This month I have
hit my two book target, reading Nights at the Circus and We Have Always Lived in the Castle, although this still leaves me a book behind going into
March, and I haven't done more than flip through The Rose that Grew from Concrete. It turns out that I suck at
reading poetry in any systematic manner.
Rogues
is not so much a book that I read/listened to this month as one that I
finished. It's a collection of short stories curated by George R.R. Martin and
Gardner Dozoir. The stories are written by a wide array of successful and
highly-acclaimed authors working in a variety of genres, including contemporary
thriller, western, horror, historical, SF and fantasy, united by the common
theme of roguery. As is the way of anthologies, it's a mixed bag, with some
excellent entries, some less successful, and a few that I can't honestly recall
after a few months, although none of them were truly dire. Particular
highlights include: Joe Abercrombie's 'Tough Times All Over', a fantasy tale
following the path of a package which is repeatedly stolen from a succession of
carriers; Scott Lynch's 'A Year and a Day in Old Theradane', in which a team of
retired thieves are tasked with stealing a street; Neil Gaiman's 'How the
Marquis Got His Coat Back'(1); and 'Now Showing' by Connie Willis, a caper of
conspicuous consumption set in a near future where a corrupt cinema industry screens
non-existent films in vast consumer centres. It's been a useful standby between
full novels, and I may look at getting another of Martin and Dozoir's
cross-genre collections some time, although for now I think I'll fill that hole
with the short stories in the new Definitive Sherlock Holmes.
As the third book in the Last Dragonslayer series, Jasper Fforde's
The Eye of Zoltar fails in only one
respect; that of actually finishing the story. It turns out that the series is
a tetralogy, not a trilogy, although Fforde's website does not have a due date
for the book currently titled Jennifer
and the Wizard (formerly The Great
Troll War.) The book itself follows orphan heroine Jennifer Strange as she
is dispatched to the precipitous terrain and treacherous politics of the
Cambrian Empire to retrieve the titular jewel, with the aid of newly-minted
sorcerer Perkins and pre-teen jeopardy tour guide Addy Powell, while at the
same time unmasking a conspiracy and educating the impossibly spoiled Princess
Shazeen in the fine art of not being a complete brat. As with the last book, there are a few niggles with continuity, not least that the trolls previously seen to be relatively sophisticated beings who consider humans as a cute but annoying invasive species have apparently reverted to being brutal, corpse-displaying savages. The stakes of the novel end up significantly greater than in the previous books, and it ends on an as yet unresolved cliffhanger, which is a bit of a bugger really.
Jane Collingwood once more provides a fine reading, with a wide
array of voices and accents; some better than others.
Finally for the month, I gave up on Viking epic West of the Moon on the grounds that if
I'm going to tell my daughter she ought to change library books she isn't
reading, I ought to do the same myself, and instead picked up Cressida Cowell's
How to Train Your Dragon, on which
the film is based. It is a completely different beast, far more interested in
joke names about bodily functions than father-son bonding, and featuring a
culture in which dragons are ubiquitous in the place of hawks and hounds, but
less so as horses. It's not a bad book, and a quick read besides, although I'm
in no hurry to plough through the next eighteen of the buggers. I confess, I am
probably biased in that I saw the film first and loved it, and enjoyed the
second one (although it has its problems, some of which I think I overlooked in
considering the films as part of the wider world created in the accompanying TV
series,) but in this case I definitely prefer the film.
(1) Although in all honestly I am baffled by the reader, Roy
Dotrice's decision to give the Marquis a French accent. Name notwithstanding, I've always considered the Marquis to be a London boy.
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