Post by Sargai on Jun 8, 2015 21:21:38 GMT -5
You can't escape them.
I'm reading a few books at the moment. I am not sure why I wasn't happy just reading the one, but you know how these things go. You get excited about a book, you start reading a book, you get unexcited about a book, you start reading another book. On and on. So this is what I have on my plate:
The Devil's Detective by Simon Kurt Unsworth
I have a thing for fiction involving heaven and hell as settings and let me tell you, this one does not use it all that well. There is so much potential in a hellscape; it can be twisted and imaginative, a nightmare world of endless possibilities... and torture, sure, but we ignore that for the sake of the immediate story. Unsworth, who Firefox wants desperately to correct to Unseaworthy, does nothing like that. His hell is instead a dystopian city settled under an endless gloom and crushed by the wonder twins, classism and bureaucracy. It is, to be perfectly frank here, exactly the sort of boring crap that you'd expect to grow up out of the grimdark movement that's dominated this past decade. You could do all sorts of things with the setting, but instead you give us yet another city where humans cower in constant fear of random sexual violence, violence, and murder, where hookers ply their trade, where upper class citizens treat anyone beneath them like utter crap, where there is no hope and no joy and everything sucks. Boo.
McSweeney's Enchanted Chamber of Astonishing Stories edited by Michael Chabon
A collection of short fiction hearkening back to the days of pulp. The quality of the stories are uncertain. I have read a few stories now; Lusus Naturae by Margaret Atwood, What You Do not Know You Want by David Mitchell, Vivian Relf by Jonathan Lethem, and Minnow by Ayelet Waldman. Of these, Atwood's monster story and Lethem's anti-romance are the best... rather, they are the only good ones. Mitchell's story has a nice noir grounding to it, but takes forever to get where it is going. When it finally does reach its destination, the story reveals that the author remembered that he was writing a genre story at the last minute and pulled something out of his ass and called it an ending. Waldman's story isn't bad per se, rather it is as unoriginal a ghost story as they come and not really worth the paper it was printed on.
A Love Like Blood by Marcus Sedgwick
Had I known that this book was the first adult title from an author known solely for the multitudes of children's and young adult titles he's written, I would have skipped it. You can tell. Oh, lord, can you tell.
I'm reading a few books at the moment. I am not sure why I wasn't happy just reading the one, but you know how these things go. You get excited about a book, you start reading a book, you get unexcited about a book, you start reading another book. On and on. So this is what I have on my plate:
The Devil's Detective by Simon Kurt Unsworth
I have a thing for fiction involving heaven and hell as settings and let me tell you, this one does not use it all that well. There is so much potential in a hellscape; it can be twisted and imaginative, a nightmare world of endless possibilities... and torture, sure, but we ignore that for the sake of the immediate story. Unsworth, who Firefox wants desperately to correct to Unseaworthy, does nothing like that. His hell is instead a dystopian city settled under an endless gloom and crushed by the wonder twins, classism and bureaucracy. It is, to be perfectly frank here, exactly the sort of boring crap that you'd expect to grow up out of the grimdark movement that's dominated this past decade. You could do all sorts of things with the setting, but instead you give us yet another city where humans cower in constant fear of random sexual violence, violence, and murder, where hookers ply their trade, where upper class citizens treat anyone beneath them like utter crap, where there is no hope and no joy and everything sucks. Boo.
McSweeney's Enchanted Chamber of Astonishing Stories edited by Michael Chabon
A collection of short fiction hearkening back to the days of pulp. The quality of the stories are uncertain. I have read a few stories now; Lusus Naturae by Margaret Atwood, What You Do not Know You Want by David Mitchell, Vivian Relf by Jonathan Lethem, and Minnow by Ayelet Waldman. Of these, Atwood's monster story and Lethem's anti-romance are the best... rather, they are the only good ones. Mitchell's story has a nice noir grounding to it, but takes forever to get where it is going. When it finally does reach its destination, the story reveals that the author remembered that he was writing a genre story at the last minute and pulled something out of his ass and called it an ending. Waldman's story isn't bad per se, rather it is as unoriginal a ghost story as they come and not really worth the paper it was printed on.
A Love Like Blood by Marcus Sedgwick
Had I known that this book was the first adult title from an author known solely for the multitudes of children's and young adult titles he's written, I would have skipped it. You can tell. Oh, lord, can you tell.
