[2011] What are you reading?

They're good fun. I blew through the first ten a few years back in very quick order. I don't care much for the fairie court politics, but that's my only nitpick. I need to read the newest one after things got left hanging in Changes. Of course, my read pile is ridiculously out of control.

 

I was disappointed with Doc by Mary Doria Russell . It tells the story of Doc Holiday and Wyatt Earp in their Dodge City days before the much more famous Tombstone events. I had high expectations for this book. I've read quite a few books on these two men and researched the time period, and I've also quite enjoyed the other three novels I read by Russell.

The book was pretty boring. I'm well aware that Holiday and Earp didn't engage in firefights every other day and that they spent most of their days playing cards, lawman, or dentist. Russell's style was odd in this one. She wrote most of it as kind of a mopey soap opera of Dodge City, full of couples pairing up, true loves lost, and pining. I think she was going for fictionalized yet historically accurate, but she kept slipping in prose waxing poetic about events that would transpire in the future. She clearly wanted us to think of Doc Holiday being built up into larger than life character, and to be fair, his history is much different than how he is portrayed. I just didn't think it flowed when she changed tone like that.

There were too many POV characters in this novel as well. That's not a problem conceptually, but it robbed Wyatt Earp and Doc Holiday of character development. I felt both were thin characters, and it seemed that their screen time felt forced a great deal of the time to advance the plot in Dodge City.

I had a hard time reading this book. I normally plow through novels, but I would read a chapter and just not want to continue that night. I really don't understand what all the love for this novel is about. I would not recommend it.

I'm reading Among Thieves: A Tale of the Kin by Douglas Hulick. It's been reviewed as a cross between Joe Abercrombie and Scott Lynch, which was enough to get me to buy. I'd also throw in a bit of Dresden Files because the stimulant-abusing main character seems to get his ass kicked every other chapter. After the tough Doc read, it was fun to blow through a third of Among Thieves in one sitting.

 

I'm on a bit of a meh streak after a run of steallar novels. I polished off Among Thieves: A Tale of the Kin in three sittings. This book was hyped as a hybrid Joe Abercrombie-Scott Lynch. Someone should get sued for false advertisement. This book doesn't come close to touching those two heavyweights of modern fantasy. It wasn't bad. In fact, it was fun popcorny schlock, but it had sizeable flaws that I wish had been addressed.

The story follows Drothe (jeez...rhymes with Rothfuss's Kvothe) in a fantasy empire with a pretty detailed criminal hierarchy. Drothe is a Nose, an informer who ferrets out corruption in the ranks and lets his crime boss know before he incurs too much loss. Hulick uses what he calls Thieve's Cant, which is essentially slang that all the characters speak in. Most of it is pretty intuitive. Dust=kill or waste, etc. However, it does take a bit of getting used to. You have to stop and look at a word being used in a different manner than its definition and analyze it contextually. It did add to the ambiance of the novel.

Drothe is a smart ass b*stard, hence the Scott Lynch reference. There is also gore and bloodshet, hence the Joe Abercrombie nod. But Hulick misses Locke Lamora's intracacies in his rather bland protrayal of Drothe. He also misses the dark humor and flawed characters of Joe Abercrombie with most of the characters being pretty one dimensional.

What this novel is a spitting image of is a Dresden File book. Drothe pretty much spends the entire novel getting his ass kicked every other chapter, healing a bit, stumbling into another situation, then getting his ass kicked again while cracking wise. Drothe is supposed to be a cunning operator, but he's kind of led by the nose in this book. He doesn't discern what's happening rather than deus ex machina plot devices moving him from one conflict to another. I had hoped for a lot more. He really didn't innovate solutions until the very end, and the solutions were so obvious for a very long time. Even then they didn't full explain what he did, which for me was kind of a meh ending.

There were several characters close to Drothe whom we are told have known him for a very long time, but their history is barely hinted at. This is what made The Lies of Locke Lamora so outstanding. They showed Locke establishing his ties with Chains and his fellow Gentlemen Bastards. Drothe and Degan were supposed to be lifelong friends in this book, but I never knew why except that was the premise.

Hopefully, Hulick can build off this premise and write some better stories for Drothe. I'm willing to check out another to see if he can step his game up, but this is a pretty average, yet fun fantasy novel.

I'm reading The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern. This is a pretty pure hype machine buy. I don't know much about the book other than it's white hot and people seem to really like it.

 

"The circus arrives without warning" is the opening line of The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern and in addition to being memorable is a pretty accurate 5 word summation of the novel. This book was a bit of a conundrum for me. I really enjoyed most of the novel, but its ending kept it from being a 5 star classic. Do I focus on the positive or get weighed down by the drawbacks?

The titular circus is an amazingly inventive circus which appears in a city mysteriously, opens from dusk to dawn, mysteriously disappears without warning, only to appear somewhere else without notice. Inside the black, white, and silver circus are paths intertwined between tents holding all sorts of miracles and wonders from traditional circus acts to delectable treats to feats bordering on magical. Of course, there is a ton of real magic going on behind the scenes. The whole circus is an arena for a magical competition between two emissaries of a pair of ancient and rival magicians. These two emissaries spend most of the book building wonderous new exhibits for the circus in an attempt to win the mysterious contest. Over time, the two do meet and form a closer bond than they do to their own teachers.

Hanging over the entire novel is the question of who will win and how the contest will end. Stories like this depend on a satisfactory conclusion to truly succeed, and I feel this one let down. It made sense and wasn't a deus ex machina plot device, but I felt underwhelmed when I read the last few pages. I expected to feel very satisfied, so there was disappointment after I read the last few words.

Still the book was beautifully written and many of the passages are quite memorable. It's a good book, and I can certainly see how its vivid and odd depictions caught on and swept this book up virally to become a best seller. It just falls short of classic status, but 4 out of 5 stars ain't bad.

Up next: Ready Player One. I got intrigued by this book a few pages back in this thread and decided to see if all the hype here (and on Amazon) was well-deserved. I have to read this quick so I can play Batman: Arkham City next Tuesday without an uncompleted novel hanging over me.

 

Last Light of the Sun was Kay's weakest novel. I highly recommend Under Heaven and the two books of the Sarantine Mosaic series (Sailing to Sarantium and Lord of Emperors). The two book series takes place in the same "world" as Lions and refrences a few events from that novel.

I'm grooving on it so far and will finish it tonight.

 

Ready Player One is a novel built off many standard fiction cliches. Bleak future world where we've squandered our resources? Check! Impoverished, yet intelligent orphan seeks to rise up and claim an epic prize? Check! Band of do-gooders fighting against evil corporation? Check! Shy boy meets perfect match? Check! Story based off and dripping 80's nostalgia? Ch...Wait. What was that last one?

Ernest Cline has taken a novel that utilizes many standard tropes and crafted an entertaining novel that is a love note to the 80's. I became a teenager in 1985, have fond memories of many things from that decade, but I'll be the first to admit that it doesn't always hold up so well these days. In the novel, however, Cline's love of all things 80's was nostalgic and fun. I found myself smiling at the countless references in it.

The story is set in the 2050's where the Earth is a globally warmed wasteland where most live in abject poverty. Jim Halliday was world famous for creating OASIS, a VR system that everyone uses to access thousands of world built around all manner of subjects. Upon Halliday's death, he announces to the world via posthumous video that he's leaving his estate and control of OASIS to whomever can find three keys and unlock three gates hidden in the vast expanses of the V R system. He leaves a rhyme to give a hint to the first key and leaves behind a journal that chronicles his interests. He was also a teenager in the 80's so his interests were heavily rooted in that decade's music, TV, movies, and video games. With the prize being worth over 250 billion dollars, a sizable group of people hunt the keys, and they seek answers in the entertainment of the 80's.

So you have people 4 decades from now obsessively watching the entire Family Ties series hoping to find a clue about a key's whereabouts, followed by hours mastering Centipede, chased by watching Tron for the 18th time. The most obsessive are called Gunters, and they are walking encyclopedias of all things 80's. Quotes from random movies pepper the novel and plotlines permeate it. At times I felt like I was watching a combo of The Karate Kid, The Goonies, and Midnight Madness without the bad 80's cheesiness.

The story is told through first person through an orphaned, socially challenged fat teenager who of course becomes the first person to find one of they keys. He bands together with other social misfits and has to contend with the evil Sixers, corporate seekers who are paid to find the key for their corporate overlords and deliver the benevolent OASIS to an evil corporation so they can commercialize it and take it away from the poor. He meets a girl who is his perfect match and falls in love.

As I said, the plot lines are pretty generic, but the fun Cline has with his 80's set pieces is contagious. I found myself smiling a lot during this story, especially when I recognized a line from a film or when a challenge was rooted in a movie or video game I was very familiar with. There was nothing earth shattering about the story, but it was damn entertaining. I definitely recommend this one unless you despise the 80's. If you're a huge fan of that decade, get out and buy this book now.