Ahira's Hangar

I'm putting a few books to rest now, Paul Auster's Brooklyn Follies, Tobias Buckell's Crystal Rain, and a reread of Lynch's The Lies of Locke Lamora before a review.

I recenty started Hamilton's Judas Unchained, and Diana Wynne Jones' Tough Guide to Fantasyland





My interview this week:

Starting Shriek: an afterword by Jeff VanderMeer





My interview this week:

Why is it that every time I pick up The Riddlemaster trilogy, I get sucked into the story once again?

I am in the middle of my umpteenth re-read. "Does the walker choose the path, or the path the walker?"<i></i>

Fistful of sky by Nan Kiriki Hoffman. Reading it for a local reading group. About 2/5s about the way through the group. Story covers a family of magic users, and one of the childern comes into her power much later than her siblings.

taraswizard
Allan Rosewarne N9SQT/WDX6HQV
Chicago area
W/T forever, always
Plan C - http://planc.bravepages.com/main.html<i></i>

Started earlier today Sunshine by Robin McKinley and I'm about 40 pages into it. So far pretty dense reading. I subscribe to a Buffy reading list (we talk about the TV series and the Buffy tie-in books we've read) and some of the posters there call Sunshine their favorite vampire book.

ETA: A Buffy book group, that sounds pretty lame doesn't it.

taraswizard
Allan Rosewarne N9SQT/WDX6HQV
Chicago area
W/T forever, always
Plan C - http://planc.bravepages.com/main.html<i>Edited by: taraswizard at: 2/16/06 3:53 pm
</i>

Taras, I really really really like that book.

That said, I did find it hard to get into initially.

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Our lives are the songs that sing the universe into existence.~David Zindell
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Taras, I've been thinking about Sunshine this morning, and about why I might have had trouble initially getting into the story...

I think that it is because McKinley just sort of tosses you into the story without giving you much background of either the main character or of the world she lives in. There's a lot of history for both Sunshine and her world, and McKinley gives out only little bits at a time.

So initially I felt sort of lost and a bit frustrated. What is going on? Why are there weird areas near this lake this girl is visiting, and how did they get that way? Etc. Etc.

McKinley never does give you any large "data dumps" or "info dumps" as I sometimes hear them referred to. But eventually she gives enough details of the backstory that I finally got a good grasp on what was going on with Sunshine and her world.

And that's when the story started to fly for me, and I really began to enjoy it.

MsMary - Riddlemaster rocks! I am long overdue for a reread of my own!

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Our lives are the songs that sing the universe into existence.~David Zindell
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This morning I finished up Neil Stephenson's Snow Crash, which was very enjoyable. Set in a post-apocayptic American, and involving everything from the Mafia, pizza delivery, computer hacking, skateboarding, and ancient Sumerian mythology - this one was a wild ride!

I think next I will tackle Garth Nix's Sir Thursday, fourth of a seven book series called Keys to the Kingdom. My younger son and I both enjoy this series.

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Our lives are the songs that sing the universe into existence.~David Zindell
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I did enjoy Nix's Sir Thursday quite a bit. For what is supposedly a YA series, Keys to the Kingdom is starting to become quite dark and edgy.

This morning I started reading Shadow by K. J. Parker, the first book in the Scavenger Trilogy. So far it shows promise, but it has yet to really grip me, though to be fair, I have only read a few chapters thus far.

A man wakes up on a battlefield surrounded by corpses and crows. He has no memory of who he is, who all of the dead people are, or why he is there. Eventually, as he leaves the battlefield and starts to travel, he begins having dreams which might be memory fragments, and learns that he has great skill with a sword.

He hooks up with a woman, a scam artist, who travels around to tiny villages. He joins the scam, and impersonates a god while she acts as his priestess.

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Our lives are the songs that sing the universe into existence.~David Zindell
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I finished up Shadow, which I have very mixed feelings about, and have gone on to the second book in the trilogy, Pattern.

Shadow had a lot of promise, and it did get enough of my interest to both finish it and to begin the next book. But I also felt that it did not completely follow through on its promise, and I found it to be a bit irritating in places. A couple of groups of fighters were renowned and feared throughout that area of the world, and all of that buildup kind of came to not much of anything (IMHO anyway). The first couple of times people recognized the amnesiac main character and refused to identify him, it was intriguing; after hundreds of pages of practically everyone he meets falling into that pattern, it just became annoying...

Shadow was set in a sort of Roman-Empire-on-its-last-legs-and-about-to-erupt-into-civil-war sort of setting; in Pattern the setting has shifted to more of a Viking/Icelandic farm setting, and so far it is not anywhere nearly as interesting...

While running farms makes our world and society possible, it is just not as interesting as one battle after another; one assassination attempt after another and all sorts of poitical intrigue...quite a switch in subject matter and gears for the reader...

Hopefully things will eventually pick up in the story.

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Our lives are the songs that sing the universe into existence.~David Zindell
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I am sad to report that the second book in that trilogy never did pick up for me. I skimmed through the third book Memory, and it just did not capture my interest, either.

I cannot say that they are bad books because they are not. But I did not find them to be enjoyable books, either.

Well, everyone has different tastes, and these three books just did not meet my tastes. ******************************************************

Our lives are the songs that sing the universe into existence.~David Zindell
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I'm currently reading Jeff VanderMeer's Secret Life. <i></i>

Getting back on reading track, after being ratehr busylately, I picked up Bonehunters (Erikson) and Carey's Kushiel's Scion again, while stealing some time to read an Agatha Christie Poirot novel, Cat Among the Pigeons. I got Stephen Baxter's new Emperor coming out (I think in June) that I'm really looking forward to read. Finally put up my review of Daniel Abraham's A Shadow in Summer, which came out last week, the first book in his Long Price Quartet





My interview this week: