Books!
I just finished Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke. :-)
I have been reading it for most of the semester- I bought it the monday after my first major test. Now, it's a long, dry book. 800-some-odd pages and written in a fair approximation of early 18th century English. It definitely qualifies as Serious Fantasy, so it's on the heavier side of my usual reading fare. But even so, it took me three months to finish! But, really, I'm amazed I finished at all. Usually once I set a book down and start reading something else, that's it. I've been reading a lot less since school started. Weeks have gone by without my looking at a novel at all and the couple books I did read were pure fluff- pulp sci fi that I got through in an afternoon. So it's remarkable that I finished my major serious reading project for the semester.
Strange and Norrell is a slow starter. The old-fashioned prose makes it difficult to read- footnotes, though entertaining, don't help- and for about the first 200 pages of the book there is no truly sympathetic character. But once you get used to the prose style it's a lot of fun to read. Clarke's writing really remidned me of Patrick O'Brien's- which makes sense, seeing as O'Brien's Aubrey/Maturin series is set during the same time period. But while O'Brien's stories are firmly grounded in actual history, Clarke's England is an alternate history, a fantasy world where half of England is technically ruled by a magician-king who has been absent for 300 years.
In lots of ways, the world itself, and the Raven King who is such a major part of it, are the real main characters in this book. Everything in the book adds richness and texture. The pseudo-historical prose, cameos of real historical people, and fragments of genuine history make it all feel very real. The richness of the world and the skill of the author's writing carried me through the slow opening of the book. But that's not all there is to the book; when the plot picked up, I realized how much I'd actually come to care about the characters. I just couldn't stop reading until I knew they were all right.
No spoilers here, but I liked the book very much. It says something about a novel, I think, that I kept coming back to it again and again, until I had read the whole thing.
I have been reading it for most of the semester- I bought it the monday after my first major test. Now, it's a long, dry book. 800-some-odd pages and written in a fair approximation of early 18th century English. It definitely qualifies as Serious Fantasy, so it's on the heavier side of my usual reading fare. But even so, it took me three months to finish! But, really, I'm amazed I finished at all. Usually once I set a book down and start reading something else, that's it. I've been reading a lot less since school started. Weeks have gone by without my looking at a novel at all and the couple books I did read were pure fluff- pulp sci fi that I got through in an afternoon. So it's remarkable that I finished my major serious reading project for the semester.
Strange and Norrell is a slow starter. The old-fashioned prose makes it difficult to read- footnotes, though entertaining, don't help- and for about the first 200 pages of the book there is no truly sympathetic character. But once you get used to the prose style it's a lot of fun to read. Clarke's writing really remidned me of Patrick O'Brien's- which makes sense, seeing as O'Brien's Aubrey/Maturin series is set during the same time period. But while O'Brien's stories are firmly grounded in actual history, Clarke's England is an alternate history, a fantasy world where half of England is technically ruled by a magician-king who has been absent for 300 years.
In lots of ways, the world itself, and the Raven King who is such a major part of it, are the real main characters in this book. Everything in the book adds richness and texture. The pseudo-historical prose, cameos of real historical people, and fragments of genuine history make it all feel very real. The richness of the world and the skill of the author's writing carried me through the slow opening of the book. But that's not all there is to the book; when the plot picked up, I realized how much I'd actually come to care about the characters. I just couldn't stop reading until I knew they were all right.
No spoilers here, but I liked the book very much. It says something about a novel, I think, that I kept coming back to it again and again, until I had read the whole thing.