xenith | 100 Books - March (Reply)

In which our hero starts to wonder if this was really such a good idea

The end of the March is the end of the quarter, so I need to have read 25 books. In January, I read 8. In February, I read 8, for a yearly total of 16. So I needed to read 9 in March.

First off, a book for Evil Editor's book chat. Actually, I read this on the 29th February, which made March looked easier.

Perfect Circle, by Sean Stewart

Let's just shove everything I don't like in a novel into the first chapter of one book. Sounds like a good idea to me.

First person, loser protag who spends all this time thinking about how badly off he is, lots of flashbacks, and it's set in modern day Texas. Gah. And nothing much really happens storywise.

Then an "Eh?" ending.

But there in the middle it grabs you, and you want to read it now, as quickly as you can, and you come closer to crying over the bloody thing than any book in a long, long time.

It's also a good example of first person POV that works.

Then things got busy and stressful, and it was another week before I finished the next book.

The Letter of Marque, by Patrick O'Brian

It ends at with an proper ending.

A bit slow in the middle, although it might have been me. I also noticed the humour more in this one.

Around book 10 of the series, I was getting bored with them, but these last two or three have been more fun to read.

Still, one week in and two books are out of the way, I'm not really behind. Next though, I go for something I know I'll read quickly.

Traitor's Moon, by Lynn Flewelling

Slow, slow, slow for the first half, and far too many new characters. Much better once things start to happen, of course.

It's "next chapter in the lives of these characters" book, and in that way it works. The politics seems incidental, more of an excuse for the characters to be where they are and doing things while their explore their past and move forward.

And then another quick read.

Heart of Gold (Laws of Magic Volume 2), by Michael Pryor

It's an improvement on the previous one -- the action starts earlier and the main characters have a more active role in solving the problem. I would be happier if the thinly disguised places in the book were a little less obvious.

Our hero manages to solve his physical problem and fix his love life, only to have all this undone at the end so he reverts to the same status he had at the start of the book. Which seems a little convenient for the author (he can keep the same inner conflict for later books).

It does have airships though.

One thing I've noticed, I do still love fantasy, not the epic, multi-volumes that could have been told in one sort, but a nice, fun bit of adventure of fantasy. So I pushed aside the library books I had sitting around and went with a book I'd bought from a UK seller last year, which took 80 days to arrived.

Swords and Deviltry, by Fritz Leiber

Read. Enjoyed. Now to find next one.

Then I ran into problems.

It was coming up to the middle of the month and I'd read 5 books which was good, but then I started and discarded one of the library books, a paranormal romance, in the first chapter. I went back to another library book, romantic suspense, that I'd started earlier but against discarded it after the first chapter.

Days passed and nothing was read. I didn't feel like it, but I knew I had to! I had to read 4 more books in less than a fortnight. What I needed was something more in the fantasy line.

Then a box arrived in the mail, with the 12 Thieves' World books I bought from the US, because it was the cheapest way to get them.

Thieves' World 03: Shadows of Sanctuary, by Robert Lynn Asprin

These are fun. There's a mixture of stories about new or one of characters with the regulars. So it's like a weird soap opera, with ongoing plot lines that slowly progress mixed with one or two episode stories.

10 days to go and only 3 books to read. Easy. I dropped a couple of books into my bag and headed off for the long Easter weekend

Mourning Meadow, by Larion Wills

This was a review book. It was only 270 pages, with a large font. It was... painful. It took me 5 days to read it.

There is an interesting story in there, but it needs to be told with different words.

Now 5 days to go and another two books have to be read.

The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, by Agatha Christie

"You haven't read the Murder of Roger Ackroyd?" said my sister.

"Well, no." I read all the Christie's the college library had, the new library built while I was there, not the old building with the foyer out the front where the well from the old gaol is, and all the Christie's my father had at the time and maybe some that the State Library had, but then I'd started seeing the patterns and it was too easy to work out who the murderer was, so I stopped reading them, and haven't read any in the twenty years since. Except "Why Didn't They Ask Evans", which I read last year because you have to with that title.

"But," she said, "it's the" -- and here she used a word that I can't remember, but it isn't a word one usually uses on a Sunday evening after a long, tiring weekend and at least one vodka cruiser -- "detective book."

I know that. I know why, "I know who did it."

"That doesn't matter," she says, and a well-read, once white paperback with $1.50 scrawled in one corner appears on my lap.

Short book. Well written book. Perfect.

As the plot of a murder mystery revolves around discovering who the murderer was, it is natural to assume that knowing this will ruin the story. Not so. It adds an extra layer to the puzzle, knowing the pieces should go together in a certain way but still not seeing how they do. Until the end

And, I had just one book left to read with 3 days still to go.

Thieves' World 04: Storm Season, by Robert Lynn Asprin