peekle book blog

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo‘s Swedish title directly translates as Men Who Hate Women; I can understand why after reading it. A brilliant and thrilling mystery, it nevertheless contains a little bit more sexual violence than I am comfortable with.

It’s basically an unlikely-partner story, but with characters like no other before. A disgraced journalist and an asocial (and possibly psychopathic) computer hacker team up to solve a 40-year-old mystery. When I put it like that, it sounds absolutely awful, but it’s not; it’s smart, which is the best thing for a thriller to be.

I wasn’t initially sure I was going to read this book, and right up ’til the end I planned to read Chronic City next (due to a general policy of reading gift books as soon as possible), but I found myself online and clicking “Buy” not long after finishing.

I recently decided that the book blog wasn’t fulfilling it’s original purpose anymore — to remind me of what I’d read and what I thought of it. Quite often, all I post is “This was a good book,” or “I don’t remember much about this,” and that doesn’t help at all when looking back after a couple of years. From now on I’m going to be much more helpful to my future self when writing here. (Oh, and I’m opening up comments again.)

Pandora’s Star and Judas Unchained may as well be two halves of the same book. That book — whatever it would be called — is a sprawling, multi-threaded sci-fi epic. The worldbuilding is of the best kind: introduce a new technology or two (in this case, wormhole travel and longevity treatments) and examine how they affect society. Earth has spread out to the stars; many planets are colonized, and travel between them is quick and inexpensive (and via train!).

Hamilton deftly interweaves plot threads, and, in fact, different types of story; at one point in Pandora’s Star I stopped and tried to count them all. There was a love story, a spy story, a police procedural, several action stories, a murder mystery and a slice-of-life story all going on at the same time. Some of these stories end; some morph into other kinds of tale. None of them ever feels truly extraneous, even when it takes a long time to get back to them. (The cliffhanger ending of the first book wasn’t revisited for quite a while in the second; I didn’t mind, because I was more than happy reading more of the thread that started the second.)

The books offer a wide array of mostly-likable heroes — even the ones who don’t seem like heroes at first. There wasn’t anyone who I rolled my eyes and said “Him again?” when a viewpoint chapter came up (unlike, say, A Song of Ice and Fire).

After I-don’t-know-how-many pages (these being the first books I read on my new Kindle; more about that below), everything comes to a fairly satisfying conclusion. The major flaw with these books may be that the ending seems a bit drawn out and repetitious. At some points, I found myself more engaged when flipping away from the climactic set-piece to other storylines. Then there’s a coda where everyone who has chosen a favorite character (mine, Paula Myo) can find out what happened to them.

Hamilton has many more books, and I want to get to them all. I found out online that his newest, the Void trilogy, is set 3000 years in the future of this universe, which makes me want to read that; the friend who recommended these books to me (hi, Dave!) says I should read the Night’s Dawn trilogy next. I probably will follow his recommendation; he certainly didn’t steer me wrong with this one. The Night’s Dawn books are available as an omnibus edition for the Kindle at an amazing price, but the size of the e-book is staggering: two and a half times the combined sizes of these books! It took me almost a month to read these…

I think I need a chance of pace — and author — before tackling such an undertaking, so I’m going to read a few other things from the stack. (As I’ve said before, I’m kind of notorious for getting really irritated at author’s tics and phrasing and such after reading too much of them in a row.)

And now, a quick word about the Kindle. I’ve wanted an e-book reader for quite some time, and since I get a lot of books from Amazon, it seemed a natural choice. Plus, Dave was really enthusiastic about his. It’s a gorgeous little machine, and I really like the shape and form-factor. The e-ink screen is really clear and reading from it is pretty effortless. At first, I thought the flash you get when you turn a page would distract me, but I don’t even see it any more, just a constant flow of text.

As a curiosity, I’m running a Kindle calculator over in the sidebar, to see if I can ever recoup the money I spent on it in savings on e-books. To be fair, I’m comparing the cost of the Kindle version of the book against the cheapest hardcopy edition available from Amazon, which means I’m not saving nearly as much as the Kindle store pages would suggest I am. Still, it might be interesting to see where I am six months or a year from now. Embarrassingly enough, I started in the hole after repurchasing Pandora’s Star so I could start reading on the Kindle immediately.

Large, sprawling historical novel about Thomas Cromwell. Has one disconcerting tic — “he” as a pronoun in text always refers to Cromwell. Once you puzzle this out, the only other thing that gives pause is the truly massive array of characters, a lot of whom share the same or very similar names. Nothing that can’t be overcome.

I enjoyed this book a lot, even if I did keep seeing the actors from Showtime’s The Tudors in my head. (They don’t even really fit a lot of the time.) The book stops at a really odd place, however; there’s more to the story, much more.

This book was slow to start, and then — almost 1/2 of the way through — clicked, and I sped to the conclusion. I don’t think I’ve seen Banks as overtly political as this before; the book is definitely a reaction to post-9/11 excesses. Apparently published in the UK without the M, though I’m not sure how that was justified; The Bridge, yeah, but this one?

All of Mieville’s imagination, put to such stunning and varied use in books like Perdido Street Station and Un Lun Dun, is here focused into one central conceit, into fleshing it out as far as possible. It helps that the conceit — the split and split-natured cities of the title — is a doozy. In the early parts of the novel, figuring out what is going on is the key; later, this switches to enjoyment as each aspect of the situation one hadn’t considered is brought up.

At the end, the book went where it had to. This is not a drawback.

Oh. And for a murder-mystery police procedural, the book is surprisingly non-violent.

I really enjoyed The Time Traveller’s Wife, so I put this book on my wish list without reading much about it at all. J– was kind enough to give it to me for Christmas. I liked it quite a bit; not as much, perhaps, as TTTW, but it is a fine story.

I was born in a water moon…

Fascinating worldbuilding, of the type Banks excels at, supports an excellent adventure tale. Several surprises are actual real surprises. Nothing is forgotten in the coda; everything is wrapped up just enough to be very satisfying. I greatly enjoyed this one.

Read it, enjoyed it, had something to say but didn’t write it, forgot it, might think of it later. Sigh.