currently reading: second week of december 2010

Changes by Jim Butcher
Palimpsest by Catherynne Valente


Soon to read:
I Wonder What Human Flesh Tastes Like
Wise Man's Fear
Patient Zero

dear Amazon.com.

I love you so much. I placed an order for five books on Thursday and got it before 24 hrs was up on Friday. They're all personal-books, but two of them are necessary for before one of the books I'm reviewing in the new year, so you're pretty much awesome. Especially at this time of year.

Love, me

in-reading notes: palimpsest

http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3973532-palimpsest

So far, it's beautiful and confusing and complex and both real and utterly unreal, like a dream and the real world crashing into each other because they're in love.




12-11-10:

This book is distractingly gorgeous. I want to blow through it and absorb it whole, but in certain sections, every page has such beautiful language that I keep having to stop to write it down so I won't forget it, and the lines strung together sound like poetry. It's fantastically absorbing, incredibly involving, and at the same time, impossible to read quickly, so it's probably going to go on hold again until after the next few books that I'm required to read.



None of this is at all a bad thing, I just don't have the schedule for leisurely reading any more-- I've become a book-eating monster who gobbles them up in a few big bites over the course of a few days, and this one just refuses to be taken that way.
 
 
(from my Goodreads pages)

review: clockwork angel by cassandra clare

Clockwork Angel by Cassandra Clare


My rating: 4 of 5 stars


So far, every bit as beautiful and absorbing as her other books! I just wish I had the time to sink right in and not come up until it's done!




12-22-10:


SPOILER WARNING!


In the end, it was very much a first novel (in a series if not her's), and there was a sense that Cassie was trying to find her voice in a Voctorian world, which led to making parts of the book sort of stilted and strange. I think the love story suffered a little from not getting inside Wil's head nearly enough (it was much more organic with Jem). The plot couldn't quite decide if it was about Tessa's brother or about Mortmain, and how they fit together. Sometimes it seems like the story wants to go somewhere that the established history can't manage to allow, and has to be forced back-- and that always leads to awkwardness.




But you know what? For all that, I loved it. As soon as I had time, I devoured it, and it made me want to live in the ugly, deadly, dirty London of Victorian times, made me froth at the mouth a little bit at the thought of having to wait for the next one.




I expected it to be a little tighter because the Mortal Instruments series was so fantastic right off the bat, but there is nothing here that can't be explained away. The next book will likely be stronger for all the problems in this one being worked through, and now that the world is established, it's ready to go-- hopefully completely off the rails. And I love the idea that Valentine isn't the first one to start manipulating things he shouldn't have had control over. Maybe there were more before him, too, a whole line of wack-jobs he could draw on for his own purposes, and maybe all of them have stories like this to be told.




The book is beautiful, often charming, has all that wit and cleverness that we all have come to love from Cassie Clare, and really, I think, the problems all stem from figuring out how to put that wit and charm and *nowness* into something as alien as the Victorian era.




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