Reading frenzy

[alobear]

 

My plan to read more is certainly going well so far.  I've read three whole books in the last five days, and am almost half way through a fourth!  All of them are also books people lent me at some point last year, so my additional plan to give back all the books I've borrowed is going well, too.

But first, I must review the book I was reading over New Year.  I started it on 11th December and didn't finish it until 6th January - but it was over 900 pages long...  It was Deadhouse Gates by Steven Erikson, the second in the Malazan Book of the Fallen series, and it was really good. I admit it took me a while to get into it - mostly new characters and not necessarily very likeable one.  However, once the disparate groups of characters started meeting up, it got really good.  There was one character in particular that I loved - a High Priest of Shadow who was apparently completely made and kept giving away secrets to the heroes by speaking aloud when he thought he was only thinking things in his head.  He was just funny, up to the point where one of the things he apparently inadvertently said was, "Speaking secrets apparently by accident - are they fooled?"  Mind-bendingly genius!  There was a lot to take in across the book as a whole, and there seven more, so I imagine it's only going to get more complicated.  Impressive stuff.

As a complete contrast, I next read Address Unknown by Kressmann Taylor, which took me all of half and hour to read.  It was excellent, though, and quite chilling.  It was written in 1938 and was about changes in attitude amongst German citizens during Hitler's rise to power.  It was written in the form of correspondence between a German returning to Germany in the early 1930s and his business partner and friend, a Jew living in New York.  The way in which the German's letters slowly changed was very well done, and the Jew's reaction to his friend's eventual rejection of him was rather terrifying.

Next was Splinter by Adam Roberts, which was complete bobbins as far as I could tell.  It was about a group of cult members who are the only survivors when an apparently sentient meteor strikes the earth and carves off a splinter of land, which then travels through space, experiencing strange weather conditions, but no effect to gravity or atmosphere.  One of the characters points out early on quite how impossible this is, but after that the reader is apparently just supposed to go with it.  It got rather wibbly and existential towards the end, but never really grabbed me in the first place.  The protagonist was a total arse, and I kept expecting him to undergo some kind of redemptive journey, but he just remained an arse throughout.  None of the other characters were well-drawn enough to get attached to, so I was left wondering why I should care about any of them.

And yesterday, I finished The Songs of Distant Earth by Arthur C Clarke.  This was a name that was familiar to me, but I'd never read any of this books before.  It was really good - telling the story of an early Earth colony being visited by colonist who left Earth much later, and how the interaction of the two societies changes them both.  I liked the early structure of interspersing short chapters detailing the 'history' of the 21st century up until the departure of the later colonists with longer chapters describing the 'present' of the story on the early colony.  The science was a bit beyond me, but I liked the characters a lot, and there was a great deal of interesting exploration of human nature and motivations.  I found the idea that belief in God could be almost universally eradicated through statistical analysis rather amusing in its naivety, but a lot of what Clarke had to say was really interesting.  I also enjoyed the fact that there wasn't really ever an antagonist or any real major threat throughout the story.  It's encouraging to me that this can be a successful way to tell a story, since lack of an antagonist is one of the problems with the novel I'm writing at the moment!

In other media, I bought Parky's Picks on DVD and enjoyed over three hours of selected interviews in Thursday night.  There really are some very fascinating and/or entertaining people that have been interviewed by Parkinson over the years.  I just wish more of the episode were readily available to buy.  I particularly enjoyed the picture Judi Dench drew of her parents, the interactions John Cleese described with his mother, and all the sections from interviews with Jonathan Miller, whom I'd never heard of before watching the DVD, but who was really interesting.