I've been reading lots of books lately and just wanted to make some quick comments on them.
Read the first two books in the Kate Daniels series and enjoyed them both a great deal, although there was a pretty big plot flub at the climax of the first one (that or else I just didn't get it). Curran (leading male / Beast Lord) is a blondie so that's kind of refreshing amid so many dark-haired leading men in many books (though I do love dark hair myself, I admit) plus he just cracks me up. I love him. And his name. Very cool. And Kate's such a smart-mouth, but I'm lovin' it, too.
After reading Dan Simmons' The Fall of Hyperion some time back, I'm now reading plain ole' Hyperion and am liking it, though not quite as much as Fall. I drooled over Fall, cursed Dan Simmons' writing ability and beautiful prose and then wept. Okay, not really, but I fell in lurv with that thing. Still, I've flown through this one and am very nearly done so I do obviously really enjoy it. I love the farcasters. And their name as well - curse you, Dan Simmons with your cool names for everything!!!
Okay, done with my adoration/envy thing for Dan and onto the next...
I read Angel's Ink by Jocelynn (sp?) Drake and have mixed feelings about it. The concept was cool - magic tats? say it ain't so! As were the various creatures who inhabit Drake's world (OCD vamps and trolls, oh my!). But the plot? It was disjointed, to say the least. There was a lot of stuff happening, but it didn't seem to coalesce into what I could call a unifying plot. Just felt like jumping from one crisis to another with no connection in between them. But for His Noodliness' sake, it was the sentence constructions that drove me crazy!
On-the-fly example of the kind of thing I'm talking about:
Turning the page, I saw that there was yet another awkward sentence construction not two paragraphs from the one I was reading. Breathing a sigh of disappointment, I plodded on. Knowing it was useless, I gave up and flopped onto the bed, landing on my cat. Flipping the tabby the bird, I scooped him up and dropped him to the floor where he of course landed on all fours. Muttering to myself, I inspected the fresh scratches on my behind. Frowning, I realized the marks weren't from the cat at all, but rather from the whip Julian had used on me so skillfully a fortnight ago. Grinning from ear to ear - which is quite doable, just ask Joker! - I drifted into the memory of it: of Julian's lean, dark body, of the braided leather whip whistling through the air on its way to beat sharp, staccato notes against my creamy, porcelain skin, of his primal grunts and my more feminine yelps, of velvet tongues and sudden snakes, of cotton boxers and hippy shakes, of thrust and parry and of tease and tarry, of worlds colliding and zippers sliding, of headboards groaning and lovers moaning, and...
And I'm getting carried away.
This type of sentence construction, which I've so aptly demonstrated above, started to irritate me so much that I had to do many stops and starts over the course of reading the thing. Which is a damn shame because it was quite action-packed and like I said, the concept was cool.
So anyway, it was alright but the prose could definitely have been much better. And now onto a book whose prose is wonderful, but whose plot is, well - I don't think it's there at all.
The name of the book is A Galaxy Unknown and it started out so, so well with vivid description and impending danger and then kersplat! It took a nose-dive. Still haven't finished it. And that's because the story never started.
Oh, and I have a Nook now and I love it! Much to my surprise. Her name is Snooki.
Also, I am hung over today.
That is all.