices as an adaptation, and had some lovely visuals that were well in the spirit of the text insofar as I can tell reading a translation; there's certainly more in the book, but I am not sure I can envision a better choice of how to film it.
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Seeing as at least the first two films (mostly) come from the first book and there are more books, we could have a lot more films to come. Which would also be good.