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Hugo reading report: Eifelheim
Apr. 18th, 2007 08:20 amThere is no reason for you to remember that I have been reading this year’s Hugo nominees: Rainbow’s End, Glasshouse, Eifelheim, His Majesty’s Dragon, and Blindsight.
I began in ignorance. I didn’t read the jacket copy. Well, I started to, but it put me off so much that I almost didn’t read the books. I have decided to give up reading book jackets rather than speculative fiction.
I started with Rainbow’s End, but I knew by the second sentence it was unlikely I was going to find it easy to engage with. This is the second sentence:
My impatience is with the familiar fictional future evoked in this book, and not the book itself; but that is the matter of another post. I’ll have another go at Rainbow’s End, and at Glasshouse, which (at brief glance) seems to be set in a similar continuum of possible futures, but for now I’m starting let’s say alphabetically.
Eifelheim. This I loved. Almost without reservations, which is saying something for me.
Eifelheim is a dense book. I read with pleasure and a sense of progress, but I was repeatedly startled to look up from the book and find I’d only progressed a few pages. The book has a lot of history and a fair amount of science. I recommend it joyfully, but I suggest you allow yourself time to properly concentrate when you read it. You can’t really skim.
What I liked about this book was that I could not immediately place it; I didn’t feel like by the end of page one I knew exactly what kinds of things could and could not happen, which is a feeling that is sometimes reassuring, but mostly frustrating, like a park full of Keep Off the Grass signs.
( If you think you will like this book, you might want to skip the unavoidable spoilers that here ensue. )
Then I read His Majesty’s Dragon, which is a very different sort of book. Coming from the dense, structured prose of Eifelheim, I was skeptical that this would be the Kind of Thing I Like. I ended up being delighted.
But that is another story.
{rf}
I began in ignorance. I didn’t read the jacket copy. Well, I started to, but it put me off so much that I almost didn’t read the books. I have decided to give up reading book jackets rather than speculative fiction.
I started with Rainbow’s End, but I knew by the second sentence it was unlikely I was going to find it easy to engage with. This is the second sentence:
On July 23, schoolchildren in Algiers claimed that a respiratory epidemic was spreading across the Mediterranean.
My impatience is with the familiar fictional future evoked in this book, and not the book itself; but that is the matter of another post. I’ll have another go at Rainbow’s End, and at Glasshouse, which (at brief glance) seems to be set in a similar continuum of possible futures, but for now I’m starting let’s say alphabetically.
Eifelheim. This I loved. Almost without reservations, which is saying something for me.
Eifelheim is a dense book. I read with pleasure and a sense of progress, but I was repeatedly startled to look up from the book and find I’d only progressed a few pages. The book has a lot of history and a fair amount of science. I recommend it joyfully, but I suggest you allow yourself time to properly concentrate when you read it. You can’t really skim.
What I liked about this book was that I could not immediately place it; I didn’t feel like by the end of page one I knew exactly what kinds of things could and could not happen, which is a feeling that is sometimes reassuring, but mostly frustrating, like a park full of Keep Off the Grass signs.
( If you think you will like this book, you might want to skip the unavoidable spoilers that here ensue. )
Then I read His Majesty’s Dragon, which is a very different sort of book. Coming from the dense, structured prose of Eifelheim, I was skeptical that this would be the Kind of Thing I Like. I ended up being delighted.
But that is another story.
{rf}
