I recently tried to read this but had to give up. It mostly had to do with it being clumsily translated (into Swedish), and the layout being a massive wall of text. I’ll see if I can find it in English and hope that it’s easier to read.
From what I read, I’d say that the novel is a good example of magical realism. It’s a hazy area, some meaning that magical realism is really a branch of fantasy. I have a sneaking suspicion that in Sweden it’s also used to prevent a writer from falling into the fantasy category, which isn’t an accepted “literary” genre here. It depends on who you ask. But there’s a long tradition of magical realism in South America. Check out Jorge Luis Borges, Gabriel García Marquez, and Isabel Allende for example.
Great Plains, by Ian Frazier. It’s like … more Ian Frazier, if you like him. You know, essays about Indians and small towns.
In kid fiction, I read: The Nine Pound Hammer, by John Claude Bemis. Kinda fun fantasy set in the late 19th century, with a lot of American folklore (the title is referring to John Henry’s hammer, for example) worked into the plot. It’s supposedly the first in a trilogy. The premise was terrific, the execution was fair to middling.
The Stolen One, by Suzanne Crowley. YA, Elizabethan-era romantic adventure. A teenage girl from the country becomes one of the Queen’s ladies in waiting. There are a lot of swoony parts over boys, also dresses. Now that I think back on it, this is a very girly book. It wasn’t great, but I was engaged the entire time I was reading.
Finished The Fortune of War, the 6th (?) Aubrey-Maturin. Joe Hill’s new book Horns arrived but I’m letting my daughter read it first. Almost finished with the Wastelands anthology (tales of the apocalypse) – it’s a nice mix, and no clunkers.
I’m well into Black Hills, Dan Simmon’s latest, and it’s a good example of excellent writing but a story that doesn’t go where I want it to go. I might finish it, but if the book vanished in a puff of smoke, I wouldn’t care. I’m only reading it because the next batch of Aubrey-Maturins haven’t arrived yet.
Just finished this, as well as two other Twain essays in the same collection, “About All Kinds of Ships” and “A Petition to the Queen of England.”
“The £1,000,000 Bank Note” is a very funny short story about a bet between two wealthy brothers (shades of the movie Trading Places) in Victorian London, as to whether or not a man will return a huge bank note after 30 days. Everyone upon seeing the note is eager to befriend him and to extend credit, so he does very well for himself, including winning the heart of a beautiful girl who turns out to be the daughter of one of the betting brothers!
In “About All Kinds of Ships,” Twain praises modern passenger liners and compares them unfavorably to the smaller, less-comfortable ships he’d sailed upon earlier in his career; he includes a funny imagined discussion between a shipping inspector and Noah about the Ark. In “A Petition to the Queen of England,” Twain, with a purposefully overfamiliar tone, asks Her Majesty if she wouldn’t mind refunding a tax he’d paid on books of his that had been published in Great Britain.
Next on my reading stack: Hell to Pay by D.M. Giangreco, about Allied plans for invading Japan at the end of WWII.
I started Leviathan by Scott Westerfeld this morning and just finished it. I loved it. I would say it was as good as Hunger Games for an awesome imaginative story and a really strong female character. I love YA fiction.
I’m through with this. I am quite impressed by the technical aspects of it – it was a very well-constructed book. And I also quite enjoyed the last three hundered pages or so, with Simmons picking up the pace some. I’m ambivalent about the ending. It did not as neatly follow out of the story as I would have wished it. Oh well; it was certainly worth the time spent on it.
I also did finish Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home, which is just great and highly recommended.
Now, because I liked him so much as a character, Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone. Thanks to Drood I already know how it ends, but so far it’s still a good read.
About to finish the second book Brandon Sanderson’s Mistborn series.
I’m very much enjoying it. Great mix of fantasy/politics/relationships/religion. The second book started painfully slow (too many chapters reminding me of the groundwork laid in the first book), but was really enjoyable once it picked up some steam. Can’t wait to start the third book tonight or tomorrow.
Breezed through The Man in the Picture: A ghost story, by Susan Hill. It was only 145 pages long, and the story itself was nothing special, but if you like the flavor of a good old fashioned English supernatural tale, she gets it just right.
I’m just beginning on The Sociopath Next Door: the ruthless versus the rest of us, by Martha Stout. According to this book, one in every 25 people is completely without conscience.
And working through some of the Playboy Interviews: Directors. Disappointed that some of the Directors, notably Kubrik and Welles, didn’t really talk much about movies. Kubrick comes of as a bit of a nutjob, actually.
About five years ago, I clipped one of those two line book reviews from a magazine about this book, and paper-clipped it to my book journal, but never got around to reading it. I’m dying to hear if it’s good!
That’s a great book. I esp. liked the snippets of various movie reviews, each of which described the decor of Bowman’s room at the end as being of a different historical style, and seeing a legible copy of the directions for operating the zero-G toilet.
Thanks for recommending this! It arrived today and so far, it’s the best vampire fiction I’ve read since Fevre Dream. (I’m picturing Brendan Fraser as Asher and the guy who played Haldir in LotR as Ysidro.)
Glad you like it! I’ve just ordered the sequel, along with a couple of other Hambly novels that the book seller happened to have in stock. I’ll let you know if it’s as good.
Speaking of picturing actors when you’re reading, have you seen the new mass-market paperback covers for Joe Abercrombie’s First Law series? You can see them on his blog here. I don’t much care for the picture of Ninefingers on the first one, but I really like the second cover, which pictures Glokta. He looks like Paul Bettany, much worse for wear. I wish I had been picturing him as Bettany when I was reading the books. (I picture Stephen Maturin as Paul Bettany despite O’Brian’s strenuous attempts to convince me that Stephen is scrawny and dark and unattractive.)
The guy on the second cover looks nothing like I picture Glokta. Where’s the deformity? He’s supposed to be a twisted wreck. And why the short hair? He looks like a character from Trainspotting.
I’m okay with Ninefingers on the first cover – he’s got that Viggo/Aragorn thing goin’ on, and that dude-I-forgot-his-name on the third is pretty much how I pictured him.
But yeah, the artwork for Glokta could definitely be Maturin, if Maturin had any heft. Maturin is tall but thin, isn’t he?
Do you picture Bettany as Maturin because of the movie?
I believe you are thinking of a different, much older book. This is a relatively new book that has no photos or graphics. Both are good, but different. It’s kind of confusing, because they share the same title.
Yes, I saw the movie before I read the books, and Bettany stuck in my head. I think Stephen is supposed to be short and wiry, but maybe he’s just short in comparison with Jack. I think his weight is given one time as 9 stone. He’s described sometimes as pale, but he tans very dark in the sun when he gets the opportunity.
In the Abercrombie books I kept picturing Glokta as old, but he’s actually fairly young, and was good-looking before his ordeal. So it makes sense to me that he’d look handsome from some angles, in poor light, and in a careful pose like the cover of the book.
I thought Stephen was supposed to be short and wiry too, but in the last book I read someone describes him as tall, so now I’m confused.
In addition to the Hambly, I’m reading a James M. Cain collection, The Baby in the Icebox. I didn’t know anything about Cain except that he wrote stories that two great movies were based on, The Postman Always Rings Twice and Double Indemnity. Some of the stories in this collection are surprisingly funny, if a bit dark. The book has a lot of biographical info. I didn’t know that Cain’s full-length novels weren’t successful, or that he tried to be a screenwriter but didn’t do well at it.
