Enough is enough. Time to get back to seriously blogging about my reading adventures.
I've moved house. I'm about half-unpacked a month and a half later. I'm still recovering from the aftermath of being held hostage by dastardly pirate-moving-men who charged me twice what they originally estimated and tacked on all kinds of hidden fees and would not unpack my stuff until I paid them. I had to borrow money from a friend (who is now no longer a friend) to pay them.
In the moving process I also injured a disc in the neck area, leading to some pretty severe nerve pain radiating down my upper arms and hands. That gradually faded as the weeks passed. Then, while unpacking, I dropped a 10 lb dumbell weight on my right big toe and smashed it into smithereens. I will now be hobbling around in an air cast until mid-March/end of March. So my life has been just filled with adventure - but not nearly enough of the proper kind of adventure as compared to what goes on in my beloved books.
Moving has been hell. But it's time to move on from moving and get back to more meaningful things, like books, and reading, and writing. So I've read some stuff here and there in between moving and unpacking and being injured, but not much of it has made a very deep impact - at least not enough to write about it anyway.
I read like I breath. I just can't not read. So I've usually got at least one book on the go at any one time, often more than one. But unfortunately, not everything I read is truly stimulating, nutritious to the brain and illuminating of the soul. Many library books go in one eye and out the other if you will, and then get returned to the library without having left much of an impression on the old brain cells in between the eyes.
Nevada Barr's Burn is one recent exception. It's not my typical sci-fi/fantasy genre novel. The closest this novel got to anything in my beloved "woo woo" range was a few rather unremarkable Voodoo practitioners. This one was all facts: who dunnit, how, when, why, where etc, and I really enjoyed the change of pace.
The Anna Pigeon mystery/adventure/action series is one I'm going to pay attention to in the future when I need to take a walk outside of dark urban fantasy and get bored with vampires, werewolves, witches, goblins, orcs, faeries, godlings, and other worlds in other galaxies and dimensions. In this novel, Pigeon is a very down to earth park ranger who is staying in New Orleans "on leave", and runs across a child-sex-trafficking ring. The characters were extremely well drawn in this novel.
I particularly loved the cross-dressing actress mother. Settings were also very convincing. I wanted to be right there in that exact spot, drinking that exact coffee. How could I possibly resist a story that had not one but two brave, heroic women out to save a houseful of young children from the predations of rich, privileged, pedophiles? Well done!
This one stayed with me. I even had to renew it in order to keep it with me long enough until I could find the time to sit down and hold it next to me while I wrote about it here. So Nevada Barr is going to be added to my favourite author's list.
I just finished reading Simon R. Green's Drinking Midnight Wine. At first I was puzzled, thinking, how come I haven't read this author before? Then I looked him up on my blog here and discovered that I had read his Man with the Golden Torc. Ah ha! Here is proof that my blog is actually useful to me - when I bother to use it.
So, I liked the book. I can't say I disliked it. It just didn't wow me. I hate it when a book doesn't have any surprises in it for me. It's boring when it's too predictable. I know it is often said that there are no new stories, that all stories are just retold in new ways, but that is really where the art lies isn't it? A really good storyteller can retell the same basic story, but never bore the reader.
I really wasn't surprised to discover that the woman the hero fell in love with was actually the human version of Gaia (the earth's soul/consciousness). I had already been guessing that for at least a chapter or two before it was revealed, and the same was true of Luna being the Moon, and the evil Serpent in the Sun, and that the Sun raped the Moon and the Moon had a son she didn't want who became "evil"and hell bent on destroying humanity blah, blah, blah...
I just couldn't get all that involved or upset about any of it, even though Green tried hard to bring it all "down to earth" by serving up scrambled egg with toast soldier breakfasts after a night of really good sex with an Earth Mother incarnate.
I felt like I was sitting in a hard plastic chair in a hall, listening to one of those pale, weedy looking guys who love to lecture on for hours at Masonic Temples and who read endless books on High/Ceremonial Magick. Yah, Yah Kabbalah. Secret hand shakes, signs and all that. Don't get me wrong. Alchemy is interesting and so is Jung. Dion Fortune is cool too.
It's just that some of the people I've run into that take it too seriously don't seem to have much balance in their lives. They make me want to go eat a nice big green salad full of avocado, go for a walk in the sun down by the lake, stick my toes in the sand, roll around in the grass, and play with a big smelly hairy dog. Anyway. That was my reaction to this one. Kind of Ho hum I guess. There you go.
But now I have a big bag full of fat, shiny new novels to read! I will list them here in the hopes that I will guilt myself into writing about them as I read them this time.
Col Buchanan Farlander: Book One
Justine Larbalestier Magic or Madness
Kim Harrison Pale Demon (I think I skipped this one in the series and read around it so it'll be a catch up read)
Terry Goodkind The Omen Machine (I really hope I don't regret getting this one out - I was getting kind of sick of the whole Richard/Kahlan series, but it's been a few years so we'll see what happens)
Nathan Long Ulkrika The Vampire: Blood Forged
Ok. We'll see how this batch turns out...
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