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June 2011 Reading Thread


palin99999

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I just finished "Rabbit Redux" by John Updike, "Crime and Punishment" by Dostoevsky, and "Small Gods" by Terry Pratchett. Moving on to the next book in the tetralogy "Rabbit is Rich". I just started "Never Let Me Go" by Kazou Ishiguro.

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I'm afraid I didn't enjoy Richard Matheson's new novel Other Kingdoms very much. This feels wrong, because he is one of the field's great storytelling masters, but while I found the story flowed well and had occasional gripping and/or creepy scenes -- this is Matheson after all -- the tale being told was both frustrating and frequently icky. It's a story about a young convalescing war veteran who goes to a small village and gets caught up with two powerful supernatural women, and not only is the dude alternately boring and whinily unlikeable [possibly intentional, I think], but both aforementioned women are portrayed quite disturbingly for very different reasons. I spent the last two thirds of the book in a near-continuous state of discomfort with how one or both of them was being handled. Oh, and Matheson's version of fairyland [though apparently very well-researched, there's a bibliography and everything, which I may have to check out] didn't really spark my imagination, wobbling back-and-forth between too mechanical and too abstract in unfortunate ways. I know I'm not really substantiating this with examples or anything, and if anyone's especially interested in my knitpicking of one of the field's most respected writers I can certainly do that, but honestly just this moment I really want to just go read Mira Grant's Deadline and stop thinking about it.

Catherynne M. Valente's The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making, meanwhile, was glorious. At a glance there are parts of it that seem a little bit disjointed, but I think the bits really all do fit together into a surprising and constantly diverting larger whole in a faerie-logic kind of way. And there are some wonderful send-ups of fairy-tale tropes that combine a certain amount of piss-taking with a genuine love of the form. I'm not entirely trustworthy here, as I'm a gibbering fan of the author's work, but I thought it a very fine book indeed.

Oh, and Under Heaven was perhaps even better the second time. I think that, even though many regard some of his earliest post-Fyonavar novels as his best, there are some ways in which Kay has grown notably as a writer since those books. His beautiful-people-doing-beautifully-tragic/moving-things shtick has grown more into a feature that's integrated into the musculature of the story rather than a melodramatic bug.

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Finished The Wise Man's Fear. What a monster, but what a quick read. Now i can belatedly join the spoilers threads. FINALLY!

I just picked up The Name of the wind today, and I'm berating myself that despite hearing all about it ages it took me so long to read it. Really really enjoyed it.

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