Miscellany — Christmastide 2010

This, in a sense, is a short supplementary note to my reading endeavours this December. It doesn't cover the whole range. Instead, for once I am only going to showcase a narrow segment of reading because these books seem to work well together.

Over the last few months, I've been playing the wondrous online adventure Echo Bazaar. It's about a London that never was, except in the most fevered dreams of its creators.

Recently, I have also come across some books on tangentially-related themes. Here they are.

1. S M Peters has produced two very different but mostly wondrous novels. Whitechapel Gods feels a bit like Gaiman's Neverwhere and yet is full of more mechanical technology. It is hard to describe why Gods works, but it works exceptionally well in conjunction with the Bazaar. The other novel is Ghost Ocean, which reminds me a lot of American Gods.

2. Jay Lake has produced two related but also wondrous novels. These are Mainspring and Escapement, with more to come. The major premise of these ostensibly Victorian-era novels is that the world is indeed an object rotating around the sun on massive brass tracks, with the universe run by an absent clockmaker. Or is it?

Well, that was my holiday reading. It was all great fun.