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I read a lot, of course, while I was ill. Martha Wells' Wheel of the Infinite is different from the other Wells book I've read, Death of a Necromancer; above all the settings are very different - in both cases the main character is a not quite respectable person (an outcast former priestess, in this case) and the problem presented is rather vague initially ? no "Take this ring and throw it into the volcano you see there". The main city in Wheel is modelled on the Angor Vat in Cambodia, and religion plays an unusually important part for a fantasy book. Yes, I know there are usually gods around but religion itself is seldom as important as it is in this novel; at least, it is for the main characters, but not necessarily for the people around them.

I am now reading Glen Cook's The Tower of Fear. I've read it before but remember very little of the plot; I do remember that it is an excellently plotted book with some very good characters, and I have always liked Cook's writing. So it is a very good, highly recommended read.

The End of my Tether by Neil Astley, on the other hand, does not appeal to me very much at all. The style is very reliant on special effects such as referrals to peoples' sex lives and their bodily odour; every page is riddled with things like that, it feels as if the author isn't sure of how to get his readers' attention in any other way. The characters fail to interest me, too, and the story hasn't yet really emerged from under the layers of stylistic embellishments and snippets of old mythology and beliefs.

The latest book we got hold of by Bang, however, was no disappointment. This was the 1963 book, Där skon klämmer; I'm a very big fan of Bang (Barbro Alving, her name was) and have a rather respectable collection of her works, although several are still missing. It very quickly made me laugh so hard I completely forgot I was ill. The really weird thing, though, was that it was only opened half-way ? the second part of it was unopened (see the bottom of the linked page) and I can't for the life of me imagine what kind of person would buy a Bang book and then only read half of it. Johan suggested that perhaps they died before opening the rest of it, and that sounds rather more plausible than the alternative.

Finally, I also watched Pride and Prejudice, the BBC version, in its entirety, which I hadn't done for some time. Not all of it, that is.

  posted by Linnéa Anglemark at 15:48 0 comments