Time for a bit of a backlog roundup here, which unfortunately means that I’m going to be writing stuff that’s shorter and less detailed than it should be.
First up, a reread of Guy Gavriel Kay’s Tigana. I first read this back in the ‘90s, and loved it enormously and it put Kay on my list of amazing fantasy authors whose books I would instantly buy and read. Since then, starting with the terrible Last Light of the Sun and continuing through the good-but-flawed books he wrote after that, my opinion of Kay has gone down substantially. But the good news is that this apparently isn’t due to changes in me as a reader, but in Kay as a writer; Tigana is still excellent, and remains a deeply moving novel that I can recommend highly.
Next is Alice Munro’s The Love of a Good Woman. When Munro won the Nobel Prize, I decided I should read something of hers, and ended up with this, a short story collection that’s mostly about people in a small town. After a couple of stories, I was finding it on the dull side; but the stories sort of build, with relationships to each other even though they’re each independent stories, and by the end, my opinion was much more positive. Very humanistic, in the way that stories of this sort should be. I should really read more of her work, and write it up inside of a year so I remember it better.
And we’ll end with a book that I wouldn’t even remember I had read if I hadn’t written it down for future booklogging, Saladin Ahmed’s Engraved on the Eye, a collection of short stories by the author of Throne of the Crescent Moon. Since I have no particular memory of this book, I have to assume it was basically on par with his novel, which I enjoyed well enough. Probably worth reading? At any rate, I do know that I’m still looking forward to his next novel, so there’s that.
Comments