Hallelujah! The Great Big
Evil Reading Slump is over!!! After a year of getting almost no reading done, I've finished four
books in one weekend.
God, it feels good to read. I finished...
Somewhere in Time/Bid Time Return by Richard Matheson -- The writing was annoyingly uneven in several
places, because it was supposedly the transcript of a recording made on a cassette player, but I still found it compelling enough to finish--the second half, the actual traveled-back-in-time-fall-in-love bit (everyone knows what Somewhere in Time is, right? The Jane Seymour movie?), was much better, except that the narrator became increasingly annoying. I'm not sure how it balanced out, but I enjoyed it primarily for the time
travel romance elements, which came just short of outweighing the things that annoyed me (especially the first person/present tense much of it was in).
Mister Monday by Garth Nix -- Read it in (almost) two sittings--almost because I started it in the van on the way to Oklahoma
City, which doesn't exactly count as a sitting, I don't think, because I had to stop to avoid carsickness. As I mentioned already, I really enjoyed it, though quite as much as
Sabriel & co. It seemed less in-depth, the world less fully realized, which is probably due to its being targeted at a younger age group. Still great fun, though.
A Sorcerer and a Gentleman by Elizabeth Wiley -- Goodness gracious. The opening is fascinating;
It is a proverb often quoted but seldom applied, that all a gentleman needs to travel is a good cloak, a good horse, and a good sword. From there is goes on to have snippets of this debonair attitude while careening wildly through its massive collection of characters, skipping from one to another without any prior warning, sometimes with several years in between. The plot, which is a gargantuan, knotted thing, also bounces around like a badly strung-out bunny rabbit, but for all that it was compelling enough that I now want to hack my way through the rest of the series to that I have a better idea of what on earth is really going on. Also I particularly liked the character of Prince Gaston, though not in a haremable way.
and
The Harp of Imach Thyssel by Patricia C. Wrede -- Good, solid, straight-up fantasy. The writing is solid, the characters are likable, the dialogue is fast moving, there is a largely uncomplicated plot and a magic harp--what's not to love? Just good fantasy reading to be found here, very enjoyable. The presence of the harp and in some ways the main character kept reminding me of
The Riddlemaster of Hed, but otherwise they aren't particularly similar. And now I'm reading
The Raven Ring, a book set later in the same world, which reportedly features a character named Charis.
