Stuff I’ve Been Reading: March 2012
1. Night Watch by Terry Pratchett. When I’m ill with a cold (which invariably strikes every March and October, lasting the full ten days), I want to read something I know I already like. That’s why I reached for a Sam Vimes book. The Commander of the City Watch is part hard-boiled detective, part beat cop, part unwilling nobility. In this book, he goes back in time to save the city and train his inexperienced younger self.
2. Thud! by Terry Pratchett. Still ill, I moved to the next chronological Vimes novel. This time, in order to dispel the tension between dwarf and troll threatening to overtake Ankh-Morpork, Vimes dives into both psychology and history to solve the murder of a prominent dwarf. I am dying to read the latest Vimes book, Snuff, in which Vimes on vacation nevertheless encounters crime, but it’s still available only in hardback.
3. To Say Nothing of the Dog by Connie Willis. An offhand comment of Chera’s, I think, put me in the mood to reread one of the five funniest novels I’ve ever read (it keeps company with Good Omens by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman). Willis’s story of time-traveling historians was even better the third or fourth time because she has since put out her masterwork Blackout/All Clear, which resolves some questions about slippage raised in this novel.
4. Wicked Lovely by Melissa Marr (20%). The three dollars I spent on this introduction to Marr’s work was sadly fruitless as I could not finish the book. The premise of fairies in our modern world intrigued me, but the story turned out to be less a fairy tale and more a paranormal romance.
5. Winter Rose by Patricia McKillip. Therefore I migrated to a fantasy author I knew I liked. This story of Roes and her sister had real fairies in it, the dispassionate kind who live in the wood. Several tropes and motifs put me in mind of the Ballad of Tam Lin, which pleased me; I would class this in a category nearby one of my favorite YA novels, The Perilous Gard by Elizabeth Marie Pope.
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