and other books

[jazzfish]

Hey look, Wednesday.

What are you reading now?

The Colour of Magic, just about halfway through. It is ... it's good but not great. Bits of it are quite funny but the whole doesn't hang together as well as I would like. More later.

I'm also savouring Sandman: Worlds' End, and I've a marker in Tessa Gratton's The Queens of Innis Lear ("King Lear by way of George R.R. Martin") and in Jessica Fern's Polysecure.

What did you just finish reading?

First reread of Charlie Stross's revamped Merchant Princes trilogy, about a family of worldwalkers. That is, I read the original first two when they came out and enjoyed them, and then stopped working at Waldenbooks and never picked up the rest. Then when he took the original six books and compressed them back into three like he'd originally planned, I bought them in ebook and read them on my iPad during a trip to Mexico. I'd intended to read the next trilogy as soon as it came out and, well, the last book is finally due out next month. So I may as well remind myself of what all went down.

They're interesting. The first one reads like "what if Zelazny's Amber, but for real?" which would be the part that hooked me initially. Then the next two veer increasingly into Bush-era technothriller territory, which also works for me.

They're hardly perfect. Characters do a lot of speculating at each other (okay, Miriam does a lot of speculating at other characters), which slows things down. And the pacing on the third book in particular is weird: a nuke goes off halfway through, and the second half of the book is ... well, cleanup and retreat. It didn't quite click for me, this time, is I guess what I'm saying.

But, again, they're interesting: they do conceptual things that I don't know that anyone else is even trying. I'm definitely looking to pick up the sequel trilogy in a month or so.

What do you think you'll read next?

"Next" feels like such a nebulous term. Probably The Light Fantastic, but possibly some other random ebook out of my collection. I seem to have acquired a bunch of them over the plague year.

Comments

[andrewducker]

The first two Discworld novels, much though I loved them at the time, really are fantasy satire pastiches. So, very episodic, and it helps a lot to recognise what they're taking the piss out of.

[jazzfish]

I am shockingly unread in Classic Fantasy, so while I recognise Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser and Conan fighting against Unspeakable Horrors, that's from having marinated in SFF rather than direct familiarity. I /did/ read Pern, so that part landed a bit better. Curious to see what part IV is riffing on!

[jessie_c]

TCOM is generally considered the weakest of the Discworld books. Pterry was finding his voice in that and TLF. Compared to the later books they spend less time on the characters and the storyline isn't as coherent.


But they introduce several important characters and concepts which infuse the later books.

[jazzfish]

Someone described it as "the first two are stories about Discworld, and then he started telling stories set in Discworld."

I'm enjoying it, but I am also eager to see the series transition from "good but ultimately forgettable" to "absolute classic."

[jessie_c]

The book where he hit his stride was Mort but don't discount Equal Rites because that one introduces the witches and a great many running themes which go on in the later books.