Books 2009 Part 2
Books read from Jan 15 - Feb 15 2009:
Again, moving wrecked my reading time which has now caused a book pile-up of waiting to be read. Grr!
In The Woods by Tana French - I looked and looked at this book for I couldn't tell you how long. Must have picked it up at B&N a good dozen times before I finally took it home. And yet another while before I got to reading it. In the future that will no longer happen as Tana is a heckuv a writer. For a first time novelist, she has a distinct narrative voice already. So the plot - back in the Ireland 1980s, 3 kids go into the woods to play one day and only 1 gets found hours later covered in blood. Fast forward to the almost present and the found kid (with no memory of what happened in those woods) is now a detective and gets assigned a case of a murdered child right back near those woods. His life promptly falls apart. It reads like a great crime procedural (for you CSI and Law & Order types) but full of life mess. The story is far from neat and polished and that works to its benefit. Also, Tana name drops the Cowboy Junkies several times so chalk her up to yet another author I read who does that. How do I find so many of them? I have no idea but I love it! She's definitely worth the read and I'm now going to have to pick up her next one, The Likeness.
Six Degrees of Space by Alastair Reynolds - Ok so if you don't know, Alastair is one of my favorite authors. He could write a shopping list and I'd be in line to buy it. This is a novella he tossed off so it's not long and I read it in a day. It's about cultural warfare and the very human trait of killing/capturing/enslaving anything not like you and what you know. In this future time, the Mongol Empire (having way back when successfully invaded Japan and then turned to the rest of the world) has expanded into space and use an ancient wormhole system to travel the galaxy. One Mongol agent is sent to investigate rumors of alien ships seen in the wormhole tunnels at the edges of the empire. So she discovers the ships and other beings eventually are coming from alternate universes inside the tunnels. The agent with the help of a Muslim alien take a ship and start to explore the universes themselves only to find there's no place like home. It's a pretty obvious story of "This is why I can't understand you" but the starting point of the Mongols is a fun touch. A tasty snack to tide me over until more of his heavy hitting stories come out.
Total Books: 5
Fiction: 4
Non-fiction: 1