I finished November 898 pages deep into this behemoth. That means I read 428 pages last month, which is really a lot for me these days. I am really enjoying this series. Contrary to the Wheel of Time at roughly the same stage in that series, I have the sense that Erikson knows where the series is going and I don’t feel like he’s wasted hundreds of pages at a time where very little happens. Lots happens in this book, all the time! In fact, the battle that I assumed would end this book occurs midway through it. I’m highly anticipating the impending confrontation(s) that I’m assuming will conclude this book.
Erikson’s energy for this series, its scope and breadth, and the amount of action he’s been packing into it is truly impressive. I hope to finish this book (~300 pages or so left) over my Christmas vacation and begin on book 7, Reaper’s Gale.
Fortunately, I’m familiar with Gaugin’s life. When Clutton started speaking of meeting a middle-aged stockbroker who chucked it all, wife and children included, to be an artist, it was pretty clear who that was.
Started The Brothers Karamazov about a month ago, taking it in at a leisurely pace. I discovered last night that an essay on Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway would be on my English Lit final exam, so I’ve been gobbling it down. Wonderful work, it’s a shame I have to read it so quickly.
You might want to give his non-SF books a try as well…The Bridge is an interesting book. My favourite though is The Wasp Factory (be warned though it is a tad unsettling)
I actually prefer his non-SF books. The Wasp Factory and Complicity are my favorites.
In my edition of The Wasp Factory, the publisher put a bunch of negative reviews on the back where the glowing tributes usually go (mostly along the lines of “this is sensationalist tripe that will only appeal to pseudo-intellectual perverts”)
Right now, Edding’s The Diamond Throne; Patrick O’Brian’s Master and Commander, and a neat little gem called The Great Dirigibles: Their Triumphs and Disasters that I found in the local used book store. (The story I’m researching’s going to be a doozy.)
Also a pdf copy of Xxenophile, and several fanfics of varying quality. There, ya happy?
Then you will love Theodore Rex. He was certainly a great president, and Morris is giving a great picture of him, but I wish it were a mite less gushy. He ascribes internal feelings to Roosevelt, and to others, that are impossible to actually know. Each time, Roosevelt is saintly and the other person is yielding to some human flaw.
Still, it’s a nice read and is moving along quite well for such an imposing tome.
Her Fearful Symmetry, by Audrey Niffenger. I thought The Time Traveler’s Wife was lovely and was really excited to read this… but I didn’t find it enjoyable at all.
The Whiskey Rebels, by David Liss. I’m a big fan of Liss’s historical fiction. His work tends to follow a formula – A down-and-out gentleman takes on a vast and complicated conspiracy in order to win the heart and safety of an unobtainable woman – but his choice of time periods and characters are always great. This time, the story takes place in early post-Revolution America and centers around Alexander Hamilton and the new Bank of the United States. Liss does his research and can translate history into a living narrative. Big recommend.
The Sea Wolf, by Jack London. Usually, I think of London as “that wolf guy,” so this book was a surprise to me. It has one of the most enjoyable characters I’ve read in a long while – Wolf Larson – and the most insipid – Maude Brewster. This character single-handedly ruined the last third of the book. Interesting, but uneven.
Map of Bones, by James Rollins. My sibling likes the Sigma Force novels and finally badgered me into reading one of them. Actually, this was quite a bit of fun. It drew obvious comparisons to Dan Brown, but a group of soldier-scientists are way awesomer than a pontificating Harvard professor.
Currently, I’m reading:
Catching Fire, by Suzanne Collins. The sequel to The Hunger Games and a book I’ve been waiting months to read.
Wait, so you’re reading a book by "that wolf guy"with ‘wolf’ in the title, and with a character called ‘Wolf,’ and you’re… suprised?
I read Her Fearful Symmetry too, and wasn’t hugely impressed. As an identical twin, I find most books that try and explore twin relationships don’t do it very well, IMHO. Another thing I noticed was, similiar to Time Traveler’s Wife, great swathes of unneccessary exposition. This one was too much detail about the cemetary, in the last, it was the process of Clair’s art/papermaking. I feel like the author has done a lot of research into her esoteric subjects, and wants to make sure her readers know it! An author whom I think has the opposite characteristic is Carol Shields - very often her charaters have amazing and unique occupations, like mermaid folklorist, mazemaker, and late night DJ; but their careers don’t define them, and the reader isn’t beaten over the head with the minutae about them. Does that make sense?
I recently finished… a bunch of books I disliked so much that I have forgotten their titles My library habits have been narrowly defined of late: I browse the New Books section, in forlorn hope of finding new works by favourite authors, then give up and get rubbish with pretty covers.
Oh! Except the new Jane Hamilton! I loved her others, Book of Ruth andMap of the World, although they were both madly depressing and SAD - so her new one, billed as a comedy, Laura Rider’s Masterpiece was great fun, though too too short. Great characterization, as always; and I do like to read what writers write about writers
OMG, that didn’t occur to me until I read this. I was all “Hey, the wolf guy wrote a sea story. That’s new.” But he still worked in a bunch of freakin’ wolves!
That’s disappointing, I was waffling on whether to get that book from the library. I’m an identical twin too and I just realized I’ve never read a book with an identical twin character, do you know any that you think did it well? I’m curious now how the whole thing appears to non-twins.
As for me, I just finished Never Let Me Go and The Lies of Locke Lamora before that. “Okay” pretty much captures my feelings towards both books. I don’t get the paeans to LLL, people were making it sound like I should be shitting myself in awe while I was reading. Perhaps the hype got to me.
However, both books suffer in comparison to Blind Woman, Sleeping Willow which I’ve been reading stories from every now and then, sometimes in between chapters of the other two books. I think in a technical sense, Haruki Murakami is just the better writer. I’m just in awe of his skill and his clever turns of phrase. I’ve also realized I prefer his short stories, Year of Spaghetti is still great.
Hmm. Let me see, there’s Fred and George Weasley… Not to mention Cor and Corin in The Horse and His Boy, the twins in Lord of the Flies (“Samneric,” right?) And the Cheeryble brothers in Nicholas Nickleby. None of these seem to attempt to portray the twin relationship, apart from as a convenient plot device. Ooh, they look the same!
David Lodge wrote some twins too, in his campus novel Small World. Angelica and Lily Pabst are a little more developed as characters, although they still manage to switch places, in a very Comedy of Errors way. In fact, I blame Shakespeare for the whole meme.
That’s 0-0, in looking for well-rounded twin characters. I suppose Niffenegger’s attempt in Her Fearful Symmetry is laudable, but (semi-spoiler alert!) neither of the two pairs of twins have particularly healthy relationships, either.
Barbara Trapido has Lydia and Ellen in The Travelling Hornplayer; they’re two years apart, but they are described as ‘mistaken for twins,’ and the description of their close relationships (“two halves of a pantomime horse”) and their (semi-spoiler alert!) subsequent separation is brilliantly, movingly written.
Not to worry, the dysfunctional relationships are spelled out in the Amazon summary. I guess I’ll keep my eye out for the Trapido book. Anyway, I just now Googled “portrayals of twins” and one site says that twins are almost always shown as either incredibly different (good vs evil twin is the most famous) or eerily similar. I have to concur, I can’t think of any nuanced portrayals. Apparently Shakespeare had twins, one of which died at 14, which explains his obsession a bit. I have to say, though, not once have I ever wanted to pull the switch-identity prank. In fact, it always bugged me when people mistook me for my twin because it was entirely obvious to me when looking at pictures, for instance.
Finished Jim Butcher’s First Lord’s Fury. I very much enjoyed it as I have the whole series. There was one loose end that I either didn’t see him tie up or he didn’t tie up, but over all a very nice series. He did leave it open for more, I suppose, but I think I am hoping that he lets this be the end.If you are a fan of Butcher, but have not tried this, I would say that this is Butcher’s look at more traditional fantasy - and yet is still a fresh look. In one of the threads about him someone said that they saw him interviewed and he said that this was where the roman legion meets pokeman. Not an entirely inaccurate description and it makes me smile every time I think of it. IOW though, be sure to understand that you aren’t getting more of his Dresden Files when you read this - this is a different world.
I am reading This Damn House, by Margo Kaufman. It is a very amusing chronicle of the remodeling of the writer’s 80-year old home near the beach in Venice, California. Her travails with architects, contractors, lenders, subcontractors, and suppliers of tile, lighting fixtures and paint are hilarious, especially to anyone who has gone through a similar adventure. The book is about fifteen years old, taking place around the time of the 1994 Northridge earthquake.
I’m about halfway through rereading Fishing with my Old Guy by Paul Quarrington. A number of things came together - a friend of mine from back home was telling me about his trouble with some of the new locals while fishing at an old picnic spot that we used to frequent ahem thirty years ago and it reminded me of passages from this book. Then there’s also the fact that Paul Quarrington has been much in the news because he is not in good health these days, and I have always loved his writing.
On the poetry front, I’m going through several anthologies - Open Wide a Wilderness, The Signal Anthology and the Griffen Poetry Prize Anthologies from 2001 to 2009. Out of these, I have discovered Don McKay’s Another Gravity, Jeramy Dodd’s Crabwise to the Hounds and Matthew Tierney The Hayflick Limit and Full Speed through the Morning Dark, among many others.
I finished The Lost City of Z, about exploration in the Amazon, which was pretty decent but more of a straight biography (of Amazon explorer Percy Fawcett) than I was expecting.
The Carbon Diaries 2015 by Saci Lloyd is a YA novel, maybe a little pedantic, about a teenage girl in England and how new drastic rationing measuring put into place to combat global warming affect her and family. Meh on this. It’s like a good set-up, but then it’s just typical.
And based on twickster’s recommendation, I read The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet, a first novel by Reif Larsen. It was so engaging and sweet – my only (very slight) issue with it is that it’s a novel that requires a lot of suspension of disbelief which for the most part the author presented very well and very convincingly, but when it didn’t work, it was jarring. A boy from a Montana ranch sets off, alone, to hop a train to Washington D.C. to accept an award from the Smithsonian (they have no idea he’s 12 years old) for his scientific illustrations. The art is wonderfully included in the form of marginalia on almost every page, it’s a great looking book as well. So thanks, twicks, for that awesome recommendation!
