Reading

[pameladean]

I keep forgetting to make notes of this stuff.

Books I have recently read and am pondering:

THE FALL OF THE KINGS, by Ellen Kushner and Delia Sherman. This has so many beauties and delights I'd have to write another book to list them, but for much of it just the same I felt there was a glass wall between me and the characters. I'm going to read it again sometime in the next few months, since that will be no trouble whatsoever, and see if the reaction was just something wrong with me, or what.

WHAT HAPPENED TO LANI GARVER, by Carol Plum-Ucci. Courtesy of Sharyn November, the brilliant editor who is reissuing the Secret Country books. The writer is a good writer. The characters are good and believeable and quirky; parts of it are very funny and parts very moving and parts frankly terrifying. I didn't want to put it down, but I stopped reading at bedtime several times because I knew Bad Things were going to happen and I didn't want to sleep on them. However. The book is one of those is it or isn't it borderline fantasies, squint this way and it's a goblet, fantasy, squint the other and it's two faces, not fantasy. I don't like where the line is drawn. It bugs me a great deal. Must compost.

I'm presently in the middle of C.J. Cherryh's EXPLORER, the last of the Foreigner series. I love this series, I love the characters, and I am in awe of how she seems to be reiterating the same old thing and then pulls about a hundred and fifty really big toothy pink rabbits out of a hat I didn't see. I'm having a great time and am genuinely not sure of the outcome. The book was badly proofed, however, which is very annoying. You'd think in these days of spelling checkers a publisher could at least not put out a book that keeps saying, "resistence."

Pamela

Comments

[lcohen]

THE FALL OF THE KINGS, by Ellen Kushner and Delia Sherman. This has so many beauties and delights I'd have to write another book to list them, but for much of it just the same I felt there was a glass wall between me and the characters. I'm going to read it again sometime in the next few months, since that will be no trouble whatsoever, and see if the reaction was just something wrong with me, or what.

yes! yes! i started it and there are things i just love about it and it's so rich and dense and there's so much going on and...and... it isn't that i don't like the characters but they seem so remote, somehow. and i loved, loved, loved swordpoint--i just feel somehow separate so far. but onward i push--it's not like it's painful.

[pameladean]

Yeah, one of my many questions is whether I'm expecting the book to be SWORDSPOINT rather than itself. Or just standing in the wrong place to hear it all. But there's an amusement in the narrative voice that contributes to the distance, for me.

P.

[sdn.livejournal.com]

i haven't read the plum-ucci, not really -- i skimmed through it before sending it to you. even so, i picked up on everything you've seen. she's an interesting writer.

btw, i will (ahem) be happy to read whatever you're working on, if you need another eye.

[pameladean]

I'm quite curious about her other book; I wonder if it uses the same device. Her first-person teenage narrator was really excellent.

As for the offer -- *fluster* -- I thought you were supposed to get paid for that kind of thing!
I can always use another eye at the stage where I have a finished rough draft and am sure that this is really not a book, so, quite conceivably.

P.

[sdn.livejournal.com]

the other book's flawed but really intriguing. it's out in paperback now, or easily gettable from the library. (it was a 2001 printz honor book.)

i would be HONORED to read your work in progress.

[serendipoz.livejournal.com]

I read the novella after I'd read the Novel of The Fall of the Kings. I need to read them both again to look at them better. They are well worth investing the time.

As for CJCherryh's THE FOREIGNER series, I am awed by her ability to create aliens that have meaning to me (as a human) and show how humanity can interface with them. I am only to the fourth of the six books, and I need to read the other two then reread them looking at the concensus.

[pameladean]

The Foreigner series contains most of the Cherryh I can actually read. I hit a brick wall with most of her stuff within the first two pages and just stop. But this series, I just love.

Pamela