The Usual > Recent Status Updates

" 'There goes C. S. Lewis,' said Fen suddenly. 'It must be Tuesday.' "

I swear that's an in-joke. As any fantasy nut will tell you, The Eagle and Child is exactly where you'd find the Inklings on a Tuesday... and Lewis didn't like detective stories.

These first stories are better than I remember. Perhaps its because I've read some of his precursors now.

I'm prepared to believe the whole demonic entity stuff, but the kid waking with a full bladder, confronting evil monsters and then sitting down with a hot chocolate without... matters taking their course?

Nope. Error 6 at line 12: suspension of disbelief not found.

This seems a seasonally appropriate thing to be reading... though I have my doubts about the DEI chapter. We'll see - it might be narratively justified.

Nope, Lessing and I still don't get on. I really need to accept this.

This is hard work.

Nice piece of character-work, heavily Wodehouse-influenced style, lots of lovely literary referential stuff, plot doesn’t quite gel. Let down badly by penultimate chapter; final chapter (for obvious reasons) lacks polish. Shame it wasn’t finished.

Sudanese Fly or no Sudanese Fly, I think Yasmin will have trouble seducing some of these people. D.H.Lawrence, for example.
And Churchill is an odd choice for 1919.

I'd love to see what a sensitivity reader would do to this. There'd be nothing left.

Wrong edition, right book. This one's 2930 pages long and remarkably good fun.

Douglas Adams by way of Ronald Firbank.

I wasn't quite up to the job this time. Will have to read again.
Note to self: don't try reading Woolf with the sniffles.

Sanguine and phlegmatic - just what I need to balance out the bile.

Psittacism is a lovely word - not that I'll ever find a use for it.

Seriously? "If you find any other inconsistencies, feel free to remind yourself this is a work of fiction." is all very well, but, my dear Kuang, that doesn't excuse you from doing your research. You don't even understand the electoral system or the law on slavery, and you make your plot hinge on those!

Seriously sloppy writing here and there. Look:

"... to learn Morse code. This took only a matter of days, since Morse code was the rare language that did in fact have a perfect one-to-one correlation between..."

Since when has Morse code been a language?

Odd that a book ostensibly about language doesn't manage a period-appropriate vocabulary.

There's something about this writing that doesn't suit me. I itch to rewrite sentences like:

"When he woke again that afternoon, he found the bowl replaced with a plate with two thick slices of bread and a hunk of roast beef."

And I can't quite put my finger on why. Or at least, I can, but not without heavy-duty tinkering.

I'm going to have to go round these books again fairly soon, I think.

A couple of oddities of usage:

"belling tower" for "bell tower"
"baronet" used as an honorific.

I'm not sure if that's Rothfuss being clever in ways I don't get, or just Rothfuss getting it wrong, Either way - little snags in the velvet.

Matthew 5:5, probably.

Ladies and gentlemen, we have a plot-twist. It's an obvious plot-twist, one I saw coming 50 pages back, but It's been properly set up and executed.

Who is this, and what as he done with the real Raymond E Feist?

“Should I congratulate him or have him hung?”

Oh, for hell’s sake! I'm not so much triggered as detonated. It’s not a hard thing to learn.

The portrait was hung in the gallery, but the artist was hanged by the Earl. For the Countess discovered the artist was hung, and so she hung around when the portrait was done, and it seems that his lordship discovered their fun, so the artist was hanged by the Earl.

HANGED!

"The temple guards carried the priestess to a guest chamber and stood guard while healers summoned from her temple attended her,"

That's healers from the temple of the death goddess. Not sure they'd be my first choice.

Hmm... this is smoother than Magician, but the way he writes still sets my teeth on edge.

' We both turned away from the room at the same time. I shrugged my lute higher onto my shoulder. "Thank you -" I paused, not knowing his name.
"Deoch." He smiled again in his relaxed way.'

Now that might be a coincidence, but it looks a lot like a little game being played. And in Welsh, too.

The word "fewer" is not in this man's vocabulary.

"Comprehension dawned upon Arutha. He turned to Gardan and said, "Sappers! The Tsurani must be digging under the east wall."

Well, yes, of course sappers. The Tsurani have been telegraphing that for a week; they might as well have applied for planning consent and put up a big Men At Work sign.
And only now a whole castle full of seasoned warriors realise something that's on p.2 of Siege Warfare for Dummies!

Ladies and gentleman, after 235 pages of should-have-left-it-in-the-desk-drawer (235 pages! I've read whole novels that are shorter than that), finally have something worth reading.

Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear. Another sign I'm not 18 any more.