Just books. (Maybe.)

[lady_schrapnell]

Too tired to do this! Kept messing up the img tag....

Anyway, finished John M. Ford's The Last Hot Time last night, and it was great. I found bits a tiny bit tedious (Doc's sexual worries especially), and - here I go again - didn't like the female romanctic lead at all as much as a lot of the other characters, but I still really enjoyed it, and think it would well reward a reread. Don't know what it is about John M. Ford, but I always find I've to read him extra-slow to understand what's going on! The set-up was wonderful, and reminded me a lot of the Borderlands books. Elves and Faerie done as the opposite of mistily romantic, but not just the opposite in black-and-white heartless/cruel either. Great stuff.

Now started on The Alienist, which I'm using to restart a ring, for which I was up next. I'm going to leave it at that, as the next step would be to greedy ring/ray stallers and book hoarders and I'm trying to avoid that here. And now. Oh, and hypocritical criticisers of anyone who dares to speak up about such behaviour. Right. Avoid. I'll just take myself off to start kneading dough for pizza, which might get rid of some of this irritation!

Comments

Rereading John M Ford

[generalblossom.livejournal.com]

I think The Last Hot Time would survive and came out better at a reread ;) One day, I got to get to those books I already got here and have not even read once. I totally agree about the extra slow reading to pick up what is going on, strangely masochistic of me, but the writing is so subtle, a lot of it ends up having to be figured out by intuition, which for me, at least in this case, ends up creating a lot of empathy.

Hope the pizza was good, I know precisely the same irritation for the same causes!

Re: Rereading John M Ford

[generalblossom.livejournal.com]

just forgot to add a link, an interview with Ford, about TLHT here,

http://user.well.com/iengaged.cgi?c=inkwell.vue&f=0&t=126&q=0-

Re: Rereading John M Ford

[lady-schrapnell.livejournal.com]

Oh, thank you so much for the link - it was fascinating, wasn't it? Really, really interesting. And I got something right - the Borderland books! It'd been long enough that I wasn't sure the detectives were the same ones, but that was very stupid of me. Have you read any of those, or the Liavek ones? I've had them on my wish list for a while, but am now all the more determined to get them!

Re: Rereading John M Ford

[generalblossom.livejournal.com]

I think that link was brilliant, or, well, I thought so when i read it and that was way back when I read TLHT maybe a year ago or so.

About the Liavek books, I got one in the TBR, a very nice find if extremely unexpected at a local sale for remainder foreign books, some importer´s leftovers or so. Yay! I will read it, one of these days, really. I also got Casting Fortune, a collection of Ford´s Liavek stories, but I only read one of those stories yet, 2 or 3 more to go. I had nearly forgotten about that book though, good of you to remind me ;)

Re: Rereading John M Ford

[lady-schrapnell.livejournal.com]

Very cool. Do you know who started the Liavek world - was that Emma Bull and Will Shatterly? It IS a shared world, like Borderlands, right? I should really check all this out myself, but have only borrowed two Borderlands books and found one other myself, in BookCloseouts. Might well be begging for a loan after you've read it.

(Writing on a lunch break, dripping bread crumbs on the keyboard instead of on the Iliad as I eat.)

Duh.

[lady-schrapnell.livejournal.com]

Bordertown, woman!

Re: Rereading John M Ford

[generalblossom.livejournal.com]

About Borderlands and Liavek, dunno much, have read nothing of Borderlands, and Liavek, just a couple Ford stories ( one in Casting Fortune, another in another anthology of his). The Liavek book is, goes checking, the fifth volume, Festival Week. Sure I can loan you, but please let me loan it to you before I read it, this book is not too high in my TBR pile, I just got these hoarding instincts because bargains and sales for such books here are rarer than the proverbial hen´s teeth. Let me know when you want to read it!

pizza as therapy

[lady-schrapnell.livejournal.com]

Yup, it was good. But kneading pizza dough when you already have a headache and it's starting in your shoulders (which I hadn't realised before beginning) is not a good idea!