Kay has written some amazing books, but unfortunately this isn't one of them. In Under Heaven he has moved away from his usual fantasy European setting and gone for a barely fictionalised account of a real incident from Chinese history, and for once I felt that his fidelity to the original facts got in the way of telling a good story. The plot is ( Read more... )

A Song for Arbonne is set in a vaguely parallel world, a story of conflict between the free loving Provençal-ish people of Arbonne and the nassty Norman-type bigots of Gorhaut, with pseudo-Celts, pseudo-Italians, pseudo-Spaniards and pseudo-Germans as well. The exiled northern aristocrat who appreciates southern music is the central character, and ( Read more... )

Having finished the Fionavar Tapestry trilogy, I decided I didn't need to keep them and listed them on BookMooch.

Where they were immediately requested by someone who works in the same corridor as me.

I'll bring them in tomorrow, Aoife.

Having read The Summer Tree a few months back, and noting the result of my 2010 reading poll, I thought I would tackle the other two books of the Fionavar Tapestry trilogy together. As I've said before, I am a huge fan of Kay's later work, but as with The Summer Tree, I felt that in these earlier books he is still getting his talent together. The ( Read more... )

I love Kay's later works, Tigana, The Lions of Al-Rassan, Sailing to Sarantium and Lord of Emperors, so I was prepared to be forgiving of this earlier work. It is a competent enough portal fantasy, with five young Canadians wrenched into a largely Celtic world to fulfill a variety of quests. There is some odd pacing of info-dumping, and the ( Read more... )

3) Lord of Emperors, by Guy Gavriel Kay

My write-up of the first of these two books, Sailing to Sarantium, has attracted more comments than any other book blog entry this year. I ended it by wishing that I had bought the sequel at the same time. I repeat that wish now. The two books are so closely intertwined that it's a shame to let the memory of ( Read more... )

18) Sailing to Sarantium, by Guy Gavriel Kay

I've read two very bad novels about Justinian, Belisarius, and seventh-century Constantinople, one by Robert Graves and one by David Weber Eric Flint and David Drake. This is a damn good novel about them, one I had been meaning to get around to for ages. It is fortuitous (or maybe not completely) that I ( Read more... )

6) The Silmarillion, by J.R.R. Tolkien

This is one of the long books I've been struggling through over the last few weeks. Funny to come back to it, twenty years after I first read it, now that The Lord of the Rings has had a longer time to settle into my subconscious ( Read more... )