peekle book blog

Most of the Iain Banks books I’ve read have been of the M variety — i.e., science fiction. The non-M books have been thrillers, excepting the one that was merely almost science fiction. This one is a slowly-building family drama, mostly from the viewpoint of one character, that shifts precariously in time and sometimes in viewpoint. Banks avoids going the obvious place in the ending — I never should have doubted him — and the book has definite charms. Not better than Matter, but a good book in its own right.

The plot is the conveyor belt of your story. It trundles along at a constant speed, moving the scenes (all packed into cardboard boxes labelled “Chapter 1″ and so on) past the reader. A novel is at its best when this machinery is smooth and continuously operating. Minor hiccups aren’t so bad, and there are belt operators so skilled at stops and various diversions (Neal Stephenson, I’m looking squarely at you here) that an enthralled reader won’t even notice them.

Undead and Unworthy’s belt is in bad shape, gears grinding, the magic smoke escaping. Practically nothing happens. There’s too much shouting and too many repititions of old jokes. The body count among established characters — three — is much too high for a series this lightweight. One of them happens off-screen; the other two within the last couple of pages of the novel. The other characters react to these deaths oddly. Worst of all, perhaps, a major plot point — the one teased in the preview in the last book — goes absolutely nowhere. No pay-off whatsoever!

There are distracting mistakes and quirks in the craft of the novel as well. Two seperate times, a conversation between characters skipped a beat, making me reread it over and over to try and puzzle out who was saying what. Once I couldn’t make sense of it, and just gave up and moved on.

Very dissapointing. The author’s foreward — either in this book or the last one, I can’t remember and can’t be bothered to go and look — warns of a coming shift in tone and focus, which is a shame for a series that started so well and so merrily.

I won’t be reading any more of this series.

A classic gothic doomed-romance novel. I can’t remember whether I was assigned to read it in high school or not, but have never held that against a book like some people can. C– and I watched the 1939 film version with Laurence Olivier as Heathcliff, and decided to both read the book. Amazingly readable and compelling, even if I did find the end-notes on how to decipher Joseph’s accent mandatory.

(A blackout followed by sheer laziness delayed the printing of several reviews. Oops.)

Schroeder shows his wonderful world-building talents off in Ventus, his first novel. Less polished than the Virga books but still wildly inventive and fun.

And it continues. Outside of the truly awful pun title, an excellent continuation to the series that didn’t push a single one of my buttons. Too many things may have been wrapped up too neatly at the end, but that’s a pretty churlish thing to say. There isn’t a new Hollows novel ’til February 2009, so now I have to find something else to read…

See, this is how you do it. Dangerous situations, power creep, <spoilery spoilerness> — it should all come from what’s gone before, based on your characters, what they’ve done and how they’ve changed. I immensely enjoyed For a Few Demons More , so much so that instead of going to another of the books on my stack, I’m stopping by the downtown Borders on the way home to buy The Outlaw Demon Wails. (Yes, even though it has a pun that bad as the title.)

The book was thankfully free of the idiomatic errors and typos the last book had, although Kisten’s last name was given as “Phelps” in the bonus short.

I almost gave up on this book. I went out and bought the next Kim Harrison novel as a bribe, something to look forward to when I’d gotten through it. At first, this just moves around the same old tired ground as the last few novels. Oh, something weird is happening and only Super-Warden Mary Sue can possibly do anything about it! So she sets out with her coterie of insanely attractive male admirers, all of whom either actively desire her or carry a torch, to figure out what’s going on. In the course of doing so, she is repeatedly greviously injured. At one point I said “Well, the only thing that would make this worse is if X was the big bad,” where X is a person who for very good reasons couldn’t possibly be the bad, and four pages later found out that in fact, X was the big evil behind everything.

And then, somehow, in the last third, the gears caught. The end of the book actually worked. Sure, there was still rampant stupidity, but I actually found myself enjoying it. Some things were even surprising — there’s a long-overdue reveal, so shocking due to past reluctance on the author’s part that even when the storyline meandered right out of the book before examining any of the repercussions of said reveal I forgave it.

Still a bit annoyed by some things: I’ve lost track of the times Jo has almost — or completely! — died, and it happens, what, twice more in this book? This is hardly mitigated by the fact that she actually had to spend some time healing and resting to recover after the first one, because she is magically rescued from all other physical harm in the book. Yawn. This is even worse than in other series because if we know she’s going to be magically healed up, zero tension is generated. A different shocking event is completely forgotten after just a little bit of angst. The book doesn’t end so much as stop; much like one of the earlier ones, it’s obviously one book split in two because they can only be so long. And, god, the endless namedropping.

I find myself in the strange position, though, of wanting to read the next book, even after almost giving up on this one.