Catching up (books)

Back to some semblance of a normal life (or, at least, no deadlines before Thursday). These are all old books, and there are two more that I wanted to spend a bit more time on, and then two more that I've read over the last week. And then there's the manga post...

Gordon Korman, Everest 3: The Summit. The trouble with this sort of series is that there’s a predictability to book 3 that’s very hard to rise above. ( Someone has to die (to justify the nameless funeral scene at the beginning) and at least one someone has to get to the summit (hence the title), and both these identities are pretty clear at the start of the book. )

The only previous Vivian Van Velde book I’ve read (or started) was one I found in a home furniture store some years ago, on a display bookcase with a bunch of other blue hardbacked books, all with dustjackets removed. Most of the rest were stats texts. I read the first fifty pages or so and liked it but had to go, so I took it up to the counter and asked the staff if I could buy it. I probably would have got a better reception if I’d held up my pyjamas and said I was going to nap in one of the display beds. They sounded absolutely horrified at the thought of considering a book as a reading object rather than a form of décor, and took the book away from me to stash it behind the desk rather than risk my sullying its pages further. I’d be less irked by this if I could remember the title.

I don’t think it was this one, although I liked this and if you find it in a home furniture store it probably also deserves to be liberated. ( Vivian Van Velde, Heir Apparent. )

( Zilpha Keatley Snyder, The Unseen. )

Atul Gawande, Better: a surgeon’s notes on performance. ( Not as good as Complications (his previous book), but that’s largely because a) I loved Complications and b) I’ve read half a dozen of these essays before on the New Yorker website or in the New England Medical Journal. )

Mary Stewart, My brother Michael. ( Spoilers for ending. )

CP Snow, The Affair. The title refers to the Dreyfus affair, which prompted one of those conversations between myself and my boss where both of us were aware of the existence of this notorious scandal, but completely vague as to details.( Anyway, this scandal involves a Cambridge college where one of the Fellows is accused of scientific fraud and forced out; and then evidence appears suggesting that he may not be guilty. )

And two re-reads: ( Eva Ibbotson and Mary Cadogan & Patricia Craig. )

Two more

Susan Palwick, Shelter.

Oh hell, it’s been too long since I read this. I really enjoyed it, although I'm still a bit unsure about the ending. An intelligent house offers refuge to a homeless man in the middle of a storm (a storm in which the house’s owner dies, having gone out to rescue his ex-wife), and the connections between these people and a few others spin out into the story. ( Shelter )

Robin Hobb, Renegade’s Magic. Third, and final book in the Soldier Son trilogy – a trilogy which does some interesting things but is also difficult, in many senses, and I do wonder what this has done to Hobb’s sales figures. I think she has enough goodwill from the Fitz books to survive one failure, but I’m not sure where she’ll go next.

( And “failure” is probably too strong a term. )