Reading Wednesday

[chomiji]

I finished the third book of Genevieve Cogman's Invisible Library series, The Burning Page. My impression is that she always intended for this to be a trilogy and for this point to be reached, and that much of the two earlier books was specifically pointed toward the climax of this volume, with its massive and well-executed climactic set piece.

Given this, I must confess I'm a little bemused by the news that a fourth volume is due out in January. I'll have to read it and see where she's going at this point

I have to give Cogman a lot of credit for relentlessly ignoring romance/sexuality as a plot element here. Many significant relationships are depicted, and none of them hinge on romantic love (although there's one that involves a large portion of infatuation).

Next, for reasons not entirely clear to me, I sought out the sequel to one of my long-time favorite mysteries, Peter Dickinson's King and Joker. I mentioned a few weeks ago that a re-read of the older book had left me flat, and my only memories of the sequel are that (1) when I discovered its existence, I was completely disoriented, because I'd often daydreamed that such a thing had been written and was shocked to find out that it was so, and (2) that the mystery had turned on a huge act of betrayal. Betrayal is in many ways a squick of mine, so I'm not sure why I wanted to re-read Skeleton-in-Waiting.

On this read, I was more interested in most of the story than I recalled being the first time around; perhaps my disenchantment with the original book made the sequel seem less unworthy. On the other hand, I recalled the identity of the betrayer (although not the details of the entire plot) the minute that character showed up early in the book. Not the best Dickinson, but not the worst, either. One thing I noticed: he had large blocks of dialog with no anchoring physical details to break them up. This is something I've done before myself, and I've been told it's not a Good Thing. Indeed, I found myself losing track of the identity of the two speakers in some of those passages. It was odd to observe it in a work by someone I consider a very good craftsman.

Now I'm reading a non-fiction book (wow, lately I've been reading a lot of these, for me), Rites and Symbols of Initiation by Mircea Eliade. It's research, actually, but fairly interesting.

Not sure what I'll read next. I've bought a few things cheap on Kindle special recently, and I should actually do something about them. I'd been hearing good things about Linda Nagata, for example, so I bought The Last Good Man when it was super-cheap.