Catch all

Shit, fallen behind again. Books 10, 11, 12 are

Midnight Riot by Ben Aaronovitch, The Snowman

by Jo Nesbo, and Buried Giant by Kazuo Ishiguro.

I loved Midnight Riot (also known as Rivers of London). Lovely urban fantasy set in London (who is definitely a character in this book) about not great cop Peter Grant who finds his calling when he gets sucked into the magical part of London and ends up part of the London police who work supernatural crimes. It's a lot of fun and I'm glad there seems to be a zillion of them.

The Snowman is my second Jo Nesbo book and I liked this one better than the Bat. The native Norweigian setting suited Harry better. The badguy was suitably creepy, but to be honest, I pretty much figured this one out fairly early on.

Buried Giant... I was looking forward to this, Ishiguro's first foray into 'fantasy', set in post-Arthurian Britain... thought it sounded right up my ally. But I found this book hard to like. Partly because I was so busy deconstructing it. It's not high fantasy, it's not epic fantasy, it's certainly not urban fantasy... it felt more like a throwback to early Arthurian legends or even Old English ballads and other Saxon tales. Which y'know, good on Ishiguro. And at one point, I thought, oh is he going to do some entrelacement now? No... not really. Anyway, when it boiled down to it, the plot is a fairly simple quest framing, to discover what is responsible for the mist that lies over Britain and tampers with everyone's memories? I did like the ultimate reason behind the mist, and I liked the journey for the most part, but despite the simplicity, it also felt like Ishiguro was trying to do too much? I don't know, it's just a hard book to warm up to. (and I say this as someone who has read early Arthurian stuff, quite a few Old English epics/ballads what not, and a lot of medieval works. So the writing style he might've been trying to emulate is not beyond me. heh)

x

Pooched

How much did I pooch this blog? Last entry was in Oct. 2014. It's now the back nine of January 2015.

Sigh.

Part of my apathy was that I read the fewest number of books I have in awhile. I only managed 33, and three of those were re-reads. Meh.

So what did I read after A Queen's Play...

• The World of Ice and Fire - GRRM, Elio Garcia and Linda Antonsson (loved it)

• Celtika - Robert Holdstock (kinda liked it)

• The Best Laid Plans - Terry Fallis (didn't like it)

• The Bat - Jo Nesbo (liked the ending)

• Mistborn - Brandon Sanderson (liked it, but not liking the follow up)

• The Lily and the Lion - Maurice Druon (loved it)

I tried to branch out this year, with the reading of a couple of sci-fi books. It just reminded me why I don't read sci-fi.

I was introduced to the sublime Dorothy Dunnett and her creation Lymond of Crawford.

Lev Grossman finished his Magicians books, and I think that was my favourite of the year. Special mention goes to Serpent of Venice and Boy, Snow, Bird.

Time to up my game again for 2015. I WILL do 50 books this year darnit!