I picked up Diana Wynne Jones' House of Many Ways
Continuing along Michael's list of novel recommendations, I've finally found one that I can get behind with enthusiasm: Jack McDevitt's Time Travelers Never Die
(*Edited 3/11/10 to acknowledge that the author confirms that Buchanan is the editor.)
Despite the book's title, it opens with a time traveler's funeral. Finding out how and why that death happened and whether it contradicts the book's title occupies most of the rest of the novel, which promptly flashes back to just before the disappearance of the dead man's physicist father and the story of the three mysterious little devices he leaves to his son, the to-be-deceased Adrian "Shel" Shelbourne, to destroy.
The devices, of course, turn out to be time machines ("converters"), which explains the locked-room-style mystery of Shel's father's disappearance as well as the very odd clothing in his closet. Equally predictably, Shel does not destroy them, and that is the start of a wonderful set of adventures across the past in search of both Shel's father and the opportunity to interact with the major scientific and cultural figures of the past, including Galileo, Michelangelo, Socrates, Leonidas (of Sparta, just before Thermopylae), Calamity Jane, the marchers at Selma, and many more. Time tourism has never been so much fun or so deliciously complicated, as Shel and his friend Dave try to solve the riddle of how to locate a lost time traveler with 30,000 years of the past to choose from.
I picked up Marsbound
There seems to be an odd trend lately towards the sort of YA science fiction I really loved as a little kid -- good, old-fashioned SF by major authors writing teenaged protagonists -- but it isn't being marketed as YA. I can't tell whether that indicates cluelessness on the part of marketers or some weird conspiracy to push nostalgia buttons in older readers. I don't necessarily object to the latter, and this particular novel starts promisingly in that regard. Then it takes a sharp turn to a different story that feels like a considerably less-effective retread of John Scalzi's Zoe's Tale (discussed here).
Some spoilers follow, though the outcome is so predictable that I don't think they're a big problem.
The first word that comes to mind for Sharon Kay Penman's colossal second novel, Here Be Dragons
Records from this period are scarce; among many things that are unclear are exactly how many children both John and Llewleyn had, and by what mothers. But scraps of information about Joanna's life, some quite striking, remain, and Penman has done a superb job of creating a plausible tale from them. The book is not light reading by any means; I now know more about the politics of the thirteenth century than I ever wanted to know as well as a great deal about the differences between Welsh and English laws of the era. But it's utterly fascinating. Only its sheer size kept me from reading it all in one sitting -- I don't have any seven-hour blocks of time!
If there's any flaw to be found, it's in the enormous cast of characters, often with confusingly repeated names. That's apparently nothing unusual for an era in which kings economically used the same names for both their illegitimate and legitimate children. Joanna (or Joan) herself had a younger, legitimate half-sister with the same name.
But Penman manages to keep the story moving along briskly, shifting among her three main characters and giving brief cameo scenes to any number of others: Eleanor of Brittany; Llewlyn's son Gruffydd; John's queen, Isabelle; fellow bastard Richard Fitz Roy; and more. Along with sprawling, the word tapestry comes irresistibly to mind for such a complex interweaving of so many characters and storylines. After finishing the novel, I spent hours happily digging around for more information about its major and minor characters and events.
Here Be Dragons is a magnificent work of historical fiction which I highly recommend. I can hardly wait to read her other novels; see the author's website for a complete list of the pleasures that await.
Read for yourself:
I like Philip Reeve's YA Steampunk novels Larklight and Starcross so much that I am quite happy to give anything else he's written a try. I finally picked up Mortal Engines
The concept behind this series is grand: in a post-apocalyptic world the descendants of the survivors of the Sixty Minute (nuclear) War live in mobile Traction Cities that survive by city-eat-city Municipal Darwinism, crunching up smaller cities and towns for their raw materials and absorbing or enslaving their citizens. Opposing them is the Anti-Traction League of non-mobile cities and villages, based primarily in Asia. Merchant airships and scruffy independent pilots travel between the Traction Cities and the floating city of Airhaven.
Within the great city of London, Third Class Apprentice Historian Tom Natsworthy interrupts an assassination attempt on the great explorer-archeologist Thaddeus Valentine and finds himself unexpectedly left behind on the ground in the company of the prickly and mysterious Hester Shaw. Fabulous shenanigans ensue as they try to catch up with London while being pursued by the Stalker Grike, a sort of mad cross between a Terminator and a Cyberman, who is weirdly obsessed with Hester. Encounters with the dashing and dangerous lady adventurer Miss Fang and the comical Peavey, captain of the pirate suburb of Tunbridge Wheels and would-be gentleman, keep things lively. But back in London, Valentine's daughter Katherine and Apprentice Engineer Bevis Pod discover that London and its Guild of Engineers are playing for much larger stakes than a few munched-up towns with the mysterious MEDUSA device.
Other than the unlikely youthful protagonists who end up at the center of events, Reeve makes no concessions to audience age. The Stalker is scary. The body count is high and some of the deaths genuinely painful. There are plenty of bad puns and other jokes that will entertain adult readers. And the world of the Traction Cities is terrific, with the simultaneously logical and hilarious concept of Municipal Darwinism and the flag-waving citizens watching on viewing screens as their cities pursue each other across the landscape while fluttering Historians classify Disney characters as "the animal-headed gods of lost America."
I highly recommend Mortal Engines and can't wait to read the rest of the quartet and its prequels. This is exactly what I like in Steampunk.
See for yourself:I don't usually blog about books I am rereading, given the amount of it I do. But I'll make an exception for Healer
I first read Healer in the very early 1980s, and got my copy personalized, probably at a Lunacon, by Wilson in 1984. There was a second book set in the same universe published in 1979, which I didn't care for as much, and apparently a third as well that I never read. But Healer was one of my early SF favorites, and it still holds up thirty years later.
Not only has Katie MacAlister written what sounds like the worst Steampunk novel ever -- romance/chick-lit with a Steampunk veneer -- she has also stolen a photograph by Tarilyn Quinn of rather more genuine Steampunk author G.D. Falksen to use as the basis for her hero in a YouTube promotional video.
The video is here, at least for the moment:
I can't believe Penguin is going to be all that thrilled about being party to theft, so it may not be up long. Compare with the photo here.
Even aside from the whole copyright-what-copyright? angle, listening to the breathless narration makes me choke with laughter:
A whirlwind romance that just may cause their airship to combust and ignite in a passion that will forever change the world as she knows it
'Cause, y'know, the Hindenburg disaster is exactly what you want to think about in a moment of passion.
Judging from the promo, this might actually be worse than SteamyPunk, though I'm not willing to sacrifice either time or money enough to find out for myself.
(And a note to Ms. MacAlister: when I think of "igniting passion" and "incredible
gadgetry," a punked-up wristwatch is not the first thing
(1/30/10 Edited to add: The video has now been pulled; no surprise. A screencap is at left; click to enlarge. A copy of the video has been posted with a record of the multiple thefts of artistic property -- background, watches, etc. -- here. The author blames it all on the video production company, MyNextDemo, which is supposedly a professional producer. One has to wonder how many other images they've stolen for their other videos. You can see MacAlister's failure to apologize or accept any responsibility in the comments here.)
I passionately loved the first Lynn Flewelling novel I read, The Bone Doll's Twin
But I had much the same reaction to Shadows Return
Overall, I liked it better than the first Nightrunner trilogy, and it does end in an interesting situation that makes me more intrigued by the idea of reading the next one than I would have expected. So I do recommend it, but with only mild enthusiasm. It's a fine fantasy novel, though potentially triggering in its torture-slavery-rape theme. But it didn't overwhelm me.
Shopping link:
I wouldn't talk so much about Kelley Armstrong's novels if she weren't so productive. Angelic (Subterranean Press, 2009) is actually a novella, a little under a hundred pages, focusing on the deceased half-demon-witch-ghost-ascended-angel Eve Levine, last used in a major role as the narrator of Haunted
I can't remember why I suddenly had another urge to read about cannibalism and survival while stranded in wintry mountains again so soon after last fall's reading adventure with the Donner Party, but I was suddenly seized with the desire to run off to the library and borrow Alive: The Story of the Andes Survivors
Continue reading "Alive: The Story of the Andes Survivors" »
I've been reading Sara Paretsky's V. I. Warshawski detective novels for many years, so when I came across the latest in hardcover at the library while searching for true tales of human misery, I grabbed it and spent an evening reading it instead of cleaning house for company this weekend. Oops.
Hardball
(Dark Horse Books, 2001) by way of a little subtle homage. So I put it on my family wish list and promptly forgot about it until I unwrapped it on Christmas day.
First thought after reading it: what a depressing bunch of stories!
Second thought: okay, to be fair, they weren't all depressing, and the sad tone shouldn't have been a surprise anyway, since he'd made the point in the television show that most Slayers did not survive very long and that Buffy was unique in having a cluster of friends and a life outside vampire-slaying.
I'm going to talk rather carefully around the plots of the stories to avoid spoilers (though since this came out in 2001, presumably anyone who cares has read it already), and since I expect that this will only be of interest to Buffy fans, I'm not going to bother with background. So if you know nothing about the Buffy universe, the rest of the post probably won't make much sense.
Just what kind of chutzpah does it take to give a mediocre novel which is the nth in a long fantasy series the title of one of the most famous science fiction novels of all time? Possibly the same chutzpah that makes Mercedes Lackey beg the comparison by stating on her webpage that she intends to surpass Asimov's total of a hundred novels in her lifetime.
Quantity is not the same thing as quality. I've read Isaac Asimov. Misty Lackey, you are no Isaac Asimov.
I need an intervention to stop me from reading this series. I thought the last time I had this reaction (why is my guilty pleasure no longer pleasurable?) to a Valdemar book it was because it was an anthology of stories mostly by other authors. Nope. Foundation
I can't believe that DAW brought this out in hardcover; needless to say, I waited for this fall's paperback edition. Even so, I felt rather cheated. I picked this book up as fluffy reading to help recover from my hideously busy fall, but this is not even satisfying fluff. It's like finding your cotton candy has been replaced by polyfill: ack, ptui!
Lackey obviously has an audience for this plot, or the books wouldn't stay in print and keep coming out, but do yourself a favor: don't be part of it this time around. Don't spend your money. But if you must, use the link below (left). Or, better yet, buy the original of this plot: the very first Valdemar novel, Arrows of the Queen
I'd been keeping an eye out for Margaret Frazer's latest Joliffe mystery since I read the first four of them back in the summer. Taking up shortly after 2007's A Play of Lords
I promised, after Clifton and Paul's strong recommendations, that I would read Roger Zelazny's final novel, A Night in the Lonesome October
Illustrated with rather weird line drawings by Gahan Wilson, A Night in the Lonesome October consists of thirty-two brief chapters (a prologue plus one for each day of the month) covering a supernatural Game which takes place only when the moon is full on Halloween night. The players and other characters are taken from or inspired by famous works of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century literature: the Count, the Good Doctor, the Great Detective, etc. Fortunately, Zelazny did not make the mistake of trying to write in an overwrought nineteenth-century style. And he was quite a good enough writer that even though I hadn't actually read all the works upon which he drew, it all worked perfectly for me.
There are spoilers for the first book, Piratica, below. You have been warned.
My copy of Piratica II: Return to Parrot Island
In the wake of Art's exploits in the previous book, all of England has succumbed to Piratomania:
Inside twenty paces, Eerie swerved around ten cutlassed and beplumed persons, three with stuffed parrots glued to their shoulders, one with a real parrot standing on her head, two pet monkeys in boots with small sword belts, and a carriage horse with a feathered three-cornered hat and black eye patch.
I can't help wondering whether this is a poke (affectionate or otherwise) at the many pirate-reenactor groups (of varying degrees of historical accuracy) that exist and hold pirate feasts and cruises and such. Whatever her intention, it's quite funny. And Piratomania has, naturally, produced a sort of anti-pirate salvation army movement, the Pirate Intolerance Regiment and Teatotalers of England (PIRATE), who drink nothing but tea and try to save citizens from "Buccaneerafear."
The advantage of long bus rides: much time to read while someone else deals with the traffic.
I was fully intending not to shop at Philcon, but how could I resist a Tanith Lee novel with the subtitle "Being a Daring Tale of a Singular Girl's Adventure Upon the High Seas"? I hadn't realized Tanith Lee wrote YA fiction, but I was certainly game to try it.
Piratica
I was glad I'd picked up some light reading Saturday before leaving Philcon so I had something to read in Gettysburg late at night while trying to unwind from the ball and then in the morning over breakfast. I hadn't considered myself a particularly passionate Robin McKinley fan before reading Sunshine
Rounding out October's vampire reading -- not that I need a seasonal excuse to read vampire novels -- I stepped up from the tedious Stoker pastiche and the enjoyable but lightweight mystery to John Ajvide Lindqvist's impressive Let Me In
This should shock anyone who knows me: see the movie before reading the novel. It's not that one is better or worse than the other; it's one of the best book-to-film translations I've ever seen and does an admirable job of trimming down a hefty 400-plus page novel into a bleak, blood-splashed movie while touching on all of the important story elements. Only the goriest and most horrific subplot is eliminated, and I'm actually just as glad not to have seen one particular scene in that subplot on the screen. But the movie is enchantingly ambiguous in several ways which are eventually explained in the book. Some of these clarifications were mildly unwelcome to me; I preferred to speculate. I don't want to go into detail because, book or film, the ambiguities are too important to spoil.
Like anyone who studied any American history in school, I knew the basic outlines of the story of the Donner Party, an ill-fated California-bound wagon train that got stuck in the Sierra Nevada in the winter of 1846-1847 and whose survivors resorted to cannibalism. When I drove around the country back in 1992, I drove eastward through Donner Pass and remember being morbidly amused to find that there was no food whatsoever available at the rest stop there, not even a vending machine. I drove in June, but that still seemed to me to be tempting fate.
In my stress-relief reading I've now ascended (or descended, perhaps) from new-style urban fantasy to vampire novels to humans-in-extremis nonfiction. While I don't read the latter genre obsessively, I'm quite fond of two standouts: Jon Krakauer's Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mt. Everest Disaster
(in which people die in the snow on Mount Everest) and Nathaniel Philbrick's In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex
(in which nineteenth-century whalers' ship is wrecked by a whale and they undertake a lengthy sea voyage in the lifeboats during which they resort to survival cannibalism; this was the event that inspired Moby Dick.) Daniel James Brown's The Indifferent Stars Above: The Harrowing Saga of a Donner Party Bride
(HarperCollins 2009) combines the best/worst aspects of both tales: nineteenth-century pioneers die in the snow in the mountains and resort to survival cannibalism. There's nothing like reading this sort of thing to keep stress in perspective, and Brown writes a truly compelling tale which manages to sustain suspense in the details of who survives even when the broad outlines of the outcome are known. I was up half the night reading it in one sitting.
Continue reading "The Indifferent Stars Above: The Harrowing Saga of A Donner Party Bride" »
(Ace, 2000), turned up in my to-read pile, and since light reading is all I can handle with all the craziness with dance travel this fall, I decided to check back and see how the series was going. Despite the silly misspelling of crimson in the title, which looks more like a cutesy late 20th century girl's name than anything they'd have done in the 1930s, I was pleasantly surprised. It's been long enough since I read the books that I didn't remember much about them, but the story works as a standalone. Elrod fills in enough background to keep the reader going without slowing down the story, and the mystery is surprisingly good with some nice twists at the end.In brief, Jack is involved with the Chicago mob and with his girlfriend Bobbi, a nightclub singer. At the moment, he's using some carefully-laundered cash to open a ritzy nightclub, Lady Crymsyn. Unfortunately, as renovations proceed, a corpse is found in the basement, a woman who had been chained to a wall and then bricked up in an alcove to die. Jack decides to investigate her identity and discover who murdered her and why. This leads him into the complicated business and romantic lives of several of Chicago's gangsters, who do not particularly appreciate such attention.
Along with his late-20th century taste for replacing perfectly good vowels with the letter Y, Jack also is surprisingly modern in his attitudes: he not only has black friends but also a live-and-let-live attitude towards gay men, even hiring one to manage his club. Elrod doesn't ignore the prejudice of the time, but Jack seems immune to it. It's a mildly false note, though presumably more palatable to modern audiences than having a prejudiced hero would be.
This isn't an especially deep or groundbreaking book either as a mystery or a vampire novel, but it's a perfectly enjoyable light read with a fun historical backdrop.
Shopping link (to the hardcover, but there's a link on that page to the paperback edition):
I've spent most of the last week reading my way through a sizable new biography of Fred Astaire by the late Peter Levinson with the unwieldy title of Puttin' on the Ritz: Fred Astaire and the Fine Art of Panache
Continue reading "Puttin' on the Ritz: Fred Astaire and the Fine Art of Panache" »
Rixo commenter extraordinaire Serge sent me a copy of James Reese's The Dracula Dossier
(Major spoilers ahead.)
Moving from the wilderness back to the city, next up on the list of relaxing books to read during my stressful and overly-busy fall was Disappearing Nightly
I promise that this is the last Kelley Armstrong book I'm going to talk about for a few months, but I finished off my little Otherworld binge by grabbing her latest, Frostbitten
Frostbitten sends Elena and her husband, badass werewolf Clay Danvers (whose back story was filled in by the recent anthology Men of the Otherworld), all the way to Alaska in pursuit of a young werewolf and in quest of two former Pack members from long ago. Complicating their search are a brutal group of werewolf criminals from eastern Europe, legendary monsters haunting the wilderness, and new responsibilities to the werewolf Pack.
I'm starting to feel a little bad for spending a week of blogging doing little but ragging on Kelley Armstrong. I think she's a good author and her two paranormal series are significantly better than most other works in the adult and young adult paranormal romance/fantasy/whatever subgenres. That makes it all the more disappointing when her books are anything other than great. And while The Awakening
Warning: spoilers below for the first book.
I decided to succumb to the impulse to binge a little on Kelley Armstrong books this week, so I hied myself to the library to check out Men of the Otherworld
First things first: the title is a bit misleading. This isn't a book about the men of the Otherworld. It's a book about the recent (1940s-present) history of the major members of the American werewolf Pack. Yes, that means men, but primarily Pack Alpha Jeremy Danvers and his adopted son Clay, with a bit about his father Malcolm and the other Pack characters. None of the other major male characters she's introduced in the series. Not even the other (originally) non-Pack werewolf Karl Marsten. This isn't actually a big problem storywise; I think Armstrong does better when she focuses more tightly on one or two races and characters rather than skittering around between several, as in Living with the Dead.
I've been following Kelley Armstrong's Women of the Otherworld series since the third book came out. The ninth, Living with the Dead
Living with the Dead is a bit of a departure for the Otherworld books. While it's an okay read (even the worst Kelley Armstrong novels are pretty good), Armstrong's decision to write in third person and follow the story from multiple perspectives (including, unusually, a villain's) makes it less gripping than the very best in the series. Two of those focal characters, non-supernatural publicist Robyn Peltier and untrained necromancer John (Finn) Findlay, just didn't grab me all that much, and both break with the series premise: Robyn isn't a "Woman of the Otherworld," and Finn isn't a woman at all. Other characters followed are half-demon Hope Adams (the narrator of the more-interesting eighth book, Personal Demon
What to say about the story? The main plot thread about Robyn's misadventures as she is pursued by a supernatural stalker -- and the police -- is serviceable enough, though I thought one character was left mysterious a bit too long. Romantic elements are present but don't dominate the story, which is how I prefer it. And the romantic resolutions were not convenient, clichéd, happily-ever-after endings; that's a plus. I was especially pleased with how the Hope/Karl storyline has developed. I'm not qualified to judge the accuracy of the portrayal of Romany or Romany-influenced culture.
There's nothing really wrong with the Living with the Dead. I just expect something a little more intense from Armstrong and hope she'll go back to single- or double-narrator first-person writing in future books in the series. There are hints at the end of the book that the Otherworld series as a whole might be building up to something big. I'm not sure how I feel about that.
A final note: I was unhappy with the use of serial rape as a story device, even in the service of demonstrating just how despicable the chief villain was.
While I can't really gush over this book, it's a perfectly fine, well-written supernatural/paranormal/urban fantasy/whatever-the-heck-this-subgenre-goes-by novel. There are sample chapters on Armstrong's webpage (look at the menu at left) if you want to test the waters before reading it.
Shopping link:
I picked up a copy of Seanan McGuire's first published novel, Rosemary and Rue
(Disclosure: Seanan is a dear friend of several of my good friends and a friendly acquaintance of mine; she was among my roommates at worldcon this year. That wouldn't make me praise her book if I didn't actually like it. Especially since she wouldn't give me her author copy and made me wait to finish it!)
I have to give Lisa Mantchev full credit for originality in her first book, Eyes Like Stars
Gertrude pointed at Macbeth, who was holding up a cruller and muttering, "Is this a doughnut I see before me?" Then he noticed the raspberry jam on everything and started to shriek.
I always pick up interesting historical mystery novels during my trips to Canada, and this past July I came home with a U.K. edition of Days of Atonement
The mystery itself is rather well done, though I missed a great, big, obvious clue early on that would probably have made me twig to the big reveal rather more quickly than I did. It's one of those clues that is a total giveaway, if one happens to notice it. I didn't. As it was, I caught on at just the right point, only slightly before the in-story sleuth, a Prussian magistrate with an obsession with violent crime. And the final twist was a genuine surprise.
Short version:
It's an Octavia Butler book; need I say more? Acquire and read it.
Long version:
I was surprised to realize only a few pages in that Fledgling
Note to self: do not leave gigantic doorstopper Neal Stephenson novels for last in my Hugo reading when I'm under severe time pressure. Anathem
Anathem is not for the intellectually timid or for anyone afraid of math, science, and philosophy. I'm not well-versed in any of those three disciplines, and this book left me gasping for air much of the time. Stephenson cuts his readers minimal slack.
The story starts fairly slowly, with the young "fraa" (monk) Erasmas moving through the daily routine of his "concent" (monastery): ritual observances with bells and song interspersed with manual labor and intellectual debate. But this is not A Case of Conscience
Moving along through the Hugo nominees, Cory Doctorow's Little Brother
In a Bay Area high school only a few years in our future, post-9/11 security theater has gone crazy. The students are subject to constant tracking via their school-issued laptops, their library books, and even their movement style, with "gait recognition" software. Needless to say, many of the smarter teenagers are busy coming up with hacks and ways to evade this surveillance as fast as the authorities can implement it. Cutting out of school means starting by frying the surveillance chip in a physics textbook so it won't set off alarms.
But when Marcus and his friends sneak out of school one day to engage in a sort of complex real-world scavenger hunt run as part of a massive online game, they have the bad luck to do so on the same day that a massive terrorist attack hits San Francisco and Department of Homeland Security troops round up anyone behaving suspiciously, which includes Marcus and his friends. Imprisoned and interrogated, Marcus is eventually released only to find that restrictions on personal freedom and even on speech and thought are slowly being tightened in the name of "keeping people safe." Sound familiar? His idealistic defense of personal liberty via the Bill of Rights and Declaration of Independence does not go over well with either school authorities or his own father.
With few sympathetic adults to turn to, Marcus and his friends use simple tricks, social networks, cryptography, and their programming skills to technologically circumvent and undermine the crackdown while fighting to find a way to get their story heard and listened to. Marcus' clear-eyed analysis of the uselessness of security theater and the price paid by innocent people due to the high failure rate of such precautions is familiar ground to anyone who's kept track of progressive political blogs over the past several years; Doctorow is clearly writing with utter personal passion.
I wanted to like this book. Really. I enjoyed Charles Stross' last two, Glasshouse
I was a little leery of the book from the start, since "lonely female sexbot" didn't sound to me like a character I was going to enjoy following. Knowing it's a late-Heinlein pastiche, mostly of Friday
I started off my June Hugo-novel-marathon for this year with Neil Gaiman's The Graveyard Book
The Graveyard Book is the story of Nobody Owens, a boy raised in a graveyard by the resident ghosts after the mysterious murder of his parents. Gaiman explicitly cites The Jungle Book
It feels unfair, somehow, to complain that Jacqueline Carey is recycling her characters when I really did enjoy the book. But I've already read one book of hers involving an unbelievably beautiful young woman who is the specially chosen one of a deity; falls into bed with most of the other major characters; and is attracted to a tremendously skilled fighting man who disapproves of her morals but is nonetheless forced into her company, with predictable results. That book was Kushiel's Dart
I made a note after seeing the film Milk last winter to finally pick up Randy Shilts' first book, The Mayor of Castro Street
Well, I feel like very, very slightly less of a fool this evening than I did the last few times I read one of Chelsea Quinn Yarbro's vampire books. This is damning with faint praise, but about all I can say for A Dangerous Climate
Short version: Redemption Road
Spoilers ahead, but don't worry much about them since I recommend skipping the book.
(Warning: significant spoilers below! The entire plot spoiled! Really! Read this and you can skip the book. But I recommend doing that anyway.)
I picked up Hannibal Rising
Nothing happened to me, Officer Starling. I happened. You can't reduce me to a set of influences.
This book reduces Lecter to a set of influences: a bright (albeit creepy) young child turned to murder and cannibalism by traumatic experiences during World War II. And giving his evil a reason takes all the interest out of it.
As a sometime collector of vampire novels, I've been hearing about Charlaine Harris' Sookie Stackhouse series of "southern vampire" novels, meaning novels set in a small town in rural Louisiana (as opposed, presumably, to vampire novels set in the equally southern New Orleans, of which there is not exactly a shortage.) After getting throughly sick of Laurell Hamilton's endless parade of sudsy Anita Blake novels, I was a little resistant to yet another vampires-become-legal-and-society-must-cope series, but a glimpse of the recent HBO television series adaptation, True Blood
Since they're very fast reads, I decided I would polish off the third Mari Jungstedt novel I had on hand, next in the series that started with Unseen
This time I was careful not to read the inside blurb beforehand, after the severe spoilers offered in that of the previous book. But I was annoyed upon reading it afterwards to see at least one plot spoiler in it. Who's writing the copy for these things at St. Martin's?
I read my first Mari Jungstedt novel, Unseen
I was somewhat annoyed that the inside front cover of the book blithely reveals a major plot development not given in the book until well past the halfway point and comes close to revealing the entire ending. I wonder whose stupid idea that was? If you pick up the book, be advised to avoid reading the cover copy.
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