So I've read two books on my Kindle so far. I'm still infatuated with it, but I did discover a few new drawbacks. One is that I was due to spend some time in a waiting room, and I grabbed my Kindle, only to discover it was out of juice. That has never happened to me with a regular book. The other is that when I finished a fairly substantial book, I didn't have the feeling of accomplishment that I normally get from putting a completed book on the shelf.
Okay. On to the books! One was China Mieville's Un Lun Dun. Still out in hardback, but I got it for only ten bucks! And it's amazing. It features his usual awe-inspiring imaginitive power, his usual good turns of phrase, and, since it's technically a YA book, it avoids the, shall we say rather leisurely pacing that plagues parts of The Scar and which sank Iron Council altogether. It's about two girls who fall into a kind of negative image of London and find that they have to save it. I've seen it unfavorably compared to Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere, which I also liked, but it's superior to Neverwhere in every way. And yeah, this alternate London comes after the alternate London Gaiman imagined, but nobody's ever accused Gaiman of ripping off Lisa Goldstein's Dark Cities Underground. This may be because I am the only person to ever read Lisa Goldstein's Dark Cities Underground, which I found while browsing in the library one day. Great book, by the way.
My favorite thing about Un Lun Dun is the way Mieville turns the conventions of stories like this on their head. There is a chosen one and a quest, but the chosen one gets kind of un-chosen, and the quest is completed in a completely unorthodox way. Most fantasy novels feel familiar, and, apart from the alternate, parallel London thing, this book feels completely new. It's not like Mieville is playing with familiar ideas in a pleasing way; he's really paving new ground. Un Lun Dun is a masterpiece, and Mieville's best work since Perdido Street Station.
All right. On to another author I admire rather immodestly. I read Charlie Huston's Half the Blood of Brooklyn, the third of the Joe Pitt casebooks--noirish crime novels about the travails of a vampire private eye. It's a quick , entertaining, and brutal read, and what I really liked about it was the way Huston reverses the pattern of the first two books. In the first two, Joe's private life and the relations of the vampire clans are essential, but they're kind of in the background of the mystery that drives the book. Here, the mystery is not that much of a mystery, and it's really in the background of what's going on with the clans and Joe. You really can't read this without reading Already Dead and No Dominion first, but everybody should read those anyway.
So there you go. New books from two of the three most talented writers working today. Now if only I could get my hands on a new Brendan Halpin novel, I'd have the trifecta. Ah! I see his Long Way Back is coming in a sexy paperback edition next Tuesday! I shall go forthwith to the bookstore to reserve my copy!
