Recently Read Books

This might be the fastest I ever read a book. Apart from about 30 pages read the night before, I read this entire book in one day. Granted that was only possible because it doesn't have a lot of words on each page (huge line spacing), but it was still around 370 pages in a day. I wanted to finish it fast so I could start a book I've rented from the library, but it turned into quite the genuine page turner. 

Solid Mieville book, though I find it hard to believe this is aimed at a younger audience. Okay so there's nothing too objectional in it in terms of actual content (it's basically a homage to Moby Dick) whereas there certainly is in some of his other books but the language level doesn't seem all that lower than his usual work. Mieville is an exceptionally gifted writer but this is sometimes his downfall: his books sometimes require the use of a dictionary to find out what the hell the random obscure word he's used actually means. I find his prose compelling and well crafted and would not say I've ever found any of his work hard-going, but I'm not sold on the idea that he can write for younger readers. 

The Millennium series is resurrected for a second time since the death of Stieg Larsson, now in the hands of Karin Smirnoff. Apparently she wrote a few other books before this but it looks like only one of those has made it to English. According to Goodreads tagging her prior books weren't in the crime/thriller/mystery genre so on paper she doesn't seem like an obvious choice to helm the series. I remember before I read the book that a bit of a deal was being made over Lisbeth Salander being written by a woman.

And what an absolutely fucking travesty of a book this turned out to be! It's like reading bad fan fiction. The entire plot is facilitated by the extraordinary coincidence that several key characters have all appeared in the same small Swedish town at the same time, completely independently of each other. Salander to look after a niece who has been invented for her, Blomkvist because his daughter now lives there and is getting married, Hans Faste one of the cops from the original trilogy is in charge up there now and even the motorcycle gang they had a run in with in the original trilogy is now operating there too. 

To top it all off, the characters are written like shadows of their former selves, especially the two series leads. 

And the book is also written to be far too meta for my taste, with Stieg Larsson being namedropped as an actual person in the universe he created, Lisbeth thinking of herself as 'the girl who played with fire' and it being commented on that she looks like Noomi Rapace (who played her in the Swedish film series). 

Worse book I've read all year. Smirnoff is lined up to write two more of these. I do not think I will be bothering. Many people may have spoke out against the David Lagercrantz trilogy existing but those were at least solid and lived up to Larsson's trilogy (although he film of the first one was shite and badly miscast all round). This just takes a shit on Larsson's legacy. 

It's been quite a while since I read the rest of this series. I actually read all five of them one after the other, they were that good. It would have been about February/March last year. I found them relatively recently considering book 5 was published in 2013. This one only came out this year, although it was first released in Swedish in 2021. It's the sixth and final volume of the series and also the longest. I've forgotten a number of things from the previous books by now, but it wasn't difficult to resume. I'd day the series goes out mostly on a high although I could have done with less flashback sequences. I found those dragged a bit. The resolution isn't completely satisfactory in terms of its own individual plot but it rounds out the stories of the main characters well. 

Great debut sci-fi novel. Looking forward to reading the sequel. 

Sequel to The Powder Mage Trilogy. I think I preferred the first trilogy but not by much. As far as I can tell the series he is writing now is nothing to do with these but I hope he is not done with this world. 

As far as I'm concerned they can't get this series translated to English fast enough. I will be pissed if they abandon it like they seem to be doing with so many other European series. 

It wasn't as good as the first one but a worthy follow-up that's quite humorous in its way. 

I've had this series on standby for ages after reading the Lewis trilogy over a year ago and finally picked up the first book. Based on this I prefer the Lewis Trilogy, but this was solid and now I've started I'll be picking up the next one every so often between other books. 

This is only an about 200 page novella by him but it's pretty damn good. Apart from starting it last night I read most of it today in one sitting. It is dedicated to the memory of Gene Wolfe, but I think it also owes something to Ursula K. Le Guin's Hannish Cycle. It's sci-fi, but dressed up as fantasy. Tchaikovsky has a way of taking what is essentially a very basic, even cliché storyline and making it interesting with his shorter reads. Spiderlight, which is a bit longer, enough to be counted as a full novel, was much the same though more out and out parody of old tropes. 

This marks 83 books read this year for me. With only a little over a month to go it seems ambitious to try to make the hundred, but this is a record for me already. I challenged myself on Goodreads to do 50 in order to read more and clear some of the backlog. I'm kinda cheating now and only picking shorter books, but hey, it counts. Let's see if I can do it.