Tuesday, February 16, 2010

Pluto platters

Frisbee inventor dies.

I was very sorry to come to the end of the House of Niccolò books. At roughly 600+pp. per volume, the total narrative clocks in at close to 5,000 pages - reading through the series has very much lubricated my passage, in the last couple of weeks, through various bits of the New York public transportation system and the insomniac's couch.

I now am wedged halfway into the first volume of the Lymond chronicles, but it is a bit too Scott-ish for my tastes - I believe, however, that subsequent volumes take us out of Scotland/Border raid territory etc. I have just gone and checked the remaining five volumes out of the Barnard library - it takes a certain amount of trouble to identify and secure a suitable supply of light reading!

2 comments:

  1. Might I be so bold as to offer a few recommendations? Since this is the internet, where Mad Maxian etiquette discourages questions, favoring instead bold statements unsupported by the trifling intrusions of truth or decency, let me go ahead and make my suggestions without waiting for an answer.

    1. Christopher Fowler's Peculiar Crimes Unit series - British, mystery, peculiar crimes. I believe that is all that need be said.

    2. Jasper Fforde's Shades of Grey (and if you like that, his Thursday Next series) - You know all those odd thoughts you have swirling in your head when you wake up in the middle of a dream? He makes books, good books, out of that stuff.

    3. Neil Gaimen's Graveyard Book - I'll admit that he's not always my favorite stylist, but nobody beats him when it comes to characters, story, and plot.

    4. Cherie Priest's Boneshaker - As an alternate historian yourself, you might appreciate the care she takes to get all the details just right. Plus I finally picked an American author.

    5. Jeff Vandermeer's The City of Saints and Madmen - I'm not really sure how to describe this one. So I'll quote Tor's review. "Ambergris is a place where you feel just as likely to get a knife slipped into your kidneys as find a place to eat lunch." Ambergris being the name of the city in which the book takes place.

    There are many more books sitting on my bookshelf, on my iphone, or in my brain, so if these strike your fancy, know that there are more.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I'm glad to learn of the House of Niccolo series. Just the right thing my daughter Abby, who loves historical fiction (but has just discovered Fitzgerald - historical fiction of another sort, one might even say).

    ReplyDelete