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Life update
Mar. 12th, 2007 07:54 pmThis weekend kinda disappeared in a haze of reading books, Questionable Content and many hours of Final Fantasy XII.
My excuse is that I've had the lurgi and not had the energy for very much else. Getting through the working day and rehearsals are about all I feel up to right now.
On the books side, I finally finished Vellum last week and I'm still not sure what to make of it. It is the sort of book that you either have to read slowly and carefully to get every nuance or just let the language wash over you. I went for the second option and I think I enjoyed it. But after that I need a nice run of fairly easy books!
Okay, perhaps not quite as easy as Jim Butcher's Storm Front, the first of the Dresden books. I'd been enjoying the TV series in a sort of 'switch off brain and relax, predict-alonga-plot' way but the book is fairly formulaic stuff. I'll probably gradually read the others but only when I don't have to pay full price.
Much more fun was Lois McMaster Bujold's The Hallowed Hunt, third in the series that began with The Curse of Chalion. Thoughtful, exciting and with likeable characters. I'm always a bit of a sucker for fantasies with a hint of the political thriller about them.
But as always I seem to find myself outside of popular opinion with this one. For example, I liked China Mieville's The Scar rather better than the first and third books in the series and was less than enthralled by Gwyneth Jones' Bold as Love but thoroughly enjoyed the follow-up. I seem to be the only person who thinks that Paul McAuley's tribute to Gene Wolfe, the Confluence trilogy was the best thing he has written, while I found the Clarke Award winning Fairyland stodgy. With the Lois McMaster Bujold series I enjoyed the first book, thought the third was excellent, but was really uninspired by the second. So guess which one won the Hugo...?
My excuse is that I've had the lurgi and not had the energy for very much else. Getting through the working day and rehearsals are about all I feel up to right now.
On the books side, I finally finished Vellum last week and I'm still not sure what to make of it. It is the sort of book that you either have to read slowly and carefully to get every nuance or just let the language wash over you. I went for the second option and I think I enjoyed it. But after that I need a nice run of fairly easy books!
Okay, perhaps not quite as easy as Jim Butcher's Storm Front, the first of the Dresden books. I'd been enjoying the TV series in a sort of 'switch off brain and relax, predict-alonga-plot' way but the book is fairly formulaic stuff. I'll probably gradually read the others but only when I don't have to pay full price.
Much more fun was Lois McMaster Bujold's The Hallowed Hunt, third in the series that began with The Curse of Chalion. Thoughtful, exciting and with likeable characters. I'm always a bit of a sucker for fantasies with a hint of the political thriller about them.
But as always I seem to find myself outside of popular opinion with this one. For example, I liked China Mieville's The Scar rather better than the first and third books in the series and was less than enthralled by Gwyneth Jones' Bold as Love but thoroughly enjoyed the follow-up. I seem to be the only person who thinks that Paul McAuley's tribute to Gene Wolfe, the Confluence trilogy was the best thing he has written, while I found the Clarke Award winning Fairyland stodgy. With the Lois McMaster Bujold series I enjoyed the first book, thought the third was excellent, but was really uninspired by the second. So guess which one won the Hugo...?
