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January 18, 2009 Progress Notes:
"Sugar"
Words today: 500.
Words total: 18,550.
Reason for stopping: This also took a few hours. I am a little scraped of words today, but that was the minimum amount required for me to justify my daily oxygen.
Books in progress: Robert Graves, The Long Week-end.
The glamour: I feel decidedly pukey today. I would sort of like some Indian for dinner, but the quease, my friends, the quease. Maybe I'll stick with toast. :/
#6 -- K.J. Parker, Shadow
Picked up after a recommendation on the trilogy from![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
yhlee, and let me say, this book was awesome.
This is a book about a man who wakes up having lost his memory, and he may well be a god. Pretty standard SFF trope. Parker, however, is both playing out and complicating and commenting on and playing with it, and along with it, the whole notion of prophecy -- and identity for that matter. Our nameless protagonist -- soon Poldarn, after a god he first impersonates as part of a scam and then may well actually be -- sort of weaves his way between these concepts. People recognize him throughout the book, and nobody will tell him his name. When someone tells him his name -- two someones -- they lie. When someone else finally tells him his name, it's not a name he's been operating under for about 20 years, and who he's been in those 20 years is of vital importance. He's either fated to be a horrible person based on those 20 years, or possibly the embodiment of the apocalypse, and he's struggling with that in a very remote, odd, almost mathematically-minded way.
That's one of the things I liked about this one: Poldarn's literalness, his methodical nature. He's not an amnesiac who comes with battery included and sociopolitical awareness and knowledge of linguistic expressions. He's looking at the world through what seem to be fairly new eyes, and he's thus very...literal. And methodical. And finds a lot of things very weird about how the regular people in his war-torn, panicking world operate. He doesn't see the social significance in things all the time. His faintly Asperger's perspective makes that alienation feel very real, and the mental displacement that gives me as a reader is really neat.
Also, structurally this isn't too complicated, but there are enough dreams, enough hops into other people's lives, that by the end of book 1 I'm slowly putting together the implications of what's going on (plot implications in structure) and my head is nicely buzzy from having to do a little reaching to put things together.
So I am totally picking up books 2 and 3. So far, recommended.
"Sugar"
Words today: 500.
Words total: 18,550.
Reason for stopping: This also took a few hours. I am a little scraped of words today, but that was the minimum amount required for me to justify my daily oxygen.
Books in progress: Robert Graves, The Long Week-end.
The glamour: I feel decidedly pukey today. I would sort of like some Indian for dinner, but the quease, my friends, the quease. Maybe I'll stick with toast. :/
#6 -- K.J. Parker, Shadow
Picked up after a recommendation on the trilogy from
yhlee, and let me say, this book was awesome.This is a book about a man who wakes up having lost his memory, and he may well be a god. Pretty standard SFF trope. Parker, however, is both playing out and complicating and commenting on and playing with it, and along with it, the whole notion of prophecy -- and identity for that matter. Our nameless protagonist -- soon Poldarn, after a god he first impersonates as part of a scam and then may well actually be -- sort of weaves his way between these concepts. People recognize him throughout the book, and nobody will tell him his name. When someone tells him his name -- two someones -- they lie. When someone else finally tells him his name, it's not a name he's been operating under for about 20 years, and who he's been in those 20 years is of vital importance. He's either fated to be a horrible person based on those 20 years, or possibly the embodiment of the apocalypse, and he's struggling with that in a very remote, odd, almost mathematically-minded way.
That's one of the things I liked about this one: Poldarn's literalness, his methodical nature. He's not an amnesiac who comes with battery included and sociopolitical awareness and knowledge of linguistic expressions. He's looking at the world through what seem to be fairly new eyes, and he's thus very...literal. And methodical. And finds a lot of things very weird about how the regular people in his war-torn, panicking world operate. He doesn't see the social significance in things all the time. His faintly Asperger's perspective makes that alienation feel very real, and the mental displacement that gives me as a reader is really neat.
Also, structurally this isn't too complicated, but there are enough dreams, enough hops into other people's lives, that by the end of book 1 I'm slowly putting together the implications of what's going on (plot implications in structure) and my head is nicely buzzy from having to do a little reaching to put things together.
So I am totally picking up books 2 and 3. So far, recommended.
