Book stuff
Unlike people on the f-list might think, I haven't been watching only films recently. I finished a couple of review books a bit before the film festival. I've also recently joined a book-swapping site called BookMooch which I discovered through LibraryThing. In it, you can list books you want to give away and also post a wishlist of books you are looking for. I've already sent out 4 books and requested about the same amount from other users, one of which has already arrived. Very nice :)!
The two review books were (153.) Steve Cockayne's The Good People and (154.) Obert Skye's Leven Thumps and the Gateway to Foo. Cockayne's book is set in rural England during the Second World War and the children in it visit a magical forest world of Arboria that is in the forest next to their house. The story turns disturbing at some point and you can't tell what is real and what is imagined due to it being told in the first person by one of the children. I think it was effective and interesting, but the build-up took too long.
I didn't like Leven Thumps, so better if I don't say anything else about it.
During the festival I've been reading (155.) Martha Wells's Stargate Atlantis novel Reliquary. I greatly enjoyed it. Though I've seen only the pilot of the tv series, I had no real problems in following the story.
The media & literature references in it were quite amusing (zombie movies, Sheppard's best Jack Nicholson imitation) and after a bit slow start, the story moved at a nice pace and kept me glued to the book. I thought there were also some interesting similarities to Wells's The Fall of Ile-Rien trilogy:
In both, the opposition is presented by a psychopathic wizard/scientist who dabbles in genetic research and tries to induce some kind of a transformation in one of the main protagonists: in The Wizard Hunters the transformation attempt was in Ilias's past and in Reliquary Sheppard really is transformed into something else.
Dorane and Ixion's are both completely amoral beings who only see others as fodder for their experiments. They aren't exact copies of each other, because their motives are slightly different and there is the slight difference that one of them is a mage in a fantasy novel and the other a scientist in a sf novel :). Still, there are similarities in their methods and their characters.
Both suborn unwilling people into doing their bidding, whatever their methods, and have slightly megalomaniac tendencies. They are willing to do anything to be able to continue their experiments and to pursue their personal goals and don't care what happens to other people in the process.
The exploration of a seemingly abandoned space which had lots of corridors and caves/large rooms also reminded me somehow of the Ile-Rien books, where the main characters spend some time eploring first Ixion's complex and then other spaces where they travel through the circles.
And speaking of marthawells, I hope everybody is already aware that she is currently posting her first novel, The Element of Fire, in her journal one chapter at a time. The book has been sold-out and very hard to find for a long time now (I was lucky enough to buy it when it first came out), so this is a great opportunity to read it, if you haven't done so already!
The two review books were (153.) Steve Cockayne's The Good People and (154.) Obert Skye's Leven Thumps and the Gateway to Foo. Cockayne's book is set in rural England during the Second World War and the children in it visit a magical forest world of Arboria that is in the forest next to their house. The story turns disturbing at some point and you can't tell what is real and what is imagined due to it being told in the first person by one of the children. I think it was effective and interesting, but the build-up took too long.
I didn't like Leven Thumps, so better if I don't say anything else about it.
During the festival I've been reading (155.) Martha Wells's Stargate Atlantis novel Reliquary. I greatly enjoyed it. Though I've seen only the pilot of the tv series, I had no real problems in following the story.
The media & literature references in it were quite amusing (zombie movies, Sheppard's best Jack Nicholson imitation) and after a bit slow start, the story moved at a nice pace and kept me glued to the book. I thought there were also some interesting similarities to Wells's The Fall of Ile-Rien trilogy:
In both, the opposition is presented by a psychopathic wizard/scientist who dabbles in genetic research and tries to induce some kind of a transformation in one of the main protagonists: in The Wizard Hunters the transformation attempt was in Ilias's past and in Reliquary Sheppard really is transformed into something else.
Dorane and Ixion's are both completely amoral beings who only see others as fodder for their experiments. They aren't exact copies of each other, because their motives are slightly different and there is the slight difference that one of them is a mage in a fantasy novel and the other a scientist in a sf novel :). Still, there are similarities in their methods and their characters.
Both suborn unwilling people into doing their bidding, whatever their methods, and have slightly megalomaniac tendencies. They are willing to do anything to be able to continue their experiments and to pursue their personal goals and don't care what happens to other people in the process.
The exploration of a seemingly abandoned space which had lots of corridors and caves/large rooms also reminded me somehow of the Ile-Rien books, where the main characters spend some time eploring first Ixion's complex and then other spaces where they travel through the circles.
And speaking of marthawells, I hope everybody is already aware that she is currently posting her first novel, The Element of Fire, in her journal one chapter at a time. The book has been sold-out and very hard to find for a long time now (I was lucky enough to buy it when it first came out), so this is a great opportunity to read it, if you haven't done so already!