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The Agony of Choice...
Apr. 19th, 2007 07:59 pm...a la new literature.
Last night, I finished Kushiel's Scion, first in Jaqueline Carey's second trilogy set in her very own Europe-with-slightly-different-names world. It's every bit as good as the previous story, and, as per the spotlight falling on a different main character, manages to portray the same world in the same way but with slightly different language, as someone actually verbally telling said story would. Very neat.
However, this means that my mini-splurge in the Borders San Francisco store has now caught up with me.
With WoT Twelve vaguely on the horizon in 2008, and considering I don't have a great deal of time to read, George R R Martin and Ian Irvine stare at me from my bookshelf. The first books in Martin's Song of Ice and Fire and Irvine's View From the Mirror series are currently waiting to be read.
While SoI&F is most definitely essential reading for any fantasy fan, the chances of my finishing it before Rob Jordan completes his 12 book jerkoff session are slim, and all things - including eating, sleeping and personal hygeine - will stop between the time Memory of Light comes out and the time I have finished reading it. According to Martin's website, there's a potential seven books to get through in SoI&F, three of which haven't come out yet. This will take me a long time (I am not, on the grand scale of things, a fast reader), and I may have to split it up. Alternatively, VFtM is a complete quartet, slightly shorter and all availble now, and If I crack on might just have enough time to get finished and revise WoT before the deadline. They aren't as widely lauded, but he has his following.
However, the main problem is more sentimental.
I fear I may just be looking for reasons not to start what is more or less universally accepted as a masterpiece in SoI&F, because I just don't want it to supplant WoT as my number one super-long fantasy epic (as most likely it will, considering it probably has things like, you know, deep characterisation, the odd person you don't want to throttle and common sense turning up once in a while). I've grown up with WoT - I started reading it on the day I went to university. Since my life stopped being a universal shitstorm, I've always had my friendly WoT novel by the side of my bed. Fine, I've read other stuff - other series, even - but it's always been waiting for the next WoT, and for better or worse, it's formed the literary subtitles to my life becoming liveable. We all know that Rob Jordan ran out of ideas a while ago, has now run out of time and has two and a half thousand characters to deal with in the space of seven hundred pages, but the few die-hard fans he has left have got round all that. It's been like a soap opera - you had to keep reading to find out what utter stupidity this or that uber-hard character comes out with next. Once I start reading SoI&F, I'll realise how childish it is, possibly in the same sort of way when I graduated to Jordan from David Eddings. I doubt the gap will be as much (Eddings to anyone else is a big jump), but it's still slightly galling to think it might well happen at all.
It'll be VFtM for now, and I'll wait until after WoT 12 before trying SoI&F. It's going to mark the end of an era in any case, however - I worry I'm just putting it off.
Last night, I finished Kushiel's Scion, first in Jaqueline Carey's second trilogy set in her very own Europe-with-slightly-different-names world. It's every bit as good as the previous story, and, as per the spotlight falling on a different main character, manages to portray the same world in the same way but with slightly different language, as someone actually verbally telling said story would. Very neat.
However, this means that my mini-splurge in the Borders San Francisco store has now caught up with me.
With WoT Twelve vaguely on the horizon in 2008, and considering I don't have a great deal of time to read, George R R Martin and Ian Irvine stare at me from my bookshelf. The first books in Martin's Song of Ice and Fire and Irvine's View From the Mirror series are currently waiting to be read.
While SoI&F is most definitely essential reading for any fantasy fan, the chances of my finishing it before Rob Jordan completes his 12 book jerkoff session are slim, and all things - including eating, sleeping and personal hygeine - will stop between the time Memory of Light comes out and the time I have finished reading it. According to Martin's website, there's a potential seven books to get through in SoI&F, three of which haven't come out yet. This will take me a long time (I am not, on the grand scale of things, a fast reader), and I may have to split it up. Alternatively, VFtM is a complete quartet, slightly shorter and all availble now, and If I crack on might just have enough time to get finished and revise WoT before the deadline. They aren't as widely lauded, but he has his following.
However, the main problem is more sentimental.
I fear I may just be looking for reasons not to start what is more or less universally accepted as a masterpiece in SoI&F, because I just don't want it to supplant WoT as my number one super-long fantasy epic (as most likely it will, considering it probably has things like, you know, deep characterisation, the odd person you don't want to throttle and common sense turning up once in a while). I've grown up with WoT - I started reading it on the day I went to university. Since my life stopped being a universal shitstorm, I've always had my friendly WoT novel by the side of my bed. Fine, I've read other stuff - other series, even - but it's always been waiting for the next WoT, and for better or worse, it's formed the literary subtitles to my life becoming liveable. We all know that Rob Jordan ran out of ideas a while ago, has now run out of time and has two and a half thousand characters to deal with in the space of seven hundred pages, but the few die-hard fans he has left have got round all that. It's been like a soap opera - you had to keep reading to find out what utter stupidity this or that uber-hard character comes out with next. Once I start reading SoI&F, I'll realise how childish it is, possibly in the same sort of way when I graduated to Jordan from David Eddings. I doubt the gap will be as much (Eddings to anyone else is a big jump), but it's still slightly galling to think it might well happen at all.
It'll be VFtM for now, and I'll wait until after WoT 12 before trying SoI&F. It's going to mark the end of an era in any case, however - I worry I'm just putting it off.
