Books I finished
1. The Scar, China Mieville
The second book in the Bas Lag Series, it was like Moby Dick and Mos Eisley thrown in a blender. My favorite fiction book as an adult.
*My favorite book as a teenager was Sword At Sunset, by Rosemary Sutcliff, a more historical look at the Arthurian legend where Arthur was the son of a Roman father and Briton mother. Clive Owen and Kiera Knightley were cast in a movie that was no doubt somewhat based on the book, but was an utter failure.
2. King Rat, China Mieville
Debut novel by the author. Rats, the underground club scene in London, and the Pied Piper of Hamelin, nominated for the Bram Stoker award.
3. A Dance With Dragons, George R.R. Martin. Book 5 of the Song of Ice and Fire serires, probably the fourth best in the series. Spends about 95% of the book wandering around but appears to be moving toward the resolution that ought to start happening if the author keeps the series to the planned seven book length.
4. Lone Wolf: Flight From the Dark, Joe Dever. Got through this in one day, but am by no means finished. The first in a series of hybrid pen and paper rpg and choose your own adventure. Book two is in the mail.
Books which I intend to Finish
1. The Passage, Justin Cronin. Literary vampire apocalypse. Very similar to Stephen King's The Stand. I'll get back to this one when I feel like doing the post-apocalyptic thing. My sister in law's review, 'I hated it, but I couldn't put it down!'
2. The Electric Church, Jeff Somers. I am currently reading this, I expect to finish before starting something else. Having said that, I set it down to look at the choose your own adventure book, and only put it down to go out to dinner, then when I looked up it was half past midnight, and I was all alone. The Electric Church is a cyberpunk tough-guy shoot-em up.
3. The Lies of Locke Lamora, Scott Lynch. Renaissance Italy-based fantasy, like a Robin Hood who keeps all the money for himself. Amazing prologue, slow first chapter. Or GRRM took all my epic fantasy attention earlier in the year.
Books I don't intend to finish
1. The Unremembered, Peter Orullian. I was looking for the next big thing (cough cough! Stormlight Archive by Brandon Sanderson cough cough!) This wasn't it. A few good concepts and some nice webisodes sold me on the first volume of the Vault of Heaven Series. It's gonna take more than that to sell me on the second.
2. The Last Light Under the Sun, Guy Gavriel Kay. I thought I'd found the answer to my sf/f question 'who is that third guy?' Flashes of brilliance and petulance. It made sense because many of the protagonists were teenagers. Halfway through the book I realized I didn't care about any of the characters. I've already bought another Guy Gavriel Kay book, which I've heard is his best, but also that his newest effort was even better than that.
*Context: The first two authors of speculative fiction that I love are China Mieville and George RR Martin. Candidates for third include Guy Gavriel Kay, Scott Lynch, Robin Hobb, and a handful of others.
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