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Swords & Pentacles
Jan. 12th, 2007 10:31 pmI got so far behind on my book updates from last year that I just gave up. Somewhere I have an abortive attempt, but trying to remember specifics of what I thought about a book I read three months ago was just too hard. Maybe I'll actually do a "Top & Bottom Books of 2006" sometime, because one of the reasons I stopped doing those was that I was doing little mini-reviews of the books in my blog anyway...
I haven't gotten too far this year yet, so let's see if I can try to stay caught up for a little while.
1. Michelle West: The Sun Sword. This is the sixth and final book in![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
msagara's Sun Sword series, which had a two-book series taking place earlier in the same universe with overlapping characters, but which somehow stops short of being an actual "prequel". Anyway. I'm now finished the series. I brought the book with me over Christmas in case I had one of those visits where I got a lot of reading done, but that turned out not to be the case. Instead, it took me about two weeks to read, which is practically the upper limit for me. By that point I'm prepared to either do whatever it takes to finish the blamed thing, or just give up on it if I haven't made any notable progress by that point.
It's somewhat of a relief to be finished the series. On the one hand, she has a knack for maintaining drama throughout, she can write very effective scenes--and sometimes very long ones, but then Guy Gavriel Kay and Daian Gabaldon can go on for a bit, too. On the other hand, most of the text feels, well, overwritten--a term I don't even know if I understood until I read this series. This would be an amazing series that I would unreservedly recommend to everyone if it had 30-50% of the text pruned out of it. As a result it often crosses the line into melodrama, as every character's stray thought has a couple of extra sentences added to it to imbue it with significance and dread. So there is a dynamite story going on here, but it's almost buried beneath the weight of unnecessary overwriting. (And I say this as someone who enjoys reading thick fantasy novels, too.)
It wasn't until this book that I realized that, unlike most fantasy series, but like, say, Steven Erikson's Malazan series, the set of "main characters" shifts from book to book. Before this book, for instance, Auralis AKalakar was an entirely minor character, but he takes an awful lot of stage time in this book, and to good effect. And yet, unlike the Malazan series, she manages an ongoing plot arc--one that often incorporates separate subplots, like the "Tor Arkosa" plot in Sea of Sorrows(I think), but that is moving towards a conclusion.
( Some spoilers here. )
All in all, I enjoyed the series, and I just wish it had been better trimmed.
2. After that, I moved on to a master of somewhat shorter fantasy novels with Steven Brust:Dzur. This one came in at the library shortly after Christmas, but I had to finish the Michelle West book first. After a few lackluster entries in the series(Phoenix, Athyra, and Orca--not even counting Dragon, which came out of chronological order), and the delays caused by the completion of the Phoenix Guards series--the previous book inskzbrust's Vlad Taltos series, Issola, was one of the best since the series started. After that, it was probably too much to hope that this book wouldn't be a letdown. And it was.
( Some spoilers here. ) The reappearance of several old familiar characters, like Daymar, Cawti and Kragar, helps a little bit. The dialogue is still pretty good, too.
One thing that weakens the book a bit, in my opinion at least, is the extended allegory of the meal. In the prologue, Vlad sits down at his favourite restaurant with an unexpected guest, a Dzur friend of Sethra Lavode's. At the beginning of each chapter, we cover another course from the dinner, and perhaps it's meant to tie in metaphorically with the content of the chapter, but I didn't have enough patience to go over it and see how. In some ways it's like both the witchcraft ritual that begins the chapters of Taltos, and the laundry list entries that precede the chapters of Yendi(?), but is less effective than either. Also, maybe Vlad(and, by extension, Brust)is a gourmet food connoisseur, but I'm not, so it left me pretty cold. It also may be representative that what should have been the big final climactic confrontation was in the "Dessert" chapter, and quite frankly, it fizzled a little bit.
So all in all the book was a bit of a disappointment, and I wish that Brust would pull Vlad out of his slump. Or vice versa.
3. I'm most of the way to the end of Crawford Kilian:The Empire of Time. Kilian is a Canadian SF author, or rather former SF author as I gather he's abandoned the genre. I've really enjoyed some of his SF novels, in particular Eyas and Gryphon. I decided to read this one mostly because I still have William S. Burroughs's Nova Express out from the library, and only a little over a week to read it...but I really hate reading two library books back to back, because then I don't feel like I'm making any progress on my own vast queue of unread books. The book is from 1978, back when you could still get away with publishing a book under 200 pages, and it hasn't aged too badly.
The novel, apparently Kilian's first, incorporates a number of ideas. First is the idea of "Trainables", people who can absorb information at a phenomenal rate, who quickly grow to dominate Earth society. Second is the idea of "chronoplanes", which are basically past or future Earths, except in alternate worlds so there are minor differences; all of them are named after William Blake characters(Orc, Urizen, Luvah, etc.). Two future chronoplanes have been discovered where the Earth was rendered uninhabitable by a mysterious attack from outer space. The Trainable government has been frantically evacuating Earth's population into the less-inhabited chronoplanes, and also trying to avert Doomsday. Our main character is a Trainable, and one of the government's best agents, and he's sent out on a very important mission, but with important parts of his briefing sealed off inside his brain. As he proceeds on his mission, though, he discovers that he doesn't know who to trust...
There are, I gather, two more books in the series, which is called "The Chronoplane Wars", so I imagine things might not tie off quite that neatly at the end of this book. Whether Kilian originally conceived it as a series or not, I don't know. Anyway, I'm almost done, and then it's on to Nova Express...
I haven't gotten too far this year yet, so let's see if I can try to stay caught up for a little while.
1. Michelle West: The Sun Sword. This is the sixth and final book in
msagara's Sun Sword series, which had a two-book series taking place earlier in the same universe with overlapping characters, but which somehow stops short of being an actual "prequel". Anyway. I'm now finished the series. I brought the book with me over Christmas in case I had one of those visits where I got a lot of reading done, but that turned out not to be the case. Instead, it took me about two weeks to read, which is practically the upper limit for me. By that point I'm prepared to either do whatever it takes to finish the blamed thing, or just give up on it if I haven't made any notable progress by that point.It's somewhat of a relief to be finished the series. On the one hand, she has a knack for maintaining drama throughout, she can write very effective scenes--and sometimes very long ones, but then Guy Gavriel Kay and Daian Gabaldon can go on for a bit, too. On the other hand, most of the text feels, well, overwritten--a term I don't even know if I understood until I read this series. This would be an amazing series that I would unreservedly recommend to everyone if it had 30-50% of the text pruned out of it. As a result it often crosses the line into melodrama, as every character's stray thought has a couple of extra sentences added to it to imbue it with significance and dread. So there is a dynamite story going on here, but it's almost buried beneath the weight of unnecessary overwriting. (And I say this as someone who enjoys reading thick fantasy novels, too.)
It wasn't until this book that I realized that, unlike most fantasy series, but like, say, Steven Erikson's Malazan series, the set of "main characters" shifts from book to book. Before this book, for instance, Auralis AKalakar was an entirely minor character, but he takes an awful lot of stage time in this book, and to good effect. And yet, unlike the Malazan series, she manages an ongoing plot arc--one that often incorporates separate subplots, like the "Tor Arkosa" plot in Sea of Sorrows(I think), but that is moving towards a conclusion.
( Some spoilers here. )
All in all, I enjoyed the series, and I just wish it had been better trimmed.
2. After that, I moved on to a master of somewhat shorter fantasy novels with Steven Brust:Dzur. This one came in at the library shortly after Christmas, but I had to finish the Michelle West book first. After a few lackluster entries in the series(Phoenix, Athyra, and Orca--not even counting Dragon, which came out of chronological order), and the delays caused by the completion of the Phoenix Guards series--the previous book in
skzbrust's Vlad Taltos series, Issola, was one of the best since the series started. After that, it was probably too much to hope that this book wouldn't be a letdown. And it was.( Some spoilers here. ) The reappearance of several old familiar characters, like Daymar, Cawti and Kragar, helps a little bit. The dialogue is still pretty good, too.
One thing that weakens the book a bit, in my opinion at least, is the extended allegory of the meal. In the prologue, Vlad sits down at his favourite restaurant with an unexpected guest, a Dzur friend of Sethra Lavode's. At the beginning of each chapter, we cover another course from the dinner, and perhaps it's meant to tie in metaphorically with the content of the chapter, but I didn't have enough patience to go over it and see how. In some ways it's like both the witchcraft ritual that begins the chapters of Taltos, and the laundry list entries that precede the chapters of Yendi(?), but is less effective than either. Also, maybe Vlad(and, by extension, Brust)is a gourmet food connoisseur, but I'm not, so it left me pretty cold. It also may be representative that what should have been the big final climactic confrontation was in the "Dessert" chapter, and quite frankly, it fizzled a little bit.
So all in all the book was a bit of a disappointment, and I wish that Brust would pull Vlad out of his slump. Or vice versa.
3. I'm most of the way to the end of Crawford Kilian:The Empire of Time. Kilian is a Canadian SF author, or rather former SF author as I gather he's abandoned the genre. I've really enjoyed some of his SF novels, in particular Eyas and Gryphon. I decided to read this one mostly because I still have William S. Burroughs's Nova Express out from the library, and only a little over a week to read it...but I really hate reading two library books back to back, because then I don't feel like I'm making any progress on my own vast queue of unread books. The book is from 1978, back when you could still get away with publishing a book under 200 pages, and it hasn't aged too badly.
The novel, apparently Kilian's first, incorporates a number of ideas. First is the idea of "Trainables", people who can absorb information at a phenomenal rate, who quickly grow to dominate Earth society. Second is the idea of "chronoplanes", which are basically past or future Earths, except in alternate worlds so there are minor differences; all of them are named after William Blake characters(Orc, Urizen, Luvah, etc.). Two future chronoplanes have been discovered where the Earth was rendered uninhabitable by a mysterious attack from outer space. The Trainable government has been frantically evacuating Earth's population into the less-inhabited chronoplanes, and also trying to avert Doomsday. Our main character is a Trainable, and one of the government's best agents, and he's sent out on a very important mission, but with important parts of his briefing sealed off inside his brain. As he proceeds on his mission, though, he discovers that he doesn't know who to trust...
There are, I gather, two more books in the series, which is called "The Chronoplane Wars", so I imagine things might not tie off quite that neatly at the end of this book. Whether Kilian originally conceived it as a series or not, I don't know. Anyway, I'm almost done, and then it's on to Nova Express...
