Haven't written about books for a while... well, haven't written period (funny how quickly I actually got out of the habit of blogging when I didn't have my own computer to do it on). What have I read since last noted?

Currently reading:
Ghoul - Michael Slade
The Time Machine and War of the Worlds - H.G. Wells

On deck:
The DaVinci Code - Dan Brown
Walking on Glass - Iain Banks
Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy

Just finished:
King Rat - China Mieville
The Wolves of the Calla - Stephen King
Memoirs of a Survivor - Doris Lessing
Weaveworld - Clive Barker
Nineteen Eighty-four - George Orwell
Gravity's Rainbow - Thomas Pynchon
A Clockwork Orange - Anthony Burgess

The way Ghoul is put together is really interesting. Michael Slade is actually a pseudonym for three Vancouver area lawyers who write detective/horror fiction, which is what this novel's about, obviously. I find myself wondering who wrote what. I mean, how did they collaborate? I can't really detect a difference in writing style from chapter to chapter, so I can only assume they didn't split it up but worked on it all together. I wonder if they all sit in the same room, or if one person starts a chapter then hands it round for changes/additions? I'd love to know.
But what's interesting about the story is the way it moves between Rhode Island (mostly Providence - which I finally visited when I went to an Oscar party that was held out there - but also Newport) and Vancouver and London. I'm impressed that the characters seem to differ according to nationality, and that they speak and act differently - even seem to have different expectations. My only caveat to that would be that the RCMP officer in the Vancouver sequence seems a bit more American than Canadian (and the character grew up in Duck Lake Sask, so he should be very Canadian), but maybe that's a hazard of working in law enforcement... interesting thought.... Anyway, its a fun book. It's almost twenty five years old now, which makes the descriptions of cutting edge UNIX systems etc. quaint echoes of the past, but I'm finding it a good read.

Other stuff? Well, Mieville is just as good in King Rat as he was in Perdido Street Station (which is also on my must-read-again list), in fact, maybe more so since its an earlier book and maybe a little less ambitious than the subsequent one. He's definitely a writer that I want to keep an eye on (along with Neil Gaiman & William Gibson). It's a fairly short & easy read and Mieville doesn't spend an excessive amount of time describing things just because he wants to stretch his literary muscles, unlike Mr. King, who spent most of Wolves describing a lot of minutiae and an even greater amount of time referring back to earlier events in the series (as well as his usual penchant for plugging his own books). Not that I didn't enjoy Wolves, it just took a lot of time to get through the extras to the diagesis.

The Lessing and Pynchon books were harder to get through. I didn't really care for the obscuring of Lessing's book - its difficult at times to tell what's going on in the narrator's head and what's actually happening in the world. Pynchon does the same thing, only most of the characters exhibit some kind of neurosis (which I suppose is reasonable considering they are all involved in the race to build rockets during WWII) so its difficult even when you can tell what's fantasy/neurosis and what's real to understand what's actually happening because each character's view of the world is warped in some really fundamental way.

Burgess and Orwell are of course classic and I'd read each of those books before, but the reread was necessary for the course. The other (usually) horror master Barker wrote a fascinating book when he sat down to write Weaveworld. Its fairly wide ranging, even though the geography is limited, and even when some of the character's motivations are unclear, it still tells a damn interesting story. It would make a fascinating movie. Its not horror at all, more fantasy of the elves-living-among-us type, and both the fantastical characters and the mundane ones are well portrayed.

If you're looking for one book to read, well, I don't know if I could recommend just one. But if you want more details, e-mail me and I'll try harder.