Book reviews, assorted
I have so far enjoyed books 1-5 of Thursday Next. Although the literary allusions and stuff gets a tiny bit wearing, it actually succeeds on a more old-fashioned trope: a near-superhuman normal juggles at least three plots and manages to pull off a happy ending for all of them in a clever way. What strikes me is that while I am trying to dodge getting embroiled in a consulting project because I need to do a big pile of admin so that my team can do some analysis, Thursday manages to put the impending apocalypse and her family drama and the other thing on hold to hare off after a side plot. Which may not be best policy outside fiction, but it is quite inspirational.
I read half The Mentoring Manual by Julie Starr and figured it told me enough about what to do in the first session that I could read the other half later. The first session is tomorrow. I hope my mentee is a talker.
Finally someone who can write took over The Wheel of Time. And while Towers of Midnight is a bit 'meh, let's shuffle all the characters into place', 'A Memory of Light' is the best book entirely devoted to a climactic battle that you are likely to read. Everyone had their moment, a sensible proportion of characters died (I might have preferred all of them), and the whole thing wrapped up nice, even if the sense of a sigh of relief from Sanderson that he'd got to the end was there.
Last Terry Pratchett *sniff*. And it works, though the proportion between build-up and climax is all wrong, and it does have an unhealthy obsession with scrubbing privies. Seriously, if witches are all about doing what has to be done - nobody needs to clean a privy so you can see your reflection in it.