Re: The City & The City

While I found The Windup Girl absorbing but unpleasant, I found The City & The City, by China Mieville more pleasant, but — up until the last third — soporific. Much of the pleasure comes from the language, not just in the prose, but in the invented languages, Besz and Illitan, and the invented cities, […]

Re: Gentleman of the Road

So I’m at the library and I see a beautiful little book in the New Books. The cover has a circle of elephants, the endpapers have a map of Khazaria, the page numbers are in red ink, the chapters have witty titles, and even the font itself is a delight to the eye. Turns out […]

Re: The Collapsium

When you’re reading something that’s so aggressively bad it makes your stomach hurt, it’s no great act of courage to invoke the 150 page rule. But when the book merely fails to entertain you, you can only set it aside with a twinge of regret. For example, I’m sorry that I gave up on The […]