Readsday

Reading Wednesday! On time and even early for once! (No I did NOT stay up all night, thank you very much, I woke up about 2 hours ago, after maybe 12 hours of sleep. Hi-ho. Morning looks rather strange, all fresh-washed and sparkling, when you're a permanent citizen of the nightside.)

What did you just finish reading?
A whole bunch of modern urban fantasy -- late Russell Hoban, Ben Aaronovitch (rather disappointing), Paul Cornell ('these characters were originally written for a TV series,' and boy does it show -- still enjoyable tho).  Fun, but sort of like that moment sitting in the movie theatre when you realize you've eaten nearly all the popcorn in the jumbo-size box you're holding.  I love Hoban to bits and pieces, always have, and I'm so delighted we got something like TEN new novels from him after the silence of the nineties, but the later books just aren't up to the earlier ones. It's like Peter S. Beagle's post-2000 second renaissance of so many short stories -- delightful, but not quite like it was. But nothing is ever quite like it was at first, and more Hoban, or more Beagle, is only something to treasure. Angelica's Grotto was surprisingly OK (given its awful premise, and even more awful cover) until the terribly botched ending, Amaryllis Night and Day was very charming and had a good twist (even if he didn't seem to know quite what to do with it), and Angelica Lost and Found was like a beautiful little finial on his whole career. There was a great quote from a Grauniad review of it:

.....he's asking, very entertainingly, deeper questions about belief and reality, about storytelling and the nature of life. "Two kinds of reality," a character shrugs. "It happens." Yes, it does happen, every time you read a book, every time you tell a story, every time a character like Volatore or Angelica yearns for more than just the narrative that traps them. Much as we often do in life.


Broken Homes was very well-written, as always, full of great characters and set pieces, ditto, and has the narrative pace of a hot-air balloon and ends on a GIANT, completely unresolved cliffhanger. I special-ordered this book from the UK because I didn't want to have to wait for the US Kindle edition in FEBRUARY, and now I feel like a patsy. I hate and despise cliffhangers (you should have heard the wails of despair when my parents took me to see The Empire Strikes Back in the theatre), and I'm beginning to get really fed up with fantasy series that have Grand Overarching Plots to keep the sales going but which also don't really ever resolve said Grand Overarching Plots, to keep the sales going. Which makes it sound like I hated the book, or personally resent its author, and I really don't. I just hate cliffhangers. Which is a personal preference, but when the publishing industry seems to be using cliffhangers as a desperate move to keep sales going, that's what makes me actually angry. (See also: the dreadfully edited/marketed Blackout/All Clear, and the way a lot of first books in fantasy series don't have "series" anywhere on the cover or even in the back pages.)

London Falling was nowhere near as well-written (at first I couldn't tell the characters apart, the prose style is so pedestrian you want it to catch a bus, and the author keeps resorting to constant ! and even ?! in reported speech and thoughts), but damn, that was a fast-paced narrative, and surprisingly moving by the end. The last scene is obviously sequelbait, but not in an annoying way, and I was very pleased at how a female character who seemed offstage was brought naturally into the foreground. (Aaronovitch tries to do that in his novel, and fails pretty completely.) However, the female villain is an express trip to Misogyny Land, and there's a long, terribly ill-judged, anachronistic and baffling interlude sort of from her POV which neither really explains her character or makes us feel sympathy of any kind for her. Broken Homes really fails its main female character right at the end, but in a way that's maybe fixable (SPOILERS). But I fear that isn't the author's intent. -- That said, Broken Homes has a mixed-race narrator and two major characters in London Falling are black (one is also gay), and that was really nice.

What are you reading now?
Just started Chuck Klosterman's I Wear the Black Hat, a gift from a very generous friend -- again: I was looking at it but then saw the first pages of Falling London, and fell down that rabbit hole instead. I have to be a little careful with Klosterman -- I enjoy his stuff, but I have to be in just the right mood for it, otherwise he sounds like some deranged suburban Midwest version of Woody Allen.

What do you expect to read next?
The Zauberberg group read loooooms out of the mist ahead of me, like Everest first seen from Base Camp. Oy vey. I just hope I don't wind up like Joe Simpson.