The Den of Ubiquity

Time for another fiction book update. Apparently I haven't done this properly since December. Last time I was in the middle of The One Kingdom by Sean Russell, and I don't have much to add to what I said last time, except that I really liked it and I'm sure I'll read one if not both sequels this year.

The last book I read finished in 2005 was The Winter Players by Tanith Lee. It's a fairly early novel of hers, though not as old as The Dragon Hoard. (It's still hard to find her more recent books on the shelves, sadly.) It's one of those rarities, a time-travel fantasy novel, by which I hope I'm not giving too much away. I don't recall the title having much to do with the plot, particularly, a lot of which has faded out of my mind in the intervening month and a half. Sorry about that.

Moving into 2006, I think I'll start numbering them like I've seen some people do:

1. Stephen R. Donaldson: The Gap Into Power:A Dark And Hungry God Arises. Still rereading the Gap series--this is the third, of five. I'm beginning to think that most of what I remember in the series is in the last two books, though I did recall several of the major events in this book. The book all takes place on the space station they reached at the end of the second book, and they leave it at the end of this one, which gives it a certain unity of place. Still a great series. The Unbeliever? Who's that?

2. William Morris: The Wood Beyond The World. Another of those "classic" fantasy titles recommended by Lin Carter in his Imaginary Worlds book. I should just give up on those completely, because most of them haven't aged well. It's better than some, but still not great, and leaves an aftertaste of paternalistic bigotry near the end.

3. Steven Erikson: Midnight Tides. I already wrote this one up, and quite frankly it's my lengthiest book review in some time. I should put it on my "reviews" web page, most of which date from about 1993.

4. Roger Zelazny: Trumps of Doom. It was probably over twenty years ago that I read the first five Amber novels together from the library in one big gulp. I just finished rereading them again last year. So my starting the Merlin books is long overdue. I confess that the name of the main character annoyed me, seeming highly unimaginative, and I'm still missing one of the books in the series, but the second half of the Amber series is off to a good start with this book. Although I do think that reading them in one lump may be the way to go, especially given today's fantasy novel lengths. I'll spread 'em out like I always do, though.

5. Dan Simmons: Carrion Comfort. I'm still alternating thick books and thin books, and this was a thick one. Simmons likes genre-hopping, and this one is squarely in the middle of "horror". It was recommended to me years ago by a guy whose membership in the Cult of Pain was very short-lived. Basically, there's this subrace of humanity with mental control powers, and while they're busy scheming and playing power games against each other, they neglect to consider that maybe one or two of the pawns might take exception to being played with. It's a bit overlong, but it definitely has its moments. Don't get too attached to any of the main characters, though, because that's one of the defining characteristics of horror for me--the good guys' survival is not guaranteed, nor is the death or neutralization of the bad guys.

6. Dick Francis: Second Wind. Another one of Francis's later thrillers, though I haven't run out yet. This time, the protagonist's a weatherman(much consulted by horse trainers--there's the racing angle for the book), who accepts an offer of flying through a hurricane in the Caribbean, which is not exactly on the up-and-up. It's a bit slow-moving for Francis, and I couldn't help comparing it to Risk, where the main character was an accountant, and which had a similar problem.

7. Carrie Vaughn: Kitty And The Midnight Hour. A paperback picked up on a whim from the library, and a nice quick read too. (After Carrion Comfort I thought I needed two quick reads before another long one.) Our main character, Kitty, is a late-night radio show host, and incidentally a werewolf. One night she begins combining the two, offering advice for the supernatural(which basically consist of werewolves and vampires), and begins to upset the balance of things. She gets embroiled in the politics of her Pack, in which she has been heretofore a junior member, and she upsets the local head vampire, too. Quite good, and likely with a number of sequels to come. Recommended to the Buffy crowd, I'd say.

8. Stephen King: Wizard And Glass. Now that Wolves of Calla is out in paperback, I thought it was time to move forward in the Dark Tower series. After the resolution of the cliffhanger from the last book, we suddenly plunge into a length flashback that takes up at least two-thirds of the book, with only about fifty pages at the end to get back to our main plot. Frankly, it's kind of like stopping in the middle of The Two Towers to tell the story of The Hobbit. It's not that it's not an interesting story in its own right, but I didn't feel like it was told at the right time, and it slowed me down when I got into it. It's also about a hundred pages too long, and let's face it, it's basically about Roland, without any of the companions he picked up on the last two books. Interestingly, it crosses over with The Stand, which I hadn't expected at all, and there's a big Wizard of Oz sequence as well, but once again that's outside of the flashback. The flashback itself is practically the kind of Western story one might have expected in a book called The Gunslinger...which was three books ago. That might not have been the right place for the story either, but I have problems with its current location. Oh, well, you can't tell Stephen King anything, I guess.

I finished Wizard And Glass on Saturday, and since then I've read a few pages of Ice Prison by Kathleen Sky, another less-than-two-hundred-pager from the olden days(1976, to be precise)when that was more acceptable. More on that in my next update, though.