Weekly Wednesday-ish Reading Meme - August 22, 2013

What have you just finished reading?

Saladin Ahmed's Throne of the Crescent Moon and E. Nesbit's The Treasure Seekers. (I kept forgetting I had the latter on my phone, when I was faced with a stack of dead-tree books.) Last week, I also finished Emilie and the Hollow World by Martha Wells.

I liked the Ahmed, but I kept getting tripped up by some writing practices I dislike. One was the constant switch in viewpoints within a scene, which I associate to some degree with amateur writing. He got better about this as he went on, to where at the end, he was switching scene by scene and signaling more clearly what was going on with the viewpoint. There were also a couple of times that things happened presumbly for Deep Plot Reasons, because in context they made no sense and had me going "Where the hell did that come from?"

The Wells was good. Emilie is sort of a Tremaine Valiarde junior: she's not super-emotional and she is very competent, although not absurdly so (especially given her age). It's a sort of wish fulfillment fantasy of the type that classically stars an intrepid young boy (child gets to go on huge adventure, child is treated with respect by adult fellow travelers and gets to strut her/ his stuff), and it features airships and mysterious underground civilizations.

The Nesbit was ... OK. It has the didactic and sentimental moments of the magical Nesbits but without the delicious magical absurdities. I enjoyed the slightly out-of-kilter voice of its unreliable narrator, but YMMV.

What are you currently reading?

I'm doing a re-read for a writing assignment, which will go undisclosed for now..

What do you think you'll read next?

I have Neil Gaiman's Ocean at the End of the Lane, which I forgot to include in my Amazon order for our trip but picked up in Chatham, MA, where we went for a day of shopping and lunch out when the weather was very rainy.