Miscellany – January 2008

Yes, January, that two-faced month, has come to an end. And not a moment too soon. I am exhausted from my participation in the Red Queen's Race, and my reading has suffered a lot. Yet, there have been moments...

1. Hal Duncan's Ink is the second installment of his tour de force, The Book of All Hours. Overpowering the typical Tim Powers epic and certainly more ambitious than many who have gone down this path, its scope is nothing less than the whole of Creation – and that includes all realities that have ever existed. More mythology than you can (and would dare to) shake a stick at. Not recommended for the faint of heart.

2. Tim Powers, yes. His Three Days To Never reads like some physicist's amalgamation of Declare and his various Californian novels thrown together with the time-travel theme from The Anubis Gates. Although it is typical Tim Powers, it is a far cry from the innovative anarchy and raw terror of The Stress of Her Regard or On Stranger Tides. On the whole, I prefer the older books.

3. Neal Stephenson's The Big U was his first novel. Its contents would be oddly evocative of long-buried memories for people who have passed through peculiar institutions of an educational nature. But weirder. And more peculiar. And excessively so.

4. Clive Cussler's The Treasure of Khan is his usual action-packed world-class thriller, making use as usual of some obscure corner of pseudohistory. But this one has global terrorism and globalism in it! And even global warming! Fun.

5. John Ringo... urrrk. All right, I read three of his books. I am still puking.

And that's it for the month of January. Obviously, it wasn't a very good month.