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Dark Destiny For The Exorcist
Jul. 30th, 2005 11:16 pmI did, of course, finish reading Harry Potter And The Half-Blood Prince, though it took me until the next day. I'm still not sure about it--it feels like a bit of a letdown, after Order of The Phoenix, or perhaps just after rereading the whole rest of the series. ( Not too many spoilers, but if you're concerned, don't click here. )
From that one I moved on to Terry Pratchett's The Wee Free Men. It's technically in his Discworld series, but technically it's in a sort of YA offshoot, or something. Sort of like The Amazing Maurice And His Educated Rodents(which is unrelated); there is an actual sequel, Hat Full of Sky. Granny Weatherwax and Nanny Ogg cameo at the end. An excellent book, as one might expect from Pratchett, and it didn't feel too juvenile, apart from its young protagonist. I don't know if the fairies that appear in the book are supposed to be the same kind that appeared in Lords And Ladies, either.
Air by Geoff Ryman was next on my list, because it was a library book and I'd been putting it off while reading J.K. Rowling. It was highly acclaimed--shorted listed for the Sunburst Award, and a finalist for the Philip K. Dick award, both of which are juried awards, I must note. It's a bit off-putting at first, as one starts out with a mature woman, Chung Mae, living in a village in a fictional central Asian country--the last place on the world to get the Net(which, in 2020, is fully integrated with your TV). Things pick up when the village is part of the first test of Air--a sort of broadcast Internet that goes directly to your brain--with disastrous consequences. The book is fairly balanced between Mae learning about the near-future world, and Mae interacting with her fellow villagers and countryfolk. In the end it mostly hangs together, though the very ending is a little bit downbeat. If you like juried-award-winning SF(mainstream lit-SF hybrids, that is), then you should try this book. If that sounds like faint praise, it is--the book didn't entirely sell me over, but it seemed to do what it did quite well.
After that I read The Swordbearer by Glen Cook. It's a fantasy title, dating from 1982, a couple of years before he broke through with the Black Company series. The plot seemed a little familiar, but I think I'd just overheard a couple of friends talking about it years ago and not realized what book it was. Crippled teenager escapes from ruins of boyhood home when extremely nasty army invades(and supposed allies fail to arrive in time)--finds legendary sword and becomes mighty warrior. Except that he begins to have trouble deciding which side he really should be on, and to resent being a pawn of the goddess who created the sword. There are vague echoes of Elric here--the sword sometimes kills people he doesn't want it to, for instance--but in Cook's own ground-covering style. It looks like there could have been a sequel, but it must've been shelved. (Unless it's The Tower of Fear or one of the few other Cooks I don't have yet...)
I've just started reading Kill The Dead by Tanith Lee. I'm running out of her books, which just don't seem to be that available in North America--or maybe just in trade paperback or something. Even in megastores like Chapters, they're not stocked, or only in trade paperback(which I hate). Anyway, this is one of her old early Daw ones, coming in under 200 pages, so it shouldn't take me long. As long as I'm not distracted...
What could there be to distract me, you ask? Well, I did finally manage to finish All The President's Men, which I considered something less than a page-turner. Woodward and Bernstein may have been great journalists, but they failed to bring this subject to life. And it was just getting into Nixon's secret tapes by the end, with a tantalizing footnote reference to Agnew's resignation, so it didn't even seem to cover the entire story it promised. Probably it was just rushed into publication before the whole farce had played out. In any case, I think I'd rather see the movie. At least I have a vague idea who some of those people mentioned in early Doonesbury cartoons really were.
But the real distraction has been the presumably-pseudonymous Galadriel Waters. See, I had the urge to see if there were any books about the Harry Potter series in the library. Apart from the dozens coming out on whether Harry Potter is pro- or anti-The Church, I found a couple. One of them was my Ms. Waters, et al., so I checked it out. It turned out to be a supplement to an earlier book, concerned entirely with Order of The Phoenix, so today I got the earlier book. Ultimate Unofficial Guide To The Mysteries of Harry Potter(Analysis of Books 1-4), which is an offshoot, I imagine, of this website, the HP Sleuth Homepage. It's got a chapter-by-chapter analysis of the books, with notes to hints and clues, confirmed or speculative, as well as things to look for, recurring motifs(socks???), name analysis, and more, so much more! It doesn't bode well for my reading that much else, does it?
Especially since I've added Harry Potter to the series I'm doing for my wiki. More on that later, I imagine.
From that one I moved on to Terry Pratchett's The Wee Free Men. It's technically in his Discworld series, but technically it's in a sort of YA offshoot, or something. Sort of like The Amazing Maurice And His Educated Rodents(which is unrelated); there is an actual sequel, Hat Full of Sky. Granny Weatherwax and Nanny Ogg cameo at the end. An excellent book, as one might expect from Pratchett, and it didn't feel too juvenile, apart from its young protagonist. I don't know if the fairies that appear in the book are supposed to be the same kind that appeared in Lords And Ladies, either.
Air by Geoff Ryman was next on my list, because it was a library book and I'd been putting it off while reading J.K. Rowling. It was highly acclaimed--shorted listed for the Sunburst Award, and a finalist for the Philip K. Dick award, both of which are juried awards, I must note. It's a bit off-putting at first, as one starts out with a mature woman, Chung Mae, living in a village in a fictional central Asian country--the last place on the world to get the Net(which, in 2020, is fully integrated with your TV). Things pick up when the village is part of the first test of Air--a sort of broadcast Internet that goes directly to your brain--with disastrous consequences. The book is fairly balanced between Mae learning about the near-future world, and Mae interacting with her fellow villagers and countryfolk. In the end it mostly hangs together, though the very ending is a little bit downbeat. If you like juried-award-winning SF(mainstream lit-SF hybrids, that is), then you should try this book. If that sounds like faint praise, it is--the book didn't entirely sell me over, but it seemed to do what it did quite well.
After that I read The Swordbearer by Glen Cook. It's a fantasy title, dating from 1982, a couple of years before he broke through with the Black Company series. The plot seemed a little familiar, but I think I'd just overheard a couple of friends talking about it years ago and not realized what book it was. Crippled teenager escapes from ruins of boyhood home when extremely nasty army invades(and supposed allies fail to arrive in time)--finds legendary sword and becomes mighty warrior. Except that he begins to have trouble deciding which side he really should be on, and to resent being a pawn of the goddess who created the sword. There are vague echoes of Elric here--the sword sometimes kills people he doesn't want it to, for instance--but in Cook's own ground-covering style. It looks like there could have been a sequel, but it must've been shelved. (Unless it's The Tower of Fear or one of the few other Cooks I don't have yet...)
I've just started reading Kill The Dead by Tanith Lee. I'm running out of her books, which just don't seem to be that available in North America--or maybe just in trade paperback or something. Even in megastores like Chapters, they're not stocked, or only in trade paperback(which I hate). Anyway, this is one of her old early Daw ones, coming in under 200 pages, so it shouldn't take me long. As long as I'm not distracted...
What could there be to distract me, you ask? Well, I did finally manage to finish All The President's Men, which I considered something less than a page-turner. Woodward and Bernstein may have been great journalists, but they failed to bring this subject to life. And it was just getting into Nixon's secret tapes by the end, with a tantalizing footnote reference to Agnew's resignation, so it didn't even seem to cover the entire story it promised. Probably it was just rushed into publication before the whole farce had played out. In any case, I think I'd rather see the movie. At least I have a vague idea who some of those people mentioned in early Doonesbury cartoons really were.
But the real distraction has been the presumably-pseudonymous Galadriel Waters. See, I had the urge to see if there were any books about the Harry Potter series in the library. Apart from the dozens coming out on whether Harry Potter is pro- or anti-The Church, I found a couple. One of them was my Ms. Waters, et al., so I checked it out. It turned out to be a supplement to an earlier book, concerned entirely with Order of The Phoenix, so today I got the earlier book. Ultimate Unofficial Guide To The Mysteries of Harry Potter(Analysis of Books 1-4), which is an offshoot, I imagine, of this website, the HP Sleuth Homepage. It's got a chapter-by-chapter analysis of the books, with notes to hints and clues, confirmed or speculative, as well as things to look for, recurring motifs(socks???), name analysis, and more, so much more! It doesn't bode well for my reading that much else, does it?
Especially since I've added Harry Potter to the series I'm doing for my wiki. More on that later, I imagine.
