Wow, no posts since Tuesday, and here it is, Friday morning. Sadly, this one isn't going to take any steps towards making up for that, since I've been working and I'm now so tired that I'm typing with my eyes more closed than open. I've got a list of stuff I want to blog about, I've been meaning to talk about Kali some, I've still not written anything useful about BlizzCon, and I'm way, way behind on reviews.
I can't say when anything is going to change though, since priorities are elsewhere. I read three books over the past few days, and I'd love to read a fourth, since it would be Feast of Crows. I'm going to wait on that one though, since I'm trying to get some substantial writing done, since I still really want to finish my novel by Xmas. During Sept and Oct I was ambitiously hoping for Thanksgiving as a possible finish date, knowing I'd be out of town for 5 days over that time and then likely distracted by other travel and vacation stuff in December. That dream died when I had to rewrite the last 20 pages of chapter six several times, then was out of town for nearly a week, then failed to get right back into writing when I returned.
And reading Harry Potter 5 and 6, and the last Jeffery Deaver book this week didn't help either. I did get back to writing my own thing tonight though, and can hopefully finish up this chapter over the weekend and get some/most/all of chapter seven done before my Thanksgiving vacation. I can't see finishing all of 8 and 9 (which should take me through the end of the book, though chapter breaks are pretty relative) between Dec 1 and Dec 25, especially not with likely holidays and other distractions, but I always work better with concrete goals and deadlines, even if they're self-imposed.
As for the recent reading... All the titles were pretty good. I read
Harry Potter 5 last year, and if I wrote another review it wouldn't change much. I only reread it because I finally started HP6 last week, and found myself unable to remember most of the details. So I buzzed through HP5, enjoying it for the most part, and then read HP6 yesterday and enjoyed it as well. Even the shocking ending, and the very, very dark turn the series took. Honestly, I was stunned at how dark and nasty things got, considering how bright and happy and "good guys always win" it was for the first 3 or 4 books. Well, the good guys still always win at Quidditch, apparently, though perhaps they don't win the house trophy, since I don't recall Rowling even bothering to mention which house won it the last 3 years. She still throws in all of those "10 points to Griffindor" references when Hermoine eagerly answers another question no one else knows, and all of those blatantly-unfair times Snape takes off 20, but since the end of the year tallies aren't listed anymore... what's the point?
Late night digression aside, book six really gets nasty and scary and depressing, and while I didn't mind, I'd imagine lots of little kids were pretty heart-broken by it, for spoilery reasons I'm not going into here. I'm now very curious to see how Rowling wraps it all up in seven, since unless the last book is like 1300 pages, (or perhaps more like 2000, given how breezy her pace is) I can't see how she'll follow through all of the plot threads that were developed in book six. Harry's got so much to do before he can possibly defeat Voldemort, (I'm assuming that's the only possible conclusion, though I could be wrong.) that I can't see how one book could cover it all, at least not if there's all the usual "a new year at Hogwart's" stuff packed in there as well. It's perfectly possible that book seven won't be set in Hogwart's at all (which I could live with), and it's also possible that loose ends will be left dangling (which I would be upset by), I am hoping for more than one of those, "and the evil bad guy was defeated... for now..." endings.
Anyway, just to put in some numbers:
Harry Potter 6, The Half-Blood Prince
Plot: 6
Concept: 7
Writing Quality/Flow: 6/9
Characters: 7
Suspense: 7
Fun Factor: 6
Page Turner: 8
Rereadability: 7
Overall: 7
I gave this one slightly lower scores than book 5, but there's really no reason to rate them differently other than me wanting to justify the time it took to do so. I'd be open to arguments that book six was actually better, and it's certainly more mature and a much bigger risk to take for the author, as much as things changed for Harry and his world at large.
As for the Deaver book, it was pretty good too, but also not quite as good as the previous (and best to date) novel
in its series.
The Twelfth Card, by Jeffrey Deaver (2005)
Plot: 6
Concept: 6
Writing Quality/Flow: 6/7
Characters: 6
Suspense: 5
Fun Factor: 6
Page Turner: 6
Re-readability: 6
Overall: 6.5
Well actually, now that I've put in numbers, I have to conclude that this one was a lot less good than the last one. It wasn't bad, and I enjoyed reading it, but it lost points by not being very suspenseful, and for not being a mystery. There's a mystery the characters have to unravel, as they try to keep a girl alive as a clever hitman tries to kill her, but it's not a mystery the reader can follow along with, since the ultimate solution is nothing that's even been hinted at or mentioned during the course of the novel. It makes sense and is believable, but if you're reading this one and trying to guess ahead, don't bother. The plot is pretty preposterous too, with little mystery to it, and a lot of cheating by the author.
SPOILERFor instance, we're in the POV of the hitman for a lot of the book, seeing virtually everything he sees and his thoughts, but they're not very interesting, and the author cheats by never having the killer think of stuff he obviously would have thought about. The fact that the hitman is working with someone else and coordinating hits with them, for instance. So we're supposed to be surprised near the end of the book when he's caught and then people are still trying to kill the girl, and when it turns out the hitman had a partner. But all I felt was tricked by the author, as he unrealistically had the hitman never think about things he obviously would have been thinking about constantly, simply to preserve some cheap, momentary suspense. The same goes for a couple of other supporting characters who aren't what they appear either. We are in their POV and we learn everything about them, with a few key and very deliberate ommissions just to try and surprise us with the eventual shocking reveals.
END SPOILERThe characters weren't very good in this one either, with the girl-in-danger not stirring any real interest or sympathy in my heart, the hitman not being nearly as interesting as the villains in previous Deaver novels, and the personal travails of the usual cast of characters lacking. The mandatory "Rhyme might be considering suicide because of his paralysis" subplot was particularly half-hearted, there was nothing new with his relationship with Amelia, nothing new about her life, and the crisis that came about for one of the other cops was not compelling.
This one is worth reading if you've enjoyed other books in the series, and I don't regret reading it, but it's not one of the best, and I'm glad all I paid for it were four months waiting for my turn to come up on the list at the library.
Lastly, I read The Eight while on my San Diego/BlizzCon trip a couple of weeks ago, and I might as well throw in a quick, someday-to-be-elaborated-on review in as well. It's another DaVinci Code style of novel, except that unlike The Historian, it was written years ago, back in 1990. The plot involves an ancient and magical/mystical chess set, one that will supposedly give the possessor incredible power, courtesty of the alchemical instructions found carved into the pieces and the playing board. The set and the pieces were hidden in and around France, during the late 1700s, and the novel follows a woman in the 1970s through her efforts to find them, and parallels her travels with those of a clever nun who was involved in the dispersal and attempted recovery of the pieces during the revolutionary period in France.
It's a good premise, and could have been a great novel, if it had just been written better:
The Eight, by Katherine Neville (1990)
Plot: 6
Concept: 8
Writing Quality/Flow: 5/4
Characters: 7
Suspense: 4
Fun Factor: 3
Page Turner: 4
Re-readability: 6
Overall: 5
It's not awful but it's at least 200 pages too long, and the pace is very slow. This book is very much the opposite of the Harry Potter novels, in terms of reading enjoyability. With those books I constantly find myself reading for a few minutes, and looking down in surprise to find myself 80 pages further along. The HP novels pull you in quickly, and go down very smoothly. The Eight is a slog, both due to the quality of the writing and the pacing. I kept thinking I'd been reading for an hour, only to realize it had been 10 minutes and I'd covered maybe a dozen pages.
The other major issue I had with the story was the too-superstar cast. Pretty much every famous person alive during the late 1700s makes a featured appearance in the novel, and most of them star for a chapter or more. At first it's sort of cool seeing all the famous historical names being dropped, but it quickly becomes silly, when every single person the nun meets in those days is someone still famous 200 years later. By the time she runs into a guy on a horse in the anarchy of Paris during the revolution and the purge, and it's teenaged Napoleon, and he just happens to be heading the exact same direction she is and ends up letting her stay in his mother's house, I was openly snorting.
There's a shipwreck later on and the one guy named in the entire village near the shoals where the survivors wash up? Benedict Arnold. It's partially understandable since the chess set is known to the rich and powerful (and the Masons -- yes, them again, just like in every other historical novel with a conspiracy theory) and therefore every other character is a nobleman or a queen or someone like that, but when every visit to a bar or chance encounter on a busy highway is William Wordsworth, or William Blake, or Catherine the Great, or Robespierre, and so on, it gets a little ridiculous.
It would definitely have helped if I'd recently read a book on European and World History during the 1790s, since then I would have had more than a faint idea who everyone was and what they were actually doing during that time. A better author would have given some introduction to them all to though, rather than just assuming the reader knew them well already, but if I started a list of improvements this novel could use, that would hardly make the top ten.
It's not a bad novel, but it's long and often boring, and I would not have finished it without downtime while on vacation and in airports/planes. I am unable to explain
the four-star rating it's got on Amazon.com; but the few reviews I've glancd at certainly seem more forgiving of the pacing issues, name-dropping, and excessive length than I was.
And with that, I'm off to bed. Hopefully I'll find some time tomorrow to cobble together some sort of BlizzCon report. It will likely to be Decahedron top ten format, with 5 good and 5 bad things about the convention, with a buncha photos. Yes, it certainly sounds fascinating, doesn't it? Did I mention that I shan't even mention any of the games shown there, since I didn't care enough to play a second of any of them?
