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larryhammerIt's Reading Wednesday -- and I have an actual book finished:
The Mystic Marriage by Heather Rose Jones, the Ruritanian fantasy romance sequel to Daughter of Mystery -- or rather, it tries to be two different types of sequels at the same time, a Romance one, which relates the romance of two minor characters from the previous book in the series, and a Fantasy one, in which new characters are added while continuing to follow the previous protagonists. If the book had committed to either mode, either by using a brisker fantasy pacing or by more strongly foregrounding the new romantic pair, it would be slightly more successful, I think. It doesn't help that, apparently in the interest of compression, a couple key scenes are omitted and recounted in retrospect.
The Ruritanian part of the genre is entirely successful though -- right down to the right sort of geographical fuzziness: Alpannia seems to hover, Schödinger-like, between "above Tyrol" and "above Savoy," bordering Switzerland and Italy, but sometimes near Austria and sometimes near France.
In progress: Surface Detail by Iain M. Banks, the second-to-last Culture novel -- this is, if anything, more engaging than The Hydrogen Sonata despite its structural complexity and taking several chapters before explaining anything.
DNF: Bath Tangle by Georgette Heyer -- lost interest and came due.
---L.
Subject quote from "King Volmer and Elsie," Christian Winter tr. John Greenleaf Whittier.
The Mystic Marriage by Heather Rose Jones, the Ruritanian fantasy romance sequel to Daughter of Mystery -- or rather, it tries to be two different types of sequels at the same time, a Romance one, which relates the romance of two minor characters from the previous book in the series, and a Fantasy one, in which new characters are added while continuing to follow the previous protagonists. If the book had committed to either mode, either by using a brisker fantasy pacing or by more strongly foregrounding the new romantic pair, it would be slightly more successful, I think. It doesn't help that, apparently in the interest of compression, a couple key scenes are omitted and recounted in retrospect.
The Ruritanian part of the genre is entirely successful though -- right down to the right sort of geographical fuzziness: Alpannia seems to hover, Schödinger-like, between "above Tyrol" and "above Savoy," bordering Switzerland and Italy, but sometimes near Austria and sometimes near France.
In progress: Surface Detail by Iain M. Banks, the second-to-last Culture novel -- this is, if anything, more engaging than The Hydrogen Sonata despite its structural complexity and taking several chapters before explaining anything.
DNF: Bath Tangle by Georgette Heyer -- lost interest and came due.
---L.
Subject quote from "King Volmer and Elsie," Christian Winter tr. John Greenleaf Whittier.
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Date: 16 July 2015 02:53 am (UTC)Hmm, at some point I forgot about reading Culture novels. Cannot now remember why. My last readings of Banks were The Business and Look to Windward, though somewhat after their respective publication dates. Thus, good to know also re: Surface Detail.
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Date: 16 July 2015 03:12 pm (UTC)I also paused after Look to Windward -- this is part of catching up myself. (Somehow I had gotten the impression that The Algebraist was a Culture novel, but I don't see it in the canonical lists, which even include Inversions.)
---L.