First of all: never you mind, these books are fun. Lighten up. That being said, fun is about all the Potter books are. They aren't great literature, or moral instruction, or a system around which to build one's life. For an adult like myself, they are cotton-candy, something to read and enjoy in a day or so (I do have a job), and then to let dissolve into nothingness. A confection. Having said that, this was the most action-packed of the seven books, but also the one least concerned with building the world, which was my favourite part of reading them. Several people died who I was not expecting to die, and several people survived who I was not expecting to survive. The revelations about Dumbledore and his subsequent appearances (yes, he's dead) were handled quite well, but the whole Jesus Potter thing was not. Beyond that, I have nothing to say, except it was a fun little read, and definitely a nice break after that monstrosity, Underworld.

Next: The Man in the High Castle, by Philip K. Dick.

Opinions, or so the bookish corner of the web tells me, are divided on whether or not Underworld is DeLillo's masterpiece, or an appalling waste of time. English critic James Wood seems to be leading the charge against DeLillo. I can't actually link to (ore even read) his article in The New Republic because it doesn't seem to be online, but I can link to this article from The Boston Globe by Christopher Shea, about Wood and his current role in American letters, and I can certainly link to Garth Risk Hallberg's rebuttal. From what I can gather, the gist of Wood's argument against DeLillo, and Underworld specifically, is an excessive concern with paranoia, which Wood sees as incompatible with great literature. Wood also (apparently; I'm working with second-hand interpretive readings here) doesn't believe there to be any real human beings in the novel, only... well, I don't know what. Not archetypes or cardboard cutouts, but certainly not genuine people. Hallberg's claim is that Wood simply doesn't understand what's going on, and is letting his own preoccupations ruin his reading of the novel. (I was going to do a big long thing tracing his arguments against Wood, but this books frankly isn't worth all the trouble, so I'm just going to say that you should read the two articles I just linked to, and then come back here and remember that my statements are informed by them.)

I'm going to have to agree with Wood here, on some pretty important points. First of all, this novel is incredibly overrated. The backward-looking structure doesn't seem to help, as it very much appears that DeLillo didn't quite think it through. While, like life, the focus of people's lives changes from time period to time period, DeLillo skips the transitions, so instead of experiencing the sense of Nick Shay trying to understand himself, we get a half-assed, barely there character who is wildly inconsistent in his behaviour and his mental state with very little explanation as to why. I'm left adrift wondering whether Nick is a single character traced through time, or an amalgam of impressions that the author simply stuck a label on for the sake of convention. I suppose if DeLillo had been more explicit, and hadn't made many of his characters so similar (in the murky past), this would have been easier to work through. There were times when I would read a section, twenty pages or so, and not know which characters were involved, because no names would be mentioned and the style, setting, and actions could have referred to five or six different people, given what was already known. This was a hugely frustrating experience. The first hundred or so pages were solid, well-written, entertaining, and though I didn't always know what was going on or why, I felt like there was a purpose behind it. The last hundred or so pages were much the same. It was the six hundred and fifty pages in the middle that ruined it for me.

I actually don't blame Wood for focusing so much on the paranoia. With so much vague nonsense, half-formed characters (Hoover and Sinatra were better drawn and made for more interesting reading than either Nick Shay or Klara Sax, as was sister Edgar and any number of the peripheral characters) and directionless meandering through the ethics and philosphy of trash, the paranoia is the one consistent, oppressive force in the novel. It connects the characters far more than proximity, the passage of time, or that damned baseball, which somehow seems to always come just shy of being a meaningful symbol. Paranoia is something to hold on to, to make one feel like the two months spent reading this book weren't entirely wasted.

I need to say some things about Klara Sax. She is supposed to be an artist. Articles about the book, characters in the book, even the back of the book itself, have all made much of the fact that she is an artist. Except that she isn't. It doesn't help that DeLillo can't write worth a damn about art (baseball, yes, but art? A.S. Byatt he ain't), coming across like a half-literate tourist trying to explain the poster selection in the gift shop at the Louvre, but Klara Sax is just flat out not an artist. People around her make art, and in one memorable seen she is being interviewed about her art, while others around her that she pays are actually going about the business of making it. But we never really see her making art, or doing much thinking about it at all. At least, not thinking about her own work. She is not dedicated, has no drive or obsession or commitment. I felt more like DeLillo wanted to feature an unmarried woman of a certain class, but didn't want to have to bother about giving her a job.

I suppose that's all. I started writing this, several weeks ago actually, with many, many things to say, but no real organizing principle to my thoughts. Having written, re-written, thrown away, and re-thought it all over the last several weeks, my thoughts have become less coherent and my desire to rant and rave about having wasted so much of my time on this colossal mess of a novel has become almost too strong to resist. So I'm just going to stop.

Next: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, by J.K. Rowling.

In point of fact, I finished reading Childhood (or Childhood, according to the typography on the cover) on Saturday evening, but I was out of town, and I haven't had the time to sit down at a computer properly since returning home. Some of you may recall my enthusiastic comments about Despair. It was hard to imagine, after reading such a collection of stories, where Alexis would go with a novel. He went with the fairly typical first-novel bildungsroman, but his execution was far from typical. The book, as the clever typographer noted, deals almost exclusively with the pre-teen years of one Thomas MacMillan (that's two Thomases in a row), a young man raised in unique circumstances and raised by a succession of people who are, every one of them, both ordinary folks and raving loons. Thomas tells the story not only in plain, straightforward prose, but also through lists and timetables and diagrams. Thomas has obviously grown to be a most unusual adult, with a life that is almost certainly worthy of its own novel (I would read it), but all that's offered are glimpses.

In Childhood, Alexis presents us with circumstances and characters that are at a level of detachment I find difficult to describe, but that also have an emotional impact, a deeply touching quality, that makes any summary seem not only incomplete, but also somehow unclean, or insulting. Just read the book. You won't regret it.

Next: Don DeLillo's Underworld, for which I may actually do some additional research, because of all the fuss that's been buzzing about the blogosphere (guh) lately.

I bought this book for two reason. First, there is the cover. It's gorgeous! The cover is simple, clean, very dynamic, and in person extremely attractive. Unusually attractive, in fact (it turns out that the cover flaps are too large to be practical, though, and they make the book unwieldy to hold at times; the extra-tight binding and narrow gutter don't help either, but it still looks pretty). Second, there is a blurb on the back of the book from Canadian author Eric McCormack (no, not the actor) in which he indicates that he appears as a character in the novel. Eric was a professor of mine during my undergraduate years, and though I wouldn't go so far as to say that we are friends, we do know each other more than just to say hello in the hallway. And it's always cool to see people you know showing up in fiction.

I enjoyed this book despite myself. Page one was a reasonably convincing fake newspaper article, but page two almost lost me, with the immediate launch into what I can't help but think of as the Canadian Indie Style. Some of you may not be familiar with it (although if you've read Flyboy Action Figure Comes With Gasmask, or really anything else by Jim Munroe, you've definitely encountered it), so I'll give you a brief rundown of what's involved. It's self-consciously casual to the point of seeming forced. The authors tend to have large vocabularies, but rarely use them effectively. Technique is virtually irrelevant, with plot and overt character development being nearly the only concerns. The narrators are self-deprecating, misunderstood, inwardly aggressive but outwardly meek. The women who serve as love interests for these characters are uniformly aggressive, beautiful, artistic, sporting an unusual name, and often (though not always) bisexual. Quirky isn't the word. In many cases, though the books are entertaining and original, that's all they are, and it's easy to see why the authors stayed "indie". I like independent presses, and they fill a need that, frankly, I wouldn't trust the larger house to fill. But. The Canadian Indie Style is genuinely grating after ten pages or so, and a book has to have a lot going for it otherwise to not outright piss me off before the end. Most books in this vein seem to feel like they've gotten almost there, but haven't quite made it. Shelf Monkey is written in almost quintessential Canadian Indie Style, but thankfully has a lot of things going for it, and I was able to put my hatred of The Style aside and just enjoy the story.

The novel is presented a series of documents (mostly emails written by protagonist Thomas Friesen, although there are newspaper articles and transcripts included) as he tries to explain, to Eric McCormack of all people, why he is on the run from the law. It's a clever technique, and it works for the most part. It does fall apart a bit when you realize that nearly ever one of the documents, no matter who the ostensible author, is written in more or less the same tone. Thomas is a failed lawyer, and bibliophile much like myself (although we have very different tastes), and he finds work in a big box book store in Winnipeg. There he meets and eventually befriends Warren, Aubrey and (the aggressive, beautiful, unusually named) Danae. Despite being hopped up on pain pills left over from what seems to be a failed suicide attempt, he is extremely lucid, with the exception of an early scene in which he encounters an over-sized mock-up of Munroe Purvis, a talkshow host with a book club more popular than Oprah's. Purvis publishes all his recommended books himself, and they are apparently the worst book ever published, with no real editorial integrity behind publishing them. The masses buy what they are told to buy.

I think what saves Shelf Monkey from being just another CIS book is how intense the satire actually is. The title comes from the group that Aubrey, Warren and Danae form, eventually including Friesen and others, to work out their frustrations about selling bad books to uneducated and uncaring readers day in and day out. They are joined by librarians and other sort of professional bibliophiles once a week on the edge of Winnipeg, where they gather in a vacant subdivision and burn books they hate. All the participants have secret names (Don Quixote, Yossarian, Offred, even a Gandalf), and present their candidates for burning in a ritualized way. As you can imagine, it devolves into cult territory pretty quickly. The problem here, and it's the only problem really, is that the setup is so long, and relatively speaking the book is so short, that Aubrey, Warren and Danae begin frothing at the mouth before we get a chance to really understand their characters, and without any real warning signs. If satire wasn't moving the plot forward so forcefully, the leap from burning books to blow off steam and a calculated act of violence (you'll have to read the book to find out what) would simply be too great to bear.

Shelf Monkey, ultimately, is a fun book with some problems that are (hopefully) only indicative of the fact that it's Redekop's first time at bat. If he gives it another go I'll most likely pick that one up as well, and good luck to him in the future. Oh yeah, and like all of us, he's got a blog.

Next: Childhood, by André Alexis.

I think this might be my first ever crime/mystery book. Ever. I've wanted to read Raymond Chandler's books for many years now, since I first read an interview with another author (sadly, I can't remember who, or in what publication) describing Chandler's skill at describing, of all things, furniture. Later, I saw the excellent series of books put out by Vintage (my cover is not the same as the one shown, which I like better) and wanted to own them for their beauty as objects, as well as for the stories themselves. Finally, a few weeks ago, I managed to find a copy of The Big Sleep that I could afford (it wouldn't do to read them out of order, after all). It was great fun to read.

Chandler's prose is energetic, casual, and surprisingly fun. I was worried that I would have to remind myself at times that Philip Marlowe is the source of the hard-nosed detective cliché, and not just another in a long, unimpressive string. Not once did such a thought actually cross my mind. The slang was sometimes hard to follow, but Marlowe was almost refreshing, defying the stereotype in a surprising number of ways. He had a tremendous and overflowing sense of humour, for one thing. I was surprised by the treatment of sexuality and pornography in the book. I expected more repression, the references to be less direct. Instead Chandler was frank, open, and though not exactly non-judgemental, his characters seemed almost less conservative than many an average person would be today. I can't wait to read more.

Next: Shelf Monkey, by Cory Redekop

I'm almost embarrassed to say that this is my first Munro book. I had assumed, as perhaps many Canadian literary students would have, that I had encountered her work in high school, or in a compilation in an early survey course at university. I now find it unlikely. I can't imagine any circumstances that might lead to forgetting that I had encountered such a strong voice. I've encountered stories of this kind before, of course. You can't throw a rock in the Canadian literary world without striking a dozen authors who write stories in this vein. I have actually said on more than one occasion, and even in public forums, that such stories are exactly what it wrong with contemporary Canadian writing. Alice Munro is certainly not what is wrong with contemporary Canadian writing. She is very much what is right. Reading Who Do You Think You Are? (and I admit to choosing this book to start with because of the pretty girl on the cover) I got, not the sense of a stale form or shopworn conventions, but rather the sense of a skilled hand shaping the stories into the only form they could have taken. N+1 has claimed her as an American author (a common mistake, given the frequency that her work appeared in American publications, but hardly surprising, given the penchant of the American press to claim anyone who does interesting work as an American—I have even seen Zadie Smith claimed as an American author, since On Beauty featured American characters quite heavily), but she is very obviously Canadian and in many ways the inventor of the contemporary short story for us. Who Do You Think You Are? is a book of jewels, some in their raw beauty, and some cut into delicate shapes, and each one worth a king's ransom.

Next: The Big Sleep, by Raymond Chandler.

It's eight and a half months into my Reading 2007 project, so I think that a status report is long overdue. The idea, for those of you who haven't been following the blog over the last year, is that I write a mini-review of every book I read this year. I've managed to keep that up for all thirty-eight books that I've read so far, sort of. Most of the "mini-reviews" have wound up being rather disorganized and somewhat disconnected from any particular critical stance. And they also tend to be written within a half hour of my having finished reading the book, and rarely do they take more than a half hour to write. It was never my intention to be so slapdash (I swear I'm capable of more considered judgements), but I think I actually prefer it this way. I never intended this site to be a place for my deepest or most profound thoughts, and I certainly don't want it to turn into a forum for academic writing. For one thing, I'm notoriously slow when it comes to formal writing, and for another I'd rather that sort of work show up in other venues, preferably venues in which I'm being paid. I'd prefer this blog be more casual, and it has been. So for now on I think I'll scrap the notion of "mini-reviews". My posts about specific books will not change any, I think it would just be better to think of them as impressions or gut reactions.

I'm also quite behind on my reading. I used to read between seventy and ninety books a year, and right now I'm not even on track to hit sixty. I suppose this isn't a bad thing per se, but I certainly feel like I'm cheating myself somehow. It feels like the longer I'm out of touch with critical/academic world, the harder it is for me to focus for long periods of time on a given text, the more things like excitement and adventure matter, often at the expense of intellectual pleasure. They are not mutually exclusive pleasures, of course, but they are quite different kinds of pleasure. I'll leave it to the individual reader to determine which is the greater, if they believe such an assessment can be made honestly.

Also, and I'm going to give this subject its own paragraph because it bothers me so much, I find that I'm very conscious about what authors I'm reading. Far more so than before I made my reading choices so self-consciously public. Am I reading enough women authors? Enough authors of colour? Enough Canadians? I've never seriously considered these issues before, in fact I dismissed them as completely irrelevant. The colour of an author's skin, their birthplace, or whatever interesting bits they may have between their legs always struck me as completely irrelevant to whether or not I would read their books. But the blogosphere (I can't tell you the self-loathing that accompanied my typing that word) seems to think such things are important. Many of the blogs I read (Bookslut, Bookninja, Edward Champion's The Return of the Reluctant, The Elegant Variation) seem to think these are issues of paramount of importance. They look at the bylines in magazines and breakdown gender and ethnic percentages. They look at the juries and winners of major prizes, pay attention to who gets more column inches. (Never mind that they don't look at any considerations beyond the blunt notion of prejudice for any numerical inequality.) I honestly don't give a shit, so long as I get to read good books. But. I feel like, if I read more books by men than women, more books by caucasians than by people of colour, more books by Brits and Americans than by Canadians, I may somehow be judged by readers of this blog to be a misogynist, a racist, or in some way a traitor to my culture. I could point out that my two favourite novels are both written by women, and that one of them is Canadian. I could point out that of my four favourite living Canadian writers, two are black, and one is a Jewish woman. The problem is that making these statements would genuinely make me feel like I was trying to hide something, or that somehow reading more books by men than women in 2007 is a misogynist act. It isn't, and I don't have to defend my reading choices. I think, ultimately, that choosing my reading material based on considerations other than "do I think I will enjoy this book?" to be demeaning to myself and to the authors I read. If I pick up a book by Zadie Smith because she is a woman of colour rather than because I think I will enjoy her book, I feel like I am implying that her skin colour and fiddly bits are more important than her skill with words (I chose Smith as an example because she has been written about as a significant female author and as a significant author of colour, but I read On Beauty last year, and loved it, because it sounded like a damned fine book, and for no other reason). That is an implication I am unwilling to make. I know that if someone picked my work because I have white skin and a penis, and not because they think my work will be enjoyable, I would be insulted. Now, my experiences as a white male in our society may influence my subject matter or even what sort of writing styles I may experiment with (I may be less likely to indulge in certain kinds of gender ambiguities, or certain kinds of rhythm), but those things have no bearing on whether or not my work is any good. At any rate, I don't like thinking of these issues when I choose my reading material, and it pisses me off that I am feeling this kind of peer pressure, even if it is indirect.

No matter what happens, I think that when 2007 is over, I'm going to start again with a similar project for 2008. Lastly, I'll just give you a taste of some of the books I have on deck.

• Underworld, by Don DeLillo (I've been reading a lot of stuff being written about this book, and I want to chime in, but not until I read the damned thing.)
• The Recognitions, by William Gaddis
• White Teeth, by Zadie Smith
• V., by Thomas Pynchon
• The Republic of Love, by Carol Shields
• The Big Sleep, by Raymond Chandler
• Childhood, by André Alexis

Thanks for reading!

A professor of mine once told me that I should read Iris Murdoch, because she "basically invented A.S. Byatt" (it may be difficult to tell from reading this blog, but Byatt is one of my favourite authors). And having now read The Bell, I can see the truth in this statement. Murdoch's style has a lot in common with Byatt's, although it's difficult to pinpoint specific examples. One gets the same sense of a complex intellectual involvement with the inner lives of a number of characters, expressed through simple and thoroughly proper English prose. The Plain Style, I guess. Robertson Davies with a better ear. It's lovely and hypnotic to read, even when nothing in particular is happening, although unlike Byatt, it's very rare for more than a page or two to go by without something of significance happening to someone. Events in this novel are like stones thrown in a calm pool of water; each makes very little impact on its own, but the ripples linger and expand. Murdoch throws enough tiny stones that eventually the pool becomes like white water rapids from the mingling of all those ripples.

The novel both opens and closes with an omniscient narrator looking at a collection of characters as if from a great distance, the tone alternating between detachment and a kind of good-natured condescension. The characters are neurotic, dysfunctional, only sometimes likable, and yet profoundly, recognizably human. In some ways this seems a little too pat, an easy and uncomplicated way of setting up the board and then taking it down again, like a game of checkers, or maybe Scrabble. The bulk of the novel is of course more specific, dealing with the daily events and remarkably troubled spiritual lives of a group of people living in a lay religious community called Imber Court, attached almost like a parasite to an abbey of cloistered Anglican Benedictine nuns. The Bell for a time seems like it will follow the spiritual rebirth and emotional development of Mrs. Dora Greenfield, a skittish, not particularly intelligent woman who has married an appalling man named Paul, though she is in her own way quite appalling (James Tayper-Pierce, one of the Imber residents, says she is the sort of woman "who is sometimes called a bitch"), as she is selfish, thoughtless and almost without the power of introspection. At the opening of the novel she is returning to her husband Paul (violent, cruel, and even more selfish than she) after having walked out on their marriage for a time. Paul is a scholar, working on old documents that have been acquired by the abbey. Imber and many of the other characters are introduced by the narrator as though through her eyes. She does eventually begin to develop into a functional, independent, adult human being, but she is really only on the cusp of that achievement when the novel switches, at the end, back to the distant eye-in-the-sky style of narration.

By far the most interesting character in the book is Michael, the de facto leader of Imber court, owner of the grounds, one-time aspirant to the clergy and closeted (well, obviously closeted, the book was first published in 1958) homosexual. The most interesting parts of the book happen when Michael tries to reconcile his deep spirituality with his sexuality, two things which he sees as wholly incompatible, yet stemming from the same source. Interestingly, he thinks of his sexuality wholly in terms of love, never in terms of lust, although when the narrator recounts the events of his life, it's clear that lust was also present. Dora, the less emotionally developed person, is perfectly capably of acknowledging and acting through lust, but Michael, the spiritual man who is endlessly examining his own actions and intentions, will only acknowledge love as a motivating factor where his sexuality is concerned. In some ways this is the most alien part of the book. We live, today, in a society that (well, for the most part; there's still progress to be made) accepts homosexuals as people who are simply different from heterosexuals, neither better nor worse. The vast majority of society (or, at least it seems that way from my experience) has moved past the ideas that gay people are criminal, or in some way suffering from an illness, but to Michael and Toby (the young man with whom Michael falls, conditionally, in love with at Imber), these are real and vital concerns to deal with. One of Michael's major struggles is to be at peace with his sexual identity, not only because he is different and the world unkind to those who are different, as the case would be today, but also because he must struggle with the idea, placed in him by both his society and his religion, that what he is must somehow also be wrong, dangerous, or evil, even. Michael's turmoil is at turns fascinating and heartbreaking. Even when he reaches a place of equilibrium he must constantly be on guard of threats to it from the outside, as he is not free to be who his is.

There are other characters, such as Nick and Catherine, ghosts from Michael's past, who are necessarily present but never seem wholly there, and are much less significant than the narrator suggests they could be (this is perhaps a major difference between Byatt and Murdoch; Murdoch has them play their role but otherwise ignores them, while Byatt would have given them greater attention). Likewise the bells themselves, the pieces of history that seem to bind everyone together at Imber, and direct much of the action of the book. They are excuses to set the pieces in motion, and though deeper tales are hinted at, they are not explored. Byatt would certainly have explored them. This is not a deficiency in Murdoch, merely a difference. The Bell is a tight novel, and indeed "wise, witty and compulsive" as the blurb on the cover suggests. (Oh yes, mine is an older copy than the one pictured here, so the cover is different.)

Next, Who Do You Think You Are?, a book of linked short stories by Alice Munroe.

The greatest strength of China Miéville's New Crobuzon novels is the freshness, the outright alien-ness of the world and the peoples that populate it, and that continues to shine through in Iron Council. The problem with the book seems to be a lack of control. The idea of much-abused railway workers taking over a job site and stealing the train to form a kind of socialist utopia is a little far-fetched, but in a world where people have beetles instead of heads, it's certainly workable. The problem is the execution. The idea that an awkward collection of working class folk, criminals, and prostitutes would be able to organize themselves, successfully fight a well-trained military, and then escape, all while having to continually tear up the track behind them and lay it anew ahead of them is preposterous, even in Bas-Lag. I understand that Miéville has socialist leanings (so do I, to a lesser degree), but there are limits to the credulity of even the most sympathetic reader. The interlude describing the history of the Iron Council started out showing tremendous potential; the scenes with Judah Low learning golemetry from the stiltspear people were delicate and compelling, but it quickly fell apart when the socialist politics (which Miéville claims leak in subconsciously) began to take over and the plot and characters took a backseat. It's especially disappointing given how good The Scar was.

The war between Tesh and New Crobuzon and the working class uprising within the city were far more interesting than the story of the train, and it was in that subplot (and was a subplot, even though the blurb on the back of the book and the early chapters of the novel suggest that they are the main plot elements) that Miéville's most polished writing can be seen. There's so much going on there that it's difficult to talk about without having to rehash half the book, but that the war itself was treated more as a problem that could be (and was) solved in five pages of special effects and a chase scene was more than a little disappointing, particularly in light of how emotionally complex the issues leading up to those five page were.

Miéville's prose felt considerably less competent in this novel as well. He's not a bad writer, not at all. He has a talent for finding interesting images and imbuing them with an emotional significance that seems inherent rather than contextual. But Iron Council simply felt sloppy. Events that would later be referenced with specificity were described with a dream-like vagueness that often made it difficult to figure out just what the hell was going on. It felt like he was in such a hurry to move the plot forward that he ignored the mechanics of his prose. In addition, he once again made use of the pseudo-stream-of-consciousness interludes that are a kind of trademark of his novels. They are always, always, always the worst parts of his work, and they are a chore to read through, because he's frankly not very good at the technique. I do hope he drops it for the next book. So in the final analysis, Iron Council wasn't terrible, by any means, but the book could definitely have done with another draft.

Back to the world of literary fiction with Iris Murdoch's The Bell.

In The Scar, Miéville returns for a second time to New Crobuzon (or more accurately, Bas-Lag and the floating pirate city called Armada) in a novel that is far more refined and entertaining than Perdido Street Station, although I enjoyed that novel very much. The narrative spends most of its time with Bellis Coldwine, a peripheral character from the first book (I don't recall if she actually appears, although her name is familiar, so I presume she was at least mentioned) and Tanner Sack, a Remade criminal (although he is possibly the most honest character in the book, and his crime is never once mentioned). I think it's fair to say that these two characters are high among the reasons that I enjoyed The Scar more than Perdido Street Station. They are both flawed, with complex inner lives that can shift from cold selfishness and blind wrath to pity to sadness or ambivalence in real human ways, but at the core they are more-or-less honest people doing the best they can, and for that they are likable. Isaac, Yagharek, Lin, and the others in Perdido Street Station were interesting, but generally they were opportunist jerks, and it took me a long time to give a damn about any of them.

I think another reason I enjoyed this book so much (and read it so quickly) was the nautical setting. Folks who know me will know that I am a great fan of the late Patrick O'Brian's work, and anything well-written about adventure on the high seas is almost guaranteed to strike my fancy. Miéville is obviously not a sailor, and there were many times where I'm sure he was pushing the physics of his fictional world past the breaking point, but still he handled the naval bits with tremendous and convincing gusto, if not necessarily with skill.

I know that's not a lot to say about a novel this large and complicated, but it's late, I'm tired, and you should really just go out and see for yourself. I'll try to do better with the next one. And since I still crave excitement, adventure, and really wild things, I'm going to read the last China Miéville book in my possession (and the only of his adult works I have yet to read), Iron Council