Andare, Partire, Tornare ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Sailing to Sarantium and Fool Moon I feel like I should update. Except, well - there's really not all that much that's happened since Friday, which is when the elements tried to get in to my place of employment and wreak havoc, gurgling merrily all the way. So, y'know, my average weekend really can't top that. Finished reading Guy Gavriel Kay's most recent duology, _Sailing to Sarantium_ and _Lord of Emperors_. It took me forever to buy and then to read the second book - for whatever reason, they hadn't captured me like all of Kay's other work has. I did enjoy them, in the end, but felt oddly - uninvolved, which is hardly the case for most of his books. It's just that he was evoking this gorgeous, patterned, hieracharical world, and I think he almost did too good a job - I felt like I was looking at a beautiful work of art that I could admire intellectually, but not emotionally. And yet, wrenchingly emotional things happened in the book. It's like seeing Giotto's fresco of Herod's soldiers slaying the first born males, and recognizing that it's full of horror, with wailing, desperate mothers and their dying children, and the brutality of the men slaying them - but you don't shed a tear. In fact, you can discuss it intellectually - look how this grief-stricken mother is balanced by this sneering soldier. It's not that I don't like the books, because they were excellent, but they are a very different read than, say, the emotional, dripping, wrenching Fionovar Tapestry, which makes me cry buckets because it's so beautiful and so sad and so piercing. Right to the heart, like a sword thrust. So now I'm reading _Fool Moon_, a story in the same (excuse the pun) vein as the Anita Blake books, except not as baroque. The author, Jim Butcher, is actually on the yahoogroup LKH (for Laurell K Hamilton) and is a cool guy, fun to read and always ready with a rant. Worth picking up, I'd say. _Fool Moon_ is actually second in the series - I *think* the first one is called _Grave Peril_ but I won't swear to it. Hmm. I wonder if my diary writing will always go down when I hit a very involved stretch of reading? Makes sense to me. 2:08 p.m. - 2002-04-23 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
||||||