My reading is winding down as I prepare for the Bookshelf Project. Once I finish Vast, in fact, it begins, and will end its first phase this fall, when my pre-ordered copy of Neal Stephenson's Quicksilver, the prequel/sequel to Cryptonomicon, arrives from Amazon.
But before I retreat into the comfort of my own library, I have two books to report on. The first is Kim Stanley Robinson's The Years of Rice and Salt. This book is set in a world in which plague wiped out the Europeans, leaving Asia to conquer the world. The main characters are followed through incarnation after incarnation--and to the bardo where souls dwell in between. Centuries and centuries of lives. There's a lot that's fun in this novel, though I bogged down in the wars and politics, as I always do in Sci-Fi novels that have a lot of wars and politics. Robinson's, alas, have this tendency. I don't love his Mars trilogy the way David does, for instance, because it feels too much like politics transplanted from Washington to the Red Planet. David says The Years of Rice and Salt benefits from a second reading, that reading it twice gave him a better sense of how the stories of all the different lives fit together and had a coherent narrative. Perhaps he's right, but it's such a huge book, I'm not sure I want to make a commitement to reading it again. We do own it, so if I decide to, I can, even during the Bookshelf Project.
Let me make a plug for my favorite Kim Stanley Robinson book, Antarctica, a cold and snowy adventure populated with interesting characters and full of tidbits about actual Antarctic expeditions.
Posted by Su Penn at June 4, 2003 01:52 PM | TrackBack